Staff Transparency and The current direction of this server

General Policy Feedback
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I didn’t claim to be in favor of the zero transparency, I am a strong proponent against it, but I think the directions these threads take aren’t towards actual transparency and instead are pushed towards topics that I think discourage actual discussion so when we get an actual response practically none of it is actually about transparency.

Things are out of our control, it’s the inevitability of existing in an online community. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be atleast getting “management is discussing xyxyxy” notices. It feels like most of the community doesn’t ask for that much but because of the directions of these threads they get mostly ignored

The communication following the announcement in the discord was nice but pretty much ended in line with the doxxing. We still have a majority of policy posts that go unresponded to, lacking even a “hey management has seen this”. Minor management activity in #lesser-announcements or a new #management-announcements channel would have a massive impact imo

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22

These threads and discussions are a far cry from what you are implying and pretending they are.

At worst, you can say people are using this thread to publically air their grievances and right now they are all constructive and very fair so I think to imply otherwise is dishonest. We’re not pushing any specific topics here, we are using recent events to highlight a long-standing issue. Many relevant points were made outside of “deltard good no take away” in the last one and here too and again I think to imply otherwise isn’t accurate. People have issues, they should be respected and addressed in some way. Just a small bit of interaction would probably shut a lot of people up if we’re being real.

This is about actual transparency moving forward. There is no window dressing, it is what it says on the tin.

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23

Man is speaking truth. On a serious note. It is not healthy ecosystem when a third or so of a player base is being told to go to a different server. That does not end well. It only ends with 10 people on a server.

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24

Ah. I didn’t even realise it was players who bought it up, it sounded like management literally just decided to crack down one day of their own volition. Still don’t like the rulings that ended up from it :confused:

Thanks for the insight, Biolock. We appreciate it.

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That’s neither how math or asking people to be nicer to eachother works.

I know this seems like pedantic nerdshit, but you really are making out the amount of people affected, the fraction that honestly care, and the magnitude of what they’re being asked, far greater than reality.

There are 12 people in this thread, which is still only about 11% of all the people on just the forum at time of writing. You are 8% of those twelve people, or less than 1% of all the people on just the forums.

Out of 921 Discord Users - give or take, let’s be real: being off by a few dozen is statistically insignificant - who could go and see these posts and transparency, who have received the same announcements and pings as everyone else: This thread represents . . . 0.013% of them.

By all means transparency is nice and all, and staff aren’t perfect . . . but I wanted to show - like mathematically - just how few people really care about some of this drama, especially compared to the people willing to put in extra work whether they’re willing to wrangle cats or code, or even just edit things on the wiki: is there any wonder why some changes don’t reflect the views of a “third” or so of a player base?

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26

The response “you can host your own server” I saw twice on the discord was from people threatening to leave CM and saying they won’t play anymore because they wouldnt be allowed to say slurs anymore. It’s a large bit of survey bias, the majority of people don’t even talk in game, much less care about their ability to say slurs. It was just a minor group of very toxic and very loud individuals who felt like they needed to defend their rights to call PVT’s slurs when they mess up who were extremely vocal in every place they could say it.

Most were already talking about how they’d be better off in creating their own server with no rules regarding toxicity/community standards in #cm-discussions

edit: again, reminder of how survivorship bias and the volunteer bias work. people who have issues with getting called slurs for messing up tend to already avoid CM for being a cesspit where they will get called slurs with no recourse (until recently), this drives away folks who dont want to have to deal with that in an online community. people who dont want to have to deal with getting called slurs are much less likely to participate in the forum because this place is already :/. toxic folk who care the most about being able to call pvt’s slurs are going to be the most vocal about wanting to be able to say it because toxic people tend to care the most about themselves, this vocality is part of the volunteer bias (Volunteer bias - Catalog of Bias). This is all simple statistics stuff that any college or highschool courses teach you…

people who dont want to get called slurs dont tend to be a part of the ‘you can call new players slurs when they mess up’ community, however this attracts people who are removed from other communities for being toxic to come here and be the way they are. the only way to control what type of a community you have online is via rules. rules that allow people to be extremely toxic attract the most toxic players because they wont be punished for being toxic which drives away normal people, rules that dont allow to players to be extremely toxic tend to attract normal people because normal people dont want to be around toxic folk

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27

It is rich for you to mention statistics and wanting to know how many people actually care about the discussion here and using that as an argument against Duke. Considering this was rhetoric you were opposed to in the last thread when it came to banning certain slurs and other such things.

I’m not even in the discord but I’m a lot of alternates and I can tell you the prevailing sentiment agrees with this POV. “Staff and management being the death of CM” has been a very popular meme for so long for a reason, it has credence.

Mathematically speaking, in this thread and the last people who share my opinions and Duke’s for example. Saw a lot of positive engagement whilst yours and others who shared your opinions did not and were subject to ridicule even. Mathematically speaking we seem to be representing a larger group here than you do even in this thread the points myself, Duke, TheeBiggest and the OP all have a lot of positive engagement with our posts. The opposition does not. Mathematically, we’re “winning.”

To address Lichen again:

We were told to make our own server more than twice but the number is irrelevant, like all things it is the context. The comment was made in poor taste at a poor time, management instead of yielding to at the very least a dialogue chose to be hostile and tell people to eject themselves from the community and “just start your own” when they and everyone else knows that it isn’t that simple and if it was CM would likely have a direct competitor by now. Regarding your comment about slurs I re-direct you to the former part of this post, a TRUE minority of players complained about “r*tard” however a significantly higher number of people protested. It was not a vocal minority and the major backlash the decision was met with is proof of that.

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Honestly just read more of Lichen’s posts: they make good arguments and I think their PfP is cute. Saves me a ton of time typing about pointless shit on the internet.

The people fine with CM’s current direction aren’t going to be in the thread asking for a change of direction, or liking the posts that do.

The people who left the community over toxicity, and the ones grateful that toxicity is getting filtered, aren’t going to be in the threads about why the community shouldn’t detoxify or getting upset when it does.

Most of the rest of the community is just here to shoot things or spectate and has continued to remove entire handfuls of words from their vocabulary or countless single-digit tweaks to in-game variables. Just because I’m cooler and sexier and funnier doesn’t even mean my “side” is any more important than anybody else’s since I haven’t joined staff despite multiple members asking me to try for moderator and I just couldn’t bother. Though, I imagine I’d still get discounted if I did.

So, is plurality more important when it comes to who gets :hesrightyouknow: versus :patrice: , or when the people who spend their free time constructively working on the game, server, and community instead of whining on the forums? How much interest does your bank give you on Reddit karma?

The staff have failed to kill the game for six years of me knowing about it existing and we still hit the top of the server charts more consistently than any other server and for longer streaks than any other. Hell, I haven’t seen anybody this bad at killing something since the last time I tried to play a combat role and watched my own gameplay back.

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29

being smarmy is not healthy for the discussion come off it arty this entire discussion is about staff transparency not drama

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30

This thread has only been derailed and turned onto a little bit of drama by 1 person.

I’m in bed so I can’t read all of Arty’s post but this wasn’t even directed at you. The way you’re engaging with everything feels twisted. It’s like discussing something with Vaush. We want more transparency on the staff/management process and you came to make weak points and attempt to derail discussion.

At the end of the day I’m winning the popularity contest ATM tho.

If you’re not here to advocate for a more transparent management or say why transparent management is a net negative you shouldn’t be posting here.

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31

this thread is absolutely nonsense, transparency is something you can kick and scream about on every server but it will never be enough

nor is this community mature enough to handle regular management conversations as shown by the forum conduct this last month

also: drama farming forum threads after a week of calmness what a fucking surprise

if anything I support staff being draconian and doing a community purge, there’s a lot of genuinely bad faith actors in this community, and to those who want ‘new blood’ in the staff team be the change you want to see and join the staff?? stop bitching endlessly on the forums and instead apply for mod, do the work and try to push for what you think is right??

sorry if I sound snippy but this has gone on and on and on and on and on and on the last month and it’s absolutely ridiculous, frozen got doxxed over this kind of shit.

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32

The idea of a “community purge” is probably the most insane thing I’ve ever read here, I can’t even begin to tell how anybody could think that’s a good idea.

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33

I totally empathize with staff keeping people posted on why some changes are made. I’m a big fan of changelogs in particular that explain why some tweaks were done. I don’t mean

Bugfixes: Fixed guns not firing when held in one hand.
They’re supposed to do that.

'cuz that’s obvious. You don’t need transparency behind common-sense changes. Meanwhile, other cases like

Balance: Increased shotgun PB value dramatically, dramatically increased acid splash damage in addition to applying acid to the weapon where applicable.
We wanted to shift towards a more movie-accurate depiction of Xenomorph acid and the efficacy of the shotgun, while not invalidating the cost-risk considerations of PBing a Xenomorph.

Maybe not everyone empathizes with the change, or understands the reference, or so-on.

With that being said: putting techwebs and bone gel in the same bucket as “deltard” gives the game away. Okay, so maybe not everyone noticed some of Neth’s plans for a more MOBA-licious game before they left, or could appreciate the grind of medical (speaking as a former meta-impacting CMO main myself) before or it’s game loop . . . but do you really need someone with a fancy color in their name to tell you why something slur adjacent was blam’d when the slur it was based on got banned, or why they banned that slur in the first place?

There’s also this weird attitude that staff are doing this in secret - your words - despite there being open applications that anybody can click on. Go ahead! Biolock’s been very patient and informative in this thread, so I’ll quote them again:

So I could go ahead and say that it’s not about the drama despite clearly being about the drama, or about having burnt-out members of staff step down so others can replace them despite the applications to do so being open this whole time, but realistically all we’re doing is yapping instead of putting the work in: including me.

Apply. See first-hand what the discussions are. Share them. Put the effort in. Honestly all the grumbling on this forum and Discord lately could have filled-out a couple hundred moderator applications, and those things have a two-thirds success rate! Maybe if you show that you care, you could be the one in charge of sharing the summaries of on-going decisions with the community, or even get a position high enough to say that staff have to.

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Oh this thread will go well I think. I say you got until message 60 until it devolves into the most insane dick measuring contest/shit flinging/nonsensical arguing.

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To both Lmvewil and Arty.

Ah yes, asking for transparency is absolutely lunacy and completely unreasonable. Mean your preferred alternative is a community purge and more Draconian behaviour. Are you mad?

You think it’s as simple as joining staff but if I were to join the staff team for example, I would be joining a niche in which I would be on the outside as I’m wanting very different things than it’s current manager and all his supporters as a result I certainly would never get the changes as want as it’d mostly rely on me stepping into that leadership position myself. Which isn’t happening nor is it something I want.

I also have a job which something a lot of people in CM often seem to lack so I have no desire. I do however have time for civil discourse, which should be encouraged but you are trying to discourage and minimise which is alarming. I suggest you put yourself in our shoes before arguing against it.

Arty, balance changes, simple one like that are not apart of this discussion and no one else has brought this up but you. It’s bizarre. The problem as well Arty is that this is mostly a discussion around management transparency and as they have demonstrated they sometimes leave staff out of that discussion entirely as well. There seems to be a disconnect even between staff and management which is weird.

To you both;

People are asking for more transparency and your frivolous manipulative attempts to minimise and walk the conversation away from that are very telling. The solutions you propose such as joining the staff have a very high failure rate and take significantly longer to see an impact. Keeping an active discussion on the topic and asking for a management response however also has a high failure rate but when we have a real discussion it’s harder to ignore and we also get the thing we all wanted the most: A community opinion and involvement on the issue.

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38

If you truly believed in community transparency instead of e-clout farming on the forums with your latest controversy bullshit you join the train of you could simply I don’t know…

Perhaps talk to management? It takes all of 5 seconds to find them on the discord and message them, and if you’re not an insufferable asshole they can turn out to be human beings that are not reptillians wanting to drain the blood from the server for their own amusement.

These kinds of policy threads are enormously bad faith and blatantly clout farming drama mongering twitter hivemind bullshit. Just sit the fuck down and talk with staff instead of making these huge threads that then will make them need to make carefully curated politically unoffensive replies because they’re now dealing with an enormous trashfire that you helped stoke

be a better person than someone who gets mad about a game and posts angry shit on the steam forums, we’re better than that. We have the UNIQUE position to be able to speak to our overlords and they will listen, utterly unique in the gaming space. Use it.

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39

Let’s be nice to one another please. But yes, you can always message whichever manager you want, we’re all just people who happened into our position through time and dedication. We were all not managers once, and we were all not staff once too.

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40

First of all, you don’t really know how many people really care about some of the changes. The fact they didn’t login onto forums doesn’t mean they have no opinion, neither it means they support some of the changes. Secondly, if we are just playing math, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that more people don’t want specific changes (such as the R-word ban), than people who do. Don’t you think it’s weird to accuse people of being a vocal minority, while being even more vocal and more minor? Thirdly, what Duke was saying, if you say to the third of your players to fuck off, it can create such atmosphere that will make even more people leave.

I have really bad news for you, this server used to be constantly on the top, now it’s just sometimes. I don’t really blame management for this, and I don’t really think it’s because of management the server is still at least sometimes on the top. Wasn’t it on top during feweh era? Does it make feweh a good admin? There is really no contradiction with the game being popular despite bad management/bad development/bad community, you call it. Doesn’t change that something bad/inefficient/inconsistent is detrimental to the game and to the community.

Still, it doesn’t tell us anything. You are saying like there are thousands of people who could have played CM, but got called the R-word and left in tears. Of course neither of us can know how many situations like that occurred, and we cannot know if they’d stick around anyway after being called a moron for killing an easy cap. And we cannot know how many people looked at the ban of the R-word and decided that they don’t want to deal with the snowflakes, or will decide so in the future. Neither of this really tell us anything. For any real statistics we would need to do a poll (not just on forums, of course), but we all know what the results would be.

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Also I agree this thread probably should be locked already, because it won’t change anything and it already was derailed by some persons.

Anyway, I think this trend will continue, and the reason is pretty simple. Someone said that the community in general has bad faith towards staff & management. I think this is true and I agree that this is a problem. But it is also true the other way around. I am pretty sure that “our overlords” don’t have a lot of good faith towards the majority of the community as well. And this was a thing for a while already.

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42

I have tried talking to management on 3 occasions and all 3 different managers.

All never responded but Forest.

I recently messaged Grim asking if there’s any particular behaviour he would like to see from me as I can soon appeal my ban and he has not responded. Management are usually busy, we all have personal lives and getting into meaningful contact through DMs isn’t time they owe me or anyone else.

I can here with an actual issue and I wasn’t being inflammatory, I’ve no reason to clout farm because clout on this forum means literally nothing. You should leave the thread, honestly, all you’ve done is prove you’re a bit childish. No one has insulted you yet you are devolving into…this

All you’ve done is intentionally derail this topic and at this point I agree with ihate the thread should probably conclude here because some cannot control their emotions.

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