Yesterday was insane. Mob mentality took over and a few people who acted immature influenced other people to do the same even though they'll regret it later and come back. There's been big hits to the community before that everyone thought would be the end of it. Zabiba's demotion got his supporters to resign, Captain Vodka and her friends going down made people wanna leave and say the community was dead, and now this. A lot of people are saying this is the ultimate end to the community, but even with half the staff gone this is nothing compared to how hard the playerbase was hit when the servers were taken down for 2 weeks by a DDoS. We walked out of that fine, and we're gonna walk out of this fine. It's probably gonna take longer than before, but to all the people who left you need to realize something. You and your group of friends are not the entire community, and you aren't what holds the community together. What went on yesterday made me cringe. Keep in mind that it's hard to have the most accurate information on this (Highwon please do an official statement to clear up any rumors), so some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. As far as I can tell there were some staff who had some justified concerns with some of Highwon's recent decisions and Highwon ignored what they had to say. That's a problem, but what happened after is gasoline for the fire. You don't need to delete the forums or leak a recent decision just because you're mad. If you're mad at Highwon you should resign and leave quietly and not go around spouting toxicity. The only thing that happens when you decide to band together against Highwon is that half the people get denied when they inevitably try to reapply a month later. The servers won't be as staffed for probably the next month, but the majority of people who play on the servers don't even go to the forums, so none of them are affected by this. This looks like a lot, but it's not something you can't recover from. We might have almost a brand new community after this, but there's been community overhauls in the past. EDIT:Now that Highwon mentioned this publicly I won't be vague about it anymore. Keep in mind that I only heard Darktooth's side of the story and I still think he's an idiot for what he did. Highwon was planning to delete the admin ts channels and a lot of the staff disagreed, but those staff were too stuck in their little bubbles to realize how many non staff have wanted them gone for so long. Hell the whole reason the ts was created was to stop the community from making too many cliques and dividing itself, but with everyone sitting in locked channels and only letting a select few in the problem got worse. Disagreeing with Highwon's decision is one thing, but purposely leaking the decision made DT lose any credibility and hurt his cause. Highwon wasn't ignoring his staff, he was listening to all the non staff who complained and the rest of the staff were too blind to notice that their group wasn't representative of the full community.
Don't really need all that drama. broseph. Most of the mods looked to be a little older and probably don't give two fucks. That being said, they should have been adults and just sucked it up and kept doing what they signed up to do. Edit: Vote it negative. I'm not the one getting all crazy over a gaming community. Don't worry, when you'll grow up you'll understand. You'll learn to appreciate the things that matter and focus on them. The gaming always comes after home life and nobody should get as bent out of shape as some of these people are getting.
Good luck getting staff members who were half as good as the 20 removed last night. Wait, highwon removed them so they were as good as dirt. I guess let's add puss3ym@st3r420 to the staff list. You know, they could've gone away quietly but they didnt and you want to know why? Highwon unprofessionally egged people on to publicly start this and fight him. Highwon could not have handled this situation any more poorly than you think the 20 staff members who were lost last night did. The staff members were what created the community. They made people want to come back. They're the backbone of it and they are what held it together. If you're a newly joined internet memer coming to the forums and you see that this place just lost 20 individuals, how will that sway you to become a staff member here? Are you like: Opportunity! or are you like: What happened? Im scared. I've seen this happen before my own eyes before. It'll be a miracle if this place holds itself together. People took sides, people started doing what you were doing, just calming the chaos and trying to become a voice of reason in an abyss of nothingness.
Perhaps in any normal situation, it would be fine. However, when the owner of this community acts immature and fires based on emotion when he should have stepped back, it sets a bad image. Do you know how many mods and admins quit or were fired last night? I counted 23 before I gone to bed. I'm pretty sure the number has actually INCREASED since 5 AM EST or so. At least three have presumably a CoI ban now, including Darktooth, an Advisor. Highwon before restoring backups deleted SEVERAL profiles for people, intentionally damaging his own forums. I can't even imagine who or what got him to cool it and restore from back up. No matter how its spun, this is a bad situation. Is it a community killing one? I can't say for sure. But it certainly will hurt the opinion of it for those that witnessed it from nearly the start of what triggered this whole situation.
Highwon was unprofessional, but fighting unprofessionalism with toxicity solves nothing. If they actually wanted to change something or prove a point they wouldn't be so toxic, since Highwon wouldn't listen to that. I agree that Highwon isn't good at dealing with situations like this, but retaliation from the (ex)staff only makes things worse.
You are completely right. They think this community is something because of them. EVERYONE'S behavior was frankly pathetic/appalling. Also nothing anyone says has any meaning, as things consistently get twisted and turned quite often when people are upset/angry or only see from their POV, the only people that truly know the exact reason for every decision made by Highwon is Highwon as he was the decision maker. I dont think a public statement is needed, it will just stir more drama. Unfortunately, this PETTY event that transpired last night has destroyed alot of friendships and left this community shattered but still intact. However, as you've stated this community has always "come back swinging" if you would say and in my experience it betters the community in a sense. As long as people are still here it's not dead yet. Clear representation of someone who has been told something that isn't true. Hence my earlier comment.
Apparently like 2 minutes after I posted I was told it was someone exploiting a permissions flaw to do the damage instead. Still, the rest still stands.
It was horrible last night. Forums were down and staff resigned/demoted but we move on from this. We had some tough times but we've made it through those, we'll make it through this. @Highwon handled this situation very well and I couldn't have asked for someone better to handle this. He got the forums running and even removed some perma bans and changed to temporary bans. Have you ever heard of that happening before? We'll recover, just like we did previously. This'll go down in SGM history
Previously? When has this place lost 20 staff members in 1 night? Maybe, 5-6 I can understand. But he lost 75% of his staff last night. Im speaking from experience, but go ahead and be optimistic. If he rebuilds this place I'll be hella impressed.
Look I'm not gonna start flame war. Your entitled to your opinion @Robokiller87 My opinion is that we'll recover. It may be slow, but it'll be a recovery.
Yo im telling you from experience Maybe you havent heard my clan I was in before coming to Sgmod fell in the same fashion as this place is. Owner went off one night, and here we are with rubble. This place had a bigger implosion than my clan. Paint me the town crier if this place restores even half of its former glory.
21 isn't 75% of...lets do some math here. There are 3 Lead Admins. They each supervise 4 admins. That's, so far, 3 + 12 = 15. Each admin then optimally, will be supervising 4 moderators and/or trial moderators. For the sale of math, lets assume -all- slots were full at the time. 12 times 4 is 48. Our final total is, as such, 15 + 48 = 63 staff positions. We're not counting advisors for the moment, even though we did lose one last night. Assuming 21 quit/fired last night, that's actually closer to 33%. Still a huge number, but not 75%. Edit: Also doesn't count Highwon as he cannot be fired other then shutting it all down/transfering to a new owner.
33 to 75% Gotcha. Because I was on the mentality that not all lives were created equal. Highwon is worth 100% of this community.
