Caleb956

1 minute ago, -Diphikult said:

know a man who may be able to help me get to my location without Caleb's help. However, it may require the ancient art of cpsave and cptele.

I hope it works, for if it fails I will be forced to use a secret method I've been meaning to keep secret.

You know cpsave and cptele was outlawed years ago for several reasons.. one of which being that the users went mad after some time.. I have placed an arcane lock around the city, if you dare to enter I will have no choice but to raise the army of old and use force to remove you from the city.. I'm sure a specific man from that army wouldn't be very happy to hear about this..

1 hour ago, -Diphikult said:

Of course we need @Caleb956 to give us access to the land of Sanderia

Brother Caleb, please, in the name of all that is Sandy, give us access to this sacred land so that we may retrieve this document for the sands

Denied.  You are a greedy, foolish man to believe I would give you access to the holy city so you can ravage the souls of the creatures who dwell there.

Hey everyone, it's your friendly neighborhood cleb here with a question for YOU.  We ( @Tekk @Kypari @SegFault ) have decided as a higher up team that it'd be in our best interest to come to you for ideas and recommendations for changes to make to the server, sooo.. What would YOU like to see done to the servers in the future? What would YOU like to see added, changed, or removed?  Leave any and all recommendations or ideas down below, we will be using the feedback from this thread to make a sort of "roadmap" for what we will be doing for some time based off of your responses! 

Note: If you see an idea that you like that someone posted, rate it "Agree" or "Disagree" for ideas you don't like! Thank you

I like saying "YOU", I'm a flippin salesman

Thank you @LAN_Megalodon, very cool!

I actually do like this idea, custom weapons are pretty easy to set up and would give some extra utility to some super unused weapons, don't see why not.

On 2/3/2019 at 2:03 PM, james8470 said:

The servers have gotten stale and 14 hours a week (2 hours a day) is too much

Here's what should be done IMO: halve the requirement (7 hours a week). It's a matter of keeping good staff members for the long-term. I don't think the current model of cycling though staff members every few months is a good one. Also, with a 7 hour a week requirement, wouldn't the servers be understaffed? No, I don't think so. With the lower requirement, we can simply have more TF2 staff members for one thing, and !calladmin and discord and the forums exist for a reason (that reason being the servers can't be staffed 24/7 anyways.

I would like to say a few things here, a couple of which may have already been said.

                 1.  There is no such thing as a 7 hour a week requirement, it is 14 hours in two weeks(In response to @mrnutty12).  This means if someone can't be on for a week or so, they have the opportunity to do all 14 hours in one week, or it could be 10 hours in one week and 4 in the others (which I don't encourage anyways..) and even at that, if they are unable to play I'm sure @Tekk @Kypari and @SegFault wouldn't have an issue giving them a pass if they explained their situation to them.

                  2. We have the hour requirement because even though being a staff member is a volunteer job, it is still a JOB.  Like all jobs, it requires commitment, if you aren't committed to what you do as a staff member then chances are you won't be performing like one, quality over quantity.

At the end of the day, like @TBOHB said, people step down for their own reasons.  I don't recall seeing someone step down because the hour requirement was too harsh, and there is only a handful of people that have been demoted for inactivity.  If they don't find the game fun anymore, or they just don't want to commit to being a staff anymore, then that is their choice.  The same could be said about everyone that decides to stick around as staff, every two weeks they decide whether they want to stick around and commit their time to the servers or not.  They probably enjoy the game, or maybe they just stick around because of how much they care about the future of the clan and want to see it succeed, but regardless of what the reasoning may be,  they still have to follow the requirements laid out for all staff members.  Not only would having a basically non existent hour requirement hurt the image of the staff team, it would also more than likely be seen as unfair.

+1 straight to CL

Stfu Im not crying, just sweating through my eyeballs

+1 its johngalt

@Moosty @Egossi

Just kidding, welcome back Chancetic I mean Potato the chinese I mean Kelvin I mean kawaiipotato I mean obata

I've really noticed the advances you've made over the last several months, and it's clear you've started trying more and caring more.  I never had an issue with you to begin with, glad you've made it to where we are now. 

Going to stay neutral for now since I've only seen you a few times since I've been back but definitely pushing closer to a +1 than anything.

oH hELL yeAh

+1000

This is my favorite quote

What is below this paragraph states how I personally feel about the state of the servers and the TF2 division as a whole right now.  No other person had any part in this, so if anyone is to be questioned then that person is me. I don’t mean this thread to attack anyone, but its important it gets out there one way or another.  I may be being completely irrational with this post, but this is several years worth of frustrations summed up into a single thread, so I apologize in advance.

If you are new here, I'm a previous Division Leader, I've been staff several times, and am currently an admin of the Team Fortress 2 servers.

Take this thread as you will.

Drama

Between several servers, different discords, groups, there has been on common theme between all of them.  That theme, is the absolute inability of people to get along with other people that have opposing views, creating drama.  There are times that a simple discussion turns into an absolute shitfest for no reason at all, and fuel must be added to the fire no matter what in order to fit each person's own narrative.  There are also times when people are constantly mocked on the servers for one reason or another, and when they ask the person who is doing it to the stop the response is usually “get over it” or “just local mute them”.  How is that a solution we should be enforcing at all? If people are mocking someone just to annoy them, or get a reaction, or whatever other reason, it is harassment, and should be handled as such.  When things are agreed upon and finished, it doesn’t come lightly, it comes when one person steps in and says let's get this done with, almost as if the two opposing parties are unable to even communicate without being at each others throats, let alone negotiate, unless a third party steps in.  It’s time to brighten up and get along with each other.

You may be asking, “why is this a problem?” Or you may be rolling your eyes at this point, well I'm directing this at everyone.  With the rate of how things are going, these servers we love to play on could very well be dead sooner than any of us think if something doesn’t change.  If that doesn’t concern you can you really call yourself a community member? It's all of our jobs to not only maintain the servers, and not only to play on the servers, but the most important job of all of us, is to have fun playing on the servers, not only for ourselves but for others.  We all represent xG, even if you aren’t a part of the clan, when you are playing on the servers, talking on the forums, or in the discord, you are representing xG and who we are as a clan.  Do we really want drama to be the thing that defines us when people look at the clan? Do we really want people to walk away because of it? I know I don't, and I sure hope you don’t either.  It doesn’t matter if “it's just online”, everyone here is a real person, with feelings of their own, we aren't built the same, and we weren't built to handle emotions the same as the next person.  If someone has a problem with how you act towards them, or how you treat them, then it's time to lighten up and be considerate for other people's feelings. As is such with the Castroy situation, he is repeatedly mocked with a phrase that is very well known to hurt him, but it is continued anyways because those doing it like seeing the reaction, or seeing that it annoys him.

This can be solved with one word.

Respect.

Another issue I'd like to bring up, is how things are handled in the division.  On several occasions I've seen people say “well not many people are complaining about it so it's not that big of a problem”.  I firmly believe that having that kind of mindset will drag the division down, we should not be waiting for people to complain to get things fixed, or removed, or added, etc.  Our priority should be looking at the issue that is at hand, even if it was mentioned by a single person, and seeing what we can do about it. Fix the issue before it becomes a problem, don't wait until the boat has already sank. On the surf server, there is a well known issue with the checkpoint saver plugin, where it resets your saved position with no warning.  I tried several times as a DL to get it fixed to no avail. That being said, I saw someone say that their checkpoint got reset, I didn’t see their name but a few times beforehand but I could see they were genuinely disappointed.  The only solution that was offered was to “jiggle your mouse around a bit and test before you walk away”, which is all fine and dandy, except for the fact that simply, they shouldn't HAVE to. We do things to make the experience more enjoyable for all players, if a new player joined and saw that their progress was reset for no reason they'd probably think otherwise and not feel too good about the server at that point.  After I saw that, I took it upon myself to finally sit down and fix the plugin once and for all, I didn't do it for myself, or for the higher ups, I did it for HIM, the one who brought it up. That's where the issue of “waiting until it becomes a problem” comes into play. Nobody else thought it was a problem, even the higherup I sent it to( @SegFault ) so he could add it to the server, but when it's affecting our players, at that point it IS A PROBLEM, whether it is widespread or not.  I believe this can be attributed to one word:

Motivation.

Something I feel several of our higher ups are lacking, or at least a good portion of the time, especially when it comes to working on the servers.  As a DL your job is the same as everyone else, but you have the responsibility to actually add to the servers and fix what's wrong. I'm not saying @mrnutty12 and @SegFault don’t do anything, but it feels like when they can't figure something out they just give up and wait until someone else( @Lithium ) figures it out.  In my eyes this shows a complete and utter lack of motivation, and unwillingness to work. You don't have to be working on the servers at all times, but if you are unwilling to dedicate time to it then why are you in such a position? An example of this is with @mrnutty12. I won’t lie and say I don't get frustrated with you when it comes to server work, because I do.  And I won't lie and say I'm always nice when I bring it up to you, because I'm not. But when you threaten to step down everytime I DO bring it up to you what does that say? It shows me personally you're unwilling to take criticism for your actions. You have told me yourself that people think you're lazy, and you think you're useless, but you don't try to change. How can you sit there and guilt yourself when there's no attempt being made. I don’t do it to try and hurt you, or push you away, I tell you how it is because it should be a red flag that clearly something is wrong, and that it should change. Another example: Population events quickly went from several times a week to sometimes not even happening once a week, whether that be from lack of players, or those who set them up just not wanting to do them.  This issue is not only directed at the higher ups, it could be directed at the division as a whole. To me it feels like many people just don't care what happens anymore, as long as x server has players on then they’re happy, those servers normally being surf or tgh. It's almost as if some people would rather see the server they like completely filled and the other server completely dead, that doesn't sound like a healthy community or playerbase if you ask me.

Management

Management wise, I don't think anyone could ask for a better staff team, but like all teams, we have our faults.

• Disagreements on rule matter

  • Many times I have seen staff enforce a rule in wildly different ways than the next staff, which if it gets the job done is fine, but not when its creating a false idea of what they can and can not do.  There have also been times that I've seen rules enforced that I've never even seen or heard of. Obviously we will never all enforce things exactly the same, but there should be more efforts to try. This comes down to one thing, consistency.

• Arguing in the servers, or discord

  • Disagreeing with each other is a given, it's not that big of a deal, but how it is handled is absolutely a problem.  A good example of this would be of what I saw last night. I won't give any names in order to provide anonymity but basically, there were two sides.  One side said he or she did this on the server and then put the blame on someone else because of x reason, and the other side disagreed and said the person that was blamed was the one who actually stated the issue on the server.  Keep in mind, there were witnesses on both sides that had different stories, and there was no solid evidence of either stories. Both sides were at each others neck for over half an hour, over something that couldn’t lead anywhere, and then it was attributed to them “trolling” or being “passive aggressive”.  These weren't just people that had just joined the server either, these were including staff members, higher ups as well. Quite frankly it's sad to see it happening.

• Rules

  • It's no secret many people think we are too strict on rules.  While I think rules are important to have, at a certain point it needs to come down to staff discretion.  In order to do that though we'd need something I mentioned earlier, consistency.  As it is right now, I think all of our rules are fair, and they make sense, BUT the matter is, is that we have too many.  I understand the want for rules to be specific, and I also understand the rules to be generalize, it should be somewhere in between.  Have some trust in our staff and give the players some freedom. We can still enforce the rules, but we don't need to have a 2 page long list of rules, either.

Conclusion

I won’t sit here and put the blame for what's happening on one person, because what's happening is all of our faults, and that means the only way things will change is if everyone works together.  We are all told that the servers losing players can be attributed to “the game dying”, that’s not a good reason. If anything, that tells me we need to push harder than before to get our servers back to where they should be. There are rumors that are thrown around on the daily of “they said this” or “they did that”, and there are constant disagreements within our own staff team, and times when staff are at each other's throats while on the servers. There are times when the entire server is riled up because of situations like this. How many people have to leave before something changes? I didn't plan on coming back so soon originally even considering the irl information I learned, but I also didn’t plan on never coming back. I came back because I saw what was happening, and I care for this clan more than damn near anything, and I'm not willing to let this continue without at least trying to get it fixed, it's time for people to take off this mask as if everything is fine in the community and buckle up and get this figured out.  If you disagree with me, then feel free, if you agree with me then feel free; but no matter who you are, it's time for things to change around here. We are supposed to be a community, a community traditionally is a group of people who share common interests, and goals. What kind of community are we when we aren’t acting like one.

Edit: How the bulletpoints are SUPPOSED to look..

Z

Goddamn this is a throwback

Yes! Hello! Yes, you! Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Sand?  That's right! We are holding the first ever #SandCrusade, right here, on XenoGamers Team Fortress 2 Servers! If you wish to join, simply put #sand, or #sandcrusade in your name, or any other flavor of sand you prefer! There is also a sand title available in the hub shop for 956 credits, courtesy of The Sand Leader himself, so get out there and spend those credits you've been saving up!

Join today, and together we will make xG Great Again!

uhmm.... @Skeletal

xG rn

Promotions

General

@Caleb956 from Member to God

@virr from Community Manager to Paid non-Member

@Skeletal from Member to Moderator

Demotions

@SegFault from Division Leader to Jew

@Kypari from Division Manager to Lad

Congratulations to those who were promoted this Promo/Demo! This is a reminder to those who have newly gained access as a Moderator to leave your STEAM IDs posted below in the comment section below to ensure the distribution of powers as soon as possible.

Discord is also now a requirement to staff, make sure you're in it!

We would also like to congratulate the following people as new members of xG!

@Rhododendron @mrnutty12 @Aegean @Tekk @Lithium

thisisamemeorisit

Welcome aboard o/

My favorites: (all jb maps) sand, legojail, downview, wakka, blackops, and the original hop. I also like helms deep and lake from zombie fortress.  Can't really put a finger on my FAVORITE though