Ok this probably won't be interesting to many so feel free not to read the rest below as this is NOT an anti-pmod rant.
Apparently, ages ago Ultima Online (UO) had a "volunteer program" where players signed up to provide online help. These people were counselors and provided all sorts of human-type help in the game, especially to newbies. :) So far, so good. However it seems that the program was totally corrupt.Volunteers - mostly females
Game Masters (actual staff irl) -mostly young males
The predictable happened with some sexual hijinks, ingame favours and such like in this "Lum the Mad" link.
I must say that UO seems to have taken advantage of the volunteers and at one time even fired thier entire (paid) support staff. Were they relying almost entirely on unpaid volunteers as their customer support staff? Tsk tsk.
Anyway, UO scrapped the volunteer program and the volunteers sued them! And the volunteers won the case.
"The lead complainant, Catherine "Terendil" Reab, had worked her way up in the volunteer program to the position of regional lead counselor, managing a rather large team of volunteers under her. For this, she was given $500 per month as a thank you, in addition to various goodies (including sundries), both real and virtual (in-game), from OSI, including a free monthly account."
from Gamespy.
I guess the volunteers argued in court that they were exploited as they were unpaid workers who took the place for tech support which the company would otherwise have had to hire.
I am guessing this legal precedent is the reason behind many weird (to me) Jagex rules for pmods, for example the "no going out of your way to mod, just play the game as usual" rule. If the pmods actually went out of their way to help as the UO volunteers did, then Jagex would be vulnerable to a lawsuit as the pmods are acting as cs staff would! Plus other policies also make more sense to me now...
Salon also has an article on it.
Back to the first link, these is one of the juicy parts:
"The GM’s formed a PK group during this time, and they were sworn to secrecy about it. They made characters and super charged them, gave them goofy names and they went on regular rampages and killed players on purpose. For fun. To release stress."
Eh at least Jagex is nice enough not to make level 126 chars and pk newbs!
...Wait a minute, Jagex mods used to one hit kill players, too! Anyone remember that? IIRC Wickedwayz once had a thread in tip.it about how he wanted his stuff back after a mod killed him. He wasn't the only one either but that was in beta.
In RS we have had some minor incidents as well with Jagex staff and female players but I think maybe I shouldn't go into that.
"Many GM’s were on duty drunk or stoned. They would convey that to us in IRC."
Huh and we joke about customer support staff in Jagex...maybe it's actually true and they really are drunk when they answer cs queries.
"SRC Zaronia made a trip in about this time period (thanksgiving I think) to go see GM JA, she and he were on line lovers I guess. Well I am not sure if he chickened out or what, but one look at her — and I think he freaked, and he ditched her. Treefrog came to her rescue and he rescued her all right, for an entire week — in bed — she says they didn’t get out much, except to drink. She also bailed his ass out of jail for a DUI — she had to call OSI — and Treefrogs mother to get the money back she paid to bail him out."
*giggles* Apparently the girls got all sorts of stuff from all this like in game money, houses, special illegal one-hit weapons, as well as getting their character's stats edited.
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