UPDATED WITH A NEW ARTICLE! (19 January 2010)
unethical behavior
Original article:
The exodus of competent and active staff from n00bstories
In the middle of June 2009 "the incident" occured affectionately known
as "n00bparty" in which Crimson from n00bstories hosts a party. It
seemed like a good time as it had been in years past, but this
one got a little out of control.
Admittedly so by Crimson herself, when people get together they do some
dumb things. What happened was documented on the moderator forum, with
chat logs, but was removed from the staff section after it became too
political. Essentially what happened was the administrators and staff
attending n00bparty abused their powers and tools to create massive
unfair advantages in a game to end a long map- an experience all players and staff
USUALLY suffer through on a regular basis. MUDKIPS, a well known,
active, and well respected member of the community, was playing during
this time and ended up receiving uncalled for !n00bs from the abusing
staff. There were additional incidents of rampant !n00bing and !recing
as well and was all documented in the forum which was removed. When
asking about the thread detailing all of this, luv2pb said it was "not
deleted, it was moved to where [he] could see it for lolz".
Most of said thread can be found here, it's really long and just showing
the recommendation abuse mostly:
failparty1
Now, the recommendation abuse was one thing, but what really was a
problem was that the staff did the following things that the ACTIVE
staff cried foul about:
1) Disabled buildings using "something" inetknght used
2) luv2pb destroyed enemy tanks with moderation tools
3) griever reportedly kicked someone for killing him
4) inetknght had mod powers when he had been banned from the server for
using "tools" that were not authorized from prior incidents
5) gave away their own vehicles on a prior map, and !rec'd each other
for it.
After crying foul, the staff were insulted and basically told that the
administrators can do whatever they want. With no other option, staff
began to quit n00bstories. What complicated matters more was that
luv2pb showed apathy towards the severity of their errors and
additionally crimson actually CHALLENGED the staff to "ragequit" more
than the attendee count of people that went to her party. Don't believe
me? Here's the thread before it was modified/removed:
failparty5
And if you want to see Crimson telling us to OFFICIALLY STFU:
failparty2
The typical "cover your ass" thread by deleting/removing threads that
make you look bad:
failparty3
After seeing the terrible leadership, I began questioning my own
role in the staff. Then, it got worse as Crimson officially made a
TERRIBLE apology with hidden meanings of basically saying she wasn't
sorry but is saying this because she thinks she has to, which in
reality, just made things worse:
failparty6
Because of the significant portion of staff quitting at this point, we
were talking about all the atrocious things that had happened in
#jason761 as it was unofficially dubbed (by crimson I think) the "we
hate crimson channel". This room was promptly shutdown, but we had
already migrated to another irc network forseeing this problem ahead of
time.
I posted an additional thread immediately after I quit the moderator
team, which of course was also deleted:
my post
What amazes me in all of this is just how clueless luv2pb and crimson
are in all of this. They STILL think that MUDKIPS convinced people to
quit with him after all of this, and that "the incident" (them abusing
powers at n00bparty) was the cause of all this "exodus", when in
reality, we see the things above and realize simply they are just
terrible community leaders. Crimson went on to lie about how the staff
that left were inactive and how they didn't need us anyways. This makes
sense as MOST of the staff that left were actually her most active staff
and most in tune with the community. She can easily make this claim
because she just doesn't know any better. She can put as much "stats"
out there as she wants, but the funny thing about stats is that they are only
attached to names of people and activity they do -- many of the active staff DID NOT play or watch the server under their own moderator names -- something easily seen if she was actually paying the server attention over the years.
It is quite laughable that they think "most staff don't even know why
they quit" and "it was over a week ago, they are just raging". The
ignorance from this only helps the exodus.
In an act of desperation and blaming their problems on someone else,
luv2pb posed a threat to the REMAINING staff -- yea, that's right, THE
REMAINING STAFF of this:
failparty7
Which of course is a travesty in itself, and it hurts to see the
community that myself, and all the other active staff have put thousands
of hours in to over the years go down in flames like this... but if
n00bstories has to die like this... then so be it. New and established
communities have a lot to gain from the demise of this community. I
have very fond feelings for many of the people in it, but with simply
lost direction, selfishness, and ignorance of both luv2pb and crimson
there is no other way to fix the problem other than for the problems
they allowed to happen to consume itself. It is simply a matter of
megalomania and elitism and the only way to fix that is for you guys to
fall off your high horses. If n00bstories somehow survives in this,
realize that you WILL repeat this again in the future. You guys seem to
be proud of the "7 years of this" -- speaks something about your
endurance, but everyone knows you have the players you do because of the
equipment you have and the ping you have. Everything else you HAD
leaves with the staff you HAD that YOU lost over 7 years time and time
again -- now THAT speaks much WORSE.
This was posted here to document what happened in a place that could not
be edited by the offending parties as had been done on n00bstories IN
PRIVATE AT FIRST, then public, then on to renegadeforums, now on
"vigilante" networks.
In response, the staff that left began "the exodus" properly with irc,
forums, renegade server, etc. Something else to consider is Crimson
talking about potentially forcibly removing the "new" competition off of
XWIS here:
lies and corruption
arnyswart actually paid for the server and was using a name n00bstories
let him use as we had been a part of that community. I would say she's
in the right to be able to retain her server name, but the better
sportman would allow the healthy, fresh competition and win through
quality, rather than brute force. Naturally, if we wanted to play the
name game, I hear n00bstories itself is on a server name that isn't
theirs anyways, so I could go so far as to say, the success of
n00bstories is not in the quality of administration, but rather through
crafty business negotiations, high ping time, and nazi control of
information about n00bstories itself.
On a related note, crimson is so scared of this that she disabled most
of our private messaging on all her forums (including renegadeforums)
and even banned a couple of us from anything that "she owns". She has
the right to do this since these things are under her control, so we can
just wait for this page to hit the google cache and let people see
things for themselves.
Scary isn't maybe the right word... look at the numbers yourself:
Approximately 43% (3 of 7) of the administration quit
Approximately 33% (13 of 40) of the moderation team quit
Crimson had some ideas backwards, of the staff that quit, the vast
majority of them were the MOST active in the server as players and staff
members actively retaining the community feeling. Most of the remaining
staff are either inactive, don't know any better, or are choosing to
stay to make up their own mind. With this said, in ANY situation,
business, community, whatever, with stats like this, it is ALWAYS a
failure of leadership no matter what scapegoat anyone tries to
blame.
It may also be a tad humorous that after threatening to TAKE OFFLINE
N00BSTORIES renegade server for funding that she also claimed that she's
looking to have a PAID STAFF. This doesn't even make sense.
Welcome to the exodus!
UPDATED: 19 January 2010!!
Just when we thought it was over, crimson and jared impress me more with
COMPLETELY UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR:
unethical access