Xarkly

Really interesting, keep them coming

This is great

Thing with CRP is that the standards differ drastically and different people have different idea beyond power gaming. So I'm not sure what your definition of good CRP is, and I think that's probably the very first question you should ask yourselves before you pursue this because a lot depends on that.

What qualifies people to teach CRP? What standards are you going off?

Disagree. While I understand and respect the motivations here, I think it’s important we don't develop CT as an RP hub because ultimately it’s artificial. There's no conflict, no stakes, little room for creativity and pursuit of ambitions for your character that makes our server uniqu and enjoyable. CT would constitute a slice-of--life hub which, while it has it’s place, needs to be kept in balance with the rest of RP that we facilitate. I think it's much more sensible for a server-health point of view to bring new players to nations to avoid developing an artificial CT hub and instead get them involved in actual playerbases and communities.

Would love a response to the arguments raised here during the stream to have some discusion

It’s pretty fine all-in-all. I don’t think this was a needed update but it’s not necessarily a bad addition. One thing I would note is what you define as best practice. More and fancier words doesn’t necessarily equate to a better emote.

What do you think about an independent war team? Just as a base concept. From my own experience, which, granted, is none too recent, war is immensely complex even when you try to take a liberal ruleset approach that promotes player interaction (which can often make it more complicated, actually) and it eats up a tonne of mod team time and motivation. A lot of problems with it, which results in wars and conflicts being rewritten every few months, is that most mods who get involved don’t seem to have the necessary experience when it comes to conflict. Why not contemplate the idea of making a dedicated team to deal with this demanding, complex area?

This is swell but it depends a lot on something that has been an (unaddressed) issue. Admin activity. 3/5 Admins definitely don’t meet the activity expectations for any kind of staff team. We can’t pretend this isn’t a problem – with the staff merge, you have made Admins assume a far more central role. With the removal of team directors, you’ve placed far fewer individuals over far larger teams. This is a dubious decision, but it becomes unworkable when Admins aren't around to fulfill those roles in their entirety. Obviously, Admins, like other people have real life responsibilities they need to prioritise, and sometimes they need to take some time off the server. That’s perfectly understandable. But like for f*ck sake, there are reasonable hiatuses and unreasonable ones, fellas. This return to our roots is great and all, but it won’t count for jack if we maintain these levels of hiatuses, absences and inactivities. If you can’t commit the time to fulfill the responsibilities you voluntarily undertook, responsibilities that are integral to the function of this server, then there is no shame in just passing it off. Except for the Dev Team, there are countless passionate, competent and more available people ready to fulfill your position. There is shame in holding onto a position you can’t dedicate the time too. I can’t stress how important this is, and it’s something you guys really, really, really need to take to heart. I’ll end this by quoting from your own Staff Conduct: “If you must leave for an extended period, then we must set aside your team rank.” @Braxis @Telanir @Llir @LotsOfMuffins @VonAulus

Thank you, Telanir.

I’m going to follow up here with a few other questions – I appreciate this probably isn’t the sort of questions you wanted, but this is an ideal opportunity to gauge what kind of Admin you’ll be in a time where we really need a good one. Following the Staff Merge, a far greater workload has been placed on Admins in leading combined teams that has caused some very obvious burnout. Without Team Directors, we’re effectively putting less people in charge over far more people. This is obviously not a good ratio. The defence here, likely, is that Admins have a team of managers to help them out, but in practicality this is still far less effective than Team Directors. Managers, ultimately, aren’t going to have the same clout as Admins. It can lead to cases like the ET being completely unrepresented on an Administrative level (i.e. our Admin came from the Lore Sect with no ET involvement) and this has in turn led to issues like being stuck for ET members as our Admin was unwilling to challenge the, frankly ludicrous, staff downsizing initiative. This is just one example of the flawed system. Thoughts? In general regarding your statement, would it be fair to say, if an Admin is continuously taking long hiatuses, that they should be removed and a more active member appointed in their place? This line of reasoning is actually enshrined in the Staff Conduct, so I’m a little unsure as to why you guys aren’t following it. What are your thoughts on this? “If you must leave for an extended period, then we must set aside your team rank. The team management must find a suitable replacement for the duration. If you were in good standing then you are welcome to resume your post once you return. “ (Staff Conduct: Lastly, in light of all this, could I get your thoughts on Telanir's latest hiatus? This came at a time when things were pretty dicey, in particular with the disastrous 1.14 update. In the days following the update, our sole developer was unable to contact either Telanir or Llir for several days about the situation was on the verge of quitting before contact was finally established. Furthermore, Grool (an actual Admin) was unable to contact Telanir for a very long time and openly disclosed in a map dev chat that the situation was not good and he had been unresponsive for a long time (I actually have a screenshot but the forums are saying it's too large to upload). Contrasting this with your comment, what do you make of this? I appreciate you taking the time to answer this. I’m genuinely not trying to stir the pot but just looking to see where you stand. Complacency kills.

Do you think admins who go on regular hiatuses should be removed

Honestly the root issue of a lot of our problems is the fact that you don't really care about this community @Telanir You vanish for months without putting things in place to keep things running, make horrendously sloppy and illogical decisions and are genuinely and remarkably oblivious to how upset people are with your leadership. I know it's a null point to try appeal to someone who doesn't care, but if you really give a **** about this server, resign. Please.

wish telanir would leave the building

Is the loophole Flemish pointed out going to be patched up? I.e. you can avoid RP by just tanking a warning. Absolutely massive loophole.

@LotsOfMuffins Would it not be more beneficial to publish the Feedback Reports here or in another thread for public viewing? It doesn't really do anyone a lick of good for them to be included here just to say ‘they happened’. In general, these feedback reports aren’t going to be entirely useful so long as they're restrained to the very small sample pool that’s being utilised at the moment -- they have to be verified by some kind of wider communal concensus like a Your View. A Feedback Report backed up by a Your View would probably produce far more accurate results than a handful of individuals being selected from a Discord that not everybody is in.

Imo the best approach is lots of small, immersive and engaging events. I think theres more merit in telling a story to small groups over time rather than 100 people at once. Trying to cater to everyone in one fell swoop isnt ideal for the sole reason that everyone will have varying standards of what makes an event enjoyable. Also the larger your audience the lower the engagement becomes and it gets difficult to tell your story. Small events that explore a storyline in a far more intimate way allows you to also change the tone of the event based on who's participating. The one problem with the smaller focus approach is that it becomes difficult and demanding to spread your story out to as many groups of possible, though that depends on the manpower you have available

Can we get an explanation as to why reverting to 1.13 was dismissed as an option Also korvic is a saint

easy mistake no worries i won’t be giving you any punishment this time but don’t let it happen again x

You forgot to include -vast, vast periods of radio silence inactivity -crippling the staff team by way of the completely illogical staff merge -creating a safety team through highly suspect means with highly suspect members that’s not even endorsed by all the admins -failing to recognize that any ‘’safety team’’ is doomed to fail if people can’t trust the admins in the first place -driving the admin team to such ineffective incompetency that people can’t trust it a shred (seriously do you think nothing’s wrong here) -downsizing the staff team for ?????????????????????????????????????????????? -sitting on very sensitive and important reports -being so untrusted to handle those reports that they have to be publicly aired on the forum (also driving the entire developer team to quit as a result of how he handled this) -updating to 1.14 -making the decision on day 3 of the update to 1.14 that we would be by no means reverting, dooming the server to devastating lag until we update to 1.15, resulting in player count noticably dipping -failing to communicate for several days with the sole developer working on the aftermath of the 1.14 mess, nearly driving him to quit -completely ignores the concerns of staff and players -driving a further rift between staff and players through lack of communication, objectively absurd policies and being very very obviously out of touch -making decisions and policies that don’t hold up to any kind of logical scrutiny and then ignoring any attempts to address the complete lack of logic -not recognizing that the mistakes above and many others are killing this server -not doing the actual honest to god right thing and resigning for the sake of this server before he murders it -head buried in the sand -clearly not caring about this community by way of failing to notice its discontent with his leadership

Can't ignore the crucial fact that nobody trusts Telanir, which undermines the trustworthiness and effectiveness of this team. FYI the original crisis could have been avoided by admins communicating.

thanks matt in future admins should touch base with this kind of lag crisis right off the bat. it’s ridiculous how the only communication we heard from an admin throughout this ordeal was telanir responding to a single player's PM. Not even Korvic could get in touch with them for ages after 1.14’s release, and as a result there was tonnes of uncertainty over what the plan was in regards to the server’s nigh unplayable state. communication is key

But it isn’t different at all. This post, in essence, is saying ‘hey guys, be nice and sort problems out yourselves!’ which is obviously the ideal state of things but given our demographic, platform and just people in general that’s never going to happen. Like we can be positive and optimistic about trying something new but this just isn’t realistic and it’s a testament to the Administration being out of touch if people really think it’s viable. Of course people should treat other people with respect. That goes without saying, but it also goes without saying that things will seldom play out that way especially in a heated situation and especially on a server with this kind of demographic Like you cannot build a system on these glaring gaps in logic. You just can’t. While you’re at it can you remove my warning point? I apologize for my grievous offence of calling this post ‘dumb’ and am sincerely glad this is now the new standard for which we hand out warnings

so since I was given an actual warning post for calling this post ‘dumb’ allow me to amend my statement in the spirit of teamwork and cooperation this latest addendum to a series of moderation changes of dubious quality is consistent with the aforementioned prior changes in that it prefers to place less emphasis on the way in which our server functions in reality and as such cannot be welcomed as a policy modification that espouses change of merit

this is really dumb OBVIOUSLY in an ideal world you only file a modreq as a last resort like this isn’t news and we don’t need you to tell us that but once again you’re ignoring the actual pratical reality and dealing with problems in a meaningful way in favour of ideological grandstanding