They're probably recruited on the basis of their observed willingness to perform thankless tasks for no visible benefit or meaningful achievement. This is a process not entirely unlike, say, the recruitment of IRC operators and other such internet volunteers.
Assessing someone's value purely by observing their actions on the internet is difficult, particularly when nobody is being paid for any of it. The lack of incentives also means that many better-qualified and suitable people will never put themselves forward; if only a monumentally stupid person would hang around being helpful to a bunch of ungrateful internet people for no reward, then only monumentally stupid people will be recruited. Anyone who thinks that they could do a better job than PA team should reflect on that; if they had been willing to prove their worth by volunteering to help out then they probably would have been recruited. But they weren't, and from that we can conclude that they probably don't
really want the position, they just want the free lunch fairy to provide them with a bunch of super-talented and dedicated other people to run the game without being paid for it.
Also, the lack of financial reward for being part of PA team means that the only way the position can hold
any attraction is by conferring status/power on people as a reward. But power comes from Jolt, and Jolt will, I imagine, not generally be willing to risk giving power to anyone who has particularly strong ideas about how things should be done. And power without a budget is really only power to issue edicts and write plans; it's not power to
get something done. This leaves only status; ops in #planetarion, some special rank on the forums, general bragging rights, perhaps the ability to go administrative on some multi's ass once in a while. This is what most PA team people's reward is. As an aside, Chef's (does anyone remember when Chef was the latest idiot newbie to pollute the Alliance Recruitment forum with needlessly grandiose plans for the Next Big Alliance, to be run entirely by people who didn't know an Interceptor from a Tarantula? I do. What's really weird is that he'd already been playing the game for about two years) post above is a perfect example: it's full of obsessively hair-splitting definitions of the various ranks and levels within (and below!) PA team, and talk of managers, committees, deputies, policies, primary duties and other bits of idiot-speak that puffed-up nobodies since time immemorial have used to make it sound like what they're doing has some purpose. Who has access to what is treated as a matter of high importance,
because it's all they've got. When your only reward is your rank, it becomes crucially important to establish your seniority and importance.
All in all, it's a perverse system - a pseudo-popularity contest to see who should have the rights to sit at the captain's table for a while. The fact that the ship is called the
SS Titanic appears to have escaped most people's attention
