I'm excited to see who the new shadow priests are. And for the current ones right now, all you guys did a great job.

A part of me says that the current shadow priest system is all fine but the other part says that it is biased. And it will always be biased, more-or-less. But how much? It depends on the selectors. The bright side in this system is that it really blows some fresh air to the community once in every while. The downside is that not enough background information of the applicants is inquired until the shadow priests are decided. What I believe is that the ardor of an applicant is the greatest factor in selecting shadow priests and everything else comes in second.
It is very important to have keen shadow priests for the sake of the forum's activity, truly it is, but the principles and even attributes of the applicants should be uncovered distinctly at first. That would be a long-term investment, whereas choosing temporarily eager applicants in the aforementioned way is a short-term investment by cause of they come and go while you may miss the right ones of the time. Not much should be changed to the system; only create a more distinct plan of rules and ordinances that will be in more strict use.
Perhaps an election - restricted to the staff only, where staff members judge users by the certain attributes and then proceed to the actual inquiries - could prove handy as well. In spite of that, I am impressed by the sub-moderator system we have here when I compare this forum to dozens of other, plain forums with no creativity or passion put in them.
Just my wallet.

Shadow Priests are decided by all of us (Staff and moderators), and there's a lot to consider. How active a user is, how much they've contributed over the years, or simply overall keenness might be a factor. There's no single deciding factor however; plenty of SPs are new users, for example. It's definitely not a popularity contest (How would I have made it to this rank if that were the case?!). I think the new system kind of eliminates any possibility of bias - with 4 new SPs every few months it would be nearly impossible to just keep choosing our friends or whatever.

That's kind of the whole point of the new system. It gives a chance for every user to prove themselves.

Even the leader promotions in the military are often biased unfortunately, because it makes a lot if you get along with the big guys despite the fact that your efforts and general behavior should be the priority. Something such as an army is heavily organized but bias still happens. I don't mean that this is more biased than any other system though, only mentioned that it's not really possible that there wouldn't be bias involved at all.
While it does eliminate or at least lower the chances of choosing just friends, at times a shadow priest might be chosen by the friend factor, seeing they come and go, and an unprofessional shadow priest may eventually only compound the community in the worst case scenario. Nevertheless, the thought that everyone is basically able to rank up is marvellous and definitely works as an incentive that unifies the community. This is not a rant; this is just development contemplation (to make it clear).

I was chosen and at the time, I had scarcely had any interactions with the moderators or staff, aside from some banter here and there about gameplay or character story.

If that was the case, I would not have gotten to be one at all.


And anyway, even if you lived in a democracy, leaders are elected by the majority's biases, not by some objective standard, whether it's a bias that some consider good or bad, it's still a bias.

People talk about bias a lot, but everyone has it, the important thing is that the selections are fair and merit based on the contributions of the members from what I've seen, if you look back at the posts, help and input of all the present and previous shadow priests, you'll see people who either were very respectful, helpful, or genuninely helped improved things around here.

They might get along with the staff, but so what? That's a positive thing, you want people on your team who you can work well with and have positive relations.

Basically the punch line was that perhaps more strict factors could be made - in a helpful development contemplation way - and that an election of sort could as well exist. Not that I would be up-to-date with how things are done in that side right now. I just felt that AussieNinja didn't come up with all of that. Yeah, getting along is crucial of course. No problemo.

lol that's fine sir Zmoke, I just decided to comment because I was one of the examples of people who weren't actually super close to anybody on the site at the time of me getting offered the position.

No harm done

I swear I pick the worst times to go inactive.......

as do i my friend!