Dominic

I might respond more properly when I’m home, but your entire argument is based off the very bold assumption that the server will even get populated when we’ve done 1v1 for years and never seen any notable success from it from what I can remember. We’d also be assuming that yourself and the other people showing interest will have that interest and populate the server for anything longer than a week. I get your logic, might as well just have some players for a month. That feels like we’re giving up though. I’d rather find a project we can actually put effort into and potentially see real change because of.

Absolutely and utterly useless, sorry to be harsh and straight forward.. but that's the truth. 1v1 has been a thing on and off at SG since at least 2016. Never at any point have I heard of a regular staying at the community because of 1v1. Even if you do manage to populate it, it'll do nothing for the actual community. It doesn't bring in regulars, it doesn't bring in new donors, it doesn't do anything. Free dedi space at this point should be used for an absolute hail mary wherever we see fit, but one that can actually have something good come of it. ZRiot is worth more of a shot than 1v1. Competitive style servers haven't and will never do anything for SG.. at our peak perhaps we could've put a foot in the ground of competitive servers.. a few 1v1s, a few Retakes, a few deathmatches, but now we can't and just putting one little server out there is absolutely pointless. I can't justify this in my head.

LoverOfGuys

Steel_ has been banned for 2 weeks across all of our platforms for general unwanted behavior / being a nuisance. He has repeatedly lashed out at higher ups and caused trouble in our Discord, in addition to making a couple posts on our forum that he knew went against the rules in which the only intention was to troll. This behavior has continued even after getting his Honorable Gamer rank removed for the exact same reason, meaning he's clearly not getting the message. We hope that this will get the point across that this behavior is unacceptable and must come to an end.

I wrote a big ass post like 3 times here and kept deciding it wasn't worth it. What do you think SG should do? Here's the question I want everyone to ask themselves: if you were the President right now, what would be your grand plan? What would you put in motion? Would you turn us into a 'gaming hub' on Discord? Timeline that for me and make me understand how we're going to survive long-term. Would you shutdown all the servers instantly because it's 'time to give up'? Give me a list of pros and cons, how would that help the community? Everyone keeps asking questions, answer some for me. I'm so curious as to what's going on in the minds of all the people asking the questions.

Please for the love of fuck don't devolve this thread into a discussion about the focus of the community, I just want Jailbreak in its own fucking section. @Revenga Great ideas, I love the layout. Yes, totally agree that map suggestions could go under the server section and that it'd encourage people to use it, be easier to keep track of, etc. Everything else looks great. I don't think it'll look too cluttered but if it does we should cut down elsewhere instead of compromising imo.

I don't really know how any of this works, so I can't critique the idea or see any glaring issues with it. And I'm willing to learn how to do all of that in our Discord to use that, I only see potential benefits to it. However, the forums are still dead and I still think this idea could help not only remedy that, but also still promote even more discussion and involvement. Let's be real - there's much more benefit to making Jailbreak its own section than having "Team Fortress 2", "SCP", "Media Events", "SG Scrim League", "Steam-Gamers Raffle"... the list goes on. It'd still be a positive change regardless IMO.

This would also allow us to create subforums under our specific sections, such as a subforum dedicated to "Feedback Threads" for Jailbreak so all the ones I'm posting are easily accessible. There's also rule discussions, general questions about the server, you can even have a secondary "Events" subforum. This could potentially make it so that we can garner mini communities within the forum that only pay attention to that one section.

Given the state of the community; the lack of forum activity and how dead the servers are, I think we should separate the server subforums into their own sections, or at least Jailbreak, TTT, and MG. While the sidebars with the latest posts and threads are useful, I often come across threads by scrolling through the forum. Maybe that's an old habit given I used the forums before those sidebars, but I still think this could help even if marginally. For reference, I'm referring to this: Separate out those three servers into their own sections so in case a TTT thread gets made or anything else in that section, it doesn't overlap anyone else like myself trying to call attention to threads about my server. This could also help people who aren't avid forum users see the section of the server they play easier.

I'm no expert on surf servers but just thinking logically I'd imagine a server wipe of records might do well for player population. Any example I can think of where my progress has gotten wiped in a game or server, it's enticed me to play more, earn it all back and become the top player. Obviously I'm not referring entirely to Surf but I did start my community server journey on a Surf server 7+ years ago and IIRC wipes were a somewhat regular(?) thing. I wouldn't do it ridiculously frequently but have we never wiped our server ever? Outside of using this logic, the reasoning for this request from the OP makes a lot of sense and I'd say it's only fair, right?

a little payday 2 with caution always does the trick

weird how only members of “the boys” get promoted?? hmmm??? Noctember any thoughts on this??

In response to parts of both @Caution and @Revenga - I hate quoting on these forums. I think the main thing in the back of my mind when I was comparing AO to a fusion of IA / AT was that they wouldn't really have any part in promotion / demotion discussion. I can't speak on how AO functioned but afaik they discussed promotion up to even their own rank and demotions for CAs and below. IA started out like this but got more and more neutered as other ranks were created, managerial ranks in particular. And I remember being in the IA rank as we continued to get more and more "fleshed out" and continuously got things removed from us. But whatever the case, I agree with what Caution said in that I am not necessarily opposed to the idea of it becoming AO again. I think that might actually be a good route. Are the responsibilities of Internal Affairs necessary? Sure, it just felt like the list had become so small that the rank was null and void. Like Revenga said, there's not many ban appeals or admin complaints, SOTM / MOTM is hardly given out and it's not a big one on the list, and CA+ admin training was also moved to specific managers of each team. This pretty much leaves "admin disputes", and any other day to day. If this is deemed enough to warrant the team, I can't argue with that, but I suppose I could've gone a different route than suggesting to pile the day to day onto the BDs. I didn't think of just bringing back AO as a feasible option, but I also can't see why it isn't. I'm also going to be honest, despite being one of the people to create the last manager rank in Lead Advisor, I agree with Revenga's rework idea. Again, I haven't been in staff for a couple of years, but promotion to manager of a team slowly devolved into "you're the best on the team, keep it up, here's some extra power" because they didn't have any real power. No manager had genuine autonomy and promotion requests were more like a glorified suggestion. Demotion discussions always ended up at the BD level no matter what, where we'd check how a manager went about warning, how many times, etc. Even if you argue they have or will be given full autonomy on promotions / demotions, I don't think it's enough to warrant the entire role especially if you just bring back AO instead. I remember working in extremely functional CA teams with no manager, and extremely functional AT teams with shitty / nonexistent managers (lol), and vice versa on the AT point at least. I'd argue that majority of the time the quality of the manager means very little for team functionality. It was a good idea on paper but I think our community is too linear to warrant so many "managers" - I'd like to make an educated comparison here but I think it'd be best if I didn't lol. If we can agree that there's just way too much going on with our rank structure at the moment, then I don't think it'd hurt to turn back time and really go back to our roots. I mean, our community functioned pretty damn well with that rank structure. You can argue the benefits of the changes we made, I think the biggest one is that a lot of people that might be barely ready to be a server manager are absolutely not ready for the power of an AO.. but to be honest, it is what it is. We had shitty AOs, we had shitty IAs. It happens either way. I'm on the side of cutting out all this extra bs and going back to the way we were. I will disagree with one point from @Revenga though, I've always viewed the Community Advisor role as an extremely beneficial rank that also served as a suitable stepping stone / indicator of whether an admin should become an AO, or in my case as a BD, if they should become a server manager. Now I could be biased here just because of how much I always loved being a CA, but I also think all the "bitch work" CAs do would be hard to delegate elsewhere. Piling player complaints, award requests, forum moderation, etc. on another rank like AO but might be too much or just might be ignored. I also think that with where the community currently stands, promoting any old staff that want to come back and help to a rank like CA could be beneficial, like what they did with Prez.

I made this thread not only to propose my suggestion to the broader public, but also to promote discussion and posts on the forums because activity is slowly dying. It was then pretty much ended by a post that said all of this was being discussed already. When are these discussions gonna come to the public? I stressed the shit out of this in the first community meeting. If you want people to think you guys are doing stuff, you want people to use the forums more, you want to seem more transparent and close that gap between the higher-ups and the community, you should bring stuff like this to the public. Why does a discussion about how a new team would work need to be so private? If you're comfortable putting it out there that it's being worked out, let people give input. You don't have to release every single little detail about it if you're uncomfortable doing so. Forums are dead, please give people stuff to talk about.

Caution was, in fact, an absent father.

If you never got banned I would've made you an HG.

Thread is gonna get derailed hard but I'm gonna throw my two cents in as someone who was apart of the Director team that implemented the recognition rank rework, and has had two years away from this place with something of fresh eyes on it now. If you really wanted to, you could split the community up into 5 recognition ranks, 6 even.. to accurately categorize people. There's many different levels to the amount of time, effort, and energy someone put in here and how impactful it really was. At the time, it felt wrong seeing someone like Haggard who built the community in the same rank as a half-decent server manager that kind of just sat around for a year and messed with a few plugins here and there. But at the same time, was it right for me to be in the same rank as someone like Haggard either? Obviously Haggard has his Founder rank or whatever.. no one needs to point it out. But I didn't compare to others like Paul or Spartan either. So there's really no great formula to it. If you're worried about hurt feelings, remove recognition ranks altogether. I mean that genuinely, it's not a dig at anyone. In any case where you have a set of recognition ranks, there is a potential for people to be upset about the work they did being categorized in a lower rank than they'd hoped. Before the rework, there were still arguments about who should've been LG instead of HG and who shouldn't have been. In reality, it's all up to the discretion of the higher ups at the time to judge what you did here, and there's inevitably going to be some biased ass decisions... and there has been, and lots of people have pointed them out in the past. I don't want to remove recognition ranks, obviously. I thought 3 was a little better than 2, and I sort of still do. But like I said, it could be chopped down to 1, or upped to 6. Not everyone will be happy and a poll to the community 2 years ago when it happened will probably look drastically different than now, because a lot of these new faces are used to this system. People don't like change, that's how it is. So if you do recognition ranks based on what the community wants, you'll never stop altering the system. Looking back now, I think some people were poorly categorized, but that could be my memory fogging up or personal biases washing away. That's why it'll never be perfect. Honestly, just chop it down to 1 rank lol. Don't call it Retired Staff.. Honorable Gamer is a little corny too imo. Make it some neutral name so you can still reasonably put those people that weren't staff but still contributed a lot into it. No hurt feelings (unless you did absolute jack shit to not even earn a simple recognition rank) and people have something to show off. It's not as special, sure, but you really shouldn't be expecting something special for when you resign. At the end of the day, the BDs could decide to put you in the highest recognition rank possible.. if you were a shitty staff member, everyone will have seen it and your shiny rank won't make people like or respect you in retirement. Don't forget to thumbs up this post and follow my profile!

Another fallen BD spokesperson

Hey, I brought this up at the community meeting, if I recall correctly the people who were speaking mostly agreed. My last point will be controversial but that's expected. - Remove the Modding Team - Remove the Marketing Team - Remove the Designer Team - Remove the Streamer Team - Remove the Internal Affairs Team I'll take it point by point, but the idea is pretty much the same for all of them. The community is not in a good place and we don't need all these moving parts. All these teams are afterthoughts when it comes to actually reviving the community in the first place. None of them do much for actual community growth and anything they do that could actually help can just be delegated to certain people. It's time for everyone's focus to be on getting people to actually join the community and people being apart of these teams and them existing at all distracts from that purpose, imo. The Modding Team is especially useless as it stands because everyone has sort of given up on CS:GO it seems, but as I said, even if their skills are required it's not as if removing the rank removes the people. If anything, it may even be better for this team to be dissolved and for server managers to have the ability to make public requests for any fixes they need, it's a bit more engaging that way. You still have the people who resided on the team able to view them and help and you also may have other people who are into modding chime in and help too. This can promote forum growth. The Marketing Team has always sort of been a sub-species of Community Advisor in a way, imo. Each and every thing they've done from when I was around realistically could've been delegated to the CAs, but it was beneficial at the time to have a smaller group of people who oftentimes had a knack for discussing marketing topics. At this point, we don't really need to be seeking out sponsorships or anything like that. The only beneficial thing I can see them doing right now is discussing a donor system rework, which can be given to CAs and should honestly be discussed with the community as a whole. The Designer Team has always been useful but it's the same premise with the Modding Team. Requests can be made public, it can promote forum growth (even if it's marginal it's worth it), and as of right now anything we do doesn't need a pretty banner behind it, it just actually needs to be useful. Most events have banners already and if public requests don't work, you don't actually need a banner and you can almost always find something decent looking and relevant on the internet. Anything else they do like COTM and the Art Contest if those still go on, as I keep saying, not a priority in the slightest. The Streamer Team has been odd from the jump imo. I can see the usefulness of it if we could really put time and energy into growing our Twitch, but our Twitch isn't going to save the community. At this point if anyone believes in the potential of it, like I keep saying, you can just delegate the responsibility to them. Is anyone even in this rank as it stands? I can also see the difficulty of finding someone willing to stream for our community, it seems to me the rank has struggled since release. Correct me if I'm wrong. Here's the controversial one. Even though it's the biggest one, I'm gonna keep it short and let people retaliate first. The IA team has three small responsibilities that can be delegated elsewhere with ease. Perm and increase requests can be given to the server managers, they shouldn't need to make them and they should be able to approve or deny them, it's not a difficult task. They're trusted with managing an entire server or two already. Ban appeals always would've made more sense in the hands of the managers of the server the person was banned from. But it'd actually be easier for the server managers as a whole to just discuss a ban appeal and then run it by the LSM for final decision. The other responsibility you can argue is day-to-day SG drama. I'm very safely assuming that that's died down heavily from where it was long ago. There doesn't seem to be many big ban appeals or important Who Got Banned and Why posts, and it makes sense. People aren't here, and when they are they probably don't care to get caught up in beef. It just doesn't seem like enough to warrant an entire team anymore. The BDs can handle anything that comes up, and it's actually easier that way since you're just removing a bunch of people who need to cast votes. If second opinions or tie breakers are needed, you can look to the server managers. I don't mean to make it out like I'm trying to turn server managers back into AOs, because to the best of my knowledge AOs had a hell of a lot more power and say than just being asked for their thoughts when need be or doing perm requests and ban appeals. I just firmly believe this community should be returning to the barebones of a rank structure while it tries to heal itself, we don't need all of these moving parts on anyone's plate right now. Now obviously someone in staff can clap back and say absolutely none of these teams are taking up any unnecessary time from relevant parties, and while I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be able to deny it.

I think some of your Prisoner buy menu ideas are funny and creative. You should make that an entirely new suggestion thread in the Jailbreak section. I feel like this idea came up some years back but I'm not sure why we never ended up doing it. It sounds pretty cool to me, honestly. I can see the potential behind some of the event ideas you listed just with the brief descriptions you gave, but I think you should go more in depth on some of them. An event where there are more jihads, even if every T automatically had a jihad actually, sounds funny as shit. With some more fleshing out and brainstorming some of those ideas could be pretty great. Incorporating riot shields into Protect the President could be a fun addition, where the 2 CTs with riot shields have the specific task of protecting the president personally. Lots of potential behind the stuff you said, just gotta get more specific so other people can be convinced of that potential too.

Oh great.. our MG manager is sexually attracted to Doomfist. @Dong you up next gang?

Wouldn't miss this for the world boss man. Gonna be the highlight of my day.

In the nicest way possible, how the hell are we less than an hour from this meeting and there's no sort of structured agenda?

Change your name back assface