Any idea, whether you think it may be silly or not, is never looked upon by us as being so. We take all ideas in stride and will discuss it amongst the team to see if it’s a viable one or not. We also have to weigh it against many things:
-How will it change the basic fundamentals of the contest
-Will it change things for all members and will it benefit the members as a whole
-How will it change things for the mods, does it cause more work or less.
This is only a few things to think about, it’s not easy changing something that’s been around for years, but that is not to say it will never happen either, sometimes change is good for all.
Keep in mind that while all of our contests are to be played in the spirit of "fun", it IS still a contest, you have winners and you have losers, this will never change.
As for how we ask for volunteers, many of you are “new”, yes a couple years in, but your still new...if your not happy with this format we can talk about going back to the “old” way of doing it...the first person to volunteer gets the job. Giving you 5 minutes to volunteer and accepting all volunteers within those 5 minutes is more than fair, you all have the same chance of getting the job as the next person. As a matter of fact, when the above post regarding volunteers was being made, there was a contest waiting for a volunteer, and no one was volunteering. This happens more then you think it does. We have tweeted, posted on Discord, even sent pm's asking for someone to volunteer.
Setting restrictions for volunteers is not a realistic expectation, here are a few reasons why;
You can only do ? volunteer jobs a day
-We ask for a volunteer, but the only people around have already done their daily allotment, how long do we wait for someone else to come along.
-We ask for a volunteer, now the mod has to look at all the other contests for the day to see who got those jobs.
You can only volunteer if you have paid out all previous jobs
-We ask for a volunteer, did this member payout their last job or not, we have to check on that first.
Volunteering in some contests should be open to non-winners only
-We ask for a volunteer, no one volunteers because they are all winners and the mod has to check to make sure they are not a winner once someone does volunteer.
You can no longer volunteer once your WRZ$ balance reaches a certain amount
We ask for a volunteer, no one volunteers because they are all above this amount and why should a regular player for many years be penalized for being around so long.
We have had many members who would post to volunteer, then someone else would post so they would edit their post saying "never mind" or "please give it to whomever", while this is a nice gesture, once again, its more work for us...I have always suggested to these people that instead, wait the 5 minutes, if no one else has volunteered, then do so. We appreciate this gesture and while those of you just think that person is being greedy or not thinking of others when you see them volunteering time after time, then you need to think of the bigger picture and know that they already stepped back to allow someone else, someone "new" to step in. Now they are fulfilling a job in order to get it done for us.
We have had countless suggestions for how to “change” the volunteers, ultimately it comes down to more work for us...In fact in many cases it’s simply faster for us to do rewards ourselves, but we recognize the fact that most people just want to help, and this is one way they can do so.
Do you want us checking on volunteers or paying rewards? Or would you rather have a contest posted that you can participate in?
Feel free to keep making suggestions however, but keep in mind some of the challenges that may impede those suggestions.
We understand the frustrations of all this, remember, we all used to be you, we played, we got frustrated, we had our tantrums...but we all keep coming back.