ROR DIARY : RESTRUCTURATION.

[Rynocerous]

I appreciate the honesty and the time.

I could write a lot more about it, but reading people's posts and seeing what is on Discord, I think there is no point.

The people who are going to refuse to deal with reality are either going to leave or continue complaining until they leave. The rest of us are just here to play the game.

[Avici]

Can you imagine how much good would bring for the server cooperation between Aza and the rest of the staff... Sigh...

[Xergon]

Hope is in the air.

[covenn]

Throwing any support behind Torque after the years of treatment many of the player base has endured from him only serves to tell me that there is little hope that the ship will be righted. He should have been gone a long time ago. I understand what you are trying to do here with the restructuring, and it is a good start, but it simply isn't enough. By allowing him to remain, you are complicit to his behavior and treatment of others. Sorry, but that simply isn't acceptable. He is a cancer and the only cure is to cut him out.

[covenn]

Oh and why in gods name was his response letter allowed to remain so long? That was a classic example of something a sociopath would write. Talk about making the entire staff look bad, JFC.

Edit: And yeah, I know I am getting banned because War already threatened to ban me if I talked about this subject again. At this point who cares. Things need to be said regardless of the consequences.

[machopi1]

Well, with any luck this enormous dumpster fire of a clusterfuсk can be salvaged and saved. But then again...i just don't see it, unfortunately.
Torq should've been given the axe years ago. And if that had happened we wouldn't be dealing with this **** now.
Somebody better send him a fruit basket or something, you know - for singlehandedly ruining the entire project.
*slowest of slow claps*

[GodlessCrom]

Abusive "dev" who does not know how to code is allowed to stay, even praised, and dude who knows how to code and tried to be productive member of community is blackballed and denigrated.

What a joke.

[Genisaurus]

I don't have a dog in this fight. I have friends in this fight, but I don't have anything to gain from it - I have declined invitations to return to RoR before these events, and I have declined invitations to work for Apoc before these events. I do not actively play either. I hope that, as much as I may feel one way or another, I can keep this as neutral as possible. No ring-kissing, no demands for heads. My goal here is to comment on some things that I feel are lacking, and are not being said. I don't expect anyone's mind will be changed.

The goal of good PR is not to make a company look as good as possible, the goal of good PR is to make sure your customers feel good about the company. I hope the difference between the two is clear; there is nothing an organization can do that is objectively, universally a good thing. There is no action that 100% promotes good PR. Instead, you choose the action that makes the most people feel good about the action. For example, if a company donates $1 million to combating homelessness, there will always be some people upset by this - they will argue that the company is enabling laziness, or supporting drug users, or something else. But most people will feel good about the company because of this, so it is good PR.

Because good PR means making people feel good about you, it means that good PR requires understanding why people feel one way or another. Google for example, needs to know the difference between, "Do people dislike us because we have a monopoly? Do people dislike us because we support social policies in other countries that they dislike?" Fighting against either of these perceptions requires very different strategies. I say this, because there seems to be this stubborn refusal to acknowledge why a large part of the community is upset. You acknowledge that the community is upset, and you acknowledge what the demands of this upset group are, but you seem incapable of saying, "yes, you have a right to be upset."

Let me say that it's good to see this restructuring taking place. I proposed the same thing two years ago. I have to wonder how many problems would have been prevented, in hindsight. But I think it's important to note why my suggestion was denied 2 years ago. A lot of team members did not want to be censored, they liked being able to talk to players without having to worry about PR. But the bigger reason was this: the team felt - at least for the year I was a part of it, and presumably for the 2 years since - that it was okay to have fewer rules on staff members, because nobody had abused that freedom yet.

I'll say that again: the philosophy of the team was that, so long as nobody was abusing their privileges, they didn't need rules. And it wasn't just with regards with replying to players on the forums - the staff felt the same way about giving themselves items, modifying their renown level, etc. As long as it wasn't abused, it was okay. And then it was abused, and there was much drama, and new rules were put into place. Secret shops were removed, GM logs were inspected more closely, commands restricted from certain teams.

Which implies that, now that this restructuring is finally taking place, it comes as a result of abuses of freedoms previously allowed to the team. Why would the team change its ethos and standard operating procedure on a dime otherwise? They never have in the past. As an outsider, it really feels like your hand has been forced by recent events. I do not believe this is something you would have done of your own free will, because you didn't before.

This is why it bothers me that nowhere on returnofreckoning.com has a staff member admitted that any abuses did occur. You are taking a step to fix your PR, but because you don't acknowledge why many people are angry, you are taking this action blindly. It's not a bad action - this should have happened 2 years ago - but I don't think it's going to help as much as you are expecting it to.

So we have a tacit, quiet implication that the team understands that some bad behavior happened, but no public acknowledgement. Okay. Even in Aza's return post offering clemency to the wrongfully banned, the public statement was, "we did wrong things, here's a fix, let's move on." I'm not suggesting that anyone should have been fired for that. What I am saying, is that is not what an effective apology looks like. And if you are going to apologize for anything at all, at least do it effectively. Show some contrition. An effective apology directly addresses the bad behavior, and acknowledges that it was wrong. It looks like this. An "I'm sorry" doesn't hurt either, but the sentiment is secondary to the facts.

EDIT: And let me be clear here: it is my opinion that restructuring does not in any way constitute a "punishment" of anyone, regardless of whether a punishment of some kind is deserved or not. It's not a punishment to institute a rule that should always have been there in the first place. It's not a punishment to make concrete a rule that was only unspoken before.

I am of the opinion that every single person on this team is expendable. I was too, when I was on it. Because at the end of the day, Return of Reckoning isn't a startup making a new product, it's an emulator for a dead MMO. The core of it is that you are restoring someone else's work. There are no files hidden in the client that would not have been found eventually. There are no systems left to be implmented that would not be implemented eventually. Sure, the balance changes and new PvE encounters are legitimately new content, but there are other combinations of balance changes and different PvE encounters that would be equally as fun. Everyone has ideas. Someday it might be a wildly different game, but it could also be any other wildly different game. There is nothing about any one team member's contributions that make them more valuable than any other, and there is nothing about any team member's contributions that make them too valuable to lose. I left, the project is still here. Aza left the first time on good terms, the project went on. Londo left, RoR is still kicking. Things slow down, but everything is inevitable. If Hargrim weren't fixing PvE, someone else would (eventually). Yali arguably makes the biggest sacrifice for the game - he pays his own money when the ad revenue doesn't keep up. Everyone else contributes spare time, he contributes the fruits of his paid time. All the same, he could quit today, and someone would still pay the bills.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that there's nobody on this project too big to fire, if need be. There is nobody on this team whose work is so valuable that it renders them immune to punishment. After all, you fired Aza. So with that in mind, at this point in time, what kind of behavior would get a dev fired? What rules actually exist, that if broken, are actually actionable? I'm not asking "What would it take to fire so-and-so," I'm asking, where is the line in general? Right now it seems to be somewhere between, "Sending players angry messages and raging at your coworkers" and "co-opting a QnA to go on a 90 minute expose of bad staff behavior." In fact, if you boil it down even further, it seems like the only offense a staff member can commit to be fired is to be disliked by other staff members that don't want to work with them anymore. That definition includes every other formerly fired staff member too.

Speaking of the QnA, and speaking of PR, all I will say is that it is really not a good look to be more concerned with the way a message is delivered than the content of that message. If you want a good example, I will unironically offer up the NFL/National Anthem debacle here in the states. Some (American) football players refuse to stand for the national anthem in protest of racist policies in the USA. Some people get more mad about their refusal to stand, and ignore the reason why they're doing it in the first place. Nike runs an ad supporting them, their sales jump up over 30%. You can be mad about the medium, but you cannot ignore the message. I'm not even going to start on the horribly ill-advised (to say the least) news post that was on the front page for days. I'm not sure if it was worse than the Apoc post, but both of those deserve some kind of award for the worst possible responses to a crisis.

There's this certain idea we promote, at least we do here in the US, that it's a strength to not care what anyone thinks about you. This is maybe fine for a lot of people that live quiet lives and don't interact with anyone. It's maybe also good for people who don't want to have friends and cultivate good relationships with people. Personally, I think that attitude is a weakness. Our success in life is entirely dependent on what other people think of us, like it or not. You know, Louis CK has a bit (or had a bit, anyway) which to paraphrase, went, "When someone calls you an asshole, you don't get to say, 'No I'm not!' Of course an asshole isn't going to think they're an asshole, everyone around you knows better than you do." When someone calls you out, you have a responsibility to stop and evaluate their accusation. Sometimes they're unfounded, but you have to reflect.

When 30% of everyone you know thinks you're doing something wrong, that's kind of a big sign. You can try to take refuge in the remaining 70%, but that's giving a lot of people too much credit. It should be clear that most of the players don't support anyone, they just want to play Warhammer Online. And who knows how much of the support is honest anyway? "Respect for the staff" was written into the rules for so long, I don't think you can trust that the support isn't just people trying to avoid getting in trouble. Notice how nobody complains about changes anymore without first taking the time to say, "I love this team and everything you do"? It's bred-in low-grade sycophancy.

Anyway, this is turning into more of a rant than a cautionary warning. I'm not saying all this to take sides, I'm not saying this to throw anyone under the bus. I'm not saying this to get anyone fired. I'm saying all this because I want you to really understand what this looks like to the community. I want you guys to understand why people are upset. I have always cared about the PR of this server, it will live or die by it. And if you do not start taking it more seriously, it will definitely be the latter.

[Flavorburst]

...
Torque didnt get punished at all, he did not lost anything worth so what was hia punishment?
...

Torque lost most of his ingame powers:
R&D will no longer communicate with the Community.
R&D will no longer have GM Powers.
That means R&D can't talk unblockable to Destro or Order Chars, can't send someone to the moon, can't ban someone.
R&D can't teleport on live server.
And you can set R&D to ignore if you like.

Limiting Torque's ability to lash out isn't a punishment, it's a preventative measure.

[bloodi]

As usual, being "ouf of line" is a much more grave sin than you know, being a total and complete ****.

And in order to progress, we will silence the dissenters, tell everyone that the jackass that made this whole shitshow happen wont be able to interact with the commnunity anymore and then, ask for the playerbase to please forget the drama and move on.

Learn your lesson kids, allegiance is more important than anything else, suck the right **** and you wont need to worry about the rest.