[Mana]

At the recommendation of @"Prince Nicky La Flama Blanca", bringing the recent discussion from the discord to the forums. This post is, at its core a giant lists of complaints, frustrations, recommendations, and hopefully can be used for a discussion between staff members and players. I'll jump right into it. I'll label anything that's my own opinion.

1.) Lack of Admins
For starters, I think many people are frustrated with the current status of the staff team. There seems to be a significant disconnect between normal players and staff members. Specifically, TTT has not had a strong "leader" in months. @"Nicol" is an admin for TTT, and for the most part acts as a 'head' figure for all of Dinkleberg's, yet I do not believe he is active enough (especially on TTT). [Let me make note, this is not his fault necessarily. He has work, real life priorities, etc. On top of that, he is the sole admin currently] On top of that, @"Dinkleberg >:(" is rarely active. [Once again I assume Dink is in the same position as nicol, so the same 'excuse' can be used for him] However, that leaves the TTT community, and really the whole community without leaders. This can lead to the following problems:

- It takes weeks for ban requests / unban requests to go through
Hey i've seen this before!
- Ranks not given out ie @Jammin (this causes problems, because there were instances where jammin could not ban aimbotters, ddosers, etc)
- Community stagnation

• I'll get into this later, but without strong leadership no changes can be implemented. @RussEfarmer brought to my attention in my spray thread, that even there was an agreement to make changes, no one but Dink has access to server files. This is a goodpoint, and just lends itself to possibly giving admins some control of the server / appointing a co-owner (through Dink's personal vetting process). I won't go into more on this because it's Dink's server and if he wants sole control of the files that's on him.
  

- No real environment for discussion. Without admins to talk to, or recommend things to, suggestions/complaints are lost to the wind.

One of the other problems that arises from only having one admin is the fact, and no offense to Nicol, that the admin is disconnected from the player base. It's my belief that an admin should know their player base as it's more conducive to making proper administrative calls (staff applications, suggestions, bans, etc)

Give @Jammin and @bryanbrr admin. We need the admins. They deserve it. They care. They're good staff. We've been without good admins for more than 3 months now. 

Jammin JUST got mod, so as much as a good staff member he is, he still needs time regardless, As for bryanbrr and anyone else that would be interested in the admin role, they'd have to go up to dink himself and talk with him about it. Admins may make the decisions on staff roles but they don't have privileges' that grant the role itself, which is why they need to relay to dink to apply the role to them. And as for admin candidates, they can't just rely on nicol to go "oh hey this guy wants admin, give it to him". Even then, dink does his own thing and there's nothing wrong with that.

2.) Bad Staff
This is going to get into, what I imagine, the more controversial territory. I'll try to be objective, but my own bias will be embedded in this. Other's feel free to give your input or disagree. There are members of the staff that, frankly put, are shit. They are just terrible at their jobs. I will not post names, because I want this post to be a discussion, not an attack on individuals. That being said, some of the staff are incredibly: immature, inactive, and inconsistent. The way they treat some players is totally different than how they treat others. It is often joked about, but in all seriousness, there is no reason for some staff members to worship @"Burb" . It comes off as creepy, cringy, and pathetic. It could probably even be considered harassment by the standards of the server. There have been multiple occurrences where rules are not consistent. For example, the situation with @thunderwalrusinnthebar and his approach to the word "tranny". While I personally think Thunder was wrong in this instance, I think it highlights a bigger problem that is not his fault. (Also, I should mention that while this is under the "Bad Staff" section, I don't necessarily think Thunder is a bad staff despite a personal disagreement with him) Consistency. There are far too many instances where the staff are inconsistent with their ruling. Other staff dismissed this as "at the moderator's own discretion" but I believe that this is a just an easy cop out. Some other quick notes:
- The staff team uses a committee system, which @Ethan described on discord to me. On paper, it looks like a pretty good system. However, in practice as it currently stands, I believe it is inefficient because of the aforementioned problem of bad staff. Bad Staff = Bad Decisions
- Former admins like @dong have mentioned that he could not do anything progressive with the community because of the current committee system. He also mentioned a problem with poor staff.
Consistency and Moderator Discretions don't align despite how it seems, but as someone who was formerly staff, hearing anyone start whining about it gets real annoying, considering its the "cop out" for complaining about staff decisions as every single time a thread like this is made, i hear that word every single time. As for committee decisions, there is a pin for each and every committee section that literally states Admins make the final decision (excluding community bans), so hearing dong complain about not being able to do anything makes me think he's just falling towards community and staff pressure.  

3.) Ignoring The Community
What the hell is the point of +1s and community feedback if it doesn't mean anything? I can already guess that there will be a response that says something along the lines of "We do listen to community feedback!" but that's demonstrably false. An example being @"aethy" s unban request. He can give more input on this more in the replies if he wants. Another example, would be the spray thread. As @JesseTheUndeadCowboy mentioned in the discord, the only person giving legitimate criticism was Russ. Russ was able to pretty much pinpoint why it was a bad idea, but the other staff, as Jesse mentioned, kinda just jerked themselves off with non-answers in a dismissive way. (He said it a lot nicer than that.)
Again, boils down to admins discretion, there are also things in the staff's discord that are brought into question that should not just be thrown out like a piece of candy to the community to prevent shitstorms. Anyone remember ginger? Got community banned for stuff that was violating discord guidelines and would've had dinks fully caught up in it. Stuff got leaked and a staff member in her clique went off and temporarily nuked the murder server.


Another big example of this lies with how staff currently treat regulars like Rylo, Ernie, Stuppidy, and Crab. Crab got permabanned for, possibly one of the most BS examples of teaming. Staff will ban people who have been with the community for years, and then pikachu face when the playerbase spams "ASAB" or complains about the staff being trash. #FreeCrab
As much as you like them for messing around too much, almost all of them were shitheads that made staffing harder than it had to be. (quote on quote almost) 

A possible solution to this would be to introduce a new rank (no in-game powers at all) that members get when they reach a certain time limit, activity, etc (whatever is deemed as a good qualification) that allows them to vote within the committee. Regulars, and people who have dedicated a lot of their time (take Jesse for an example) should have more input than they already do.
Oh boy the "helper role" discussion again.

Summary
- We need admins.
- There are too many bad staff.
- Stop ignoring regulars.

I will end this with this; I understand that regular players (myself included) can be shitheads. We complain, we troll, etc. I write this post with this self awareness.

Responses in red, yes there are biases, no I don't care.
may edit it.
Also, as much as i hate the consistency card and like the people in staff, can you guys deal with the stupid grapple exploiting on the server? (no we're not going into the HURR DURR REMOVE JUMPPACK, REMOVE GRAPPLE debate)