nice work guys

[Zeebu]

have you guys noticed that the last few threads here have been locked and then ended in a warning/ban?

im not normally a person to stir shit or anything... but come the fuck on. obviously something is up. i dont know what is going on but its bleeding all over the forums. its making it worse because instead of addressing the situations straight up in front of everyone, your just referring to a couple forums posts and banning. you cant do that. the population of our little game is dying too fast to close your doors and hide beind a couple of 'rules'.

what the hell are you guys so afraid of? a good public dispute seems like its called for. let a thread stay open for more than 4 hours. i would suggest that noone post about any single tw mod/er, but it will happen. instead of closing it, let that mod come on and defend themselves and their decision instead of just closing the thread and trying to hide the fact they might have fucked up. its a 10 year old free internet spaceship game, you arent getting paid to run it and we arent paying to play it. so who cares that you fucked up something. throw it into the open, apologize for it and then take suggestions on how to make sure it doesnt happen again. if you as a mod feel like you did the right thing, say your reasons why it was the right thing to do and let the general population know.

we dont have enough people playing this game anymore to ignore a veteran playerbase vs staff dispute. you cant just blindly ban forquestioning staff and expect it to be ok. ban for cheating yes. ban for racism, no problem. ban for evading an ?ignore or double squadding, sure. all of those are easy. instead of banning a person for questioning staff publicly, man up and address it in front of us. it hasnt been your 'policy' or something. but fuck that. now before closing or moving my thread take a look at my bans/warnings. in general i am a tw rule follower and i am continuing to do so now. i am not calling out any single mod, i am calling out tw staff to man up and go with a little transparency. rant turned out longer than a thought... but please answer this on forums wihtout closing. dont hide behind some slapdick comment like 'staff doesnt need to defend itself on forums' or something similar. that is horseshit. with the number of people upset lately, it is exactly what you need to do.

[Ara]

It's because:

Zone bans aren't to be disputed on forums. Send in any possible disputes on bans to twbans@gmail.com.

Staff protocols aren't public knowledge and thus not open for public discussion.


In this forum you can put anything you think are issues for TW Staff members. We do read and appreciate your input, however please keep your posts about general issues, not personal issues you may have with any TW Staff Member(s). All forum threads/posts about personal issues are subject to deletion.

If you have personal issues about a staff member or a complaint, please use the following email addresses:

Complaints: Complaints@trenchwars.org

Also the forum rules tell you not to revive closed, deleted moved topics.

Also the forum rules tell you that if you have a complaint about a forum ban, E-mail forum staff. Do not make complaints about zone bans here, email zone staff.

I know you might not have read these rules, but this is the simple explanation. If you are interested in becoming forum staff, talk to SpaceHiker or other forum staff.

We're always open to constructive discussion, but if you want to make a change, join staff. Talk is cheap when you won't be doing any of the demands that you make. Insulting someone won't get anyone anywhere. When someone abuses his powers in staff he or she is dealt with by upper staff members. Clearly I can see some lack of respect for the old rules because this game indeed is so old. It's only normal that staff members get hated when they force the rules and get thanked when they create new thrilling events.

[Zeebu]

i did not call out any person or incident directly at all. wasnt meaning to if that was implied.

this was basically made as a request for staff to change to modify their policies some.

i dont think i would be welcome into staff because i would probably not host enough for you guys. also, i am a believer in transparency and being held accountable publicly. you will be more likely to do something stupid if only 5 people know about it. you would think twice if 200 know about it. thats all. so yeah. am i staff worthy material?

[Ara]

It would take lots of hours to dispute everything on forums, something you can't expect from Staff.. And also most of the time the info is sensitive, and there's not point in making a specific staffer get on the line of fire for only doing his job. We have good clear organizational structure, and we do deal with cases of abuse and do make sure our staff follows our own rules.

[Zeebu]

It would take lots of hours to dispute everything on forums, something you can't expect from Staff.. And also most of the time the info is sensitive, and there's not point in making a specific staffer get on the line of fire for only doing his job. We have good clear organizational structure, and we do deal with cases of abuse and do make sure our staff follows our own rules.

this is a good response.

on to the next line. why wont you let us bitch about it to each other in a public forum? you dont have to respond, but let us whine to each other about staff if we feel like we are being mistreated.

also, the 'sensitive' response is wishywashy at best. give me an example of why something could be 'sensitive'

[Ara]

IPs, MIDs, Whois info, and what not are sensitive information, something only staff is allowed to use as evidence, and as an arguement. Because of this trying to argue something that is based on this kind of info with non-staff personnell publicly isn't possible. This is also why sometimes we do have to let players rant on things they really don't know about, it's just something that comes with being staff, more responsibility and more information. It can be sometimes frustrating to not be able to tell the truth to the public because of this, but usually you can see when banned or warned players are clearly only trying to twist things. Staff does explain to the person why he or she was warned or banned, it's his or her own choice if she or he wants to make it public, but that's no obligation for staff to start discussing it publicly. We have BanG staff that specifically checks every ban staff makes, we have personnell staff that specifically keeps an eye on every staffer. What we are missing is a PR smod, someone that could handle communication both inside and outside of staff, but I guess that's something we won't have after KJW, although I think we had a spot open for it.

In this forum you can put anything you think are issues for TW Staff members. We do read and appreciate your input, however please keep your posts about general issues, not personal issues you may have with any TW Staff Member(s).

There's that boring few lines again..

[Zeebu]

alright.

lets say i want to publicly vent my frustration about a single staff member on forums. how can i do that without having my thread closed? (no sensitive information allowed)

[Azada]

Trash talk section :P

[Ara]

Ok any more questions while we're all civilized here? If you want to know something about Staff related issues I'll try to answer.

[Crescent Seal]

rules need to be changed, simple

[Xog]

Ok any more questions while we're all civilized here? If you want to know something about Staff related issues I'll try to answer.

Why isn't a lot of upper staff involved with the population? You have responsibilities too. Host more events, don't just leave it to the ERs. It would be nice to see some big names showing their hosting abilities, along with communicating with the general population.

Nobody really looks up to ERs. They look up to the people in charge. They have the authority. People with authority are usually the people everyone looks at. I think that's one of the bad hits this zone took when PL took out ZHs. One less political view of the zone's staff structure.

I haven't ever seen you host an event.

[gran guerrero]

bring back the Zebra Humpers

[Ara]

Why isn't a lot of upper staff involved with the population? You have responsibilities too. Host more events, don't just leave it to the ERs. It would be nice to see some big names showing their hosting abilities, along with communicating with the general population.

Nobody really looks up to ERs. They look up to the people in charge. They have the authority. People with authority are usually the people everyone looks at. I think that's one of the bad hits this zone took when PL took out ZHs. One less political view of the zone's staff structure.

I haven't ever seen you host an event.

Yea I have hosted probably only one event this year, I just don't feel like I need to be messing around reserving adverts from ERs. Ohh but now I remember, we hosted two special events with smods Stargazer, and Kim in elim and with Stargazer and Connection in tourny, those did get a lot of players. Better ideas for making events popular are always welcomed, especially would be interesting to have some kind of prizes for major event winners, anything from pizzas to shields in publics?

ERs do have a following, in my opinion every ER should be a good enough host for players to count on a good event coming, but we all have to learn to host before that.

I don't think we really need Zone Helpers anymore, we aren't really getting new players anymore and I rarely see true ?help calls that would only need an answer. Most of the time it's a request for doing something, that requires more powers than Zone Helpers had, such as starting a bot, hosting something, help in TWD, and so on. There are some newbies left in this game but not so many that we should in my opinion devote a whole category of Staff for this single purpose of answering newbie questions. But things may change and opinions do also.

[Xog]

Were the ZHs taken out before or after someone realized no more legitimate help calls were being made?

If you're not giving newbies an offer of help, they probably won't ask for it. The ZH tag is an offer for helping someone.

If I were a newb at soccer I wouldn't ask the referee how to play and what the rules were, I'd ask my friends. However if there was someone designated for assisting players with showing them the rules or how to play (like a coach aka ZH) i'd go straight to them before my friends. See where I'm going with this?

[Ara]

Yes it's true, we could encourage more usage of ?help, as a side effect it could cause more abusing of ?help, but I guess that's just something you have to accept. If we would get lot of new players ZHs would of course be needed. Arobas did work on a system to find out "real" newbies, but asking for a mentor kind of system for new players might be too much to ask as the game is so old, not so many new players, and old players are losing interest in other things than TWD, Elims and other leagues.

If anyone would know how to edit the ESC+F6 help messages we could include more information to newbies, that haven't turned it off, about events, leagues, squads and staff and what not. Although learning the basic keys is important too..