Caution

Liam, you have helped out so much over the years. I appreciate not just the amount of technical work you’ve put into the community, but also how much you have served as an advisor in BD matters. Focus on your personal life, and if you ever feel like you’d like to come back, there will always be a spot open for you. Farewell, my friend.

fear

Thuxys has been demoted, permed, and put on a ‘Do Not Unban’ list for leaking the fastDL password into the GG discord.

Why would you not post your opinion in the thread made a week and a half ago in the SM section where we asked for y’all’s opinions? I don’t have an issue with your opinion whatsoever, but being a higher up and posting this in the announcement section instead of in the thread where we actually asked for your opinion is pretty lame.

As of right now we have no intention of discontinuing any awards. I can’t see a reason off the top of my head why we would remove them.

Hey everyone, After gathering a bit of input and having some discussion with the other BD's, we decided to do some rank restructuring. There's still more to come, but this is the first push. Ultimately, we're trying to take the ranks back to a 'simpler time', as we feel that there's a lot of clutter going on with the ranks and we are looking to cut down on that substantially - at least for the time being. First, we're gonna change up how supporter ranks work. We're going back to two tiers - one will be $3.99 and one will be $5.99. I know that there are a lot of people who have shut down their subscriptions, and I understand. Ultimately, I would appreciate keeping SG in mind if you're able to subscribe. It greatly helps out. While I can't say for certain we'll keep these prices forever, the prices won't ever change for people actively subscribing. I will never change the price of something you're currently subscribing to. More details on this will come out in a specific post by someone else, detailing what the perks will be for both ranks. This will probably take effect within the next week or so. Our donation goal is also now reflecting our new, anticipated operating costs. Next up, we are cutting almost all the 'teams', with the exception of the events team. Marketing team, design team, modding team, and stream team are all going to be removed. We greatly appreciate everyone who has participated in these roles and gave it your all, but they no longer fit the direction that we are currently trying to take the community. We believe that the majority of these tasks can be completed by people without needing to be on a team with a forum rank. Junior admins are also going away - it's just going to be a full blown SA from the start. We will also be removing applications for each individual game mode. There will just be one admin application process, and if you want admin on another game mode, just send a message to whoever is in charge of adding / removing admins for it. Last, but not least (for now), the Board feels like we owe the community an apology, in particular the older group of people who were affected by the change in the recognition rank system. This is a situation where we honestly had good intentions in doing it, but it did not turn out the way we had hoped. In the discussion of cutting down on general 'clutter', the three-tier recognition rank system came up, and we have decided to go in the opposite direction with it. We are going back to a two-tier system: Legend and Honorable Gamer. Legend will be reserved for staff members, meaning server managers and above, who served actively for at least three months in a higher-up rank. If that criteria is met, there is no BD input on this, outside of a forced demotion or other disciplinary situations. It's an automatic process with any type of bias removed. Some long-time admins may be given the 'Legend' status, but it is rare. Legends will keep SA powers on the server, but are equal in terms of not being able to use powers on them and whatnot. Honorable Gamer will be for anyone CA and below who resigned with at least three months as an admin or CA. Once again, outside of disciplinary reasons, this will be an automatic process and will not have input from us. There may be, from time to time, long-time members who will be given this rank without having been an admin. HG's will NOT have admin status. The Veteran rank will cease to exist. Everyone in the veteran rank will either go to Legend or to HG, depending on what ranks they have held. The new group of Legends will be: These are all the changes we are pushing out for now, but you can expect some more in the coming weeks. Thanks everyone for your continued participation on the forums, servers, and discord...and an additional thanks to those subscribing or thinking about subscribing. I appreciate your continued patience and motivation. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Updates coming tomorrow.

I think returning to the roots is important and cutting out 'excess' can be a good idea. I'm not opposed to this, at least for the time being. As far as IA's go...it's almost "six to one and half a dozen to another". Ultimately, we need a group of people making decisions on the things you mentioned: ban increases, ban appeals, and general punishments / drama (admin strikes, banning members that have more status than random people, etc.). These tasks are undoubtedly not going to be handled alone by BD's. We jump in on them and offer input, but it's a huge help having other people chat to the accused / accuser, witnesses, gather evidence, etc. We handle high-high profile ones usually, but that's super rare, far in-between, and not worth mentioning. So, with that being said, I think we can all agree that there needs to be some sort of group handling these tasks / assisting the BD's in handling these tasks for them to get accomplished in a timely manner. I know that you said you said you're not suggesting to bring back AO's....but as I read it, it's pretty much a suggestion to bring AO back. For those who weren't around for AO - it was basically IA and a server manager combined. When we created IA's, the intent was to separate the duties so server managers could focus solely on server stuff, and IA's could focus solely on IA stuff. The thought behind this is there were AO's who had no interest in the drama and just wanted to server manage. Admittedly, it was not a significant amount and a change wasn't 'needed', it was just an interesting change to a decade old rank structure. While some of these responsibilities slightly altered here and there, the gist is that AO's handled ban appeals, player complaints, increase requests, etc. Usually the AO(s) of whatever server the complaint / appeal / was on would handle the situation...there wasn't really a lot of 'toe-stepping'. On occasion, we would have an 'Administrative Manager', who would kinda act like a mini-BD. We'd include them on promotion discussions, punishments among AO's, etc. So, the reason why I say that it's six to one, yadda yadda, is because it ultimately doesn't really matter what you call the group - but one is needed. Shit will pile up and not get done otherwise. I'm actually...not opposed to a discussion of bringing back AO. It would mostly just depend on if the current server managers would want that extra responsibility. I wouldn't want to change that and add more power / responsibility and all of them go 'lol fuck this im out'.

RS wasn’t like that though. While I’m not going to say there were literally no cases of bias, there were virtually none when it was RS. If you were an AO+ at any point in time and stepped down or were even demoted for inactivity, you got RS. CA and SA’s got HG, and HG was also either specially given out to people who weren’t admins but contributed, and there was another system where it was 6 months of forum time with 100 posts (or something to that effect). LG can and will have that bias, and the system right now seems to have a lot of it, just given the nature of the system itself. While HG was a biiiiiit more biased at times, RS had that virtually removed. Unless you were banned / demoted for misconduct (and even then, there were people with RS who were demoted quietly), you got it. If anything, the bias was kinda flipped and we actually gave it out more liberally to longtime admins that weren’t staff; Itch being a great example. Should the bias not be taken away as much as possible? While I agree that some people are like ‘we’re not worthy’ when you start comparing yourselves to others, I don’t really like that mentality or want to encourage it from any angle, although it may sometimes be unavoidable. If I started tossing out names like bor3d, Atarian, etc, most people will have no clue who those people are, and have no clue that they probably did a lot more work than Haggard. Which isn’t meant to be disrespectful towards Haggard, but TA’s are absolutely the workforce behind the scenes. I agree that people generally don’t like change and you can constantly rewrite systems to make people happy or just keep up to date with whatever the current userbase wants. The admin application process is a great example of that, and I’ve probably posted on this website at least 100 times that the system constantly changes and we have tried nearly everything, with nothing being ‘perfect’. I think changing the admin system around here and there can be a good thing though. I don’t really see the recognition ranks rework as being one of those things. It seems a lot more of a ‘ehhhhh good initiative bad judgement’ on the Board’s part. Which I’m not faulting anyone, it was an interesting spin and a good try. I just don’t think it really ‘stuck’ very well and kind of still doesn’t sit right, whereas having two ranks, one for staff and one for admins, with limited bias kind of seems better. Maybe we just kinda say ‘our bad, guys’, cause I think All T’s has a valid point. I could be dissenting from the majority opinion here and I don’t want to change shit people don’t want to see changed, but I’m just generally curious what the community thinks.

Sort of off topic here…but just gonna toss this out for feedback… What if we scrapped the concept of a middle rank and just went back to giving staff the admin recognition rank and giving regular SA’s / longtime players the non-admin recognition rank?

Hey everyone, This thread has been a long time coming, and admittedly I should have made it earlier. I'm making this so you guys can hear stuff directly from me, and not another BD. Not that I don't trust them to get the right info out, but hearing it from me and avoiding a middleman is long overdue. This is addressed to everyone, from the Regulars to the Directors. I've been reading and seeing a lot of frustration coming from everyone. Some of it aimed at me, the Board, the Server Managers, etc. Most of you won't see it, but even the Directors are frustrated. They're in Discord venting that frustration the same way that the lowest ranking members are. I get it. First and foremost, I want to immediately and up front address that SG is not in any danger of 'shutting down'. Yes, it is extremely ideal to have a situation where we are positive cash flow, but ultimately I am able to finance SG personally. When I took over the reigns from Spartan nearly 7 years ago, I knew that there might be a day where I would have to pay out of pocket for SG. I started playing on SG servers when I was 13 years old...15 years ago. Even though I'm not nearly as active as those days, believe me that SG will always hold a special place in my heart...meaning that to the point of sheer stubbornness, I would never stop paying for the lights to stay on here. What does that mean? Well, it does mean that I am going to be less likely to just 'hand' money out. That's not saying that I won't, it just means that I expect plans, details, etc., when it comes to spending money, because at this point it is coming out of pocket for the most part. If we can save money by going to one dedi (which is the current plan), I encourage that as well. This also allows more money to be given out to marketing and giveaways and whatnot. It also forces us to really go back to the basics and focus on fewer servers at one time, instead of spreading our attention everywhere. Beyond this, however, I really don't want anyone focusing on money. This sounds counterintuitive, but I believe that after establishing popularity again, it will shortly follow. I do want to see the donator setup continue to get revamped. I'm still in the Middle East and have a lot going on in my personal life, including starting up a business that blew up unexpectedly. I walked away from SG pretty much completely and entirely about a year ago, handing the reigns over to the BD team. I made sure money flowed where it needed to and when it needed to, and that's about it. I've been slowly adding more time for SG, but this is mostly done by catching up on changes, proposed changes, and just reading in general. I'm a firm believer in leaders passing recognition and taking blame, and I do fully take responsibility in letting SG get to the state it's in now. With the integration of me getting back involved in general community affairs, I do also plan on getting active again on the servers. This doesn't mean 4 hours a night or anything, but I do plan on hopping on. I've seen a few threads with the general premise of brainstorming how to get SG populated again. I greatly appreciate threads like these and think they're a great idea. I want to encourage that, outside of clear shitposting or just saying 'game over man, game over', none of the posts should be getting deleted or the threads getting locked. This is just going to discourage people from posting and contributing, and that's not what I want to see happen. There have been a few ideas tossed around in these threads that I have been greatly considering, including mass unbans and promoting people that were previously demoted. For those who have been around SG for awhile, especially back when it was ZM, there have been a few dark days like this. SG has been on the actual verge of being shut down in the past. It's never ideal and never fortunate, but we've always pulled through completely and solely due to the determination and general love for SG from the player-base (which is everyone). Once again, I greatly appreciate the hard work and brainstorming that everyone has put in, and please feel free to provide input and suggestions on how we can make this place thrive again, and feel free to tag me in stuff or send me PM's. If I don't respond within a day or two, please send a follow-up.

Jam, because i can’t ‘jelly’ my dick into the jar afterwards

No, I genuinely prefer ventrilo over Teamspeak

what about ventrilo

wait…what?

Curious if any other vets on here are looking to head that way. I got a few months left on this Middle East contract then was looking to volunteer over in Ukraine and fuck some shit up.

the most disrespectful thing in this thread @Gator @Black Rain @Maniac @BoM @crazedkangaroo When can you guys all meet to discuss this comment

All the codes were sent 12 hours ago or so, i imagine they will be distributed shortly. Please make sure to check both Steam and Origin, as there are codes for both. There are two or three people that have Ubisoft codes, and I’ll have to get with you privately to try and figure how to get those out to you. A higher up will let you know if you have one of these codes and to reach out to me. thanks & enjoy

Hey guys, I’ve dropped the ball a bit when it came to the giveaways. I’ve unfortunately had a bunch of work drama over the last three weeks and just recently became sick as well (thankfully not Covid). I’m doing alright~ish now and will start pushing out the codes tomorrow for the higher ups to start disseminating accordingly. There’s quite a few and I’m gonna try and knock it out in one sitting, but it might take a few days. Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the delay.

I support a soft delete option that still gives moderators the ability to see what was posted.

I’ve never listened to an artist that I have such a love / hate with their songs. The College Dropout was such an amazing album, but after that Kanye’s songs for me are like 75% ‘how the fuck did they really think this was a good idea when they put this together’ and 25% are great, and that’s me being super generous. Maybe I need to actively listen to him again to get a better vibe. He has a lot of songs that he’s just featured in that i like…but as far as his songs, I’d say take a pick from College Dropout, but one that’s not on that album that hit me hard when I first heard it was Runaway. That’s probably my favorite song from him.