(The Real) State of the Union

[BoM]

 

Hey! It's me, your favorite active BD, here to bring you a long awaited update on the status of all. This is not to rehash old problems or go over much of how we got here or why, but to state how it is now and where we are looking to go in the future. This will hopefully cover all of the major talking points of what is now the last 3-5 months, but if something is missed feel free to message me or bring it up elsewhere. This post is going to sit locked as a reference point for what might be other discussions or thought points, and there will be relevant ways to contact the BDs or otherwise continue conversation at the end. Please sit tight and enjoy the read.

 

Gaming Communities

The status of gaming communities has obviously gone downhill in the last 6+ months, if not well before then. We've seen other communities falter as we have, and even worse we've seen a lot of communities die off completely. Considering our size and history compared to some of the communities that have died off it is not a direct worry as something that would happen here, however it is, of course, still cause for concern. It's been brought up here and there that not only are those gaming communities dying, but that the concept in itself is dying and that we are doomed because of it. It is the board's position that this is inaccurate and we simply need to continue evolving ourselves into something that stems beyond just being a CSGO community, while still re-enforcing our CSGO foothold where we can. More on this below.

 

Our Community

Continuing on from the above line of thinking, the board recognizes that there has been a lack of vision and direction and it might seem like we are just spiraling out of control. There is a lot to cover about our community, but it is important that everyone reading understands the game plan and even the options in front of us. First and foremost we don't have plans to shut down the servers at this time, but we have discussed shrinking down what we have. As it currently stands, there are a lot of people interested in a variety of our servers, and how we condense those efforts to less servers and also the right servers is a bit of a mystery to us. Everyone has their favorite servers and probably has ones that they think should get chopped, but overall there isn't a clear consensus beyond probably 'keep the big 3'.

 

Beyond the servers, we have a very obvious want to expand into new things that aren't CSGO as we have been trying at for over a year now, and quite frankly we don't plan on stopping. Unfortunately some people have viewed this as us giving up on CSGO, but in reality we still intend to keep a focus on that as well. When our staff structure is working we are more than able to work on community expansion and have reliable people pushing CSGO aspects, but as many have noticed our staff has taken substantial hits since about August-Sept. Since then our community expansion plans slowly hit a wall as we couldn't pull up enough staff to keep the engine going. There have been conversations and meetings and a variety of changes and plans set up to try and combat this, but we are still in that position today.

 

Does this mean we are stopping our plans to grow beyond CSGO? No, because if we do that and CSGO keeps failing we're doomed anyways and to bet everything on a game that doesn't hold the traction it used to isn't something the board see's as a viable option. Fact of the matter is no matter what angle you look at it from, CSGO has lost some of it's traction (if not a lot of it) and that concerns us just as much as it does anyone else who cares about the community. Our goal currently is first and foremost to re-engage with the community and then from there try and bolster where CSGO is at as we have recognized there is a growing force trying to help revive the servers and grow a new ground level of population. The board will continue to dabble with other growth opportunities on the backend, most particularly discord at the the moment, but we do see the need for a shift in direction. Call it meeting the public halfway.

 

Beyond that, we'd like to hope that by us engaging with the community and reaching out on new and old ventures that we can stop the infighting, the toxicity, the backhanded remarks, etc. It seems as though everyone, even those making the comments and starting fights, are getting tired of it at this point. It has gotten us nowhere, and it's wasted 1-2 months that we could have been making progress on things many people still clearly care about. There is no need for anyone to continue down that path, and we believe there won't be much of a need to do so as we will all be working to better the community.

 

Staff Activity & Structure

Obviously some of our problems over the last 6+ months stem from a notable lack of activity among our staff, pretty much all the way up to the top. There is no good way to sugarcoat everyone burning out and giving up on the dream, which was at the very least the case from the period of December to March. Prior to that, we lost key staff members in generally sudden manners during the holiday months October to December. As mentioned previously, during that time it became glaringly obvious that we did not have a proper flow of new staff members to possibly cover those gaps. We don't need any history lessons beyond that, because we all know that if there isn't enough staff or enough active staff it just all goes to shit.

 

The board recognizes certain mistakes that were made not keeping up on key team and leadership positions, going for a bit too much autonomy while we worked on stuff at the BD level, and even not enough accountability on us as BDs. A first step to remedy this for us is setting up a cross team internal communication for staff members on what the Board is working on, both for different teams and just for the community, allowing everyone to keep a better on what is being prioritized. This is on top of re-doing how we handle tasks to be prioritized better and also looking at how to better handle having a proper amount of day-to-day BDs to handle that new prioritization. We also have some thoughts to try and have a more clear cut day-to-day BD group vs the back end BDs that are there mostly for voting, tech work, etc.

 

I'm throwing in a small blurb regarding Gator and Caution, and their general inactivity from a public view. As much as we would all like for them to be more active, this will likely remain this way for a while. They are both very busy with a lot of real life stuff, but are still available when we need them on a vote or something big going on, but both of those things are pretty rare lately. They have given the BDs all the power and access needed to handle everything we need to handle and we all know and understand that. If anything we have to call on Nishok a lot more to come help us than anyone else, which makes sense since he is the real owner. Kidding...I think.

 

Onto all the other ranks that need addressing and possible adjusting to move forward. An obvious point to start is looking at the admin rank which has gone through a few turbulent changes through most of 2021. As it stands now we've pretty well restored that to how it was before, which is public voting and we've also discussed how any BD responding goes over how the votes were counted, i.e. if certain votes are not counted it will be explained. Beyond that, growth for the admin rank will obviously come into play heavily based on server activity and growth. The CA rank has been a weird clashing and tipping point for a long time now, and while the LAs in charge all through 2021 made great strides to make changes allowing for the team and members to grow and evolve, it needs more. We will be introducing both a discord moderating team and a server representative team to provide branching teams that pull pieces from the CA team and focus on them as their own rank. This will be explained further in a post officially releasing these teams.

 

When we start looking at the servers we have to look at the other groups as well, that being the SM/LSM team and the divisional teams. The divisional teams need the other teams bigger than them to step up in order for that engine to start running right, and that's where it's gotta start. The board isn't here to blame the divisional team for the servers failing when the guys in charge of keeping up on them sort of dropped the ball. What we will do is continue to work with them and continue to try and find incentives for those people to work. Our biggest struggle has always been that divisional roles actually require a lot more hands-on or technical work whether it be modding/picture + video editing/pumping out events etc. We aren't so concerned about Marketing they all tend to be self motivated and less task oriented, they mostly tell us what to do...but it it is harder to get more people on this team.

 

The more obvious team to try and shine some light and understanding on is the SMs, which saw faltering all through 2021 as the servers started to see various declines. Through different meeting types, discussions, and involvement the BDs and LSMs tried to find a way to better keep some continuity in progress for the servers. Unfortunately those changes brought about by us ended up taking focus off simply getting on the servers and playing them and just resulted in a lot of talk with not a lot of action. We have found that looking at the LSM position and having a BD overlooking that spot rather than giving it the full autonomy we were going for is clearly needed. In some ways the SMs dropped the ball, but then you can take that a step further and say the LSMs should have kept up on them, and then logically the BDs should have stepped in. BDs let off the gas thinking we could treat LSM as a mini-BD rank and be super hands off, but that trickle down of the hands off effect cost us. It's clear that in order to move forward with any sort of server push this is where a hands-on BD will have to be spending time and holding everyone accountable.

 

The Servers

 

Oh boy, the servers...the thing everyone is here for. If we wanted to really hit on a history of all the servers it would require many many threads with lots of input and clarifications and it would all end up being for nothing. The most important place to start here is to say that the servers are in a terrible spot, one that I'm sure many people fear they cannot get out of. The board feels that too, and like all of you have been rather lost on what to do for a while. Long before it was publicly noticeable there was a lack of server growth and at times a notable decline. Add on to that the more recent declines down to virtually dead servers for a while and obviously still, and again it's not clear on what exactly the best move would be. This is primarily because different servers have different problems and some of those cross to multiple servers, some are isolated, and some are just tied to people not the server(s).

 

The other glaring problem is how we focus the efforts of a dwindling number of people properly, in a way that satisfies all those people. This is where the board gets really stuck because you're talking about something everyone is passionate about and has an opinion about, but everyone has completely different paths to take. Even if the board did step in and make a firm decision on lets say cutting certain servers and focusing on others, the potential backlash on that could be even worse than not cutting at all. This isn't an excuse for not moving on the servers a certain way, and we've definitely had different plans and conversations...but the success of each server bounces around enough and has highs and lows of people interested that we never pulled the trigger...on any of it.

 

So now we need you guys (those being people actually invested in the servers) to help give some direction on where and how efforts should be focused on servers and in what order as well. We had talked about making a schedule of 'we will shut down this server 3 months from now unless there is growth' and maybe that is the right way to do it, but please find the appropriate places to give input on what servers should get focused at the very least...and we can feel out the idea of shutting down XYZ server along the way as we all move to grow the servers that are collectively desired.

 

There has been mention that the BDs have no idea what's going on and don't play on the servers and this and that, but I'm gonna run down the servers quickly anyways and whoever reads it can clarify whatever they want to in the respective server sections.

 

ZE - We'll start here. After all the efforts that have been put in over the last year and before that, it feels like the drive to make that server go has burned for the last time. Anyone that has been paying attention knows of the pikajew incident (which is old yes) and then that incident leading to newer events that lost a lot of our population, and then from there Maniac and several dedicated others tried to push forward sever times over the last however long. At this point we see people pushing for this being one of the servers that might be worth just shutting down as to not be a distraction. We aren't decided on anything this is just openly sharing the 'notes' we have on the server(s).

 

TTT - This server, for as dead as it has been, still has decent traction and people pushing for new things and growth. A decent bit of our population, particularly people that have been staff, have either come from or been through TTT and have come to love it. There is a bit of a split in the style of the server and that's affected it's growth and sustainability, so that's something that anyone who is interested would have to be involved. The more notable call from most is to have more updates to the server. Obviously a few big updates in the last 6 months and before that got held up by XYZ factor, like sub roles for example. Hopefully executing some big ideas and updating can prop this server back up as it's proven to be self sufficient in the past once it gets going.

 

JB - Has some people..sometimes. We've lost some good staff members that were dedicated to the server and ZZL (JB King) has been super busy, but overall this server seems to just have taken a hit from the community as a whole grinding to a halt. The server does have a few problems in the fact that most people that are not JB players think its full of toxic screaming children, which isn't horribly off-base, however it has thrived on that exact type of player for a long while now and we will likely not be able to overcome that part specifically. What we can do is focus a lot on the admining of the server in hopes that we curb that toxicity and what not and that might be something we can work with.

 

MG - What's to say here, it's a server that has had less push than ZE for a long time and is probably likely to be a drain on resources. MG has always been in an awkward place since it moved to CSGO and then got hit by the tryhard vs casual trope that it remained stuck in for a long time. It's definitely one of the servers in the list of 'we keep this here for some fun and nostalgia', but it's possibilities of being a bread winner will likely remain very close to 0%.

 

Scrim/Retakes/1v1(?) - These servers always hold some traction as long as the competitive CSGO scene remains a thing, whether or not many people in the community specifically want to get on and play it all the time. Retakes was always one of those servers that if 3-4 people are interested then it will fill up and be a fun thing for 1-3 hours if not more and then keep rolling that way. 1v1 has been brought up as a server we should bring back and maybe that is something we should do if there is enough of a push for it. Scrim has always been a very big staple of SG even though we all blow and get carried by the few capable players in the community, so of course we keep this one.

 

Movement servers - Continue to have the most potential for sustained population and are the only niche thing that only CSGO community servers can offer...compared to RP or general FPS modes that are imitated or share styles with other games. Which ones should we have and keep exactly? That part might not be so clear to the board, but what is clear is that we are willing to keep and work on anything for them and put people and resources in place to try and grow them. Also scrolls wants to bring back climb because he says it will save the community so maybe that is the sleeper carry play here.

 

Squad - Surprisingly has some traction lately and was even randomly full for a weekend even though that was just for a free weekend. There have also been changes to the seeding system for the game as that was an acknowledged weak point by company obviously. Normally this would not be enough to say 'hey we should still put in effort', but there are also people interested in stepping in and trying to run it and use the new seeding system. We will see where this goes.

 

Hopefully nothing was missed, but this was just a quick assessment so everyone can see where we stand on these servers.

 

Money

 

We don't have any. That is the unfortunate and honest truth of it, and from talking to Caution sometime in the next 2-3 months we won't have any reserve cash left and he will be paying out of his own pocket...a point we would like to avoid. Obviously pumping effort into the servers should get subs and then we can get back on track, but also to think we will regain all those subs instantly is not likely. We need to do two things, one is to rethink the 5/10/15  model as that might not be the most viable anymore and then 2nd is to look at other sources of revenue.

 

At this point we will ask for money and do fundraisers or whatever it takes to make sure we have money rolling in, but beyond that there are other things we would like to do. First is to try and at the very least get people to give twitch prime subs as they are 'free' and give us 'free' money, hopefully also putting in some efforts to twitch growth again but that's been rough since we lost strayyz...I miss him. Second is to run raffles/giveaways where we sell tickets for $5 maybe on new $60 games and hopefully gain money that way, but we need to make sure that is viable and will actually earn not lose money. I will also continue to work with deli and the marketing team on these and other pyramid schemes money making ventures. 

 

The Discord & Forums

 

The discord server is all in all generally where the board saw it going, and where we want it to be. Obviously with slow to no community movement you haven't seen the returns on investment, but the server is setup well and has a lot of the needed things in place for rapid expansion..so now we just need to pump up our numbers and flow of players. We get a decent number of random new people joining, but our retention of those players as of the last 3-4 months is likely low (hasn't been tracked well). Even so, it's become a solid central point of the community and no matter where efforts are being put in, if the community is going in a positive direction the discord is poised to do the same. There are still a few people chanting long live TS3, but hey we can't all be winners.

 

The forums are on the opposite end of the spectrum, long overdue for big and small updates...with broken functions (SB emotes) and things that should just be changed. It's definitely gone from a big concern -> something I just focused on -> me being distracted -> me thinking whats the point of focusing on this rn. As it was just me for a while and those who stepped in didn't have much more know how than me on it, it all just went very stagnant. Recently Crazed has started helping me and poking around on stuff when he's not sleeping with his BF so our new plan is to make small but much much more frequent updates on things as we find them and decide to work with them. This will eliminate unhealthy guidelines on stuff like coding the forums, while also allowing me and crazed to go full ADHD and randomly make improvements when we get bored.

 

Community Outreach

It's time, the big one, the how are we going to get back to basics around here. The first step in our community outreach is this small novel I've written for all you lovely people still reading. The next step is tossing out BD meetings and replacing them with consistent community meetings that allow for more transparency as to what the BDs think of everything and where the community is going. Ideally this will be the place where you can come and see a portion of maybe even all the BDs, and we will structure it similar to how we do CA meetings or our BD meetings with an agenda and then an open floor meeting. This has the possibility of being like a hybrid BD meeting/community meeting if we all can work cohesively and everyone can follow the rules that get laid out for it. We will aim for doing these once a month for a while here and then maybe after that we can shift to every 3 months if it becomes redundant.

 

On top of that we obviously know we need to take a much bigger involvement back in the staff roles, both reaching out and finding people for them and then making sure that the engine keeps running. Autonomy..failed us and that is something we recognize and know we need to just try and fix now for the future. We are looking to open up ranks like CA for everyone to apply to and we will be much more open and transparent about spots that we need filled in hopes of finding people who want to step up.

 

The 3rd/4th step is to make sure we have clearly laid out ways for people to reach the staff and have conversation(s) with the BDs about various topics in ways that are productive. As much it is probably satisfying and helpful from an emotional state to just vent in a public thread, unfortunately that doesn't efficiently get any ideas across even if it's the hot topic of the week. Overall there need to be avenues people are comfortable talking through that allow the everyday member and a dedicated staff member the same ability to have a conversation with a BD. It doesn't mean everyone is going to get a say or get to talk exactly the way they want to...to the board...whenever they want, but it does mean providing avenues that allow people to have some sort of discussion on topics they are passionate about with the people who can make changes.

 

Final Points

 

The board is not blind to its failings at this point and is not, nor has it meant, to push the blame off on any one or group of people. The fact is mistakes were made, and whether you agree on what exactly the board did wrong...obviously moves we made inevitably got us to this point. We were given the reigns by those before us and by Caution/Gator to do whatever we want however we deemed necessary and through various changes we allowed certain things to go through we shouldn't have and pushed for things that maybe put us worse off than we were. It's not an excuse, but it's not easy being a board member and eating shit all the time even if we all step up and give 110%..and it's even shittier getting told you're not worthy of BD or should leave just because of  'not enough time in the servers' or 'your vision isn't ours'. Things like that.

 

We're not asking for anyone to forgot the reasons that got us here, we are just asking that you accept we are what you have to work with and if you work with us the effort will be there. We have gotten together and discussed our availability and tried to be way more transparent with who is where and can do what. The structure of the community will work if you work with it, and what really got us to this point is the Board trying to allow for growth of others by taking a hands off approach...and now know that was not the right path we will pull it back and push things more in the directions it needs to go. This does not mean we will just do everything one loud community member wants or the one who gets the ratio in a thread, but it does mean we see flaws in how things have been running and are making changes so we can look forward not be stuck in the past.

 

I personally have been told that...it's not me, it's not my fault...blaming others that are maybe afk. Sure everyone hates me and I am an asshole but I am at least here right. Fact is I'm a board member just like everyone else and if I was overwhelmed, which I was, I should have spoke up I should have called for help. I think, like everyone else...and I mean everyone in the community, I lost the vision and I lost the passion for this place. What you guys haven't gotten to see is the passion from the BDs, the shit that gives you something to grasp onto and trust. I get that now, especially considering you guys are all still here saying you care about this place even when it's in shambles. I don't know why I give a shit about all you little assholes but I do and I'm just asking you guys to trust in this place, and to work with us.

 

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Below are some positive avenues to keep the conversation going from here:

 

- If you want to have a conversation directly with the BDs please DM us on the forums (Just add us all in). Alternatively you can just message one or several of us obviously. I promise you this is the best way to actually get an honest response, it's not anything about the privacy of it...it just gets everyones' attention best.

- If you want to disagree with something said here, DM myself or crazed on discord and we can try and figure out what might be wrong with it.

- If you want to just bitch about the BDs and how shit they are, ask one us to join VC. The forum back and forth is so worthless for actually arguing. Let me yell at you.

- If you want to talk about a specific server make a thread in the respective section, good to have these ideas as public as possible.

- If you want to talk about a topic here in a specific manner just make a thread and do a Re: Discord and Forums or whatever.

- If you need a boyfriend to talk to message greg. He's lonely.