Culture of sG

[The Ben 187]

Bear-man is definitely one of my favorite War3 SOs, anytime there is a new player, he doesn’t disappoint when helping them out on the server. He is also a funny guy, I’ve have never seen bear man upset or troll a new player.

[Dr. NarwhalsNumbNuts IV 2291]

We let CanadianBill stay on gmod for so long after multiple people came forward with valid complaints. Our CD started to look like a pissing contest at one point. Staff took a backseat role and refused to punish someone that was actually a nuisance on the server, not just for community members, but for the general population as well. Hell, when it came up that his admin was still active but he didn't pay, for about 3-4 months iirc, due to the forums downtime we had some months back, he was allowed to repurchase his admin - after losing it for a month due to staff finally taking action after numerous complaints came up - and continue being toxic and too heavy-handed with his admin powers. 

 

This is a great example of staff taking a "meh" or "someone else will take care of it" situation. Of course, I haven't personally be on our server in some time due to my own stuff going on IRL but the way the situation above was handled seemed sloppy and lazy.

 

There are valid points in Destin's essay, but if you're playing stupid games, you tend to win stupid prizes. Talking shit or banter, or whatever else someone on the outside looking in, is not a big problem imo. Sure, some members have cliques that tend to monopolize conversation or activity in discord or servers, but we gotta remember that this is the internet. If this is your primary source for social interactions, fun, or other outlets, it may be time for you to step up and take action with these problems or find non-sG alternatives to getting your outlet fix. 

 

We need people here more than they need us. This is a business, service, or whatever you want to call it, at the end of the day. As a service, we live and die on our clients/customers, so if we aren't taking care of them, then we deserve to fall to communities who do cater to those needs. There's a fine line that needs to be found in today's gaming world, since so many of our clients have now moved on to other games or limited their interactions in the community to a few people they enjoy playing with. They are the hands that feed us, so why do we keep biting them? 

[Dakota 4722]

Oof. 

 

Do people not understand the glory of the complaint department? Have you not seen my frivolous complaints I've made about dumb, YET VALID, bullshit? Staff must take the CD seriously. It's the only serious place in sG. If you war3fags have a problem with an SO or other war3fag then use the complaint department. Going to face or a staff member and not seeing a result will be typical. Shit is done behind the scene. CD lists point and clear that shit was handled and what actions were taken. 

 

If you're too much of a pussy to reveal yourself to the accused use Private PMs to staff. 

 

This shit isn't hard people. 

 

@turbulance @Agent

[Dr. NarwhalsNumbNuts IV 2291]

29 minutes ago, Beerman said:

Oof. 

 

Do people not understand the glory of the complaint department? Have you not seen my frivolous complaints I've made about dumb, YET VALID, bullshit? Staff must take the CD seriously. It's the only serious place in sG. If you war3fags have a problem with an SO or other war3fag then use the complaint department. Going to face or a staff member and not seeing a result will be typical. Shit is done behind the scene. CD lists point and clear that shit was handled and what actions were taken. 

 

If you're too much of a pussy to reveal yourself to the accused use Private PMs to staff. 

 

This shit isn't hard people. 

 

@turbulance @Agent

sure, but you tend to shoot yourself in the foot when you do those long-winded, drawn out complaints. While well-written, they're laced with memes, jokes, and insults, which makes me believe you post them more for rep and less for actually trying to bring light to a certain issue you may have. What I'm trying to say is that when you do that, it can lead people to believe that the CD is a silly gladiator fight, where two or more people post crap in a forum for the rest of us to grab popcorn and watch. It could be downplaying the importance of the CD. Also, you're correct in saying that private PM's to staff are good. But what if it's a staff member that is being complained about? Or if a staff member, say Sean, who addresses the complaint tells the offending party, you for example, that the post has been made? The person making the post could feel contempt or embarrassed when, not if, the issue is brought up in another medium, be it on the forums, discord, or in game. 

[Dakota 4722]

I dont think I've ever posted a legit "I'm actually salty" CD thread. Because shit isn't that serious. But as long as the complaint is valid. Staff has to take a look and respond in kind, except for @Clamps. 

 

And yeah. If you don't want a gladiator thing then do pm to staff. If a staff member leaks it....well it's a leak. If it's about a staff member, I would say it'd play out like a CD thread but without th3 audience to pander to.

 

But yeah I get away with having fun in the CD by having actual complaints underneath me being a retard for my own amusement. 

This was a good one. Eddy wouldn't take it seriously until I took put the sissy part 

 

[trav 6834]

13 hours ago, turbulance said:

 My two cents was about SO's and staffers coming in using admin powers for no reason on random people or a player and laughing about it or doing it for the lols and how it can leave a bad impression on people. I had no pitch fork in my hand and neither did Agent he was just explaining his past experiences about how he TRIED and nothing ever happened and how I can relate to it and so can others. Again read what I actually wrote and put it into the context of the thread and what I have said previously countless times now. But then again I am glad to see everyone is still like the CD is the beginning and ending of solving issues within the clan. The whole damn point was...it isn't

 

Tbh this was a big pet peeve of mine when I wasn't in the clan. New Staff or SOs abusing their power and disrupting rounds on JB, especially when you're trying to warden the round.

13 hours ago, Dr. NarwhalsNumbNuts IV said:

We need people here more than they need us. This is a business, service, or whatever you want to call it, at the end of the day. As a service, we live and die on our clients/customers, so if we aren't taking care of them, then we deserve to fall to communities who do cater to those needs. There's a fine line that needs to be found in today's gaming world, since so many of our clients have now moved on to other games or limited their interactions in the community to a few people they enjoy playing with. They are the hands that feed us, so why do we keep biting them? 

 

To be honest I don't think we really are. Our issue is some people want servers populated to play on and we're struggling to do so.

 

Everything else in this thread is kind of a non-issue imo.

 

Almost every other community besides eGO (who just merged with pG) is going through the same thing we're going thru. pG was struggling and decided instead of continuing on, the owner thought it would be best to merge with another community that he used to be part of. Even the huge clan that is Hellsgamers have discussed their problems in the GCC discord about their server population and its dwindling numbers. They too have one popular server, along with others that populate every other day and are no where near what they used to be. Their members have expressed their frustrations with them as well. In fact some HG members left Hellsgamers to start a new clan for themselves lol.

 

Every community has to endure this change of declining CSGO popularity, it's how we steer through the change that will be the difference maker.

 

Play games with sG members and forget all the bullshit.

[Gerald 1371]

Something that I do not see a lot of emphasis on is that staff tends to not talk about their planned server releases well enough in advance. There are faint inklings and whispers of new servers being worked on, but there are no official posts. How is the community supposed to get properly invested into the possible upcoming content, if they do not know much about what is actually coming up?

One such example is the ZS game mode for Garry's Mod. This has been discussed for years, and there was some recent staff interest in it, once again. Is it really what anyone in the wider community wants? Will it be marketed properly so that people that would want it actually know about it? How would it be ethically monetized to offset additional server resource usage and engineer commitment? The answers to those questions won't be know until the project is much closer to completion, if it is even being worked on or being seriously considered. Earlier disclosure of such projects might also help with drawing in programming talent that could help with release of said projects. sG does not have a large internal analytical department that it can utilize to predicate the answers to these and other relevant questions. This is where greater prominence throughout the whole community, as opposed to the veiled curtain approach maintained by staff, would be helpful in deciding proper resource contribution and direction.

Going concurrently with the example mentioned above, servers should have easily digestible statistics released about player activity on a monthly basis, if possible. Game.me does contain server statistics, but they are not easily digestible or condensed. If there was a way to condense server info into monthly activity graphs and conglomerate it into a monthly post, this would bring more awareness to server population and performance to everyone.

[Agent 22]

14 hours ago, Beerman said:

Oof. 

 

Do people not understand the glory of the complaint department? Have you not seen my frivolous complaints I've made about dumb, YET VALID, bullshit? Staff must take the CD seriously. It's the only serious place in sG. If you war3fags have a problem with an SO or other war3fag then use the complaint department. Going to face or a staff member and not seeing a result will be typical. Shit is done behind the scene. CD lists point and clear that shit was handled and what actions were taken. 

 

If you're too much of a pussy to reveal yourself to the accused use Private PMs to staff. 

 

This shit isn't hard people. 

 

@turbulance @Agent

This is just another example of the casual toxicity this place is full of and is such a turnoff to newcomers. If you actually read my post you'd see that I did try and do something about it, but for some more context, as a new guy to the server I had enough trouble just trying to get a TS IP address out of someone. And when I did manage to ask someone higher up they just brushed me off. I didn't stop because I was "too much of a pussy", more so because I came to the conclusion that people didn't care. This may have been many many years ago, but personally I feel as if not much has changed since.

[Dakota 4722]

12 minutes ago, Agent said:

This is just another example of the casual toxicity this place is full of and is such a turnoff to newcomers. If you actually read my post you'd see that I did try and do something about it, but for some more context, as a new guy to the server I had enough trouble just trying to get a TS IP address out of someone. And when I did manage to ask someone higher up they just brushed me off. I didn't stop because I was "too much of a pussy", more so because I came to the conclusion that people didn't care. This may have been many many years ago, but personally I feel as if not much has changed since.

Do you did or did not creat a CD thread. I'm confused on what was toxic from what i said. The teamspeak is on the front page of the website too, your original posts made it sound like you had an actual problem with a player. I don't know the teamspeak off the top of my head. It's on the website. 

[Moose 4890]

First off, I'd like to say thanks @Destin for writing something up, but also providing what you see as solutions to the problems. Even if we don't agree on some points, I appreciate it much more than the typical user who comes in and says we have problem x, without any hint of a solution. If we had the solution to all our problems, we wouldn't have problems. 

 

First off, I would say the thing that I disagree with most is that we aren't a business, we shouldn't be compared to one. As Travesty has said, we're a gaming community, where yes, we provide some services (in which case we could handle some things better), but most importantly we bring people together that would probably never have met otherwise to game / become friends. 

 

I will admit that your example was one that could have been handled better, regardless of how we as Staff felt. People were upset after thinking they were going to receive something and were told they weren't going to. This is why after talking with Sean, it was decided that it was our fault as staff for a lack of communication, and the users would get what they (even if just an assumption) thought they were going to get for participating. We should have done this to start with, and it will be the manner in which we handle something like this going forward.

 

As far as leadership goes, this one has always been a mixed bag. You have ups and downs for everyone as far as activity, motivation, etc. goes. But overall I'd agree with you. Things take too long to change for the most part. But that doesn't mean that nobody is doing anything - obviously everyone knows there's staff channels, that the public doesn't see. But there's also a lot more segregation than that. There's management channels, engineering channels, etc. that only particular people with those responsibilities have access to. I'm not giving the default excuse of "what we do is behind the scenes", as I've already said I mostly agree with you. But most of us, and most of staff I'd say in general, is at the moment pretty active. As Mimics last announcement hinted, there are staff changes coming that quite honestly, I've been pushing for for quite a few weeks now ( again, where I'm dissatisfied at the time it takes to make changes ), where we'll hopefully see some decent changes.

 

As for community culture, I'd like to start out by saying that if you're going to make a thread like this, don't just dismiss other peoples opinions by saying they're wrong. You can agree to disagree, but if we're going to listen to what you have to say, then you shouldn't react like this

 

21 hours ago, Destin said:

Alright sure, we just have fundamental differences on how recruitment should work and yours is wrong.

I personally think we're the most inclusive we've ever been. It's easier now to join than it ever has been, and I know there are many people who think we should just let people in and wear tags as soon as they make an app if they meet certain play time requirements. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but you've been around long enough to see the storm that it makes with this community. Many people like to have some sort of say in who joins our "club", and we're just never going to make everyone happy. Personally I think we're at a pretty good spot overall in how it works, although I'm never going to turn down tweaks to continue to improve.

 

Lastly, addressing toxicity. I personally don't think I've seen people be actually toxic in a while. Sure we have bickering, some trolling, etc. But I don't think I've seen anything that would warrant in my mind a demotion or JP in a while. I know some people have said they felt harassed, and yeah, maybe sometimes it's a little too targeted/constant. But overall I don't think anyone has been crossing any lines. At least the lines that we've previously setup... When people have made complaints that I've seen (directly come to me, pm to staff, cd thread, etc. ) I typically will go to the person and ask them to chill out. But I personally don't think we need to adjust community standards to create a protective online bubble for people. I'm not saying you just have to grow a thicker skin, I know some people just get offended easily. But there's lots of other ways that you can ignore / dismiss it (blocking them, not engaging them, ignoring it without blocking them...). Again, it's a large community with the purpose to bring people together that enjoy others' company. It's made up of small cliques, and that's fine, you don't have to like everyone...

 

23 hours ago, turbulance said:

@Face take a look at your War3 admin logs

I can guarantee that these will only be looked at once in a blue moon without a complaint being written. We're not going to waste our time combing through logs to hopefully find an abuser and punish them. Not to mention logs give us close to no context of the situation. 

 

For those saying that SO's, staff, or other admins in the past haven't been punished, we do our best to evaluate each situation. Sometimes it's a private discussion with the person. Many times we don't want to remove a position / power off of one/a couple minor offenses, but eventually something is done if it needs to be (see: staff cash getting limited (RIP war3)). 

 

 

 

Also, some people mentioned us not branching out to new games. I'll say it over and over again. If you find some games that are actually popular and support dedicated servers, we're more than open to suggestions. Problem is, most current games aren't giving the option of hosting your own servers, so there hasn't been many choices going around lately.

[Dakota 4722]

*highlights @Mooses post*

*ctrl+f "beerman"*

0 results 

 

[DogsGoMeow 1606]

good effort

[Bluestreakid15 540]

I appreciate the fact that you took the time to write something well thought out about the issues at hand here. I agree with some of your points, and disagree with some of your points. But you're right, in the long run there's some stuff that needs to happen around here.