Although I didn't agree with the lawsuit, what people don't understand is that "the volunteers" had to put in so many hours a week or lose their status as counselors. This made living real life and volunteering hard to juggle for most of them.
No, no they really didn't. Yeah, we were asked to put in six hours a week. Sometimes I put in 10 or 20 because I enjoyed helping players. Sometimes I let my Shard Lead know that life was hectic and that I wouldn't be in for a week at all. You know how many times they booted me for taking a week off? NEVER.
People did the usual thing that people do though -- they didn't communicate, and then they got "wrapped up" in what they were doing, and then, instead of doing the right thing and just taking time off, they felt it was a job, and decided they'd been forced to do the very thing that they, themselves, had decided to do in the first place.
There weren't any victims of the program, unless you want to get into favoritism, but since I didn't witness that going on in my shard or even my region, I can't comment on it. I will say that I believe it happened, but I will also say that it should have had zero affect on what anyone was doing. If the only reason you became a Counselor was to become a Senior Counselor or a Shard Lead, you were in for the wrong reasons. The only reason I moved from Counselor to Trainer to Assistant Senior Counselor to Senior Counselor was because I was good at what I did -- helping players, which translated then into helping new Counselors. I, for one, know that I and the people I worked with over on Napa Valley were among the finest in the program, and overall, had the respect of our fellow players because we gave a damn about helping players.
Everything else was, and should have been, superficial.
But people forgot that.
And someone sued.
We're paying the price for their greed, even to this day. And in the end, the suit proved exactly what I and many of the rest of us knew was true: EA wasn't profiting from having us volunteers around. The game went on just fine without us. And that, unfortunately, was a key -- flawed -- argument in the deck of those who sued... that we were what kept the game profitable. That we were customer service.
We weren't. We were the live tipsters.
And yeah, it's true, people don't need robes or powers to help other players. However, without the ability to jump between players and know who needs help, it's really not so easy to do.
Me, honestly, I'd have paid EA to work as a Counselor, that's how strongly I felt about being a Counselor and helping other players. Though, I do admit to having left the program literally two weeks before it was axed because I didn't want to be on the receiving end of a million questions about the buggy state of UO:3D, which was released early and incomplete (it was even missing tiles in the client). But that's the point, in the end. I left when I was no longer comfortable doing it.
If only other people had done the same thing.
