fantastic

2/22/19 promoted to JA 5/24/19 promoted to SA 6/30/19 promoted to CA 8/30/19 promoted to JTA 9/3/19 promoted to SM 1/24/20 promoted to IA 2/23/20 promoted to LSM 2/23/20 promoted to TA 5/14/20 promoted to MKT 5/21/20 promoted to Director I'd say most of my promotions were on the faster side of things given how keen I was, although I was far from a perfect candidate for some of these promotions (my SM promotion was pretty lucky given I was fairly questionable as a CA).

Hmm I don't recall coming off as a dictator in public. Behind closed doors in the staff discord I'll be a hardass at times since I don't have much free time to spare on other things. I think we can do much better which is why I push for things the way I do without much sugar coating. Also, to answer your question: Director is actually pretty "simple" to get in that there's no magic formula to it. Hard work gets recognized. Bring something unique to the table as well.

nah im just a dick and couldn't muster the energy to mention i added it after reading zzl's post

just when exams are over and i feel like i'm freed, i remember i have to mark two assignments for 150 students in 10 hours

Great stuff champs, keep it up, well played! Great moves. Congratulations.

yeah except instead of the weird part where you have to figure out what a person likes based off their forum name, we do it for you gotchu pretty sure @williamc_d likes eating dogs

Wait what. Aren't cats supposed to be lower maintenance than dogs? A cat knows to do its business in a litter box but with a dog you have to do a lot of training when it's a puppy to housetrain it. Either way, I like dogs more because I think there are more options with a dog. You can go walking, play fetch, or take them out to classes and socialize with other people. I don't (?) think these options are feasible with a cat. My puppy took a long ass time to train (~1 year to house train) and we're still working on some things, but I think the effort was worth it.

Congratulations all!

Was actually planning on getting a 3070 or 3080, wasn't sure which would fit into my budget

Hi folks, In a month I want to purchase new PC parts and get a build going to replace my 6 year old PC. Existing parts: i5-4690K Hyper 212 EVO Asus Z97-A Motherboard G.Skill Ripjaws 16GB DDR3-1600 RAM Asus STRIX 970 GPU 750W 80+ Gold PSU Misc. HDDs and SSDs (SATA) Shit case I'm going to trash Okay, so here's a few questions before I go to my budget and other expectations: 1. What do people typically do with used computer parts? These are a little old so I can't imagine they'll sell for much used, and I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. Do people just recycle them or something? 2. Is there anything worth salvaging with the above build? If so, please list it in the suggested build :D thanks! Okay, so my budget is $2000-$2500 CAD. I want to be able to run nearly any game in 1080p with maxed settings and at least 144FPS the whole time. 1440p 60FPS would be ideal too. I would like an AIO cooler to keep things cool because I run my desktop for quite long every day and if my door is closed my room can get hot. I'm thinking of an AMD CPU for the best bang for the buck and an RTX 3070 or 3080 depending on what's left in the budget. I'd like 16GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD for Windows and games. Any suggestions would be great, thanks if those expectations aren't reasonable for the budget provided LMK!

absolutely the fuck yes pineapples are amazing on pizza

Q3 Report In an effort to increase the transparency between the Board and the community, we decided to release a quarterly report detailing some high-level initiatives, issues, and other areas of interest. While there will be topics that we can't disclose as they are either tentative or too sensitive, you can expect a good chunk of content from these reports. These reports will cover what happened over the past few months, and what we look forward to addressing and releasing over the next few months until the next report. Growth In the past few years SG has been relatively stagnant in terms of community growth. We've always done about average in comparison to other communities - neither extremely better nor extremely poor. We've attempted growth in the past through mediums such as SCP: Secret Laboratory, Minecraft, and other games, but these efforts never lasted long and within a few short months the plug was pulled due to lack of interest. This quarter, the Board re-evaluated this strategy and determined that in order to see the community grow like we want it to, we would need to put our best foot forward and begin to go into games with the long haul in mind. As such, our expectations for proper planning prior to server releases and initiatives into new games have risen. Every half year or so, we'll look to run a fundraising stream where we can raise money for new servers. Along with other sources of revenue (new donation tiers, etc.) having a set pool of money before we launch a game enables us to keep that server going for as long as possible without financial worries. Starting this past quarter in the months of July to September, SG saw significant growth in numerous areas, particularly in our Squad servers. In September, we moved quickly to purchase a Squad server for 24/7 Fallujah. Many factors go into a decision to move forward hosting servers such as the ease in getting the server started, its burden on the community, and the expected conversion of players on the server into players in our community. This last point is particularly important - we can host all the servers we want, but if there aren't enough people who are actually participating in our community from these servers, we don't actually grow as a community. We've seen enough growth and success with our first 24/7 Fallujah server that we purchased a dedi in Virginia (east coast) and opened two other Squad servers: 24/7 CAF + HELI along with 24/7 NEW PLAYERS | BEST MAPS. On the topic of growth: this quarter we introduced some changes to our rank structure by adding an IAO Manager position and a Streamer position. The Streamer position will be touched on later in this report, but the IAO Manager position is special as it aligns with our goal of moving day-to-day duties off the Board where possible. Giving the IA team some form of independence while keeping the Board close enables the Board to move faster with "big picture" ideas such as community growth. As we continue moving into new games and growing our community our rank structure will need to change to accommodate this. As such, next quarter we look forward to planning and potentially implementing a division system to increase modularity and independence where needed. The implementation of divisions is dependent on our needs and changes in the next quarter and is by no means a finalized decision. Community Image As our community grows our image needs to grow with it. These past few months, the Marketing Team and the Board have began steps towards increasing our social media presence along with our streaming presence. With the regular use of Twitter and Twitch, our community will be able to reach our playerbase even when they aren't gaming and reach new people as well. The establishment of a Streamer team within the Marketing Team means regulars in our community can pursue their passion of streaming with the support of our community while increasing our outreach as well. In the previous section we talked about community growth; as we look to venture into new games where hosted servers may not be a thing, the forums and Twitch will be incredibly crucial to tie our community together. In the interest of growth without restrictions, BoM and others in the community continue to work on our Discord server. Through multiple discussions between players, staff, and the Board, we've come to realize that our initial vision of having everything on one server simply isn't sustainable. No matter what we do, at some point the Discord will become cluttered and difficult to navigate for players. As such, we've decided to move towards having separate Discord servers on a case-by-case basis. For instance, Squad needs several seeding channels along with other relevant channels as we increase our presence in Squad, and so we've opted to set up a separate Squad server. Rest assured, BoM and the team are taking steps to ensure these separate Discord servers will remain tied to our main Discord server. Our web presence can be significantly improved as well. fantastic and the Technical Team continue to work on improving our site and integrating server stats as much as possible. This includes highlighting our servers in a cleaner way (one which makes for better SEO), creating a more consistent and modern look across legacy sites (CT Bans, ENTWatch), and adding more value to our site as a whole. Challenges As the Board continued our work in expanding our community, we've taken time to reflect on our existing community and game presence as well. Last month many of you heard about the situation with Zombie Escape. While it's unfortunate things ended up the way they did, we're able to launch a new presence in Zombie Escape and revamp our approach with how we're communicating with regulars and ensuring the server remains a fun place for everyone. With Paralyzed, Takuto, and Maniac at the helm, we have a great balance of the technical and social knowledge needed to get the server off its knees and active again. These past few months, SG has seen low population across our CS:GO servers as a whole. While there are many factors that can be attributed to this, the one we could control the most was where our dedis were located. At the start of this year we moved servers to Quebec and we saw numerous reports of people having increased ping. The CS:GO server browser sorts servers by ping; thus, it can be assumed that we dropped lower on many people's lists. The reason for the move was better hardware for a lower price, but having done a postmortem on the move, the Board and TMs came to an agreement to begin moving our servers from Quebec back to the US East Coast - namely Virginia. It takes quite some time to get things moved over and working again. With the co-operation of our TMs and server managers to inform players of the IP changes, we're confident we'll see some growth after our move. We've also faced some serious burnout and shortage of helping hands at the higher-up level, particularly with the server managers and technical team. The staff who make it to this level often need to juggle their passion for our community with their duties in real life, and so we've worked towards making things more efficient in our community. This includes working on proper communication between staff ranks, a streamlined system to talk to the Board when needed, and re-evaluating priorities within the staff team. On the technical side of things, we've advertised our JTA and TA positions on AlliedMods, a popular community for modders of SourceMod. We've seen some interest come from this, and look forward to continuing to bring on help! If you're interested in applying for any staff rank, our door is always open - please apply here! The Road Ahead In the next few months we plan on continuing our steady path in growing our community further. Through the initiatives above along with exploring options in Rust and DayZ, we're excited at what the future holds. We'll continue working on communication between the staff and our community, ensuring that input is taken and used as much as possible. Although we're moving fast, we'll look to ensure we have solid plans when moving into new initiatives and due diligence is being done. Our community and staff team are exceptionally strong, and with the incredible support that was shown in the last quarter, the future is bright for SG.

We're working on that (: glad to hear you're enjoying the servers! So am I - I've been binging way too much Squad. Be sure to apply for admin (:

@vinylbro how u gunna let him do that to u Grats all!

im too wholesome for tinder so i could never send that, im only getting lonely asian women who arent my type

Our server is full with 10 people in queue as of writing this post! Come hop on for some late night fun!

Zombie Escape Mapping Contest! Zombie Escape is without any doubt the most popular custom gamemode being played on CSGO. The biggest communities have come together to organize and sponsor a mapping contest! Rules Make sure to read them through carefully before deciding to enter the contest. If you have any questions regarding them, simply comment the #questions channel in the below Discord server and we can clarify any issues. Prizes 1st place: $300 2nd place: $175 3rd place: $100 4th place: $50 5th place: $25 Judging Maps are judged against four criteria: Quality of the design (is the map beautiful and well designed?) Gameplay (is the map boring?) Replayability (would you play this map every day or tryhard it every week?) Originality (is it an overused theme?) 2 judges will come from each community involved! If you have any questions, please ask by responding to this thread or ask in the CS:GO Mapping Contests Discord. Good luck to all participants!

The 2017 protocol is the exact same as the protocol today - I don't think it ever changed since 2015/2016 when I joined. The only difference is, admins back then stuck their neck out for regulars and would be susceptible to punishment if they were wrong. We discouraged this behaviour starting last year when clarifying posts were made at the admin level. However, I don't think it's improper to discuss adding some wiggle room for admins. I'll add it to our agenda to discuss which you can followup on in a few weeks by pinging me or DMing me directly. As for that server crash issue, our technical team was recently busy with focusing entirely on the new forums, and with that out of the way I've asked for it to be prioritized as I'm sure having the population cut in half every 2-3 hours isn't very productive. So yes, lots of elbow grease being put in. As for the screenshot, the only thing I can suggest is to talk to whichever admin that was in private first, and if you're unable to resolve it, make an admin complaint. Thanks again for your candid feedback! Again, you're more than welcome to hold me/us accountable by pinging in this thread or in DMs for followup.

My personal response, not on behalf of the Board: When we talk about admins needing to see something in order to deal with it, the intent behind it is so that they are 100% sure (no less) that the person who broke the rule deserves to be punished. If player experience is being impacted that much, then perhaps there is leeway for us to discuss relaxing that policy or find other ways of being 100% sure besides just seeing the situation. Logs aren't enough though. On our server, there are many more ways to be "justified" in killing someone such as various ways of T baiting or performing traitorous acts. I've conveyed this to the TTT managers and they're looking to address the "grey area". Once this is addressed, we can move forward with determining whether we can be more "lenient" with enforcing the rules (that is, increasing the number of situations we can be 100% certain a rule was broken). Punishments are entirely up to the admin. We have a strict policy of warn OR kick before a ban. In the worst case, this means a player is given one chance to straighten up before they're permed if they mess up again. It's entirely up to the admin to determine how severe they think punishments are given. Situations are extremely case-by-case so unfortunately I can't speak more about it in this post. We've tried using karma as a preventative method to prevent RDMers from dealing significant amounts of damage if they're joining just to RDM, but unfortunately there's no good way to prevent people from RDMing if they're regulars besides having admins on. Probably the best preventative method is to have more admins, so if you're interested feel free to apply (: . Yes, I agree with this. Having events regularly would be helpful. On Jailbreak, we are discussing having 3 events per week minimum to encourage player-to-player and player-to-admin interaction. I imagine TTT would benefit from this as well. @Trazz @Gentoo You're welcome to suggest other ways of increasing community interaction! The "lack of motivation" you feel is likely because admins are adhering to the "if you're not 100% sure, don't act" policy. In reality, there's many admins (including myself last year) who challenged this policy, but it's for the best that we punish players for things we're 100% certain they deserved punishment for. We can implement other ways of becoming 100% certain (more logs, demos?) which will increase the likelihood of an admin being able to act. I imagine this will alleviate this concern. Regarding not knowing how admins really are: at the end of the day, this is a gaming community. It isn't exactly our place to demand extremely thorough background checks, employment history, etc. that a normal company would perform. We have safeguards in place to prevent admin abuse from happening such as a trial admin period (Junior Administrator), logs, and a clear hierarchy of managers who overlook staff they're managing. We also time promotions so that no one can climb the ranks quickly so that there is a better chance we catch any attitude problems. The admins you mentioned that were involved in the Discord riot were given disciplinary action, and Dominic and Zayne's behaviour which led to them being permed largely occurred after they resigned. The screenshot you provided is out of context, so it's hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic. I imagine you guys were being friendly and that's how he jokingly talks to people he considers his friends. Maybe you should let him know you don't appreciate him acting like that towards you? Of course, I'm not trying to put blame on you, but when an admin adds you on his friends list and goes to another game some banter isn't unexpected. I've mentioned it to the TTT managers a few times already, and I tasked @Greggy Gjust now with following up with the managers to investigate a fix. I think your opinions were valid, but we need your (and the community's) help in brainstorming solutions to them. Identifying problems is good, now let's work towards solutions (: . Rest assured, we're aware of many of these problems already and it's refreshing to hear someone genuinely speak up and share their thoughts. Thanks for your constructive criticism! Hope you'll be able to feel significant changes soon with the direction and vision we're moving towards.

Congratulations!

Thank you for your detailed constructive criticism; I'll read over it and provide a response sometime today.

Dominic and Zayne were permanently banned from SG by unanimous vote for general unwanted behaviour, including poaching admins, advertising, and attempting to incite drama over accusing us of stealing. Constructive criticism is fine, baseless slander is not. We have 0 tolerance for that kind of behaviour here. Below are further details regarding the above. Take a look at the below admins at another unnamed community's new TTT server - what do you see in common? Several SG admins were contacted and asked to be admin at another community to help Dominic and Zayne launch a competing server. Note that their admin roster is entirely SG admins. Furthermore, both Dominic and Zayne decided to hop onto our TTT server this morning and advertise. Dominic's attempt to start drama is below. TL;DR: he accused us of screwing over people by having subscriptions (automatic donations). Interestingly, Dominic actually supported recurring payments as a BD. Prior to this permanent ban, Zayne was demoted from the Veteran rank for recurring attitude issues and impersonation of an admin while in the rank. He was expected to uphold a level of professionalism needed as both a former higher-up and Veteran, but failed to do so on multiple occasions. Copy-paste from an IA thread: Good luck with your new endeavour, but don't bring SG into it.

@vinyl you making videos this time?

I have plans for that subforum

Besides awards, what's missing that qualifies this as a bare-minimum functioning forum? Just wondering, not trying to start an argument or anything. @ElementalCan you DM me a screenshot (full-page) of what the forums look like for you? I'm a little confused when you say things are too big while also saying there's a lot of wasted space.