The Game Rating and Administration Committee is facing difficulties in recruiting a monitoring team for probability-based item information from game companies. Since the mandatory disclosure of probability information on the 22nd of last month, the committee has had to monitor game companies that either fail to display this information or provide false data, but the process has been rocky from the start.
According to the committee on the 5th, despite posting recruitment announcements twice to hire the originally planned 24 members for the probability-based item investigation team (monitoring team), they ultimately failed to fill all positions. Currently, a third recruitment announcement is being prepared.
In the first recruitment announcement in January, the committee was only able to hire 10 people, less than half of the 24 planned. To fill the shortage, a second announcement was made in February, but only 12 people passed, bringing the total number of hires to 22.
The difficulty in securing personnel for the monitoring team is attributed to the lack of employment guarantees. The committee requested a budget from the Ministry of Economy and Finance to operate the monitoring team but did not secure enough funds to hire regular employees. Therefore, the newly hired monitoring team members will work as non-regular staff.
The monitoring team members hired this year have contracts lasting until December. After the contract period ends, instead of renewing contracts, the committee will post a new recruitment announcement, and applicants must apply again as new candidates.
A committee official said, "We required a minimum level of expertise related to games, and finding personnel who met these criteria made it difficult to fill all positions."
The shortage of personnel is raising concerns about monitoring gaps. On the 20th of last month, Gravity announced that over 100 paid items sold in ‘Ragnarok Online’ did not match the disclosed information after a full inspection. Users filed complaints with the Fair Trade Commission, which is currently investigating. Additionally, in Webzen’s ‘MU Archangel,’ there was a ‘floor system’ where the acquisition probability was 0% until a certain number of attempts were made.
Due to this recruitment method, concerns about monitoring gaps are growing. The recruitment process usually takes about a month, with an additional month required for job training. If, as this year, the team fails to fill all positions and goes through one or two rounds of recruitment, there will inevitably be a monitoring gap of 2 to 3 months at the beginning of each year.
A committee official stated, "We plan to actively discuss with the Ministry of Economy and Finance the regularization of the monitoring team to prevent any work gaps."
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