Elcark

Just a quick poke before anything here spirals more than it has, do try to keep things civil and be respectful of others statements. Anything negative here should be made as ways to improve on and everyone is entitled to their own viewpoint. Needlessly aggressive back and forth isn't going to help anyone.

1 minute ago, Fink said:

How about we try to avoid making the population days a chore and market them towards those who truly want to play. We need to stress that there is no point in joining if you really don't want to, and there's nothing wrong with that. If not enough people join, then its tough luck. I feel a big problem with JB and a reason it died was due to the fact that the server became littered with the pooptiest players. I'm not calling them poop, but they were just awful at playing JB. They are not any regulars, I'm mostly referring to typically younger kids that would join with little experience and get on blue and do nothing. If players aren't dedicated and willing to be creative, the gamemode sucks. I feel that if we can appeal to dedicated regulars on the forums who desire to play, we could possibly get a decent sized lobby for at least a couple of days.

I agree with a lot of this and when we've done these population nights on more then one occasion it did get good population for a few of those days, at first. The last part i mentioned is important though. There aren't enough of those dedicated regulars like there used to be, and those that are left are just too few and too unwilling to put in the effort neccissary to make something like this consistent. It always goes downhill quickly and dies out because of that.

When a few other things clear up I do want to try and see a more regular population event of sorts going on if we can make it work, but one that rotates focus and isn't for jailbreak alone (make zombie fortress great again).

Not a fan of catfish but those are some great catches, congrats. Makes me want to head "up north" fishing again soon.

The issue with population nights that has happened is it's not long before people stop attending because they're doing so due to it being a "time to populate" and not because they actually want to play. It becomes more of a chore then actual enjoyment and people start doing things they'd rather get on, leaving just those few who are dedicated enough to get on no matter what. As this becomes the case for more and more people it becomes less likely that anything even starts up since so few people decide to even attend eventually.

With jailbreak there's a few things that make it more unique as to why it struggles then other servers when trying to populate it then just how these events affect it. For one it's harder to get started then pretty much any other gamemode. For every server you need a small starting population to kickstart it, not only is it debatable you need more people for jb then most, you also need something to do. Other gamemodes are very straight forward with what to do and while jb gives content for that, it requires much more organized effort to use that content to actually have fun. Im personally not sure what lead to the decline of people coming on everyday, but the old regulars that made up that population have simply moved on at this point, either to other servers or other games entirely. There's just not enough people who care enough to create a stable population from. Whether that will change in the future will likely only happen not if a bunch of old people come back, but if new people suddenly decide that it is where they want to play. 

In terms of the plugin being broken, as far as Im aware the entire plugin is going to get removed in favor of a new one.

13 minutes ago, Kypari said:

We can add to the list as we go along so we don't need to worry all too much about what we add at the moment, though if there is anything that we can think of to add that would be neat ^^

We want it to be as complete as possible right away. I'd rather not have to notify staff to look at the manual every time we decide to add a new line.

At the moment i'm not sure of many more besides those listed here and would probably be ok with just them. I'll ask around if I can on top of anything you three come up with.

13 minutes ago, mrnutty12 said:

 but really we should add something like that to the admin handbook for future staff.

This is exactly the second point you agree with. Regardless, we all seem mostly on the same page then. 

If we're going to do this then, we should start by having a proper list of pointers. So far we have

- Sex Toys

- Anything that resembles genitalia (not so sure on this since "explicit genitalia" is already plainly expressed and people could misrepresent "anything" to include things such as Popsicles, eggplants, etc)

- Nipple Bulges

-Exposed Butts

On 6/12/2018 at 10:18 AM, Caleb956 said:

I'd say that's the main problem I see with the whole situation, is that everybody interprets things differently and so people hear a whole bunch of different things about whether or not a certain spray is allowed, and obviously there will always be SOME SORT of gap in how staff handle stuff like this, but it's always good to try and minimize it as much as possible.

Which is why i'm so strongly against blanket terms like those that have been made as examples so far. They leave the most to interpretation and have caused the most amount or argument between people because of that. I think the wording that is there right now covers exactly what is generally expected and still leaving room for people to use the sprays they enjoy without it getting too revealing. The issue with it has been that it hasn't been properly enforced at nearly any point with genitalia being the only word most people actually take to heart. Had it been, this whole situation would not have happened. 

I think we should leave it as is (adding in kypari's word of "whatsoever" if anyone thinks it will make it sound better, I personally don't) and then doing the rest of adding a simply list of overall examples in the admin handbook then addressing staff about it. 

I do find it very regrettable we both have been at such odds everytime you've shown up, though have been less then fond that your attitude has always been devoid of any positivity for others.

If I can look past that though and the general bandwagoning on drama that has been happening, then I can see the good intent behind you making the thread at this chaotic point in time. The way I reacted to it was due to the overall greater extent of what has been happening and while the manner I did was simply poopty, I have meant everything I've said.

I won't lie, I personally will not miss you. That being said i am sorry both to you and to those who will miss you.

Take care

1 minute ago, dr.derpy said:

Im going to come out aswell and say this is partially one of the reason's as to why i stopped playing on the server.

I just felt like the entirety of xg developed into groups in which every group despised each other and would lead to people unfriending each other just because of slight issues with each other and no-one seemed to want to try and talk to each other to fix the issues.

and that's something I think has improved tremendously due to those groups that cause this having left. Regrettably leaving hasn't stopped them from coming back to track mud everywhere cause they're bored I guess. 

2 minutes ago, Brian said:

He made a simple statement, and within five minutes, he got four replies and the thread was closed by the very same people he's referring to.

No, it was a bullpoop statement assuming everyone disagree with them had to be some friend group plotting against them when this whole ordeal was a bloody group of friends doing exactly that themselves. 

4 minutes ago, Brian said:

 

It's the community right now. A lot of them don't want to admit it, but the best way to get moderator isn't to show that you're hard-working, constantly on the servers and reminding others of the rules, but instead get real close to the current administration until you've got a spot in their private discord, at which you're pretty much a shoo-in all the way to administrator. Nobody wants to admit it though, because if they did, the facade would crumble, and they would have to take responsibility for their actions. If you looked at XenoGamers in the past, the best way to get staff positions was to be hardworking. Now all you have to do is talk up admins, and if you're a furry, it helps.

This is also complete bullpoop made up from a viewpoint outside of what actually happens in the community and especially the servers. Hell, all I've ever heard about staff in the past revolve around extreme bias and even people admitting to only giving positions to friends cause of bias. I hold expectations for staff higher then most other people and have seen only one admissions in the entire time I've been here that I can find no reasonable purpose for it existing outside of pure bias. 

Overall though, there's one major thing that I've become dead tired of. Old people who have left the clan, most the time claiming they want nothing to do with it anymore, still lurking around waiting to jump at any hint of drama or to cause it themselves. This has been an issue for far too long where people come back only to comment on how awful they think everything is, say this that and everything in between is a problem, then end up coming around solely to cause those damn problems themselves when they didn't exist until they did so. I seriously think a lot of the worst people around here have left, and the problems those people complain about are ones that they were the worst perpetrators of, especially with the argument of "groups". Until this old groups crawl up and start mucking about again, this isn't something that plagues the community anymore. You have people like bone who actually try to find a resolution to these problems when they get brought up like this, and then you have other people who go around and decide they'll break rules on the server to try and prove their point. 

I'm just going to cut myself short at this point, but when you're coming back just to stir things up and not actually help anything, then the nicest way I can put it is please, go away. That's clearly not going to stop though and there's always going to be people coming back for the sole purpose of being buttholes, which is why i'm going to just leave myself at this point. 

2 minutes ago, NitNat said:

Okay so I’m putting this blunty because I know damn well I’m not the only one who feels like it’s just a bunch of friends gathering together to protect anyone in that circle and not caring about anyone outside of their groups input. Like there’s even random people crawling out of whatever rock they came from, not being relevant in the problem at all, to help save anyone who’s under fire.

Frankly this all started because of a group of friends crawling out from under a rock and starting a fire themselves. 

And since people are already devolving into bickering and pointing fingers in such a feeble manner instead of actually trying to contribute to resolving any problems, I am going to close this.

~Closed

22 minutes ago, Kypari said:

 

Staff discretion would mostly promote "if this staff is on, then you get away with it. if this staff is on, you get in trouble", which is exactly what I want to avoid. It would make far more sense to have a list of what is and what isn't allowed in the admin-handbook alternatively to in the rules so that people aren't drawn away or bombarded with rules. Could be a simple list like:

- Sex Toys

- Anything that resembles genitalia

- Nipple Bulges

etc.

If things come up in the future, we can always add to it. Yeah we can't cover everything but to minimize the grey area I feel this would be suitable, especially considering it would be out of the way of people who read the rules so they aren't bombarded with it.

 

44 minutes ago, Elcark said:

• (and work with staff to have a more generalized understanding on what should and shouldn't pass)

Having a short psa if need be is what i'm talking about, but doing that in the staff manual could be plausible too. 

Disabling sprays is definitely an option, it's just a very poor one. Doing the opposite of and allowing nearly anything is an even worse option though. The very reason we have rules restricting what can be used is to avoid a plethora of things that are going to be unsavory in the eyes of the general population, regardless of legality. 

2 minutes ago, LAN_Megalodon said:

Okay okay okay, so just stay with me here, as I see it we've got three options if we're going to change the rules: 

This is for the most part what i'm trying to express (and similarly, how I've already mostly brought it up to other higher ups).

Just a few things I'd take apart are that to put an explanation on nipples, it should not be difficult to view exposed male nipples as a non-issue compared  to female ones. You can go outdoors and a seeing a shirtless man would be viewed as normal and not though on twice by society, a topless woman on the other hand is a very different story. If we're going to remove sprays then we have to go the whole nine yards and not allow other custom images as well, there's no way around that. Going to such an extreme is going to be all or another. You are right that the thread basically got hijacked but i'm fine with that since the way this rule is viewed is the real issue, not what krampus did (though i'm still very agitated in how the situation was brought to be). 

To put some solid statements down, nothing is going to happen to krampus. This issue did not happen because of him, but because of an inconsistency in enforcement among all staff that I take the blame for. I will however leave the thread open in case anyone else has anything new to chime in on the subject until there's further development on a solution by higher ups. 

Sprays issue-we have three ways to go about this as far as I can figure, i'm going to list them and what we can do about them, but if anyone has an alternative (especially if this is going to come to a community vote) do state it.

• Keep the wording at explicit nudity/genitalia and getting staff to enforce it properly. (If we go with this then kypari had a very slight wording change we could also do if it is thought to be more suitable).
• Change the wording to some kind of blanket term (inappropriate, nsfw, pg13, etc) and ultimately have it up to staff discretion (and work with staff to have a more generalized understanding on what should and shouldn't pass)
• Disable/disallow custom images

Now again, if anyone has another way of putting this then say so, otherwise we can decide out of these here among ourselves or if it's deemed more appropriate, take these options and put them to a community vote then go from there.

3 hours ago, Segal said:

 Our current spray rule is as follows; "all sprays cannot contain nudity or derogatory content. This includes any spray that depicts sexual content or anything else that may be deemed inappropriate by Staff."

No it is not. (It might be on some obscure server motd, but Im fairly certain it's not)

-Sprays, avatars and items that are able to be customized cannot contain the following: explicit nudity/genitalia, racism, hate symbols, gore, derogatory content and images of sexualized minors (this includes drawn images).

Nudity by itself is indeed a very vague term that is going to be interpreted slightly differently by different people. So is any other attempt at a blanket term such as inappropriate, pornographic, pg13, etc. This is clearly evident from the back and forth of interpretation that has gone on both now and in the past when these words have tried to be used. That's exactly why I added these two whole words to make it more clear. 

I seriously haven't understood how the addition of such has made it anything but more clear. Not to be disrespectful of anyone in any way, it just baffles me personally. In the end the issue shouldn't be one of interpretation in any capacity at this point as far as Im concerned, it's one of proper enforcement of what is actually said in the rule which I already explained why that has been lack luster.

Really the next thing Im thinking at this point if understanding what is meant when you actually bother to read what is there is so difficult is putting it to a vote to try and see how people want this changed to any capacity. Hopefully things will make the least bit more sense if people can actually look at the way it is being put forward, but I will express one last time that finding a perfect solution that will be consistent for all situations is flat out impossible for something as incredibly variable as this.

23 minutes ago, Bone said:

It's like you didn't read past the second sentence I wrote before you quoted me and used it in a response. 

The very second sentence I state address exactly your second one. You're saying sprays aren't a problem on csgo because they don't even exist on csgo. Well tough luck using that here because they do in tf2. I honestly don't know where you got lost in what I had to say for that. 

23 minutes ago, Bone said:

Objectors and decals are already treated the same way as sprays, and we've had a problem before with Objectors and players (including staff members) using pornographic Objectors so... hey, you might be on to something there!

Why are you even bothering to mention this (unless your sole purpose is to just try and claim staff use porn objectors, which i'll get into shortly)? Of course they're already treated the same because it all falls under the same category, and if we're not going to allow sprays because it's "too hard  to agree on the rule" then it should be a no brainier the same would have to apply for anything else otherwise we'd just have the exact same disagreements about them. 

23 minutes ago, Bone said:

By this definition then cropped porn sprays shouldn't be allowed whatsoever, because you can definitely tell there's more going on off screen, even if there's no nudity shown.

By first glance, hardly. You can infer what may be there as well, but you can absolutely not say that you know for a fact solely on what is displayed before you when it's not actually there to be viewed. Something along the lines an outlined penis is something you can look at and know there's a penis there. Something where it's the upper half a male with the lower half cropped out, you can not say that you KNOW that there is a visible penis included because, quite simply, it's not there and you're just making a personal inference at that point. 

23 minutes ago, Bone said:

But you know what's really unwelcoming and off putting? Joining a server and seeing spawn covered in cropped porn sprays while a staff member is telling a player that their spray isn't allowed, but this one over is because because it's juuuust zoomed in enough to not see anything.

Just like how having to clarify this "all the time" is over exaggerated, so is that example. I'm sorry, but you're not on the servers often, and because of that you don't see how they commonly are. As someone who is, that example and what has happened here is a VERY rare occurrence. What will be off putting and will be an everyday occurrence guaranteed will be people coming on the server, going to use their spray, and discovering it's disabled entirely, and that's because there is an extreme abundance of people who use sprays of all shapes and sizes. Only a fraction use them like you are claiming are everywhere. 

23 minutes ago, Bone said:

This is the biggest problem though. The majority of players who have rule breaking or borderline rule breaking sprays are the staff members themselves, it starts with them. Staff members need to be the first to change their sprays and lead by example. Imagine a newcomer or regular seeing a staff member with a rule breaking spray, they're gonna think "Oh, this is ok, because they know the rules pretty well". Until that happens, rewording a rule isn't going to do anything as long as staff refuses to follow it themselves. 

Saying the majority of people with borderline sprays are staff members are, forgive me for being so blunt, bullpoop. I won't claim I know every single staff members sprays but I will claim i'm fairly certain I know them better then you and personally have only ever encountered three individuals with sprays of this kind with this example today being one of those three and by far the worst. I fully agree staff are the ones who need to lead by example and should refrain from sprays like this one, but the reason it has been allowed to slide in this manner isn't due to staff being biased and wanting to flaunt around porn sprays, it's because the general opinion on servers has been in acceptance of this. This is something we clearly want to change at this point and I already stated need to get staff on the same page for it, but saying staff are refusing to follow rules is just being daft to how things are on the servers.

There is no way to find a solution to this without it ultimately being unfavorable for some peoples. 

There's a lot here, so Im going to start with saying even though this was something worth bringing up, this was a very poor way to do so to say the least.  There are much better ways to address dissent about something other then getting a group of people together to prod and "test" someone, purposefully start up an argument creating a scene on the server, bloating it into an issue that occurred by your own actions and could have gone by without creating such uneccissary drama, all in a pseudo witch hunt. The situation could have been handled better by krampus, but I personally think people got off very easy here considering how intentional of a mess this was. Now that this rant is over....

6 hours ago, Bone said:

why don't we just disable sprays server wide?

This is (almost) the worst possible solution. Not to say it isn't a solution, but it is effectively just giving up on the issue. Comparing this to csgo is a very poor example because of the stark difference between the two games in regards to it. Custom images (as near as Im aware) effectively don't exist in csgo where as they are actually prominent in tf2,so it's pretty foolish to assume they would be treated the same across both games when they don't exist across both in anywhere near the same capacity. If we disable sprays, then with how this whole situation is treated by extension we can't allow objectors or other items with custom images as well.

All in all custom images are a notable part of the game itself and just disallowing that part in it's entirety creates a lot of alienation to it as well as a very unwelcoming outlook. We have two extreme options looking at it in this manner, either disallow all images and risk looking unfriendly, incredibly strict, and uptight as a community, or allow any kind of images, which I hope I don't have to explain why that would go south.

Before being able to come to an alternative to either of these though we have to just accept that there is no plausible way to find a solution to something so frivolous without there being some level of entirely personal opinion, vagueness, or however you want to word it as to where the line can be drawn.

There is no statement that covers everything because of how incredibly vast the subject matter is. The only way to do that would be to list every possible thing that would not be allowed, a list that would grow ever larger and make the jailbreak rules list look like a footnote as well as be so insanely strict it would be infinitely more suitable just to disallow custom images (which again is incredibly unfavorable in itself due to how prominent they are not just in the game, but on our servers). Trying to implement something a more "universal" ruling to cover everything unallowed such as pornographic, questionable, or pg-13 only will (and have proven to) make the attempts of loopholing and opinionated rulings far worse due to being incredibly vague in overall coverage. 

Now I honestly don't understand why one little word, explicit, has caused so much issue for understanding for so many people. Since it has though, ill try to lay it out as simply as possible here. Explicit-obvious-your mind immediately recognizes it as what it is upon looking at it. This is designed to still uphold the general idea of what should be allowed, but also give some amount of leniency due to again the significant variety of images that pop up because there is a substantial amount of people (namely from surf, but far from limited to) who prefer this lenicancy over strictness.

People do very often forget though that the rules don't just state explicit genitalia. Nudity is also included to cover these very borderline situations that should not be allowed even though they "don't show genitals so 100% ok fam" and by that reasoning, all of these images shown are in fact explicitly nude and therefore against the rules. This is something I myself have felt strongly towards but haven't strongly enforced due to the general level of leniency that people seem to have desired for some time now. I do want to push this fully at this point though because had it been then this situation would not have happened at all, at least not in the way it was conducted. 

No matter how we try to word what is and isn't allowed though, there will ALWAYS be people trying to loophole and edge what is allowed. That's not something that is exclusive to this rule. That being said, from my own experience the only time that we end up back in this situation (which doesn't happen anywhere near as often as some people are trying to state it does), its due to someone purposefully trying to make this be a problem, just like happened now. This is such a non-issue 99% of the time otherwise that it is painful people insist on doing so in such an overdramatic way it becomes far more of an issue then it should.

As I see it, we have two options here. Except that we are a bunch of nitpicky children that shouldn't be allowed to turn the safe search on google off and thus disallow all custom images, or grow up and realize that a gray area is absolutely necessary for something driven solely by opinion like this to be able to have the best middleground for everyone. If we can accept to go with the latter, then I would push for fully enforcing the concept of explicit nudity properly finally and attempt to get this to be a better understanding among staff. In regards to that, there is one very important thing I need to state.

We are people too. We are not perfect, and because of that there will always be at least some variance between us. There will always be situations where "one staff said this but another said this" but it is incredibly important to bring these up when they happen instad of just using them as reason to complain about in consistency. We NEED to know when this is happening so we as staff can come to better understanding of how to treat things amongst each other so we can better serve everyone else.

Drunken idiot

+1

+1 we need more gender diversity before we get sued.

Now regrettably I haven't seen you quite enough on the server to be 100% for you, but what I have has been very positive. On top of that the way you act off servers makes you look like an outstanding member, and just person in general, as well as someone who clearly cares.

Pretty great person I look forward to seeing a lot more of.

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5 minutes ago, Dannypicacho said:

don't you need a minimum of 6 hours on the server

Yes, but with what he has it's likely enough he'd get the hours in two days that it was pretty pointless to close it. That being said the hours required for membership are going to go up after this application regardless of if he gets enough hour or not. 

Won't lie it bothers the hell out of me cause spiders icky gross, but it's actually a really well done image. The hair is kinda lacking, everything else though looks fantastic. I think you should deffinitly be happy about it.