MOD ANNOUNCEMENT

[theearth]

As many of you are aware, there has been a recent incident involving ourselves and a few players. We wish to address this matter here.

Firstly, we apologize not only for our delay in speaking on this, but for our own behavior during this. We do take fault for having been too inflexible on the matter which started everything. All of us are to blame for this inflexibility and we all take responsibility for it; not just one mod is fully to blame for anything which happened. The plot the player desired should not have been dealt with in the way that it was. Our reasoning had been that we had not seen evidence that the plot had been set in stone, we had not been given reason why change was necessary to reconcile the plots, and that the details behind this plot/what was needed to occur to bring it to fruition were not brought to us. We offered one compromise, it was not taken, and we should have been more flexible about offering further compromises. We are, again, sorry for that inflexibility on our end.

Secondly, to prevent any risk of this sort of situation ever happening again, we are discussing a frankly overdue new system of accounting for, organizing, and simplifying coordination between planned plots, both meta and player. Details on it will be coming soon.

And thirdly, the mod with the most concerns voiced about her has been issued a warning, and will be taking far less of a stance involving plot-related issues for the time being. We will monitor her behavior to ensure a repeat of this kind of situation does not occur again and, should it, she will be dealt with. In line with those concerns, while she will still be involved in plotting and whatever issues may come to us, the other mods will have far greater a say, and will be considered the figures of authority where directly addressing player concerns and needs is concerned.

However, what we stand firm about is that ganging up on a person while refusing their own comfort is not permissible. The mod in question had become extremely uncomfortable having so many people, including one not in the game, on her all at once while she was not feeling well. This was the reason warnings were issued. We do, however, concede to having been too impulsive in issuing warnings to all involved, and once more, we do apologize to the parties who had been warned without having acted severely enough to warrant a warning. All but one of the warnings has been lifted.

Finally, not all the mods are experienced mods, and even the more experienced mods will acknowledge they can always use some help. So please, we ask that if any of you have any suggestions on how we might improve to come and tell us.

Thank you and, once again, we all apologize for our respective parts in this situation.

Comments to this post are enabled. At request, they have been unscreened. If you have left a screened comment and would like it unscreened, please indicate so! As per the suggestion of Guin, if you would prefer to leave us a screened comment, please do so on the Mod Contact post.

We will make a second post addressing those concerns, resolutions, and invitation of a second round of feedback as soon as we're able.

UPDATE - 5/3:

The StE modteam is currently planning to come together as a group and discuss all the issues brought to them on this post. Linda and Guin will be present while we are all on to continue discussion as a full team in order to ensure that all points and issues are thoroughly addressed.

This discussion will be happening as soon as possible - but coordinating schedules has proven difficult, so please bear with us.

This post will be edited accordingly once the discussion's day and time have been set.

UPDATE - 5/3:

The discussion will begin Sunday, May 4th, 5:00 P.M. CDT/3:00 P.M. PST.

UPDATE - 5/4:

The discussion has begun and is underway; it's proven to be more intensive than anticipated and hasn't yet ended, but will resume tomorrow and continue until concluded.

In the meantime, screencaps of the discussion thus far are posted at Linda's public Plurk; further updates will be made on this post and the linked Plurk, including the date, once set, of the second post.

UPDATE - 5/5:

Discussion has now concluded - we're sorry for having been quiet for so long!

Formal address of the points brought to this post as well as a second OOC post and a mod apps announcement will be coming by the end of tomorrow - Tuesday, 5/6.

- THE STE MODS: Anduin, Blue, Mini, and Olga

Comments

please respond to my second comment-- not this one. i'm going to be editing this one.

[shineonyou]

Alright, so I suggested to Blue when she contacted me that she ought to do a second post after this, directly addressing all the major issues that everyone has brought up today. The importance of this is so that all your good points don't get lost in a shuffle of comments, sock accounts (which are totally legit), and +1s. What I'm going to try to do in this comment is highlight the key bullet point issues that are an absolute NECESSITY for the next post. I'll also provide explanations synthesizing all the comments on this post so far.


» Players are uncomfortable with coming to the mods
• the PM warnings: We need to know who wrote them, who signed off on the warning, what they were thinking at the time.
• the 'Don't Be Mean to Mods' OOC comm post: same info required.
• Accountability and Transparency: people are legitimately worried about approaching the mods in a one-on-one, private manner. in the past, issues that have been brought up or plot points presented have been completely forgotten or totally shut down.
• Mini's role in this and what will happen to her?
• Blue's role in the initial problem with Mini, and what exactly she said/did to Batty.
• Anduin's role in this and what will happen to her?

posts for further details:
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5785216#cmt5785216
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5784192#cmt5784192
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5791104#cmt5791104
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5794432#cmt5794432
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5797504#cmt5797504
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5803136#cmt5803136
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5803392#cmt5803392
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5803392#cmt5803392
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5806720#cmt5806720

» Rules, upholding and enforcing how the game runs
• Anduin and AC: what is going on here?
→the cast member in question responded here
→Anduin responded here
• Plot handling in the future: if there are two conflicting plots, what will you do? how will you make sure you aren't shutting down players' ideas or being inflexible?
• Information dispersal: it seems like some players are "in the know" about plots while others aren't.
• Questionable bias against Batty/other players: was this a problem Mini had? What do you do if this happens in the future?

posts for further details:
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5792896#cmt5792896
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5789568#cmt5789568
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5799296#cmt5799296
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5832064#cmt5832064

» Mod Roles
• PR; obviously whoever wrote those PMs to myself and others should probably never ever deal with players ever again. what will you do to work on PR?
• Are you guys communicating with each other? is there a way you can work on that? what plans will you implement to make it so that you're all on board with your own decisions? what plans will you implement to make sure your own decisions aren't like what's happened here?
• Mod apps? you guys definitely need more people on the team-- either to balance you guys out or to just generally help with the workload of a huge game.
• who does what? this technically fits under transparency, but it also fits here-- we know certain mods are more picky with apps than others, we know certain mods are better at handling player plots and player concerns than others. can we get it in concrete who does what so there won't be such varying standards?

posts for further details:
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5785728#cmt5785728
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5815680#cmt5815680

good solutions:
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5799552#cmt5799552
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5799296#cmt5799296
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5810048#cmt5810048
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5832320#cmt5832320

good summation of the major problems:
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5793152#cmt5793152
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5805952#cmt5805952
http://saveyourselves.dreamwidth.org/213376.html?thread=5809792#cmt5809792 - (wonderful analysis on what it means to be a mod)

finally, here's a link to my original plurk where I explain everything from the original plot conflict to setting up a date for me and Guin to walk the mods through each of these points.
batty's apology
legitimate concerns about the discussion's tone thus far

[hitmewithyourbest]

So which mod are you friends with? Because you have honestly had poor reading comprehension in a lot of this and have seemed intent on making this out to be about Batty being a bad person, which is distracting from the larger issues.

Also, the fact that you are devaluing a person's being uncomfortable with mods who have shown, repeatedly, to be bad at this is kind of gross and implying it's immaturity is beyond disgusting.

please respond to me on this comment since i'll be editing the above

[shineonyou]

heyyo, alright-- if you think i've missed anything in my synthesis or that i should pay particular attention to something i only glossed over, tell me here. this is to help the mods out for their next post.

i also totally believe that they ought to fully address everyone's role during this whole event, detail out what actions were taken and what communication happened between the four, and finally have each mod explain what they will individually do in the future to keep this from happening again.

[justkingreally]

I'm going to start this out by saying that I'm relatively new to the game, and I've had no interaction with any of the mods beyond what happens on the application and echo pages, without even having any of the mods friended on plurk. I know very few people in the game personally, so I'm about as much of an outsider as you can get on something like this and still be in the game.

That said, I was a mod/leader of various types of online RP games from 2001, when I was an unemployed high schooler, until the end of 2011, when I was (and still am) a full-time working bill-paying adult, so I've definitely stepped in my share of mod potholes over the years. Modding is stressful - that's the entire reason I don't do it anymore. I want to get online and have my fun outside of my stressful job, not get online and have to go to what more or less becomes a second job. Mods never get enough credit for what they do, it's true - but what's happened here has gone beyond allowable mod rage and needs to be curtailed and, more importantly, controlled in the future. Mod rage is a potent weapon for driving people away, as you're unfortunately finding out, and it needs to be handled with kid gloves to achieve the desired effect - that being players realizing they can't just fuck around and do whatever they want, when they've actually done so, and that consequences will be appropriate to the circumstances, neither too harsh nor too lenient to the point of being nonexistent. From everything I've read about this situation, you've been leaning far too much to the former for a long time now, with some aberrations towards the latter when it involves yourselves or people you're close to.

I have to say that I'm really not impressed with how all of this went down, and I appreciate the transparency shown by those players that put the word out, not the mods. I won't go so far as to say that this apology isn't an apology at all, but it's certainly a conditional one. There's still a great deal of victim blaming going on, which is exactly what's going on here. I can easily translate this post into "We only did this because she did this first," and while technically that might be true, there is no way in hell that emotionally or logically its right. Batty brought a complaint to the mods. From the sounds of the plurk caps, she tried to do it with more than one mod, over the course of at least one day and probably more. She handled the confrontation with far more class and tact than any of the mods showed, repeatedly stating that she did not expect anything to happen immediately, and yet she was jumped on. You haven't apologized for that at all. At the time of this writing, I'm honestly not expecting you to, because the mod collective seems to be very reluctant to admit they're wrong. Batty's crime was bringing in more people to a private plurk than the mods were comfortable with (when one of the mods that was pinged in the plurk never responded at all). The mods' crime was blatantly ignoring her complaints, telling her her complaints were baseless, and compounding it with disregarding repeated attempts to bring up the complaints from Batty herself and other players. In effect, Batty stole an energy drink from a convenience store, while the mods robbed a bank.

Having said that, I don't think this situation is unsalvageable, but you're going to have to put in a lot of work to make it up to the players and even yourselves as mods. When you choose to mod a game, you automatically place yourselves above the players, and in theory that's fine - a car needs to have a driver for it to go anywhere, and a game needs a leader for it to continue. You guys are the drivers, the dungeon masters, the coaches, and your "payment" is the ability to control the world, the plots, and in some ways even what player characters do (or at least have the option to do). But you pay for those privileges by having to hold yourselves to even higher standards than you do the players, and from everything that's been said here you've been taking the good things without accepting the less good. That needs to change immediately, first by being as transparent as possible- actually, no, that's third. First is actually admitting that you haven't been holding yourselves accountable to those high standards that mods need to abide by. Second is returning to holding yourselves accountable to those same high standards and sticking to it. Third is being as transparent as possible with the playerbase and retaining that high level of transparency until such a time as they choose to "remove you from parole." It won't be easy, but it's what's necessary.

I'm going to give some suggestions for things that I think (or at least hope) would help the situation, and while some of them involve a bit of work, it's work that seems, to me, to be worth it. Do I think this game is good? Yes, or I wouldn't want to play here. Do I want to keep playing in this setting? Definitely. But with a mod team that has this tight a grip on the reins with seemingly no maneuverability, things need to change or the game is going to stall and die. No one wants that.

On to the list.

HOLY FUCK I BROKE THE CHARACTER COUNT

[justkingreally]

• Write a Mod Contract for your game that all of the mods (and probably the players) can see. Include in it things such as general guidelines for dealing with complaints, how long to let apps sit without any response to them, and most importantly what the code of conduct is for all mods that needs to be adhered to when acting in the name of the game. It can be as long or as short as you wish, but having this and making people agree to it before they become part of the mod team will at least give you a solid backing in what to do in various situations. It's an easy way to avoid having to use "precedent" when someone made an honest, or even a deliberate, mistake in the past and will cut down on the number of "Well I don't know..." problems where everyone more or less has their own idea of what to do. Definitely leave room for deliberation and unplanned-for circumstances (such as the car crash one of my friends was in several years ago), but day-to-day dealings will go faster if the answers are clear-cut and available for all the mods to see with the click of a button. As an addendum to that...
  
  
• Do not go to anon comms or Wankgate. I'm not here to make a decision on whether these places are needed or not, but it's one hundred percent black and white that they are toxic places for mods. Any complaints people have with the game need to be brought to the mods, and not aired in a space where there is no accountability. People can and do say whatever they want under the idea that no one will know it's them; that's part of what makes the internet in general so hard to deal with, and why the assclowns come out to play in cyberspace. We all know the stories of how someone who's nice and fairly mild in real life can turn into a raging douchebag when given access to the world wide web and the realization that really, no one can hurt them there, and the anon comms and Wankgate are much the same for the general RP population. Now, you've made it very difficult for people to have faith in you dealing with complaints fairly, if at all, and that is definitely one of the things you need to turn around the most. But you need to show your players that you can do that as well, so make it a rule for yourselves to not go there and avoid letting your blood pressure rise. It really does relieve a lot of stress when you decide to cut yourself off from constant negativity. There's always going to be people that react badly to you; I know of literally no one who is universally beloved. You don't need to invite trouble by deliberately going and looking for it. And especially do not comment on it and encourage it yourselves. Any mod stirring up wank in either place should be immediately banned.
  
  
• Have both screened and non-screened Mod Contact posts to allow people to contact you in what ways they feel comfortable with. There are definitely instances where Player A has problems with Player B and doesn't want Player B to know and immediately jump in and get defensive or start screaming about it or insert unhelpful reaction here. While it would be nice if players could solve all their personal problems with just the two of them, we all know that's not a truism even in real life, and it's even worse online. That's the reason why most mod contact posts are screened. But you've also alienated so many players from seeking your help/advice/whatever else that you need another way to do it, one that allows others to see - and yes, monitor - how you handle problems. Make another one and leave the comments unscreened to give your players both options. Don't be surprised if for awhile everyone uses the unscreened instead of the screened, but you do need to pay your dues for awhile to regain their trust.
  
  
• Set up a Discussion Post on the mod journal for your private use if you don't have one already. Plurk is a great tool for immediate discussions, but its nature hinders it from long spiels like the one I'm making now and can end up limiting needed conversations, especially since everyone needs to be online at the same time to actually talk. AIM is a great tool for longer discussions, but it still requires people being online at the same time and possibly setting up an AIM Chat, which are just getting more and more finicky the longer the software is out. Having a central place for any sort of discussion that needs a more complicated mod talk than "I'm going to approve this"/"Okay" lets you share all the information with everyone at once so there's no crossed wires, and everyone can read all of the prior talk as well. Don't delete a discussion thread until it's fully resolved (or never delete it, if it's a really important or complicated thing). Require everyone to check it at least every couple of days to see if there's anything new that came in.
  
  
• Set up a Calendar for plots and update it regularly. Someone mentioned this upthread and this is definitely an idea that needs to be implemented in the immediate future. It can be a table/HTML construction like Paradisa's, or it can simply be a text-based list with bullet points under the months, but get it up and have it constantly available. Possibly ask people to submit plot ideas there, or at least "soft plot" like if someone wants to have a weekend art festival or something. Use color-coding to mark whether something's a Game Wide Plot, a Locke-or-Vegas Plot, or a Optional Plot. If you want the nature of the plot to be a surprise, then that's absolutely fine - just mark down the days on the calendar as something like "June 5-11: Big Game Plot!" You can even use :), :(, and :o faces to indicate whether an unknown event's going to be happy, sad, or shocking if you want. But make and update this calendar frequently, checking it over at least once a week, and keep it updated for at least two months in the future. That is more than enough time for most plots to be developed and ready to set sail, so if a player wants to do something in ten days, they'll be able to look at the calendar and see if that specific day, or any days bracketing it, is free. It will help clear up confusion in the future and open a few more options in the future for players to do things like Kotetsu's party, or that arts festival I made up earlier.
  
  
• Bring in new mods... It's become painfully obvious to a lot of people that this game has outgrown the modteam, and I'd venture to say that it's outgrown almost any modteam. It's a large game with a lot of things to oversee, fairly frequent applications, and made more complicated by the reincarnation and echo aspects. Absolutely no one can blame a mod for needing some time away from all of that, since modding really does become a second job for any game as complicated as this. But that's when you have to throw your hands up and admit you need more help. While I haven't seen your behind-the-scenes work and how it's structured, I'd say you need at the very absolute least one more person, much more preferably two, in order to take some of the burden off the shoulders of the current mods. That way if someone has a final or a thesis, or an excruciating day at work, or gods forbid a medical emergency, the game isn't unduly slowed down by one missing member. Even if all they do is update lists or approve echoes, it would be one less thing for the mods that have to be really deep in the plot/world stuff to have to worry about getting done.
  
  
• ...and Delegate. I honestly can't tell who does what here as a mod - from what I've seen, it seems to be mostly Olga and Blue responding to apps, but the rest of it seems to more or less just be whoever's available, and I could have one or both of those suppositions wrong. Sit down among yourselves and decide on specific facets of the game that each of you is going to be in charge of individually, or group into teams of two and split the work into general areas such as "Plot/Story/World," "Data (accepting journals to comms, running AC, updating calendar/taken lists/etc)", and "Apps/Echoes." Or maybe put Echoes in Data; you'd know better than I would which of those sections is easier to get through. If everyone has a specific area to concentrate on then no one person is burdened with all the work across the game, with appers clamoring to know if they're accepted and other players wanting to know if their echoes are approved. This combined with more mods would probably also speed the echo approval rate; given that this game halfway runs on echoes, having those approved quickly is essential for a lot of threads and especially between-character plots. There's been times for everyone when echo requests have taken only a couple of hours and other times when it's taken, on occasion, five days, which is a lot of time to leave a thread in limbo waiting on an outside source.
  
  
• Learn when to step away. One of the smallest problems that lead to this was the fact that Olga simply didn't tell Batty and company that she's heard their problem and she'll get back to them after further discussion with other people, which is ironic given that they were insisting on it after she told them she wasn't feeling well. Mods need to be emotionally detached from what's going on around them, because they have signed themselves up to be the eye of the storm, the boulder in the tornado, that one spot of peace where someone isn't losing their mind. Does that mean a mod can never get angry, or frustrated, or upset? Does that mean they can't scream and shout and cry buckets of tears? Hell no. I know I certainly did all of that and more several more times than I care to admit. One memorable occasion involved a player who didn't know my personal history (and therefore didn't know my triggers) making a cutting remark that sent me into a full-blown panic attack. But when those times happened, I stepped back. When they happened for other mods, other friends, they stepped back themselves or our comods pulled them back. If you find your passionate emotions rising, you need to disassociate yourself from the situation, because you're getting way too invested in it to be rational and, more importantly, impartial. A mod needs to be impartial, and it seems to me the biggest thing that's come out of this is that the mod team as a whole is currently incapable of being so. Many others are saying you need to listen more to your players, which is entirely true, but you need to listen to all of your players and not just your friends or yourselves. A mod's duty is to the game, not to a small group inside the game.
  
  
• Take stock of whether you're truly capable of functioning as a mod. Everyone has done this: joined a game, planned for the long haul with it, and slowly fallen behind as things just get busier in your life than you expected them to be. Maybe it's school, maybe it's a job, maybe it's family, maybe it's a fire-breathing dragon descending from the heavens to carry you away to an Island Paradise. Whatever the reason, there always comes a point where what you can do in simply less than what you want to do. And, frequently, other people notice it before you do. Many, many comments have been made here and in other places about Anduin not doing anything, and indeed, the only time I ever saw her poke her head out was last year during the major wank and that immediate aftermath. Since I've actually joined the game I've yet to see hide nor hair of her around in a mod capacity, although I have not looked at each and every mod post made to find her icon. If she doesn't have the time or the will to mod a complicated game like StE anymore, than she should step down. If she doesn't want to step down, then a vote should be taken among the remaining mods as to whether she should remain on the team when she isn't pulling her weight.
  
  Similarly, many complaints have been made about Mini, but for different reasons. She's most definitely around, she seems to respond to things with the mod journal pretty frequently, but we've long since reached double digits in players that are afraid to talk to her at all or have anything to do with her. She is, unintentionally, holding players hostage through the fear that they'll say something about her, or to her, and she'll fly off the handle or be incredibly acidic in return. Her reaction to this ordeal, at least as told by Batty and Linda, showed her incredible determination to be inflexible in the movement of a more or less personal plot that was not time-sensitive, whereas her plot made Kotetsu's party very time sensitive because, see, Batty was right. The brutal murder of a Numbered person would override (almost) anyone's urge to have a fun little party to celebrate the conviction of their enemies. Even if you incorporated her death into the overarching plot in Vegas, this was not a situation that could only have happened on that specific day and could easily have been moved one or two days into the future to let people have a little fun first - and yet every proposal Batty made was shot down. Absolutely unacceptable. This is far from the personality that a mod needs, and she needs to have a good hard think about whether she is mod material. I, and apparently several other people, don't think she is.

I hope at least some of these suggestions are helpful, and I hope that we can move past this and continue on with an awesome game. But I'm going to finish this with two caveats you need to apply right now because you are continuing to be unfair to the people that began this whole incident in very, very different and ridiculous ways.

One - Take The Warning Off Batty. Going back to my initial comparison, Batty's "crime" wouldn't even count as a petty misdemeanor in the real world, and in RP Land it certainly doesn't deserve a warning and a ban threat. Did she include too many people in a private plurk to talk to mods about a problem? Yes, I would say four people for "moral support" is too many. It's an implicit trust that private communications will be kept private, which was obviously the logic Batty was operating on here, and so I can see having one in-game friend in with her to make sure the mods kept the snap reactions to a minimum. But Anduin never responded, which is on Anduin. Olga chose to keep engaging the situation when she should have promised a resolution at a later date, especially when people were telling her to do so in consideration of her health. The players are not the problem here - the mods most certainly are. And the players should not be held accountable for mod fuck ups, especially not because the mods refuse to see that they did fuck up.

Two - Suspend Mini. Or Ban Her From Modding. Her inflexibility about this situation is what started this whole thing, and her refusal to move a plot that literally wouldn't affect her after it happened because her character would be dead is, frankly, infuriating. Many, many people are uncomfortable with her, and she has done nothing to endear herself to the game at large. Her actions have stabbed the game in the lungs and put it in the hospital. This will be tough for her to hear, maybe impossible for her to accept, but even on the internet actions have consequences, and she's more than earned hers. When you have this many people who don't like a mod and want her gone, it's time to bow to public opinion. Whether she's salvageable or not, I don't know. I don't know her. But she's earned more than a warning.

It's time to straighten up and fly right, kids - else you won't have a game to run soon.

[nevergivesup]

Hey anon. So, this is going to sound completely ridiculous and at this rate, I suppose no one is going to believe me, but I'm going to respond and and apologize anyway.

Here's the thing. I looked this over and I was all ready to respond to this being a huge misconception regarding the number of strikes I have. October, I was new. The hiatus mentioned above is actually for both November and December together, which I had a discussion about. January, I had a strike issued to me privately. February, I commented. March, I had a strike publicly. So honestly, I could understand how it'd look like I've been skating through with no repercussions until March.

HOWEVER, while I was writing this response I was informed that STE has a *two strike system* rather than a three. I cannot even tell you, anons, how fucking mortified I am to have been told that. I seriously and legitimately hadn't realized that. And if that's really the case, then yes I should have been booted last month. And I am completely okay with that happening now, believe me.

I am just so damn sorry that I was going along completely oblivious to this fact and probably went and pissed a lot of people off. I am really sincerely sorry.

If you guys haven't gotten another, more active Snow by then, I'd definitely love to come back and join you guys again later on if allowed. I know I wasn't all over the place to prove it, but I do still love this game to death.

+1

[sockcation]

[sockinit]

I'm not friends with any of the mods. I have no relationship with them whatsoever, nor do I intend to have any relationship with them, since they seem like wank magnets. I am not distracting from any issues. That the mods fucked up badly and repeatedly has been addressed very well by other people in this post, and I absolutely agree with the complaints that they acted like idiots and that their 'apology' was not actually an apology at all. These issues have been addressed at length. The issue of Batty's behavior, however, has not yet been addressed by anyone else that I can see, and so my intention was to address it.

It is important for the health of the game that everyone who fucked up here understand that they fucked up and endeavor not to fuck up again. This isn't about taking sides or choosing a team or tallying up fuckups and giving a medal to whoever fucked up the least. The mods fucked up, and are currently (rightly) being raked over the coals for it, which will hopefully encourage them to improve. Telling Batty and co. that they also fucked up and asking them to apologize for their conduct does not in any way invalidate the fuckups on the part of the mods.

Being unable to handle a simple discussion without other people acting as cheerleaders is more or less the definition of immaturity. I do not, as you claim, think that Batty is a 'bad person.' I don't really know Batty that well either. I know that in this case, she made a decision which was immature. That doesn't make her a bad person -- it makes her a person who made a mistake. It should be possible to acknowledge that mistake even if you like her very much, and the staunch refusal to do so is worrying.

Re: +1

[sockinit]

This is not an anoncomm, this is a game discussion. Accusing people of being whiteknights and friends of the mods does not actually add to your arguments in any way, so it's best to avoid doing so.

[sockstobe]

Actually, you would technically have been booted a while ago - "Please note that using a hiatus instead of providing enough activity to AC two months in a row will also result in a strike for that character, present for four months." This is in the hiatus rules, so you should have had a strike for November and December's hiatus, as well as January, so by March you had 3 total strikes or would have had the rules been followed.

Just to clarify for why people might be upset which is in no way your fault.

[nevergivesup]

regarding the AC issue, I made a response about it here. Feel free to respond to me there about it.

+1

[sockemanons]

I'm not coming across as a "white knight". No one looks good in this, and I'm not defending the mods' actions. The ban warnings were fucked up, the fact that there was no compromise from Mini was fucked up. But enough people are already going into that in much better detail than I can.

And I don't think the players started it, for the record. The mods obviously started it with the fact that Mini couldn't resolve her own player plot with Batty's. I am denying none of these things.

However, the way that was went about it was severely disheartening to me. The only reason that plurk remained even somewhat civil is because Linda did most of the talking. And honestly, I don't accept "but Anduin could have shown!" As an excuse. Anduin has been a known non-entity in most plurks for a while now, and no one has seen them do much of... well, anything. Sure, they weren't planning for Anduin to not show and for it to be four people to just Olga, their communication clearly shows that. But they had to known it was going to be a likely possibility.

Olga should have disengaged, but Batty should not have brought that many people into the plurk. Having at least one person to corroborate and back up your points would be seen as logical, but there were enough people in that plurk for Olga to feel cornered, and that's as much Batty's problem for bringing in a whole group to make her feel better as it is on Olga for not letting it sit until she could talk to the other mods at length.

[earnedmystripes]

Hello everyone.

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for me to say my piece, so here I am, finally. I’ve waited this long to comment because I’ve been doing what I should have done in the first place, and taken some time to emotionally distance myself from this matter. I believe the concerns I had were legitimate, but admittedly, I was unsure how to approach the matter and I should have taken the time to consider my course of action more carefully. In retrospect, I realize that adding four parties to the private plurk was a bit excessive, and including a former player was not the best idea. I’ve apologized privately to Olga for these things, because upsetting her is the last thing I ever wanted to happen, and here is my apology to the playerbase for my role in this conflagration.

[nevergivesup]

I stated above that I had to have a discussion about my hiatus, and it was for that exact 2-month hiatus clause. I had to hiatus because I literally *could not* come online at all for a long while. I knew it would probably be until the first week of January and even cited as such from the getgo (here) and nothing was said about it. But even still, yeah, I still had to have a discussion about it.

If you're right though and that's a nonnegotiable thing... well then, fuck. I was even more wrong than I thought.

I'm honestly pretty pissed off about this. Not getting kicked, but not knowing for so long, and I honestly wish it had been brought to my attention sooner. Though at least it happened now and not months later.

[sockinit]

Thank you. I really appreciate this apology, and I'm sorry you ended up in this mess in the first place.

[sockemanons]

Thanks for this, Batty. I was really soured on your guys' position just because of how you guys went about it. Good to at least see you've taken the time to step back, evaluate everything, and apologize for your own mistakes in the matter. Hopefully this all gets resolved as well as it can possibly be.

[sockinit]

Thanks for the comment above, which is very helpful, and +1 to addressing everyone's role. Specifically I would like to know:

- Mini's reasons for refusing to compromise on the death plot
- Blue's role in the initial problem with Mini, and what exactly she said/did
- Which mod wrote the PMs, which mods signed off on it and agreed on the warnings
- Which mod wrote the 'don't be mean to mods' passive aggressive OOC comm post

Incidentally, I'm hearing some murmuring that Mini's reason for not compromising was essentially that she just doesn't like Batty/had some past OOC drama with Batty. If this is actually the case, she doesn't just need to be dropped from the mod team -- she should either be kicked from the game or at the very least kept on a last-chance basis.

[nevergivesup]

regarding the AC issue, I made a response about it here. Feel free to respond to me there about it.

[pianistofraielin]

Frankly, I feel a 2:1 ratio of subordinates to authority figures is perfectly acceptable, and I have modded games before under this assumption and never had any issues with it. But that is my own comfort level and I acknowledge that not everyone may share it.

Perhaps the mods should discuss amongst themselves what player/mod ratio is acceptable to them and include it in the rules, to prevent this sort of situation in the future.

[sockwall]

At least someone's stepping up. The radio silence on the mod end is only making Batty en crew look like shining stars. Thanks for this, Batty.

[detectivetroll]

For the most part I'm staying out of this, because I've had good dealings and fun plotting with the majority of the mods but am not interested in discounting what's obviously evidence to the contrary.

But I do want to second this, because I've never felt anything but comfortable with Blue. Her responses to my plotting/questions/etc and what I've seen of her responses to others (Fran issue aside) have been helpful, informative, and openly inviting of discussion.

[shineonyou]

okay, definitely editing my above comment. thanks for your input! and sorry for missing the first OOC comm post and the details about the death plot. i know you or someone else said that above-- totally slipped my mind while writing this.

[redemption]

I made a major mistake.

In Snow/Jake's case, Jax had initially asked in private for a January strike. Then, later, she'd had a hiatus starting in November, was passed with that, but then did have the activity for that first month, avoiding a two-month strike in December.

However, at some point, I had a giant mental lapse and sincerely thought up until a few hours ago that she'd also had activity for January as well. I literally don't have an excuse for this; all I can imagine is that I somehow convinced myself that our conversation about November had happened later and... I really don't know. Come the March AC, I moved the character from the "free June" strike pile to the "free August" one, sincerely believing it was a resolved matter.

Jax would never allow me to give her special treatment above what other players receive. Us being friends has nothing to do with me being a complete moron, and since she'd thought it was three strikes before being booted, nothing was said when she'd asked for another strike and we continued on. This matter is absolutely my fault.

When it comes to the AC though, it has always been lenient; when it says "four threads/characters," that's exactly what it means regardless of thread length as long as there's at least two comments from the character in question (though I've also counted two threads with only one comment as one). Furthermore, if anyone comes to us with something like realizing they took a strike when they actually had the activity, decides to offer enough threads for a month they initially used a hiatus for, asks us about what they can do to stay in the game when they're falling behind, needs to turn in AC late, etc., we've attempted to reach a compromise with them.

Problem is, while some of that has taken place on the AC posts or hiatus pages, in some cases it's also been done over posts in the mod contact or PM/plurk/AIM as well. Obviously now we can see the issues with that and I, personally, apologize a thousand times since I'm the one who's handled it from the very beginning. When we were talking about things last night, even before the full realization of my fuck-up was revealed, the agreement between us mods was this: anything like this does need to have a record of taking place, at or near the time it happens; from now on people will still be required to have a note made somewhere publicly if some sort of problem was resolved with a mod, even if it's just permission to submit activity "late" or what have you.

As further clarification, pretty extensive notes are kept of each AC; in particular (and which I don't believe has ever been mentioned at large), records are kept where a character's threads are sparse during a month, which is where things like asking if there's any more activity for a particular character comes in- so the mistake of marking that in cases where someone actually had a lot of activity (but just happened to pick shorter threads for the AC or something) isn't made. Any time a character is in danger of taking a game-removing strike or is even in danger of a two-hiatus-in-a-row strike, I'll often contact the player to see what's going on, even possibly researching their activity myself before starting a conversation.

I have made other errors in the past, such as failing to notice that a thread doesn't quite fit the activity period in particular, or the same thread is being used over multiple months (...and especially, accidentally marking one player's character as passed but then leaving off another, leading to weirdness when the AC reminder goes up). I do try to be incredibly careful. I do look into all of the characters at risk of idling to make sure I haven't missed anything. It's just that doing AC takes something like at a minimum of six hours all together each month, and checking hundreds and hundreds of threads does mean... sometimes I miss something I shouldn't have. I realize now that making sure all of this is accountable should have been a much bigger priority; the other mods have access to the google doc I use for the AC, but that isn't enough when I'm excusing people in private without making note where everyone can see. I was concerned about people's privacy in allowing people to retroactively undo hiatuses/strikes with activity outside of the AC posts, but should have realized that it could look dodgy and found a solution earlier.

Lastly, for what it's worth, I've never considered myself the head mod or anything like that. I was originally taken on by Mal for things like organization and throwing plot ideas around, and really only stepped into more when absolutely necessity. I have had extremely major issues in my life which came to a head last summer, did contribute to the issues with the game around that time, and have more or less lead to often struggling to keep my head above water since. I have never officially been in charge. Ever. To be honest, I've only very recently started picking up the slack again, both in mod work and actually playing in the game.

Maybe I still need a break from the game / RP in general, and have for a while - I'm not sure. Because of all of this going on, compounded with this error coming to light, I may step down as soon as someone can be found willing to do the lists stuff and AC on a regular basis. We may find someone to do that and then have two people. All I can do now is apologize and promise that, to the best of my ability at least, it won't happen again. I love this game dearly and only want to do what is best for it.

[sockinit]

The issue isn't really the ratio or the number of people at all, though. It's involved versus not involved. If there were 15 people who were legitimately involved and one mod, I would say that mod should suck it up and deal with those 15 people. But all 15 of those people need to be actually necessary to the conversation. Bringing in random extraneous people causes more wank, not less.

[holeysock]

I am commenting here largely to voice my agreement with most of what has been said, because I figure the more voices chiming in, the better an idea we have of the general consensus among players.

To be a bit more specific than just "I agree with most of this", I think to begin with, we need complete and full transparency from the mods on what has happened here. I think it'd be best to hold off condemning any particular person or making any final decisions until after we have all of that information. Linda, Batty, and co. have already given us all the information on their side of the story. Now we need the mods'.

And I believe this ought to include an account from all four mods of their involvement in this particular incident, as well as their general duties on modding, etc. I mean full transparency. About everything. No holding anything back, spell out everything explicitly.

I'm very sorry that it's gotten to this point. Being scrutinized to this degree is nervewracking and can feel unfair and like an attack, especially when this entire situation came about from people feeling as though they are being attacked in the first place. But this isn't supposed to be another attack on the mods--there is obviously a problem here and no one is sure quite how deep it runs, so we need full disclosure in order to understand the full scope of the situation and to be able to regain trust. Hopefully once all of the cards are on the table, on everyone's behalf, we as a game (players and mods together) can sort out what needs to be improved so that we can move on from this.

(Also, I am chiming in to say that yes, absolutely we need more mods and more delegation amongst them going forward. Plot mods, maybe a specific dedicated echo request mod or two, app mods, maybe a specific PR mod to mediate in the wake of all of this? The more the duties are spread out, the less stressful things are likely to become, and hopefully the better we'll be able to handle things.)