So What Are Staff Working On These Days?

[Exalt]

You're new PR guy Azov was a complete joke of a hire, but I'm not going to dwell on that long. I just think it shows more incompetence when you hire someone that is universally hated by everyone in the game to a position that deals universally as the go-between of staff and players. Also, way to hire the most un-charasmatic, self-serving, and largely self-glorifying (which is completely unwarranted) person I've ever seen write an introduction post. Jesus H Christ guys... Azov was the best you could come up with? Seriously? How long did it take to decide you'd give Azov the job?

Aside from that, I know before I quit, all staff kept talking about was how they were going to fix Pub. Pub is fucking useless and nobody that sticks around in this game plays pub for long. There are a few exceptions, but by and large, pub is a huge minority when it comes to retaining your core base of players. At this point, retention is your highest hope, since who knows if the steam thing will work, and even if it does, it's a ways away.

So I was just wondering if you've finished this Pub redesign spiel you guys were working on for over a year and finally moved on to something more worthwhile yet? TWD/TWL/ELIM are a few things I can think of that needed far more attention. My guess is that the same people who always were the head Ops of those leagues remain in their positions, and nothing has ever been done to fix, upgrade, change, or tweak any of those things. Am I right, or will I be drastically surprised?

[bkgmjo]

If you let me know what the pub settings you remember were, I can fill you in. I doubt there will be a huge surprise for you though.

[Turban]

I don't know what is going on with the elimination project, it was left under Reckful and Spawnisen, but from the looks of it there has been no progress. Mythril also wanted to be involved, but not sure if he was ever invited to the team despite me directing him to the leaders of that project over a month ago.

TWD is about to have a new Head of TWD who will make some changes. I don't know the details, but should be exciting nonetheless. I will personally work together with this team closer when it gets going, and other sysops are also showing their support to improve this league as it is one of the cornerstones of this zone.

TWL is on-hold, development wise, but I have plenty of ideas that will be focused on when other projects (public, twd, steam) have been finished or require less help from the developers. it's not a high priority at the moment as the season won't start for another 7 months.

TWEL is starting soon, Mythril has made an announcement and all leagues have been reset. it seems that it's going to be all four leagues are going to be focused this time around instead of only having three leagues. he will make an announcement soon, but i think the league will officially start tomorrow.

as for the public changes, they are slowly moving forward, but I don't know all the details and current status of any. to disclose something that I've heard, someone is going to design a splash art for public statistics that will be up soon(ish) unless something unexpected happens to delay the progress of that one. Azov will hopefully find more information about this when he logs in.

EDIT -- may as well have everything on one post.

marketing is something that we also need to prioritize, and as stated in another thread, developers and SSC members are meeting this weekend to talk about Steam in detail.

Spawnisen is (or was) the head of marketing, but I haven't seen him much as of late.

hopefully that cleared it a bit. we have basically two active developers, and by active i mean they have a full-time work, a busy social life and still manage to find some hours to improve this zone. i would love to have more of them, but developers do not grow in trees. outsourcing or hiring additional dev personnel is still an option, but i don't know where to search.

[Jerome Scuggs]

honestly i dont know why people hate pub so much, wud rather sit in spec and bitch about no games than actually play pub. i've had some fun pub games in the past month or so, i dont know what could be done to get people to play it more.... though i suspect most people who prefer to TWD would be more willing to play pub with a restricted leviathan

also when did tw settings become public? they used to be the online equivalent of the coca-cola recipe and now you guys have all the settings just sitting in the public twcore repository. i've been playing with different ideas for leviathan but nothing really works without breaking the ship

[Azov]

as for the public changes, they are slowly moving forward, but I don't know all the details and current status of any. to disclose something that I've heard, someone is going to design a splash art for public statistics that will be up soon(ish) unless something unexpected happens to delay the progress of that one. Azov will hopefully find more information about this when he logs in.

Yeah I'm working on finding out some information on this. I'll get something out in the morning EST hopefully.

[Turban]

honestly i dont know why people hate pub so much, wud rather sit in spec and bitch about no games than actually play pub. i've had some fun pub games in the past month or so, i dont know what could be done to get people to play it more.... though i suspect most people who prefer to TWD would be more willing to play pub with a restricted leviathan

also when did tw settings become public? they used to be the online equivalent of the coca-cola recipe and now you guys have all the settings just sitting in the public twcore repository. i've been playing with different ideas for leviathan but nothing really works without breaking the ship

pretty sure the public settings (number-wise) are still private information that will never be disclosed to anyone, although some leak(s) may have been done. however, public has been different over the years (2000, 2003, 2008 etc all were different kinds of publics with small changes here and there), and even the past 4 years there has been tons of changes that often go unnoticed.

[Jerome Scuggs]

however, public has been different over the years (2000, 2003, 2008 etc all were different kinds of publics with small changes here and there),

i can tell

[Turban]

as an added note, Azov was made the PR person before my official promotion. I personally have faith in him, but there is no hiding that he has to do stellar job to (re)gain the trust of some players. it's truly an uphill battle for him at this point.

tbh, guy gets more hate than he deserves at times.

[DoTheFandango]

anyone need a spider on their squad or something i just remembered my password and it's all coming up milhouse

[Jerome Scuggs]

anyone need a spider on their squad or something i just remembered my password and it's all coming up milhouse

if you logon ss you will definitely get on a squad

come back to us dtf

[Exalt]

I don't know what is going on with the elimination project, it was left under Reckful and Spawnisen, but from the looks of it there has been no progress. Mythril also wanted to be involved, but not sure if he was ever invited to the team despite me directing him to the leaders of that project over a month ago.

TWD is about to have a new Head of TWD who will make some changes. I don't know the details, but should be exciting nonetheless. I will personally work together with this team closer when it gets going, and other sysops are also showing their support to improve this league as it is one of the cornerstones of this zone.

TWL is on-hold, development wise, but I have plenty of ideas that will be focused on when other projects (public, twd, steam) have been finished or require less help from the developers. it's not a high priority at the moment as the season won't start for another 7 months.

TWEL is starting soon, Mythril has made an announcement and all leagues have been reset. it seems that it's going to be all four leagues are going to be focused this time around instead of only having three leagues. he will make an announcement soon, but i think the league will officially start tomorrow.

as for the public changes, they are slowly moving forward, but I don't know all the details and current status of any. to disclose something that I've heard, someone is going to design a splash art for public statistics that will be up soon(ish) unless something unexpected happens to delay the progress of that one. Azov will hopefully find more information about this when he logs in.

EDIT -- may as well have everything on one post.

marketing is something that we also need to prioritize, and as stated in another thread, developers and SSC members are meeting this weekend to talk about Steam in detail.

Spawnisen is (or was) the head of marketing, but I haven't seen him much as of late.

hopefully that cleared it a bit. we have basically two active developers, and by active i mean they have a full-time work, a busy social life and still manage to find some hours to improve this zone. i would love to have more of them, but developers do not grow in trees. outsourcing or hiring additional dev personnel is still an option, but i don't know where to search.

If forums still had a +1 or Like feature, this would receive one from me.

Thanks for the info Turban. Despite my condescending tone toward all staff, you have never been included in that. I know you just took over as SYSOP as well, so things take time.

As far as ELIM goes, I thought this was the next project that was going to be worked on? My only real issue here is Mythril should've had Spawnisen and Reckful come to him, not vice versa. Mythril would know much more about both elims than either Spawnisen/Reckful would know combined (at least WB elim, which Spawnisen has probably never played in his entire TW career). Also, if these guys can't even schedule a meeting in an entire 3-4 months from the last time I've heard elim being mentioned as an upcoming project, something is wrong. I understand people have time constraints due to having a job and a real life, but if they don't have time to do the things they claim they would as staff, maybe they shouldn't be the ones leading the project?

TWD I'm glad is going to have some changes. They're sorely needed at this point. With fewer players, something has to be done with both the limited squads we have available, but also with the way it was set up as the TWL qualifier in 2003ish when TWD was made. It was great back then, but we had over 100 squads in each division back then as well. I even have a screenshot of it on my old computer, so I know there was a huge difference in population and amount of squads. At this point, if you play enough games to qualify, people STOP playing games. They also rarely even seem to practice using TWD as much, when TWD used to be the #1 reason people logged in to subspace on a day to day basis outside of TWL Sunday. I know you and many others have a lot of good ideas for this though, so I'm okay with being told things are going to happen soon. I just hope this doesn't turn into what the Elim project just did.

TWL for the most part doesn't need many changes I don't think. It's been steady every year since it's creation. The only thing I would hope for is a regulation/pyramid type league that SS used to have waaaaay back in the day. SVS or w/e used to have this too. It's an interesting idea that I hope gets looked at one day, assuming the game isn't dead by then.

I'm glad TWEL is back up, but is the website working again? Last time I seriously played TWEL was in like 2005 when it was created. It was a big deal to be top 10 back then, but it pretty much died off until this past season of it as far as I know. Hopefully, Mythril will keep building this up. It's a good league that had a great website back in the day (I haven't checked it, but I'm assuming it's the same one). What's the 4th league going to be though?

Pub I understand needs to be set right and there is a need to keep pubbers happy, but I just don't know why we've worked almost exclusively on Public for years now. No other league has changed beyond Public, and in my opinion, that's one of the reasons for the hugely declining population. The core base of this game remains the people who've played since they were kids, and none of us really play public. I just never understood the mindset that public is the one thing that matters, when public is the one thing that the core playerbase doesn't play. You're working toward retaining new players, gaining very few, and losing the veterans.

[Reckful]

Elim project is stalled atm. The maps have been setup to be split but its not finalized to do so yet due to needing a 2nd bot for a 2nd arena. Bot dev is currently stalled on it as zreqdf has been working on a 2v2v2v2v2v2 module for elimination games.

[Exalt]

pretty sure the public settings (number-wise) are still private information that will never be disclosed to anyone, although some leak(s) may have been done. however, public has been different over the years (2000, 2003, 2008 etc all were different kinds of publics with small changes here and there), and even the past 4 years there has been tons of changes that often go unnoticed.

Honestly, I don't have much against Azov except for his obvious love for power and the way he talks to players, which is far too politician like rather than as a peer or a friend. Friends don't talk the way he does, and nobody at all likes a politician, not even themselves.

I won't quote everything, but read this introduction speech:

My background in real life is in law, politics, and government. Communication is extremely important and vital in my line of work. This bastion of experience and knowledge that comes from my real-world experience makes me ideally suited to recognize and address issues as it pertains to our own community politics and our need to have someone to provide clarity to situations that occur, answer questions directly and honestly, and be able to help us stand out as a community for everyone else to see. Most importantly, it also makes me suited to be someone who is approachable and friendly to those in the community who want to address concerns and get answers from staff.

I mean... As a PR Rep, the job is to not only communicate things staff are doing to the players for transparency (which I think anyone in this game could do that, aside from maybe 2pacZ), but also to RELATE to players on a peer to peer playing field. This doesn't mean speak unprofessional in official posts, but this also doesn't mean speak like a politician.

My thought is honestly that anyone that can write like that in a 2d online space game forum and feel that it is acceptable language, they just don't get it. If he understood the bolded part of that quote (community politics), he'd understand not to speak like that. None of us are morons who don't understand the language, but I'm not at work right now. I don't want to speak to someone as if I'm speaking to a corporate executive, let alone a senator. The amount of shit he already got for that post was indicative enough. That being said, I'll let him grow into the position, but I find it hard to have faith in someone that has screwed up on multiple levels in other positions of power.

Mainly, people that strive for power for the sake of power are not the ones we need driving this ship. That's never worked in the past, and being "nice" to people and refusing to fire them from positions means you are allowing the mistakes of the past to continue unabated, simply due to having a conscience. The problem is, I'm sure your conscience would be far more troubled if the game died on your watch (despite the fact that you've been given a sinking ship, and the previous SYSOPs didn't step down before it hit the iceburg).

I don't know, I'll leave Azov alone, since he did a good job of ignoring the hate mail that anyone would receive in his position (I'm not sure I'd ignore it totally if it were me, but I'm sure I'd still be able to act professional while silencing my critics). I guess having the ability to withstand adversity is a good thing. I just hope he learns from his past mistakes and he learns how to communicate better. There is a difference between writing posts that have truth in them and actually communicating the truth to the players. You don't have to be a communications professor to understand that.

[LF]

ITT: We don't need a PR rep to be the voice of the 2 sysops who refuse to communicate with the players directly themselves. We need a leader who actually communicates his intentions and the progress being made, which turban is now doing. Obviously not my call to make but I think let him (Azov) stay mod if he wants, but there is no need to create a position with SMod access for a player nobody even likes and quite frankly a place he doesn't even belong to begin with. My guess is if you were to do that his true intentions would show and he would likely leave due to not having "power". Thats about as honest and non-troll response you will get from me on that topic. As for the rest, I have ideas but for another place & time

[DoTheFandango]

if you logon ss you will definitely get on a squad

come back to us dtf