A message to the community as a whole

[Sciamach]

Pardon the following rant, but my gods some of this needs to be said.

To begin, let me tell you all a story:

I've said many times before that I used to admin a Team Fortress 2 server. Things started out normally truth be told; It was the usual rigmarole of: Log-in, say hello to the regulars, kick that one guy spamming with his mic or chat macros, and play the damned game. Things proceeded like this for a time until eventually, until a number of the regulars started forming up a Competitive Team.

Now, normally when this kind of thing happens, its viewed as a good thing, but there were a select number of people from the server that wanted to keep the game the way it was before; just a pure fun Team Fortress Shooty server with no competitive input whatsoever. The server had spent so long just being a fun-house, that many had grown accustomed to it being that way, and had no desire to see their playground turned into a training ground for our comp team.

Things worked out in favor of the comp team, and we started holding comp practices every couple of nights. Problems started arising however as the comp team started trading out members for people who were less familiar with the community. This brought about problems with the members who were removed in favor of more skilled players from elsewhere. These comp practices also started taking place around the time the regulars would be logging on for regular gametime, meaning they all had to either wait it out or find another server to play on, further increasing the rift between the comp and casual players.

It was around this time that I really stopped enjoying my adminship, as members would be submitting ban-requests on eachother almost constantly for reasons just barely outside the rules; AKA things myself and the other two admins would usually let slide with a simple: "ey man, stop doing this"

It got to a point where former friends were viciously reporting one another on an almost weekly basis, for the same things every single time. It was almost heart-breaking to see--

Myself and another admin would try to alleviate some of the rage and tension between the disparate groups of the community by just holding events on some nights meant for being just plain fun, or comp scrimmages with a open-signup (not requiring the usual standards that the comp team had), just to try to help ease things with everyone. Believe me when I tell you; this didn't end well. The last one we held was basically a massive screaming match between a handful of the more crude, and vocal players (which ended in a large number of bans, on a number of friends)

After that, I just couldn't be bothered with the server anymore. The change in pace had utterly ruined the server for me, and I really couldn't stomach the idea of communicating with much of any members from the community. I'd still log in every once in a while to handle the odd issue with a cheater or spammer but my attendance was limited solely to handling problems. I was burned out, and had no desire to even play the game anymore. Eventually I just made my final departing post on the forums and blocked most of my old friends from the server on Steam. I all but left TF2 for about a year and a half after that.

I'm telling you all this because I'm seeing a worrying trend here on Disco now. A trend that has been going on for what seems like years. A very obvious divide between those that would play the game for the fun of it, and those that take it a little more seriously. It's honestly starting to seem like a deadringer of my time on the TF2 server.

Guys, there is seriously a problem here. The community is struggling, and dividing up the community with this asinine Us-V.S-Them attitude is seriously not helping anything. Everybody is guilty of it to some extent, myself included. It's a toxic attitude that is readily apparent to anyone new coming into the community, and here's the thing; Those newbies are the lifeblood of Disco. Without them, Disco dies due to a lack of population. The toxicity is so bad that we're even now turning on our staff and whining to them about not taking one side or another in a particular issue. I'm saying this as a former administrator of a community myself: This is the absolute last thing you ever want to do.


Now, specifically to the staff of Disco:

I do not envy you guys. At all. Team Fortress, a FPS where people hop on, game, and go elsewhere with everything they've earned going with them is one thing, but when you have something like Disco's persistent universe and the time investments in both in-game assets, and RP, and you have to throw bans around...

I honestly can't imagine the crap you all have to put up with. You all could be doing alot worse, trust me. I'm glad to see there's some good heads on most of your shoulders (not you snoopy.)

To everyone else:

Cut the staff some slack; admining isn't anywhere near as easy as you all seem to think it is, and these guys are doing it gratis with half a smile on their face, while burying themselves in coffee beans. Not every decision they make is going to be 100% perfect. That's fine, but guess what; they're only human. Like I said, Disco already has a large number of problems. Whining about the staff isn't helping things in any way, and is causing more harm than good.

Call me whatever you will for this post, but the fact of the matter is that everyone here is human. Nobody here is perfect, and we as a community have seriously got to start getting our acts together. We're all here to have fun with a 12 year old space-game. There's no reason to get so garment-destroyingly upset over everything that goes wrong. So please, complain if you must, but keep it in moderation. Nobody wants to listen to whining all the time, and that's what Disco is gradually becoming, on the part of everyone; no single group in particular.

Seriously, I've only been here about a year, and I'd really rather not see Disco shrivel up and die because of the same thing that cost me a TF2 server. So the next time you feel like yelling at someone about something incredibly minor in a VIDEO GAME MEANT TO CREATE FUN, NOT DRAMA, please; take a moment and compose yourself.


Colorful post is colorful.
/rant

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.