Flamboyant's Hiatus

[GodEmperorFlam 3447]

A Flamboyant Hiatus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtICevCiuIo

 

Anyone who knows me knows that this has been coming, I’ve been dragging myself along for the past few months in a burned out state. This is just a bit of a ramble from my POV with some tidbits.

 

Admin?

A handful of months before I became admin, there was another who was trying to dip their toes into the lore scene. They wanted to do a full rewrite of magic, except in their mind it was okay to fully wipe MAs and handpick who becomes a magic user afterwards. Since they were admin this was a scary time, since in my mind if I opposed them I could get the boot as other directors have in the past. It was around this time where I decided I wanted to go for admin to make sure that I wouldn’t have to deal with that kind of nonsense again. Luckily that admin’s particular plans never came to fruition and things returned to normal.

 

After some time passed, another admin left the team and I saw an opportunity. I put my name forward and was eventually brought on. I’ve been an admin for a while now, having endured the cycle of most admins leaving and then a new wave joining. During that time I haven’t taken a real break besides when my computer hard drive broke down, any “hiatuses” that I took I was still trying to manage stuff over discord.

 

Admin.

Typically, I wake up to 20+ discord PMs and I’ll receive more throughout the day. I’d say this is typical for an admin. People come to us even if they should be going to another level of staff first, because they want to get an answer from the “top”, usually to try and overturn something a staff member did. Outside of that, I usually get pm’d by people having different lore questions, people requesting for me to look at their google docs of lore, people trying to dispute a decision made by one of the people on my team, or someone trying to reach me so I can play middle man for them and another admin.

 

In my early days as admin, I tried to keep on top of all these PMs. I quickly learned that doing this would eat up hours of my day and I couldn’t get much else done. My reputation was high though, as I was one of the more responsive admins. Looking back I’m not sure if I’d change this, but I do know that keeping this up is exhausting and I couldn’t/can’t continue.

 

Fast forward to now, I ignore most of the PMs sent my way unless they look like something that really needs my attention (e.g. a powergaming issue that I can delegate to the story team). This saves me a lot of time in the day that I can use to focus on IRL stuff, admin discussions/votes that popped up in the day, or other story team stuff that requires my attention. At the same time, it causes communication to break down. I’m going to take the Fireheart route and have forum PMs become my method of remaining in contact with folks. More on this is below. 

 

Burnout

I don’t think any specific thing made me burn out, but if I had to pin the final straw on something, it’d be vaults. Dealing with vaults has to be the most mind numbing thing I’ve done in years and it sucked the life out of me. I’m not even done, there’s a handful of chests sitting in the vault area waiting for me to get to them. I get filled with dread whenever I /warp into the area though and can’t bring myself to finish. This was around when I recognized that I needed a “break”.

 

For an admin, there are two types of breaks. There’s one where you still check in on discord and are around, and the other where you typically go totally dark for a period of time and maybe check in eventually. The latter type of break is such a pain to deal with though since things tend to implode when an admin decides to vanish. A good example of this would be Seventh’s current hiatus. Seventh honestly deserves the break and I’m not trying to put him on blast, fyi. However, with him gone, we’re missing the activity data that he would normally put together. I’ll be taking the former type of break as it wouldn’t be fair to the current admins for me to just disappear when there’s a lot of stuff still stirring. However, I’ll only be around for admin decisions/emergencies, so you should talk to ST management first if you need something story-wise.

 

Attitude

Now when you’re burned out, you tend to have little patience for whatever you’re burned out on. I’m not an exception and I’m not going to try and pretend I’m some kind of angel. There’s plenty of great people on LotC, but there’s a group that I would consider the vocal minority that continuously pop up. These certain individuals have been banging their fists on their desks trying to make some noise. Some of this noise has been good, legitimate feedback, and some of it has just been noise for the sake of noise. I’m not going to apologize for my treatment of some of these individuals, but I will apologize to the rest of the community who has been witness to the back and forth. Oh and @LorelessPuddleMancer you didn’t deserve the sass I was giving in OOC recently.

 

However, I don’t want to permanently become the overly toxic staff member that previous people have become. Constantly dipping into the shitposting side of me isn’t what I’d consider healthy, so I’m going to stop. I’ll be taking a hiatus for 2 weeks to collect myself, starting from Wednesday. If you want to contact me, do so by sending this account a forum PM: https://www.lordofthecraft.net/profile/100598-contactflam/

 

Contacting the account pointers

Spoiler

Please put the following in your message title so I can see what it’ll be about:

• [Lore] - Put this if it has to deal with lore.
• [Events] - Put this if it has to deal with events.
• [Wiki] - Put this if it has to deal with the wiki.
• [Player Report] - Put this if you have a complaint about another player that revolves around the above 3 genres.
• [Staff Report] - Put this if you have a complaint about one of the Story Team members. If it is a big complaint (e.g. the person is abusing their position hard), please make a staff report: click me.
• [Misc] – If it has to do with something like vaults, put this.

 

Resigning?

@Medvekoma to my #1 fan, if the Lore Games hasn’t officially started by (6/19, 2 weeks after the hiatus ends), I will resign from staff. This thread has been admin approved so if things haven’t gotten rolling by the deadline, I’ll be gone. I don’t want to take up space on the admin team if my hiatus isn’t able to help with my burned out state, so we’ll see how things go.

 

Hiatus Notes

I will be trying to finish vaults in the next few days before my hiatus starts on Wednesday, along with wrapping up a player report that has been given to me recently. I’ll be delegating anything else that was on my plate to my management, so if you had something that was sitting on the Story side of things, you’ll be contacted soon by them.

[GodEmperorFlam 3447]

Hiatus has been extended to deal with some IRL things.