TornadoHorse

The intention is to go ahead and close survival and open this new server in it's place?

Isn't this exactly the same thing that the techs do anyway? I don't see much point in differentiating each tech for a couple of reasons; firstly that'd require us getting even more techs and we're very hesitant about that now, secondly I think techs would end up being a server tech for each server anyway. I don't see the benefit on changing the tech's name to fit a specific server if they're going to continue doing the same work.

After reading your post, beast, it was unfair to label you as not a survival player. I think the intention was to point out that all of the sadmins are exactly the same type of player; little to no pvp, prefer to build staying away from the pvp (except from the notable examples you gave), fairly quiet players, rarely coming into mumble or speaking with the players as players, only if necessary is there a post about S. It's not meant to be an insult, it's just how many S players see the admins so all you tend to get labelled with things like "non-s players", especially considering playtime on all servers. Moving on from that, I think the main point of the post has been completely missed: Please consider the whole post, don't just take it as a personal attack, it wasn't intended or written like that. We need to take action immediately so we can solve the above problems.

I have constantly been asking for updates and trying to help survival move forward along with many other players. Every time we've been informed that the Sadmins are working very hard on things that they cannot yet reveal, more behind the scenes work for R28, and after many months of waiting, this is it? Nothing? Not meaning to sound hostile, but what have you actually been doing all this time?

This is partly where the problem stems from, do we have the right admins for the right server? Given the state of survival's server and players, do they really know the server at all?

If what you're saying is correct and unbiased, then this is quite ridiculous if it is driving away players. I've said this time and time again, we need a more even and consistent level of moderation. It's fine that different moderators have different styles, approaches and tolerance, however if it is upsetting players someone with authority needs to step in.

Oh Dr Dray... You always were my favourite sadmin (fuck that traitor Tharine) ;) Hope to see you around occasionally, I greatly appreciate all the work you've done for Survival and MCPublic and for being a great friend to so many of the players, treating those special players (JackTheLumberr) as if they were normal people. On with The Next Episode of your life, don't forget to Express Yourself with whatever you go on to do... I'll stop... See you around, man!

That'd be great if you could, thanks. I totally agree that a good community can keep players around for a long while, the only reason I have stuck around here for so long is because I like the people I got to know here. When I've played on other servers it's only been for a couple of months, I've been here for coming up to 5 years now. I have to disagree with your second point, however. If we had the best game play then we would have a lot more than 3 players online. The community enhances the experience and we are able to offer that unique feature, however no one will come to play here in the first place with the boring, dead server that we're offering. I'm looking forward to seeing some productive changes listed in the changelog, I'm really glad that we've got those running now. Yes, you're going to make some people unhappy with some changes, but I'm certain that everyone will agree that any change is better than nothing. I was full of praise for everyone involved with the citadel revision and when we started communicating better between staff and players but since then there's not been anything to get excited about. I do think the negativity can go too far sometimes, but again you can't be surprised that we're not happy when the server we love is getting none of the attention that it needs. I can't stress this enough, if there is too much work in the role, get more people to help you with it. So many of us have been campaigning to get more admins added to the team for months and months now, everytime I ask about it I get the same response "We're working on it" or "Yes progress has been made" - where is that progress? what has actually happened? Four brings up a very good point above: This is one of the main flaws not just on S but for the whole of nerd. We are incredibly inefficient with so many processes here that we're missing out on chances. Great players who could have been great admins have left because we were too slow to act. The best, cheapest adds no long exist and it's now far more expensive to get the same player joins as before because we were so slow with getting the information about finances together, or even discussing the topic of advertising.

Because we have little to no power on these servers. We can welcome the players, but if the players aren't there to welcome, what are you suggesting we do? When did I ever say this wasn't worth my time? Please stop assuming things and jumping to conclusions. It is a problem, but it certainly shouldn't be the priority - there are far more pressing issues that have been listed out so many times and still haven't been solved. Would you be able to message this to me a few examples of this negativity as I genuinely haven't seen any, I'm interested to see what you're talking about and then seeing how I could help solve this. For sure, this is a community server so everyone who plays here can affect it, however I believe it is more at fault with us (staff) for not creating an interesting server to play on. I don't understand how there can be any debate that the main feature that will bring in and keep players here is the server type and gameplay. We (the players) constantly hear that there is so much behind the scenes work going on to make the server better, but if we don't see anything and the server physically better you can't be surprised when we aren't happy. Even as a mod I haven't seen any sort of progress in planning threads both in public and private. Partially that's my fault, I had an idea for survival but due to a fairly large work load and a period of disruption I wasn't able to submit this idea clearly anywhere, however I have the barebones of the idea written down somewhere.

I think you might be exaggerating slightly there slide, but you're right that S isn't always a really positive, nor is it always welcoming to newcomers, however we cannot continue handing the majority of the blame for the servers failure on the players. The server isn't interesting and poorly handled. The players don't always make things easy but it's not their fault. I have been fairly active this revision and haven't seen a single new player ganged up on or driven away by the players. There's a few players who have been actively welcoming new players and accepting then into the community. You do have a point that we could be more welcoming, but that isn't why the server is dead.

A few of us joke around and call ourselves toxic because it's funny how we had been labelled that, none of us really go around promoting the idea that we are 'toxic', however. There are still terms that are used to group us together and often to invalidate our opinions, most recently we've been called "too passionate" about the servers, apparently that's a bad thing now. I totally agree with the part about honest, respectful debate, however I have a problem with what you're saying as a whole. If a certain server isn't getting the service it needs, if certain staff members aren't fulfilling their responsibilities, what are we meant to do? Of course the answer would be take the issue to a head admin privately. What if nothing is still done? What if that server still doesn't receive the attention it needs? Because to me and many others, this is what seems to be happening right now. We've gone in full circles of taking care with our approaches, drawing up detailed lists of things that need to be done and we've also tried campaigning loudly to get people to recognise the problem. This issue is brought up far too often because it is never solved. What are we meant to do?

I don't have too much of a problem with how the mod nomination process is right now. With the 4 challenges that you stated at the top of your post, I think all have very simple solutions. 1. If you comment, give a reason why you do or don't support a player. When I comment if I support someone then i'll talk about the good things they've done, what they'd add to staff. If not then I usually add a reason. On those who I don't know I don't want my vote to impact other's opinions so I say "neutral". I think we pretty much do this already with only a few not giving reasons. If you don't give a reason, don't let that vote influence the results. 2. I don't fully understand this. If I had seen someone doing something shady that made me believe they wouldn't be great on staff then I think I'm totally allowed to bring that up. I did this a few rounds ago with a player however I didn't present any evidence to support my claim. It was later found out that the player was kidding about this. In future I will try not to sound so influential about that I kind of thing? However I don't want to have to be presenting evidence for every opinion I have about a player, that would be way too much work for everyone. 3. Make it clear to players that when they are given the responsibility of staff that if they aren't fulfilling that responsibility then they will be spoken to and in the worst case scenario, demodded. 4. I don't think this is an issue, not in the rounds that I've seen. There shouldn't be any competition between players to get moderator, if 2 players are both very good candidates for the role then both should be added. I'm not sure so sure about P and C, but I don't think this has been an issue on S for a long time. I nominate those who I think would be good regardless whether I'm around them all of the time or if I rarely speak to them, I know many others do the same. I think the changes proposed would create too much work for not that much of a gain, if that makes sense? I think if we were to change anything then it should be to do with the applyformod page. Many large servers use staff applications to see who would like to become staff. This might not work as well here but I don't think it would harm the servers in any way. The players would be able to provide information about themselves and how they would think they'd help the servers. Downsides of this would be that becoming staff may seem like even more of a promotion than it is now, I wouldn't like to promote that idea. If someone has applied for mod then speaking to them about it may help. If they aren't chosen, let them know why so they have something to work on and aren't left feeling totally ignored, this has happened frequently in the recent past. Speak to them about why they think they would be a good addition to the staff team. I think communication is definitely something we could work on in many of our problems.

I found it very strange that recently chumazing made a modmail saying goodbye and complaining that she was removed, and then she was invited back to be a mod there despite not being staff on our servers for around 6 months afaik.

I think it's fairly clear to see that we have 3 inactive head admins; cyotie911, draykhar and thrawn21, from an outsiders perspective, at least. cyotie and dray have a combined playtime of about 5 hours on all of the servers combined. From what I've seen, both have been fairly unresponsive to discussion threads, ban appeals and other attempts of communication. None of them came to the most recent staff meeting, although I do appreciate that thrawn came along to the general meeting and took notes. Is this enough? It's great to have experience on the head admin team to be looking over the newer heads, however if they're not actually around to do this, what are they doing to deserve keeping their role as head of the community? The tech admin activity on the servers doesn't actually bother me too much. As long as problems and issues are being brought up to them and dealt with promptly and to a good standard, I think that's enough, they're doing their job. If they want to be players also, that's their decision but if they're helping the servers with consistent tech work that's great. I always think we could do with more tech admins because the tech work is never going to run out. Because they're not frequently in game it's difficult to say whether they're active or not which is why having a server changelog would be a great way to see what work is being done by the server admins and techs. Admin activity is a big concern, however I think most of the admins are fairly active right now. Although I can't say anything about the C admins since I don't frequent there, the new changes look very exciting from a player's perspective. Right now, I think we need to be more concerned about whether the admins are actually fulfilling their roles, not whether they're active or not. As was repeated many times in the meeting, we need to be constantly looking for who could be the next admin because the turnover rate (at least on S) is high and with more admins it's less likely they'll become burned out. Looking down the nerd.nu/staff page our mod list is actually quite short, I think this accurately represents the size of our servers. From what I know, the majority of them are fairly active however occasional inactive clean-ups are great. I don't feel this is a pressing issue anymore. When we used to have tons of mods who hadn't been seen in months on the active list that's when we had a problem but we had a fairly big clean-up recently which dealt with that.

Although I could be wrong, I saw someone complaining about being 'harassed/stalked' by certain players because they were visiting their profile frequently? Not really sure why it'd be removed because of that or why someone visiting your profile would be an issue but hey, I guess people are overly sensitive. EDIT: Unless of course this was just a coincidence and unrelated and there was some other issue.

I would say helping with anything to do with staff that players cannot do - modreqs, hosting events, staff discussions etc. If they are actively contributing there, then I would deem them to be active. If they are only contributing on the forums/subreddit and not actually playing the game, but their contributions are useful then I would say that could count as being active, however if their contributions aren't really helping then they should be spoken to about it. If they are not meeting the criteria of being staff here then speak to them, let them know if their activity hasn't increased then they will be removed. If they do not reply, remove them. If they reply saying that they'll be more active but then don't become more active, remove them. If they step up activity and get back into the community more, fantastic! With all of these things, punctual communication is the key. Discuss a time-based goal for them to reach - if they aren't active within 2 weeks then they'll be have to step down/be removed.

Got a few favourite songs at the moment: Stromae - Papaoutai, Jess Glynne - Right Here, Jungle - Time Favourite album would probably be: Kasabian - Empire

This is the kind of reaction that worries me. We should only do something like this if the Padmins think that it would really make PvE better, not because S needs saving. I don't think this idea would work if we put it on S alone due to it being very similar to PvE. In theory I really like this idea, but I wouldn't want to risk PvE's success to possibly make S look a bit better.

3am or thereabouts for Brits and Europeans and on a weekday, lol no thanks. Is this definitely the set date of the meeting?

Speak for yourself, Eehee. I don't mind this revision either, but that's not because of the couple of changes that've been made but because it's something to do. I'll quite happily play most of the revisions that survival has put up but that doesn't make them good. I'm happy to play casually with people I know, that's the same for many left at survival. It's not the player's fault that there is a low player count, it's the fault of the revision for not being interesting, for not being advertised, for not trying new things. It's all very well saying "come on players, let's give this revision a go" but who are you actually speaking to when you say this? Everyone who uses the forums frequently is already playing. After months and months of sitting stagnant we've lost far too many players and we're not replacing them.

It will be welcoming to the players who also want that kind of game mode. We market our server as PvP and Raiding, we use paid advertisements our server as PvP and Raiding, and funnily enough those who join will be looking for PvP and Raiding. It's one of those things that I'll keep on asking until we get an actual answer from the sadmins: How are we measuring our success? a) Happiness of the current players b) Player count. Once we know this, we can then decide what our approach is. If we're only going to try please our current players and maybe bring in a few more then it should be totally community run. If we're going for the player count, whatever the community says shouldn't matter. We should do what we think is best to get a large amount of players whilst still being a bit original and unique. I don't care which of these options is chosen, but we need to stop trying to please everyone, it doesn't work. We don't have any other S players, that's it, we're all used up! There are a few more casual players who weren't seen much after last revision and the only ones who've stuck around are the ones who really want to make change. I'm sorry if you're not happy with who plays on S and what they think of their own server, if you want to go and hunt down anyone else who plays on S for their thoughts on the revision be my guest, you'll probably be wasting your time as if they wanted to get involved and give their thoughts then they would have done so already as this "Lets change S" stuff has been going on for years.

If it is turned into hostility, I will remove the comments instead of locking the thread. I'll ask it again and again, please stop grouping us all together as 1 voice. We are many different individuals who all happen to believe that survival is in a bad state and we all want to change it. Everyone who wants to be involved in discussion can be and generally is involved.

I think Wayne's suggestion is fair. A simple mistake would only lead to an addition 2 weeks, whereas with the doubling method, a simple mistake could lead to an extra 6 months. It's the difference between there being a chance of a player coming back and there unban date being longer than nerd's lifetime. On another note, I think it was foolish to get rid of 'permanent' bans. Now that we've started giving a number for every unban date, it seems that there's more players not coming back.

Damn you look young in this one, MasterCommaThe.

:/