Hi am no one 
I think people were anticipating a spring-themed contest and the âachievementâ theme threw people off, meaning they have to create completely new artwork.
That takes time. Donât worry, submissions will show up.
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Ill probably pass one this time, i feel sorry for IMC lulz.
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Been very busy irl and got tired when I have free time, havenât touch my artwork for 3 days. But donât worry, you wonât be alone
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At this rate, it looks like the contest will be cancelled (or there will be one winner kek). Oh well.
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For the sake of this thread, Iâd like to point out that My.com operate a Discord, they have staff in multiple Discords, they interact privately with users all the time, there are in fact many friendships.
There are zero issues.
I would argue that it vastly helps their company, they are connected to their userbase, and it provides them with a tool to communicate efficiently with their volunteer forum moderator teams, which keep all of their forums pretty nice to use.
My.com deserve the p2w criticism they get for their games but theyâre HOT when it comes to their community engagement and community management.
There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about staff talking to users, or being friendly and engaging. Tell management at IMC that they need to trust their staff more, youâre not a bunch of children, you can talk to users without causing drama just fine.
This answer upset me a little, it stinks of overbearing management that donât trust their staff to not cause a PR disaster just from having conversations with their userbase. It sounds like management are over-controlling and distrustful.
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I think as long as itâs kept professional there should be no problem with staff answering stuff privately. The staff just need to ensure problems are directed through the correct channels. And to make sure to post answers here if they are of interest to the community. Maybe Staff could speak to each other before responding if it helps.
I hope our lovely staff will consider this feedback 
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The lack of good communication with the players has been IMC biggest administrative problem since the start of this game.
This can easily be seen by the fact that the moment a GM shows themself in the game they will be bombarded with questions from people that comes rushing to talk to them, even if they have no proper answers to give in return. Summed up most of the answers we get are: âIâll take a note of thisâ.
The copy/paste non-answers from the ticket support staff where itâs very clear that they have not even bothered to properly read or understand the questions are so notorious itâs basically a meme by now.
And then you have the lack of staff on the forum that not only think itâs not their job to talk to the players, but also neglects to moderate the forum to the degree that normal players stays away because of the high level of toxicity. Itâs so bad now that I know of more players that actively stay away from the forum than players that use it.
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Yes, the forums are very toxic, also they certainly do not read tickets. They just have a quick glance for keywords and that is it.
Like using an 8x tome for the sole purpose of doing missions/dungeons, when missions and dungeons keep crashing/disconnecting. They just treat you like everyone else with those issues: give you a few reset vouchers.
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I think the issue is developing âfriendshipsâ with customers when youâre supposed to act as an extension of a company/corporation.
A lot of game devs, like the Absolver devs and as you said, my.com are involved in their own discords and do fine. ToS itself has a translator discord that had a lot of active GM-volunteer interaction before launch. But maybe Iâm biased, because Iâve seen an instance of a GM in another mmo get waaaaaaaaay way way way way too attached to a single player due to having a lot of private contact with them. I doubt itâll really have much of an effect since this is only for the art contest, really, but itâs just an iffy thing to do imoâŚ?
IMC def does have communication issues though lmao. I was one of the few who went to go yell at them on facebook for this reason early on the gameâs launch. But I still donât think they should achieve this communication by going into casual discords.
good: GM regularily logs into the game towns, people can recognize and greet em and theyâre prepared to answer the questions, can joke around with the community (had a lot of fun with GMs before and server-wide jokes) but not have favor or bias for any group, discusses issues openly on a forum and relays feedback seriously, holds polls and discussions for game mechanic improvements rather than just say âalright note takenâ, etc. If something they canât answer quickly comes up, they say âhold up, let me discuss this a bit and Iâll get back to youâ, states their intentions and current thoughts very clearly and often, only engages in extensive private conversations with announced and community accepted/nominated groups of people
bad: GM constantly PMs a single person for a discussion that involves a lot of people, GM joins private chat servers and keeps the discussion where itâs not accessible by a platform provided by the company itself, GM lets themselves engage in conversations where people are very upset/biased/abrasive/trolling, etc.
I donât think GMs should be robots, but they definitely shouldnât be friends. Thereâs also the issue of some players developing a feeling like they have some sort of authority over the game because they have the ability to speak with a GM.
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You wonât be alone! I promise you. Juggling classes and work is a bit of a hassle. Donât lose hope!
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This is basically the problem.
The userbase takes the lack of response or answers to a difficult question that canât immediately be answered as a serious negative over a longer timeline.
Western audiences in gaming value honesty and openness a whole lot. Especially small and dedicated communities. They are very forgiving and loyal to developers that are open and honest. Itâs ok to explain why something is difficult, or to be unable to provide something for the customer, if it includes a clear and well explained answer for what the issue is.
GM lets themselves engage in conversations where people are very upset/biased/abrasive/trolling, etc.
With the social media team at our company I emphasise the importance of understanding roles. When roles are set in a discussion it is easy to end up losing to the audience. The important factor representatives must maintain is to not allow a situation of defender+attacker roles to occur. This happens when a representative mistakenly attempts to defend against criticisms that they might disagree with. They might even be correct about their defence, however it always places them in a situation where they continue to receive further attacks and require to be further defensive.
Community participation is generally completely safe provided this is avoided.
As for the relationship between player and staff becoming an issue. It really doesnât. Not in any tangible way that matters to the game. The only issue it tends to create is that toxic people tend to use it in spurious ways to generate drama without any real purpose.
Neither my âgoodâ nor âbadâ list was meant to describe how IMC is acting, haha. Iâm well aware in which departments IMC lacks in when I wrote that post.
I donât think that a GM forming a relationship with a player in THIS game in particular, especially just over the subject of an art contest, will cause any harm either. Iâm not even sure how much power a GMâs suggestion has in this company. But uhâŚI wonât get into it since Iâve blabbered about it on an offtopic thread before, but Iâve seen an MMO scrap and invent entire game mechanics (something of the size of say, trandescendence in tos) at the private âsuggestionâ of a player close to a GM. This isnât even counting the private favors, like gear generation or hack/rmt overlooking that a good chunk of other companies (i.e. Nexon) has been known to do in the past because a GM knows someone. Of course, this has a lot more to do than just âGM and Player A got too buddy buddyâ and has more to do with the companyâs general professionalism, but the smoke eventually leads back to the initial question of âwhy the hell was this employee so favorable of this one personâ, and thatâs where the entire situation could have been avoided.
And like you described, just standard procedure in dealing with a customer. But you cannot mantain that if you want a âfriendshipâ with anyone. A rep/GM might know their place but a customer sure as hell might not. And a lot of PR issues are essentially drama without real purpose, if people are angry theyâre angry and itâs hard to brush it off as âoh theyâre just being dumbâ when youâre a company.
Another thing to note is that people already were pissed off when they initially made an art contest discussion thread because ingame issues werenât getting discussed. lmao. people donât understand that different people are assigned different jobs. It didnât matter, people still got angry. If they went ahead and decided to go the length of discord involvement over this issue, theyâd have to seriously step up their game for every other department in communications or else have to deal with another group of angry people.
I do prefer that they get involved in discords and improve their communication versus them staying in the safe zone out of discords and keep their communication spotty as hell, for the record. After all, the assumption that players might seek favors and GMs might grant them is very loaded. I still think the honest to god best way of going about this is an open discussion on the forums, where maybe some people can relay input from the discord. That way nobody HAS to be involved with a group run by another player should they wish to participate in discussion, all discussion and behavior is viewable by anyone, polls can be held more easily, post logs are more reliable, etc.
Lot of the issue IMC has with communication is that itâs so inconsistent too. They opened a good discussion on this topic and then proceeded to shut down suddenly on Elin, and havenât left a serious indication that they want to continue discussion about this. They couldâve just declined the discord invite and then moved the conversation to a public thread, but instead it went cold turkey. I can see how everyone is pissed that theyâre using the discord excuse to avoid conversation.