Modgap Axiom

The Modgap Axiom states that:

No matter how many moderators are promoted, there will always be periods of time with no staff online.

It implies that a high frequency of moderator promotions will never be able to cover every hour of every day of the week given a relatively small size of the MCO community.

Causes

The server goes through a daily cycle of a low amount of concurrent players (5-10) to a high amount of concurrent players (30-50). Low player numbers lower the chance of seeing a staff member online:

• Moderators and admins have their own jobs, other hobbies, friends, and families. Other staff members may be asleep at the time.
• Staff may experience burnout or slowly lose interest in moderation or playing on the server altogether.
• Some staff members do other work for the server, such as organizing events or developing plugins in their free time instead.

Generally, only the regular players join the server during the periods of low player count, new players join infrequently. What may be 10 new players in an hour during peak hours, may turn into 10 new players per six hours during this period instead. Even when the staff member is online, they may be AFK or busy with something else.

Implications

• Regardless of how many moderators are promoted, some griefs will be undetected. Admins would then need to clean it up at a later date.
• Logchecks could then lead to bans of players who were never given an opportunity to be interrogated by a moderator.
• Spammers take longer to get punished.