I have spent a decent amount of time working as a staff member on servers run by Shady, Ryan and Yey (3 months on Skyrimcraft, and 3 months on MCSurvival.) That's enough experience to talk about a serious issue that has been in the community since I started playing. For most people, being a staff member isn't fun, because when you are a staff member, it doesn't feel like you're playing a game because you want to play a game, it feels like you're logging hours onto the server because you have to. It's similar to the arbitrary endpoint trap¹, because a lot of players have set a goal to become a staff member on the server since, for a long time, staff members had been considered to be the pillars of the community, and previous staff members continue to be an important part of the server to this day. The problem is that they end up finding out that being a staff member means that you have to deal with players on the server who either have a problem, or are causing problems for other players on the server.
It would be difficult to make it to where staff members enjoy playing on the server, but I have a few suggestions. (I also strongly urge any of you with Ideas to comment below.) For one, when you have a problem that you can solve for yourself in the server, instead of asking for a staff member immediately, try googling it, looking through /help and /rules, and asking your fellow players first before you ask a staff member on how to do a basic task on the server. If you have been griefed, ask for help in a calm and collected manner, and don't purposely try to cause issues for staff by pushing the boundaries on what does and does not fall within the /rules. following this etiquette would make things drastically easier for staff members.
When it comes to what senior staff can do, they have a lot more options when it comes to how they can help make being a lower staff member more appealing. Why not pay staff members for doing staff work (this is very specific, since making it to where they wouldn't have to pay money on stuff like taxes, or just paying them for time spent online would both end up displacing the economy be a significant amount.) seeing as how staff have access to chat logs, why not pay staff members for time, or commission at the end of the week for every time that they dealt with a player in a responsible and effective way. Numbers would need to be balanced in a way to where it's enough to make working as a staff member more rewarding, but not enough to make it to where it would damage the state of the economy. I understand that this idea isn't perfect, so if you can think of another suggestion, I hope you will take the time to type it out.
(Edit: I would like to stress the point that staff members don't need a form of compensation for being a staff member, the suggestion of adding a sort of payroll was meant to make it to where staff members wouldn't have to focus as much of their time on getting farther in the economy, and make it to where they could focus more on staffing. since they would have less stuff to worry about, it wouldn't be as much of a load to carry. keep in mind that staff members are still players on the server. they care about their towns, nations and resources just like everyone else. they're just spending time helping other players instead of helping themselves. I really do hope that someone else can come up with a better suggestion, it's why I made the post in the first place.)
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¹ a more in-depth look at the Arbitrary Endpoint Trap - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8ma4QM2tyE
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