the state of things

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This feels like a Chillville post. To try to justify Arcibu is just too much lol, it is not his first ban and when he got last ban removed, did he change? No. Be as butthurt you want about the lost of Arcibu, but he did things that was not ok. He crossed the line enough times to deserve a ban over and over again.

I am happy to see that the server is still getting new players, I have found a big bunch of totally new players latetly, that wants to have fun and enjoy the game. That is what we need to keep, not the jerks that just does things they way they want to, that threatens staff if they dont get their way and that are pure dicks to anyone and at anytime they possible can and that also breaks rules time after time or wanders the extreme fine line 24/7.

In the crowd of new players, we will eventually have top players.
 
i rememeber a time when people got banned for MQ. i remember the time when people got jailed for talking shit. i remember when people got jailed for 3 boxxing. i remember the time when people got jailed a couple of hours NOT DAYS for minor infractions. i remember a time when staff went out of their way to do fun events. I remember a time when dealing with a petition i felt the GM was genuinley happy to help me not annoyed with another stupid petition. I remember a time when the server was ran strictly on common sense and a very few set in stone rules such as no hacking, no 3 boxxing, no using the same account for 2 toon. and no chuck norris jokes.

saying all that. its a 2 way street. our community over the last couple years have been a bunch of crybabys and nothing is good enough for them. and the babysitters are just tired of dealig with it on a daily bases.
 
I get that those rulings are viewed as "iron fist" and "mean and unforgiving" and "robotic and cold", but you're bitching about the less-common situations we don't give in.

Just from my own experiences with you and GMs in general, being overly by the book is not the less-common situation. I know that some GMs are cool and will just give people items back that got deleted, but im more talking about the nub that doesn't read the rules and just gets straight up banned. Yeah, you would like to account for his "nasty" emails that only you have seen, but I can guarantee those emails came after he was banned without warning, he said himself he didn't even know what happened until after the fact. Anyone that has put a few dozen hours into a video game and then suddenly gets banned because they were ignorant is going to be pissed off. A simple warning and/or just talking to the dude and explaining the rules would have prevented the banning, kept the player, prevented the "nasty" emails, etc.

I'll bring up the few of the unreasonable iron fist situations I have personally experienced.

The Eisley thing is the biggest recent one. He gets his player characters banned, because he tested an item from his dev character on his player character. He WIPED the group by using an inferior weapon to his usual one, and certainly didn't benefit. He also talked about some things that had been mentioned in staff channels, nothing he said granted any benefit or was some sort of major secret leaking. The thing is other current staff members have admitted to doing both of these things. Slaar and Woldaff leak things from staff channels into goonsquad IRC, and have done so for years. Yes, Eisley took a few shortcuts (just like everyone else on staff does), but he never had any malicious intent, and he never benefitted himself or any of his friends because he had a dev(other than making new content and fixing broken content, which every dev does). How does the staff respond? No discussion, no warning, just bam banned from the game forever. Then make a thread trying to justify a bad and personally biased decision, then delete said thread because the server population seems to think it was a bad call.

I made a pug one day and claimed an item on that pug (said in /rs and /shout). We kill mob and I award said claimed item. Some dude after the fact doesnt remember me claiming it and petitions asking if a GM could check the logs. Tao answers and asks for my proof of claim. I have logs of the entire thing, including claim that shows all 18 members of my raid in zone, so I send that to him. Tao says that is insufficient because the rules state that a "picture" is needed. To me it seemed reasonable that a log is just as good as a screenshot, but apparently our iron fist interprets "picture" to mean screenshot only. In the mean time, I've talked to the guy that petitioned, i showed HIM my logs, and he was satisfied, and asked to close the petition, but Tao would not let it go and insisted that because he petitioned and I had no screenshot we now had to random the item between everyone in the raid. I don't remember what happened in the end, and the rules changed shortly after, but the fact that all players were done and content with the situation, and the GM decided to put both of them through hell in order to be "by the book" is just bad policy and completely unreasonable.

I think making people feel bad and/or regret putting in petitions is a frequent tactic of GM Tao (and maybe/probably others), I've heard him countless times mention in vent how he is going to make so and so regret petitioning about something or another.

That said, Tao is one of the most devoted volunteer cops on the server. He is more consistent and level headed than almost any other staff member, but he just often lacks the simple human compassion that could make so many petition or rule breaker situations end up better for everyone involved.

I had a ton of fun on this server, but in the end I got left feeling like everything I put countless hours into creating was deteriorated and destroyed by staff being power hungry and trigger happy. In general, staff is amazing, the only reason any of us have any fun is because of that fact, but bad things stand out a lot more than good things and there have been some bad things.
 
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What a huge part of it is imo, is the top and most vocal part of the server is disgruntled and board, exaggerated the problems, then to top it all off as the most vocal fuels this air negativity and it brings the server down quite a bit and exasperates the issues and makes it seem alot worse then it truely is
 
What a huge part of it is imo, is the top and most vocal part of the server is disgruntled and board, exaggerated the problems, then to top it all off as the most vocal fuels this air negativity and it brings the server down quite a bit and exasperates the issues and makes it seem alot worse then it truely is

this too!
 
What a huge part of it is imo, is the top and most vocal part of the server is disgruntled and board, exaggerated the problems, then to top it all off as the most vocal fuels this air negativity and it brings the server down quite a bit and exasperates the issues and makes it seem alot worse then it truely is

There is truth here, but I would be less disgruntled and bored had my guild not been destroyed. FWF died for a number of reasons, but we had numerous people cite staff issues as a reason for quitting before our main cleric gets banned for BS, and it was just too much.

There are issues at all levels of the game though as evidenced by this thread. As always, people at the top tend to just be more vocal.
 
You're just trying to discourage other people from playing. I keep seeing this. But lets take a step back and look at things. Several players in the past have been punished based upon opinions. I can see direct bashing as a no-no. But the rule of fist states that this is a sandbox and yes there are rules to be followed. But there are situations where those rules are well a bit silly. The currently Complaint i see from the staff is A Players bitch to much. And B our population is to low. Well lets see as to why this is. There are many situations and PEOPLE who make this game unwelcoming. Lets take a good example of a player boxing on raid, he accidently loots the wrong item on the wrong character it happens a common mistake. Will the staff member refund /fix this? No. And i will tell you why. It has been the tranining method of this game to not be an idiot, and those that are not as smart and god like as others are looked downed upon. This is a prime exsample of how this game is unfriendly.

Problem oops misslooted

Quick fix = happy player

happy player tells more happy players about the good kind people in sod.

more players yay!

Yes I am prepared for the argument we are not staff members from WOW. Well this is very true but keeping players happy while not exploiting is not hard. If something happened in the game that was not the players fault or B it was a common mistake fix it, this was the all purpose code of the gm in Live EQ, (yes i know this is not live but let me finish my point).
Keep your player base happy and they will stay and play if not enjoy ruling your kingdom as it gets smaller and smaller.
 
i rememeber a time when people got banned for MQ. i remember the time when people got jailed for talking shit. i remember when people got jailed for 3 boxxing. i remember the time when people got jailed a couple of hours NOT DAYS for minor infractions. i remember a time when staff went out of their way to do fun events. I remember a time when dealing with a petition i felt the GM was genuinley happy to help me not annoyed with another stupid petition. I remember a time when the server was ran strictly on common sense and a very few set in stone rules such as no hacking, no 3 boxxing, no using the same account for 2 toon. and no chuck norris jokes.

saying all that. its a 2 way street. our community over the last couple years have been a bunch of crybabys and nothing is good enough for them. and the babysitters are just tired of dealig with it on a daily bases.

the best gm replay i have gotten oozu was

"What is it? Make it quick"

Customer Support could be worked on. but he also could have been annoyed that day. Could have just been an off day?
 
Lets take a good example of a player boxing on raid, he accidently loots the wrong item on the wrong character it happens a common mistake. Will the staff member refund /fix this? No

As far as stuff like this goes, I would assume the rules are the way they are to discourage carelessness which would cause undue work for a shorthanded volunteer staff. And they definitely get petitions about this sort of thing, and maybe this is a false assumption but I'll bet at the very least, every now and then, these types of petitions are taken on a case by case basis rather than to the letter of the rule. Maybe not often(ever?) with raid looting situations like this, where word of mouth might spread the idea that a gm will be your cure for dumb. I don't know.

The only real problem that seems to brought up here is that the information filtered through to the limelight tends to be the hammer-fist reactions without the context that leads up to it. Dev tweaks without context as to why they happen, or patch notes, tend to bring up the same line of thought. I don't view these as terrible things; I view them as things. These are not new things. A dev crew being in full swing for a while and a lot of recent noteworthy drama filled bans are going to bring up issues with the perception of staff.
 
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I'd really like to see the server dynamic shift back towards Guidelines vs Rules.

With Guidelines it's a lot easier for staff to look at situations individually and make a judgement call themselves to keep the game experience fun on both ends, staff and player.

With Rules you get
1) - Sorry guy, you're shit out of luck, rules say so.
2) - Players twisting the staff's arm (I'm in jail for breaking a rule and I'm mad and Bango made a joke /petition Jail his ass he broke a rule too)
3) - Rule Lawyers. Seriously fuck those guys.
4) - A Justice System mentality. Saw this a lot recently and I don't like it. When everything's a set-in-stone rule people switch to jury-mode. Show me proof, give me evidence, etc. As we've recently seen, this nature of conflict between staff and playerbase is godawful horribad for everyone involved.
4) - A compendium spanning 8 different sources that has to be updated and cross-referenced to ensure non-conflicting information. This also means a new player who used to be able to read the EULA now has about 3 hours of wiki and forum-browsing/hunting to do before he starts playing.

There's been a lot of talk lately about an upcoming "Don't be a dick to staff" rule going into effect. This one probably upsets me the most, for a couple reasons. For one thing, why would a rule like this be "going into effect" at all? I used to have nightmares of Ikaa answering my petition and me not crossing a T or dotting an I properly and ending up in pojustice for the rest of my natural e-life. There shouldn't have to be a "Rule" to back up a GM slapping a pee-pee for someone being an unruly ass to them, they should just handle it. A rule like this scares the crap out of me as a player, and it makes me worry that I'll get jailed or banned for comments/criticism/jokes like "It's Slaariel content, of course it's not done." or "HAHAHA ZORR YOU GOT 2 SWORDS FROM SHAR VAHL, YOU GOT WOLDAFF'D DAWG!" or "It's Marza content, run in circles and count to 5 - strat done."


Having hard-fast rules for mechanical situations is all well and good, but community-shaping intiatives should really be kept at an abstract guideline-level.

tl;dr: We all take this game way too seriously, who signs the paychecks?
 
Server needs to be more about having fun with your buds and less about being super serious dicks to one another.
 
I'd really like to see the server dynamic shift back towards Guidelines vs Rules.

With Guidelines it's a lot easier for staff to look at situations individually and make a judgement call themselves to keep the game experience fun on both ends, staff and player.

I agree with you. Unfortunately, using 'guidelines' also promotes tinfoiling in a serious way. If GMs have discretion to give one person one answer but another a different answer, then players, who never see all the details in between, claim GM favoritism and corruption. All. The. Time.
 
Server needs to be more about having fun with your buds and less about being super serious dicks to one another.

Well the place has become more and more cutthroat over the years. Instead of freely passing along information and helping where you can, it's about hoarding secrets and trying to keep ahead at any cost.

I'm almost not sure why, but as soon as someone sees themselves as "better" than someone else gear/ exp wise they automatically see themselves as superior in all ways. Act like asses all in all. Which creates the Low End vs. Top End vs. Staff conflict which most see them self or most of people apart of.

People reminisce about the good old days. Where you could log in, chill with your friends, and get some exp and money. Why help someone in a quest when there isn't anything in it for me? Why group with someone lowered tiered than me when I could box in a dead toon who's still amazing? Those are some of the reasons I've seen people become unhappy. That is essentially the responses they get.
 
I agree with you. Unfortunately, using 'guidelines' also promotes tinfoiling in a serious way. If GMs have discretion to give one person one answer but another a different answer, then players, who never see all the details in between, claim GM favoritism and corruption. All. The. Time.

I think a lot of problems could be solved with players being quiet about how matters are handled personally. When an issue is resolved for you, why must you tell everyone? All it does is promote bad feelings when the issue is handled differently with someone else, who could have a completely different situation that no one will hear about.

Someone is banned, then unbanned. Good. He tells his friends there was a mistake and it was handled.

Someone is banned, but never unbanned. BOOO! Hate hate hate!. What that banned player never told his friends was he was completely in the wrong. He doesn't tell his friends that he was banned for MQing, 6 boxings, making death threats to the staff, and subscribing all staff emails to spam bots. So everyone cries foul when Player B isn't unbanned like Player A was.

tl;dr - Players won't admit to their friends when they are in the wrong and the staff doesn't pardon it. They'll feign innocence forever. Each staff ruling should be taken as unbiased, and made with facts taken into account that players will never know.
 
I am a rather new player to SoD, and having completed a whopping 15ish raids so far, you make take what I say with a grain of salt. However, the root source of dissatisfaction, at least in this thread, seems to be the quite stiff competition over high-end content. In effect, there is an indirect PvP. Players are at each other's throats because the mob they need comes up once every five days and is likely to get sniped very quickly once it does pop. Such stiff competition seems to lead to the ban hammer coming out quickly.

In my opinion, SoD is meant to truly be PvE. High-end content should be hard because the mob is really hard to kill, or the item you need is rare, not because so-and-so guild has a few hour time advantage on you.

All this said, I am not sure how to how to eliminate this problem without massive content additions, which is impractical for a volunteer staff (of whom we are all really appreciative for putting to together a really awesome free game!!)

As for Eisley's banning I will leave with a quote from Ghandi, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." If you jail Eisley for a week or whatever, and FWF is out their main cleric, you will get a message across. If you ban him forever, you get your most active players asking questions like, "Hey when does Diablo come out again?"
 
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