In post 11, Cabd wrote:Mastina/RC, do you have alternate suggestions on how to keep the IC queue healthy? It's bone dry and there's a replacement request active for it right now.
It'd be a greater workload, but one thing which might help is having the IC review group review not just new ICs but offer feedback to any IC who wants feedback on their play (probably as an opt-in thing for non-new ICs): what they did well, what they could use improvement on, but always having it be positive reinforcement.
If you're putting things down and if you're placing blame on the IC for faults in the game, it very strongly discourages someone from ICing again. The IC should have just as much of a positive experience as the players they are teaching, and if that is not the case, if the IC feels like a failure, feels like they are unjustly being called out or whatever negative emotion dominates them, that's simply a situation which is not fun for them.
There's a bit of a dilemma when it comes to an IC.
On the one hand, we want to hold our ICs to a certain standard, which encourages newbies to stick around on-site and grow into healthy behaviors. An IC not doing that is not doing their job.
On the other hand, we want to encourage people TO IC, and if they feel like they're going to receive that level of harsh criticism that can discourage them from doing the job: if they think they'll fail, they simply won't try. If they think they're ill-suited for the job, they won't try. If they think they'll receive too much hate, they won't try.
And that deprives us of the people we need.
This might not give an immediate solution but might in the long-term offer a little extra help, since positive reinforcement will encourage ICs to keep ICing and go.
Another thing which could be done is encouraging players in certain queues once they get more experience after a game has ended to if they want, share their knowledge with the world by ICing.
But I'm honestly not sure.
To get ICs, you need to make people WANT to IC.
To make people WANT to IC, you have to make them want to also fulfill the objectives OF an IC.
And that revolves kicking up interest in improving the quality of play across the site, encouraging people to teach good habits in the new generation, sharing knowledge with the next generation, and so on and so forth. I don't quite know how that can be accomplished.