|
It largely depends on timezones. In a guild of 23000 people, that many people are hardly going to be online all the time. However, if moderators are evenly selected out of the members, then timezones shouldn't be an issue, since for a select timezone there should be an approximate fixed ratio of moderators to players. So firstly, at any one time, a guild acts as a much smaller guild thanks to timezones.
It also depends on how long the moderators are online. Should moderators spend longer in the guild than the average players? I don't know, suppose they stayed on the same amount of time though. Do you aim to have about one moderator on at all times? I wouldn't say that's wise, they may not be able to cope with all the players and may even get discouraged by the massive work load.
In a very large guild, even with a very low moderator to player ratio, with enough moderators that pretty much guarantees a moderator will always be online. Although in a very large guild, that's not enough. So really what you want is a decent moderator to player ratio, but wait, if you hit dead on the right ratio, about 50% of the time you're going to be below that ratio just due to chance. (The other 50% you're over.)
So, ideally you want to work out a player to moderator ratio that doesn't fall below an ideal amount very often. There are propper mathematical ways to determine such things, far better than guessing them, since the human brain is actually very poor at determining probability by intuition alone (Don't believe me? I know a few tricks that'll make you stop and think if you really want to hear them.)
The following may seem like jargon.
The maximum number of players online divided by the minimum number of moderators online is the worst case scenario. But, the chances that this will happen is insanely small. Since you get some number like 0.01 ^ 3000 for a guild where each member spends 1% of their time on Gaia, of size 3000 players. So, in statistics, you can choose how often you'd like to be wrong. Suppose I like to be right 90% of the time. The number of players/moderators online can be fairly accurately modelled with nothing but a survey and some nasty sums, and from those we can work out how many players there will be less that (root 0.9) x 100% of the time, and how many moderators there will be more than (root 0.9) x 100% of the time. Multiplying those probabilities together (which are somewhere between 0.9 and 1) will give you 0.9, and those two numbers you obtain from that equation can pretty much guarantee there'll be enough moderators around 90% of the time, which is a fairly good coverage I think. (Although you could go for something like 99%, or even 100%, but you need a _lot_ more moderators.)
Summary: 1) Any guild acts smaller than it really is due to timezones 2) The ideal ratio of existing moderators is bigger than the ideal ratio of moderators online at any time 3) This ideal ratio of existing moderators can be calculated from the ideal ratio of moderators online at any time, which I can do for you should you so wish.
Hope that was insightful.
|
|