We Don't Trust You [Feedback]

[Esterlen 4499]

 

 

 

“Alright, I’m charged up.”

-Jesse Niccum, c. 2015

 

---

 

Before we begin, I want to say this: If you want us to stop making these protest threads, then stop giving us matters to protest over. I don't like having to write these any more than you like having to read them. There was no communication, no explanation, and no justification for this. Tahmas, don't tell me you're oblivious, because nobody can possibly be that stupid and out-of-touch. You must know there’s a rapidly growing chunk of players who are quickly growing increasingly disgruntled by your performance, attitude and decisions, and you had to know this was only going to make that worse.

 

Now to begin,

 

As it so happens, I’ve just been informed of the removal Thepyrodude from the GM team for the accusations of having a poor ‘general demeanour towards players’ as well as ‘general abrasiveness’, punctuated by ambiguous and as yet unclarified charges of ‘past complaints’ and ‘staff misconduct’.

 

I’m getting deja vu from the time they dismissed me from the Wiki Team, without warning, for the ambiguous claim of ‘bias’, and didn’t provide a single screenshot of evidence to back it up. As it so happens, I’ve learned recently that the ‘bias’ was an excuse - I was actually removed for privately denigrating the powers-that-be. And now we’re seeing that kind of admin megalomania all over again.

 

 

Bet you’re feeling prescient now, Kincaid.

 

I want to be perfectly clear with you all: this is not a just or fair removal. This is a coup. It is the start of a systematic effort to remove from OOC relevance anybody who expresses an opinion or sentiment contrary to the wishes of the Administration Team. For these people (who believe the server is heading in the complete wrong direction under the current admins), Pyro was a figurehead, culminating in his post entitled ‘Admin Intervention in RP’ two weeks ago.

 

https://www.lordofthecraft.net/forums/topic/153534-admin-intervention-in-rp/

 

Firstly: where’s the evidence? The answer is that there’s none, because Pyro hasn’t actually done anything tangibly against the rules. Indeed, he’s done everything expected of him as a GM except for the most important thing in the eyes of an echo chamber Admin Team - complete and total compliance.

 

 

Here is the official statement from GM manager Josh regarding why Pyro was removed from the GM team. We first want to point out that there is no evidence to back up these claims. They are unspecific accusations at best, with no specification on where, when and how these alleged crimes happened, who was involved, and so on. Most importantly, there’s a complete lack of screenshot proof of any of this happening.

 

When asked for evidence, the following reply was given:

 

 

Here’s a translation from the flowery language of the tried-and-tested staff elite: ‘We don’t actually have any evidence, we’re just removing you because you’ve been spreading all this dissent in the community and that makes us look bad.’

 

Now, to explain why this is completely unreasonable. This is a Minecraft roleplaying server, not the federal justice system with a witness protection agency. If Pyro is being punished for something, he deserves to see all the evidence against him and have as much a chance to refute it and provide counter-evidence as the prosecutor has to do the opposite. By keeping his prosecutor private, you are literally only listening to one side, and choosing only to see HALF of the evidence before making a final verdict. That is the very definition of a weighted, unfair system.

 

I understand that the reporter is kept anonymous to prevent potential harassment, but the complete one-sided, bias, unfairness of a system where the defendant is never shown the evidence against him or allowed to defend himself outweighs that. Besides, you can easily punish anyone who does harass the reporter.

 

With that out the way, let's go back to Josh’s official statement and break it down.

 

1) Unprecedented toxicity

 

Ah yes, the return of ski_king3’s favourite buzzword, an appellation used to denigrate just about anyone who does something the staff don’t like. ‘Toxicity’ is an unquantifiable and unmeasurable concept, and without proper screenshot evidence the accusation of this holds no weight.

 

2) MCly running from RP

 

I’m severely disappointed in this charge, because GMs are once again going against established precedent. And this time it’s literally written in the rules:

 

 

Anyone is allowed to MCly run from RP. The pursuers must simply give chase and down the runner mechanically to then resume RP. Not only this is plainly written in the rules, several GMs, including GM manager Beast720 have enforced this as a viable tactic in the past when players got disgruntled about people bolting from them MCly. Are GMs suddenly held to a different ruleset than regular players now? Or is this just admins manipulating unwritten expectations to justify removing someone who wasn’t part of the echo chamber?
 

3) Metagaming

 

Again, it’s very hard to make a defense when we’ve yet to be shown any solid screenshot evidence. But, assuming the metagaming took place during these alleged assassination attempts, I’ve managed to do some detective work so I can draw some conclusions of my own.

 

 

 

The Imperial Palace is, in RP, swarming with guards. Why the f*ck wouldn’t it be? It’s one of the most busy areas of Johannesburg. It’s also an established precedent (even if admins seem to be ignoring those a lot lately) that when a conflict is happening in a major RP hub, it really isn’t metagaming for guards to generally gravitate towards that area. Even if they were asked to log on for the fight (which again, is also allowed). Do you expect to assault the emperor in the middle of the palace gardens and not draw any sort of attention to yourself?

 

4) Powergaming

 

We weren’t shown any evidence or explanation of this either (starting to notice a trend here?) so once again it’s hard to make a defense against empty air. I do wish to make some assumptions based on my extensive experience with RP fighting, though. 90% of blatant, undisputable powergaming cases come from new players who don’t know the ropes yet. Any cases between veteran players is usually highly subjective, embroiled with minute details (and usually involves some sort of magic related argument). I highly doubt Pyro blatantly power-gamed, and instead the GM managers and Tahmas (who are clearly beacons of professionalism and objective, neutral judgement) put his emotes under a magnifying glass until they could find the vague subjective details to justify his emotes as powergaming. You could literally do that with anyone. I could do it with Tahmas.

 

5) OOCly banning people from Oren

 

I can justify this in one sentence.

 

If someone is plotting against you, purely OOCly, without RPing it out whatsoever, then what can you do to defend yourself other than with OOC?

 

The only people who I can think of as ‘OOCly blacklisted’ from Oren are people who have fought against, undermined, and tried to destroy Oren on a chain of multiple characters (Narthok, Vegetarianism, Malgonious, etc). It’s a very hard list to get on, actually. If you’ll notice, a good chunk of Orenian leadership (and former emperors) is made up of people who have at one point been an enemy of Oren: Zhulik, Cracker, Leowarrior, Niccum, etc. Being OOCly ‘blacklisted’ means that you, the ‘blacklistee’, have transcended your status as an enemy of Oren from RP to OOC. That’s not something that’s easy to do, especially without actively trying.

 

Now, these people who are ‘OOCly blacklisted’ more often than not play characters who are more or less innocent and harmless (yet inconspicuously show up on the enemy side at every warclaim Oren is involved in). They can do this because they do all their anti-Oren plotting in OOC. In their TS and Skype chats. Thus, they can integrate and infiltrate into Oren’s regions and playerbases despite being an active OOC enemy of the Empire, and we can’t do a single thing about it since all of their plotting is done via Skype, and not through actual roleplay.

 

So, once again, I ask you this:

 

If someone is actively plotting to destroy your playerbase, but does it all OOCly and refuses to RP it out, what can you do to defend yourself but to block that person from your playerbase OOCly?

 

Biased decision makers:

 

Don’t even get me started on the cabal of GM managers who made this decision, as well. You have Josh, a leader of the group Pyro’s nation is actively warring against at the moment, Tahmas, an inveterately corrupt admin whose ostensible goal (though he’d never admit to it) is to wipe ‘big bad Oren’ off the map through a plethora of OOC regulations on RP and war, and Beast720, who…

 

 

Well, that speaks for itself. I could make another whole damned thread about how out-of-his-depth a simpleton like Beast must be while running the GM team as manager, but I digress. Even taking out active, conscious bias from this ill-advised committee, subconscious bias is clearly rife and prevalent. Competent and fair-minded GMs, when having a conflict of interest in these matters, would recuse themselves from handling this sort of complaint and let somebody who the community knows is unbiased and reasonable (Ever?) handle it. Unfortunately, in dealing with the staff elite, we’re not dealing with people who possess even a modicum of competency or reason, and so we’ve gotten the result we have.

 

Just the other day, Lego_XBOX told our community that we couldn’t defend our own land, and he would ‘ban us all’ if we tried. Yes, he actually said that - you can read more about that situation in Lyon’s thread on precedent that I linked earlier. He completely and utterly mishandled his supervision of a raid, showing clear and obvious bias, ignoring past precedent and totally disregarding the rules he is supposed to enforce. He even admitted afterwards that he was totally wrong, and then he went back and forth on it, vacillating with vaguely Bill Clintonesque phrases like ‘determined in another way that had been originally thought’. I did not have sexual relations with that woman either, Lego_XBOX. Now a person prone to misjudgements like that shouldn’t be on the staff team, and despite numerous calls for him to resign or be dismissed, nothing has happened. The lesson we learnt from that?

 

Abuse is only abuse when people who question the admins are even suspected of it, and those people tend to be part of the Orenian community. Assuming Pyro has even done anything wrong, and I’m of the firm belief he hasn’t, what he’s accused of is small potatoes compared to the countless infringements inept and prejudiced staff like Lego_XBOX have been able to get away with. But of course, they get a free pass, because they’re a part of the clique of revolving-door staff elite who govern LotC. And a complaint from a complainant who probably has an explicit political agenda in making that complaint, being motivated not by a genuine issue but rather the intent to hinder the leader of an RP faction opposed to their own RP faction, is considered wholly legitimate so long as it's against the right staff member.

 

I know Pyro to be a fair-minded and thoroughly decent GM who espouses the cause of dynamic, developed roleplay with minimal staff control and intervention. I know that he has always and will always advocate for the rich tapestry of roleplay which weaves together to become the multitude of stories we share on this server. Of course, this doesn’t and will never suit the narrative of the grasping, venal staff elite, who want total and incontrovertible control over all roleplay. If it doesn’t go their way, they void and amend it. Forget any hope for dynamic RP.

 

Pyro resisted the likes of Tahmas and represented an immense portion of the community in an increasingly unrepresentative staff team which has proven time and time again that its interests are completely divergent from those of the players. Using florid language to distract from the issues at hand, a cabal of reactionary admins dismissed all the problems in the server he brought up, intent on sticking to their ways and preserving the status quo and echo chamber alike. I don’t know if we’ll ever evolve beyond this point, but I hope for the community that I love and consider myself a member of that we do, and undergo some fundamental change.

 

 

I’ve got a very simple message for Tahmas in response to this:

 

Resign now.

 

You are the single worst, most corrupt, most incompetent and most malicious admin we have ever had, as far back as I can remember, since 2011. You are probably worse than ski_king3, and that’s saying a lot coming from me. Your agenda is completely and totally separate from the well-being of this community, and the vast majority of old players can see right through the illusion you put up. Your attempt to silence the dissent that’s come from this incredibly poor decision (Getting the Orwellian FMs on red hot alert to shut up anybody criticizing this? Screeching in an effort to keep leaks from the removal chat silent so there’s minimal public outcry?) is pathetic and demonstrates to me how much of a megalomaniac you really are. Pyro undertook the gravest crime possible of questioning you, of making a thread that hurt your PR and exposed that your agenda was one to maximize staff control and kill any hopes of anyone winning a conflict that upset the status quo, and you privately swore retribution from that moment. This baseless removal of somebody who acts as a challenge and rival to the stagnant, inviolable roleplay world you want to create through OOC regulation and intervention, is the culmination of that retribution.

 

To the Administration Team:

 

We don’t trust you. We don’t trust you to make the right decisions, and we don’t trust you to lead us. You were chosen through clique mentality and oligarchy as opposed to a genuine belief that you would represent community interests. A few of you also need to go, but I think most of your errors pale in comparison to those I’ve already mentioned. If we want to change this server, expanding and improving it, we need new leadership in control, not the same old tried-and-tested members of the staff elite who come in and out of the positions like a revolving door, seemingly becoming robotic and totally disconnected from the community they were once a part of upon their ascension to the red tag.

But I know the voluntary subordination of your own ambitions and authority in exchange for the community’s well-being might be too much to ask for from people like you, so I’ll keep this short and sweet - put Pyro back on the team. A GM like him represents the interests and ideals of the people who are actually on the ground, the players who are role-playing, an aspect of the server that you are all incredibly removed from and direly need representation for on your team. Otherwise, the echo chamber will be continued indefinitely.

[_Sug 2809]

Poetry. Simply. Put my guy back on the team silly administration. Like please help me understand Administration and GM Team. Stop being silly and write a proper response post to this situation. Thank you.

 

 

[Cracker 4570]

Rhys is right. Let the man see his evidence and be able to defend himself. Similar allegations were made during my tenure as GM and I was given the opportunity to refute them as would any player who had been levied these charges; why not thepyrodude?

[WuHanXianShi14 0]

I just want to point something out.

 

Screenshot taken from 5 minutes ago from when this thread was in the feedback forum. It should be on recent topics, but it's hidden. Aerial's post is hidden too:

 

I then moved this thread to 'off-topic', and look.

 

There it is.

 

Admins, are you REALLY censoring the feedback forum so it doesn't show up on recent threads? That's really not a good move. I wouldn't be suprised if I was reprimanded as an FM for pointing this out, to be honest. But as an FM I know I'm supposed to be able to distinguish between actual feedback and shitposting, and not just manipulate the forums to shove all feedback under a rug.

 

Not impressed.

 

EXTRA PROOF:

Spoiler

 

Aerial's thread, seen here, timestamp as of this moment: Posted 36 mins ago. Clearly in the feedback forum.

 

 

Current state of the recent threads bar (Apologies in advance if showing the existence of hidden threads goes against FM protocol, couldn't be avoided.):

\

 

Now, moving Aerial's thread to off-topic.

 

Now let's check the recent topics bar again now Aerial's thread is out of the feedback forum:

 

there we go. And if any of you are still skeptical here's a picture of the recent topic's bar with the timestamp of when Aerial's thread to prove I took these screenshots within the same 20 minutes or so.

 

 

 

[𝕾𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖚𝖘𝖍 2451]

TL;DR I think Tahmas is quite the good fellow though.

[Imam Faiz Kharadeen 3167]

3 minutes ago, 吳憾戰士14 said:

I just want to point something out.

 

-snip=0

u kno threads sometimes takes a few mins to appear on the right hand bar right? i've posted topics thats taken like 5 mins b4 it decided to end up on the recent topics bar

 

unless ur on about something else

 

 

[Kaldwin_ 241]

Doesn't China, a communist country, also censor stuff they don't like?

[Esterlen 4499]

5 minutes ago, 吳憾戰士14 said:

I just want to point something out.

 

Screenshot taken from 5 minutes ago from when this thread was in the feedback forum. It should be on recent topics, but it's hidden. Aerial's post is hidden too:

 

I then moved this thread to 'off-topic', and look.

 

There it is.

 

Admins, are you REALLY censoring the feedback forum so it doesn't show up on recent threads? That's really not a good move. I wouldn't be suprised if I was reprimanded as an FM for pointing this out, to be honest. But as an FM I know I'm supposed to be able to distinguish between actual feedback and shitposting, and not just manipulate the forums to shove all feedback under a rug.

 

Not impressed.

 

Shut it down, Tahmas! They know!

[WuHanXianShi14 0]

Just now, Imam Faiz Kharadeen said:

u kno threads sometimes takes a few mins to appear on the right hand bar right? i've posted topics thats taken like 5 mins b4 it decided to end up on the recent topics bar

 

unless ur on about something else

 

 

Nope. I refreshed the main page of the forums multiple times over the course of about ten minutes, and this thread didn't appear on the "Recent threads" bar until I moved it out of the feedback forum, and into off-topic.

[Guest]

Pyro said these could be released. Thank you to @Beast720 for shedding some more light.

[Imam Faiz Kharadeen 3167]

1 minute ago, 吳憾戰士14 said:

Nope. I refreshed the main page of the forums multiple times over the course of about ten minutes, and this thread didn't appear on the "Recent threads" bar until I moved it out of the feedback forum, and into off-topic.

im pretty sure its a glitch on the forums boss man, cuz i saw it on the side when it was at 2 minutes posted in.

[Rael 935]

The threat posed by the likes of that which has taken over the staff team was emphasized some time before their ascension. Instead of allowing people mired in nepotism and a constricting sense of allowing only those in their clique to be welcome, instead of  time and time again disregarding the approaching signs of yet another malicious force taking over the server, why don't we stop it beforehand?

 

The only way this issue resolves itself is through the resignation of the aforementioned party. It will be on their terms, however, once they're done playing gods. 

[WuHanXianShi14 0]

Just now, Imam Faiz Kharadeen said:

im pretty sure its a glitch on the forums boss man, cuz i saw it on the side when it was at 2 minutes posted in.

It's not a forum glitch. This thread and Aerial's thread were both in the feedback forum, and neither were shown on recent threads. But, as soon as I moved it to off-topic, it showed up. It's not a glitch. The feedback forum's been censored so threads posted in it dont show up on the recent bar.

[Imam Faiz Kharadeen 3167]

Just now, 吳憾戰士14 said:

It's not a forum glitch. This thread and Aerial's thread were both in the feedback forum, and neither were shown on recent threads. But, as soon as I moved it to off-topic, it showed up. It's not a glitch. The feedback forum's been censored so threads posted in it dont show up on the recent bar.

you win this round brown man.... 

[Babehab 386]

If I jump aboard the bandwagon do I also get rep?