Platyna,
I do hope that this will be my only post in this flame-fest.
Platyna wrote:Bjørn wrote:i wrote:Indeed. Test and official game servers should be separated. It's all about it.
Well, I'm sure everybody will agree with you there. And as far as I know Crush, Fate and Jaxad0127 are all already running their own servers in order to test the content changes before they are applied to the official server.
Of course it is moot, they want power, and I don't want them to have this power, and many respectect community members agreed with me.
It seems to me that we see here the crux of the matter: a lack of trust. All those discussions about who-should-have-which-privileges and who-broke-the-server are superficial in comparison to that.
Platyna wrote:
Peavey, Crush, you have shown to the whole community here - that you have no dignity and no honour, and all you care is power, even for the price of splitting the people who, for long years, were very well working with each other.
With a statement such as this, it is hard to see how either side could possibly trust the other. Of course, this is very late in the discussion, but still... I have yet to see any evidence of Crush or Peavey (or yourself, of course) using their `power' for any reason other than to help the community at large, by the way.
While I have seen them criticise technical decisions, I have never seen Crush or Peavey perform such a personal attack in public. I don't understand; what do you expect to achieve by telling people that they `have no dignity and no honour' and that `all [they] care [sic] is power'? The only thing personal abuses achieve is to make people distrust and dislike each other. I have no idea how that is supposed to help the game.
Platyna wrote:
Free online games are not about items and levels, they are about the community and the team, the one which you attempt to destroy to have level 80.
Very well said, except for the unjustified personal attack. (Peavey's character is quite a bit beyond level 90 by the way, without any form of GM privilege abuse.)
Platyna wrote:
Bjørn wrote:
The recent argument with peavey wasn't because he had those rights, which I know he would be ready to give up, but it was because Platyna accused him of abusing his rights. [...] This was really insulting, and ultimately why I asked Platyna to no longer get involved, because peavey wasn't the first one encountering this kind of personal abuse from Platyna.
To the best of my knowledge, Peavey used his `GM powers' in an administrative act to deal with a troll, after several complaints from players. Would it have been appropriate to ignore this as an isolated incident in which the rules and current GM availability were insufficient and a developer showed initiative in a way that helped the community in the long run without unfair damage to an individual? Possibly, depends on the details and on the general policy. Would it have been appropriate to criticise his concrete act, analyse any permanent damange that had been done (none, as far as I know) and review the rules (to see whether they need to be extended) and clarify with everyone involved how such issues should be handled in the future? Absolutely, that would be a reasonable thing. My second-hand knowledge of the incident (backed up by this forum discussion), however, is that this is not what happened, and that instead he was attacked as a person and accused of being power-hungry (despite him not having gained any personal benefit during this process). Could you please clarify whether or not that was really what happened? Perhaps the public chat transcript would help here.
Platyna wrote:
It is disgusting. I have maintained the server for years, I have maintained the forums, and now you jump in and make random people enpowered over my work without my consent. If you will after years treat all your co-workers in this project like that, then good riddance Bjorn.
Have you tried to analyse the reasons he might have had for that decision?
My current understanding of the matter is as follows: (a) Everyone involved is trying to make the game `as good as they can'. (b) There is a rift between several people who do not trust each other, because they believe that the other people are more interested in power/personal benefit than in making the game as good as possible. Point (b) is
exclusively a lack-of-trust issue, because I have seen
absolutely no evidence that any particular person or group is more interested in power and personal benefit than in the benefit of the game and the community at large. Of course it's a good idea not to blindly trust everyone, but in our case this lack of trust manifests in personal abuse that has made it very hard and at times impossible for the people in question to collaborate. Thus, necessary technical improvements (such as changing the configuration file structure to exploit includes to reduce the risk of new content not being included in updates) were needlessly delayed and almost blocked altogether for no technical reason (or, at least, for no technical reason that was ever brought up).
Judging from what I know, there have been many attempts at healing this rift (which has caused minor and major earthquakes during the time I was following development), none of them successful. Bjorn thus decided to make an administrative decision to remove one person from the project to allow the necessary trust to be re-asserted and personal abuse to be reduced, to increase overall productivity.
It's unfortunate that a `personnel decision' was necessary here, but considering the ferocity of the unjustified personal attacks we have seen in this thread (note that I object only to the personal attacks, not to the attacks on technical decisions, which definitely are things that can be argued about) I can understand his decision.
-- fate
