EPTI dont know, its 12:54am and well I'm not tired yet, so I figured I would write something.
Moderating In General:
So to address the topic and give you a bit of background information, I am a moderator for Liquid`Jinro's stream. Moderating or Moderator can be defined as:
One who presides over a meeting, forum, or debate.
Now to be clear, moderating a forum and moderating a live chat are two different ball games. Sure you need to have morals and experience is always a plus but that is basically where the similarities end between the two.
Moderating a forum is I suppose by no means easier, but you are allowed to be less focused on the task at hand, and can freely pop in and out of moderating. With live chat moderating, you have to be on the ball always looking out for those trolls or people who get testy and start flame wars in chat etc.
With power comes responsibility. Not everyone has what it takes to be a moderator (and a good one at that). Some people are just too passive, others too aggressive, but it takes patients and experience to achieve balance between the two. In some circumstances its good to have both, where if a chat goes rogue just get a itchy ban hammer, while in others you might want to let things take there course. But the thing about moderating is that people will ALWAYS make you the bad guy. Arguing that they haven't done anything wrong, and proceed to get angry at the moderator for banning or time outing them because they see it as unjust or unfair. This is where you need a set of rules, but its hard to define these in a live chat without posting them every 5 seconds for people who come and go, and that is why experience is important, to know when someone has done something wrong and when they are just joking.
Modes can sometimes confuse you with some of the moderating tools on various stream sites. Justin.tv has slow mode and friends mode, modcaps etc and some of these can get a bit confusing to a newer moderator. Slow mode is most useful when chat gets a bit to quick to check every line, but it also inhibits 'true' live chatting with other users, while friends mode is good for letting everyone in chat know about a stream event or notice such as rules or announcements.
Then there is the factor of handing out punishments. For example if someone is making a joke, how well do you know the border between time out and permaban from chat? and do they really deserve it? Most people come back from a time out and interact, and genuinely contribute but some people do try to argue it and get angry, and at this point sometimes its better to permaban the person if they are really causing so much trouble.
In the end though moderating is great fun if you have a civilized chat. You can interact and generally people sort of look up to you as in a position of power, and can ask you questions etc. Most of all though its about the fans of the streamer, and if your a fan too, your really going to enjoy being a moderator.
Now if you think you have what it takes, I urge you to ask the host of your stream to perhaps moderate for them. It's not easy but it feels good to really help someone out when they are busy playing in game, and who doesnt like a bit of power
My personal experiences from moderating:
Some funny stuff happens in Jinro's chat. Sometimes when we ban people, for example user Facepalmer gets banned, he will come back with another Justin.tv account with the name Facepalmer1. Then they come back yelling at the mods 'hah what are you gonna do know', well I just permaban again
There was this one guy where I had to do it 6 times (I was just a n00b moderator at this point), the 6th time Jinro was in chat and he goes 'Jinro one of your mods is being unfair.' Jinro goes 'how so?', and the dude says 'oh he banned me'. At this time I interject and say 'yeah I banned you once and your smurfs 5 times'. Jinro just laughs. Now to be perfectly honest, if your going to do it, why not make it a whole different name and be way less conspicuous, its pretty dumb to come back to a chat yelling at the mods with a number difference Some other funny moments:
- Jinro calling me 'Chancey'
- Jinro playing 2v2's with TheWind
- Icebox (another mod) trolling me hard, when I found his Battle.net account, messaged him he didnt reply, so he led me into thinking it was someone else. The next day I find him sign on as he says he was going to do in Jinro chat ._.
- Bumblebeesc (another moderator) trolling Jinro.
- Conversation between Me, Jinro and MC:
Jinro: David kim please give me odin
MC: Jinro
MC: if terran get odin
MC: protoss get
MC: Zeratul and Artanis
Chany: lol wtf
Chany: Zeratul imba, Artanis only
Jinro: Ok fine MC you can have Artanis
Wait of like 10 seconds....
Jinro: I use 30 SCV repair odin. - Hot_Bid cannon rushing other team
- Jinro spreading creep into my base, and I couldnt rewall or put down buildings
(he was playing Zerg)
Most awesome moderating moment:
Recently I was moderating for Jinro before he went to MLG, and because I have been moderating for Jinro, I feel I have made some friends in the pro scene ^o^. Not many people have an account on Korea, so when Jinro is not doing much I try to help him take questions from chat and send them to him via Battle.net. Helping him out with moderating and all has really soaked up a bit of time, but all the meanwhile having his stream open on my other screen has allowed me to advance my play up to a Platinum level in Korea :D, and to be honest nothing bad has come from doing it at all, and really only good things have come from it. For example, I was messaging him when he was playing Smash.tv with oGsMC and he allowed me to play a game with himself and MC. I was like OMG IM PLAYING A GAME WITH MC. I felt bad for the other moderators in chat because I couldn't really moderate from in game and chat went a bit crazy about MC playing ^^. I was so totally going nuts over playing games with 2 big pro's in Korea, one MC and the other Jinro. MC is quite the character, and he is known as the Smash.tv expert in chat now because of it
After MC went to bed, Jinro messaged Hot_Bid and Heyoka and we played some 4v4's on North America. This was nuts for me not only because I got to play with Jinro and TL staff, but also because I got to chat on skype with them aswell :D I was so stoked at this point, nerds dream come true
Most of the people called fake Jinro, checked the stream and where like 'Holy crap its the real jinro', some even bad mannering Jinro :O, but regardless I had a ball.Jinro if your reading this, thank you so much for the opportunity to moderate your stream. Good luck, have fun and play some awesome games at MLG Raleigh!
Please check out Jinro's stream!
Steam link.
I will upload the replays if you like
