MSN Games - Volunteers

Volunteers

MSN's competition with AOL Games resulted in the creation of a Volunteer Program for the Zone, which AOL also offered. The idea was to have volunteers moderating chat lobbies, hosting tourneys, offering tech support, and interacting with the gamers to collect general feedback. Volunteer Moderators for the Zone were initially designated as members of the "Zone Team", or zTeam, with assorted tokens assigned to five different teams: the Gaming Team (!), Helproom Team (+), Tournament Hosting Team (%), zStar Team (*), and Tech Support Team (?).

Because of legal complexities when AOL was sued by their volunteers—and the volunteers won the case—MSN Games reformed their policy by contracting a third-party company to manage the program. In 2001, Participate Systems won the contract and would continue to lead the program until its official disbanding. During the volunteer program's conversion to its new management, all previous token designations were replaced with a single "+" token and a new name, the "Member Plus", or MPlus program. Participate Systems was acquired by Outstart.com in November 2004.

The Zone sanctioned a number of independent groups to operate tournaments on the Zone, subject to the groups retaining a tokened tournament director and obeying the Zone Code of Conduct. Groups operated in a number of games, including backgammon, cribbage, chess, hearts, and others. Some of these groups (for example RTW Online's Thunder and MrFixitOnline's Smackdown series of tournaments in the Age of Empires series of games) created an intense following, and the associated intercine rivalries. A few, such as GammonZone and Warpgammon (backgammon) and Pegging Pals (cribbage) even survived the demise of the Zone and migrated to other servers.

Citing MSN's statement regarding the closure of CD-ROM games on the Zone on June 19, 2006, the Member Plus program was also disbanded at that time, due to the removal of chat capabilities from game lobbies and the end of support for the ZoneFriends client.