You know, at first I was very tempted to make a joke on how Lyth probably submitted too many player requests and it was easier to ban him, rather than process them, but oh well. Might as well make a more serious one.
The recent events on Discovery has rekindled a very particular feeling that I've not felt for a few years. The best way I can describe it is uncertainty in both Discovery as a community project and the future of my own participation which is, once more, completely out of my control.
I will be the first one to say that I am far from being a model community member, but I would like to think that over the course of the last few years, I've reduced my footprint on the admin radar by a considerable amount. That being said, it was also the case for a few of the banned members. So watching them being slapped like that is not as much disheartening, but rather worrisome.
The administration team made some mentions of the system being made more transparent. Instead it seems that they took this bunch of players to make them an example for the other members. The fact that they deliberately did not mention names of other ''potential candidates'' only reinforces this feeling. That this is a vague spearshake at troublemakers that would have been effective a few years back when we had people knowlegable and driven enough to replace them, but now the Discovery Community has condensed so much that removing these ''troublesome'' members will have a severe impact on the activity of certain factions. Note that most of these people are faction leaders. Now, you do not want bad members to have that title and power over an ID, but at the same time there is no denying that these people were highly active for better or for worse.
This should have been a sanction thread with "Members Banned / Warned" with the involved community members given a ban, while all of the remaining people on the chopping board would have gotten the warning part of the thread.
Instead it seemed to be an excuse to give problematic and potentially problematic members a jolt to the backside. Something Disco needs, but I am doubting that THIS was the way to go for it. In either case, people who are currently arguing against this judgement, remember what happened the last time when the community made threads regarding poor choices on behalf of the team. I am talking about the sanction imposed on me and Protēž and Dawson Rogues regarding shooting off someone's turrets. That thread was 10 pages long at the end of its life, during which no admin bothered to post and simply waited out for it to lose steam, fade off the list before invisib-ing it.
This is the same thing that will probably happen now. I am eager to be proven wrong.
So what now. If I am one of the members to feel paranoid about this sudden culling of members regardless of when was the last time they've done something questionable, should I even bother putting any effort into Discovery if the next batch of bans will happen the next day anyway? Dunno, you tell me.
--------------
PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
----------
