personal [9-22-16] Personal Update - New Job, Etc...

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello everybody, I just wanted to give a smallish update on what's happening to me in the next upcoming weeks. Basically, my Summer job ended on the 9th of this month. I immediately went looking for new jobs and fortunately found one. While I'm not actually working yet (still have to go through an orientation + training), I will be working there soon. This job will be part-time, which will leave me with extra time to work on GFL. Although, I will be focusing on other things in life such as setting myself up to go to college (this upcoming Winter) and getting certifications that could help me find another job in the future. Once school starts, I highly hope I can find time for GFL.

 

With that said, I would like to talk about the last few months. Ever since the series of negative events have occurred, I've been spending A LOT of time working on GFL. Since security has became such a big factor in how I run GFL, I've been trying to do as many things as I can without giving access out. It will stay this way. Now, you're probably expecting me to complain about the work I'm doing, but that's not the case. The things I've been doing with GFL recently have highly benefited me, a lot, and I honestly enjoy them. The only thing I can complain about is the fact that a majority of our servers are dying, but sadly, there's nothing much we can do for a majority of the games we are suffering in (all I can say is I've tried my absolute best, Valve).

 

Recently, I've been very stressed out since many decisions have popped up (probably more than you think). I've been thinking about this for a long time and in the next couple months, I'm not going to be able to put as much time into GFL as I have in the past four months. That's why I am going to focus on strengthening our current teams in hopes that future decisions, etc are made smoothly. I want to eventually get to the point where I am only doing the back-end things while the Board of Directors, Division Leaders, and Community Advisers are making all the decisions and such to benefit the community (yes, this includes coming up with ideas). I hope to be called a "highly trusted" Technical Administrator by then (no, I won't be "stepping" down neither)  

 

Anyway, other than that, I've been spending a lot of time into building the Linux back-end of a possible system we'll use when we slowly move to OVH. There are many other things on my to-do-list as well and yes, I'm aware of the long delays I'm causing (e.g. @Amelie needing access to our social media accounts). I'll try to get that all done (so many things at once).

 

Lastly, I would just like to give a big thank you to all the people who have contributed to GFL in the past four months. It has been a very, very rough ride and there are many gaming communities who wouldn't have survived it. While we still need to improve in areas (e.g. getting more donations, completing the IPS 4 application, etc) and a majority of our servers are suffering in population, I would say our back-end is more stronger than ever. Once we get a ticket system, there shouldn't be issues going unnoticed. I'm happy to say that GFL is indeed, a "strong" community.

 

If you have any questions/concerns, feel free to reply with them!

 

Again, thanks!

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

I apologize if the post seems kinda.. bumpy? It is late and I'm honestly tired. I've re-read it and I believe I got the point across.

 

P.S. Yes, my sleeping schedule is messed up again. Good game...

 

Thanks.

[Joshy 4,297 / 42,765]

It's a nice follow up to those events, recent updates, and for things to come.

 

I think the key take-away is that all of us should be stepping up our game.  There are a couple of things that we need to switch our orientation on.  I think people have been seeing me use the words "community relations" a lot and it's something that I don't see others using as often.  I'm meaning for our leadership team to think more about events, reputation and ideas that go beyond being a cop for their servers or a technical side like a Developer without emotion; it's how we keep members around and excited, and it should be inherently fun for us as well as proactively preventing those rule breakers (kill two birds with one stone).

 

I'd also really like it if, despite our permissions, we were one position ahead.  For example: A lot of problems Server Admins seek help on from Server Managers... could really be used by critical thinking instead of actually applying a command or update.  Imagine a community where Server Admins thought and acted like Server Managers, and Server Managers thought and acted like Division Leaders... and so on.  You don't have to act the position that your forum title carries or permissions on the server; we can all act and do better.  It's kind of like that "Fake it until you make it (or become it)" sort of deal...  by the time someone asks if you're ready for your promotion, then you can easily say you've been doing it for a while already and the actual promotion is just a simple title change.

 

I enjoy that a lot of people want to get promoted too.  One thing I have been noticing is that a lot of people are really interested in the Community Advisor position.  I don't think it's a bad thing, and I would love to see more people on the team You guys can make it happen!  I think this is a sign of excitement, and people are really enjoying the stuff we have been doing and how the position has evolved beyond being a forum moderator (much like the cop example above).  We don't have to be the only ones evolving...  You guys can make something new of your current status and inspire others to want it too.  This is going to really help the community out a lot.  I've been jumping onto a bunch of projects and delegating wherever I can, and if you guys would like to learn more about getting involved, then shoot me a PM.  You might not be able to come up with the ideas on your own just yet, but after a few projects and some practice, then you'll all become naturals.  If we want something... we wont have to sit around and wait on someone else... we can make it happen ourselves.  Make the future community that you want too!

 

Thanks for the update, Roy!

[SwegBuster 879 / 15,298]

I have been working with my co-manager, @Flippyfloppy, and alongside with one of the CA's, @Joshy. We are trying to improve both of the Zombie Mod servers (both EU and US). Although we may have not made a lot of progress on it yet, we have discussed a lot of ideas and it seems like these servers have a very bright future. I'm getting a lot of things put together in place for our Members and Donors and learning a lot about the plugins.

 

I have also been training anyone who asks for help! @Major_Push and @Flippyfloppy are some examples of this, and I've just began with my boy, @Joshy! We were talking about some of his programming skills and he is going to help me improve in this area so that we can customize the servers and be more competitive. If anyone else feels like they want some sort of understanding of how we run servers and you are currently looking to pass time, feel free to message me on the forums. I'd rather have someone learning and not the best if they are interested and having fun, than a person who is the best at what they do and doesn't care or is offline all the time.

I am pretty sure you all know that I work in retail (if not, you do now). At my job we do these meeting type thing for Managers and PICs (Person in Charge), so they can pass down information through the ranks and let everyone know what is going on in other departments. It helps them to prepare for the day, but no one likes doing meetings or people are busy in real life. So why not compromise and make a thread in the manager section then use it as a form of communication? Why are you making this suggestion when we have Discord? Well, I feel like sometimes we need a more dedicated section for communication between divisions and managers. I also feel like not everyone likes to start up Discord daily and go read about stuff while other conversations are going on. I believe it would be better to use the forums as a more direct way for us to communicate what is happening in the other divisions or the division we are currently in.

 

I am looking forward to the next update @Roy!

Edited September 22, 2016 by SwegBuster

[Coolest Cat 1,266 / 14,449]

17 hours ago, Roy said:

Hello everybody, I just wanted to give a smallish update on what's happening to me in the next upcoming weeks. Basically, my Summer job ended on the 9th of this month. I immediately went looking for new jobs and fortunately found one. While I'm not actually working yet (still have to go through an orientation + training), I will be working there soon. This job will be part-time, which will leave me with extra time to work on GFL. Although, I will be focusing on other things in life such as setting myself up to go to college (this upcoming Winter) and getting certifications that could help me find another job in the future. Once school starts, I highly hope I can find time for GFL.

 

With that said, I would like to talk about the last few months. Ever since the series of negative events have occurred, I've been spending A LOT of time working on GFL. Since security has became such a big factor in how I run GFL, I've been trying to do as many things as I can without giving access out. It will stay this way. Now, you're probably expecting me to complain about the work I'm doing, but that's not the case. The things I've been doing with GFL recently have highly benefited me, a lot, and I honestly enjoy them. The only thing I can complain about is the fact that a majority of our servers are dying, but sadly, there's nothing much we can do for a majority of the games we are suffering in (all I can say is I've tried my absolute best, Valve).

 

Recently, I've been very stressed out since many decisions have popped up (probably more than you think). I've been thinking about this for a long time and in the next couple months, I'm not going to be able to put as much time into GFL as I have in the past four months. That's why I am going to focus on strengthening our current teams in hopes that future decisions, etc are made smoothly. I want to eventually get to the point where I am only doing the back-end things while the Board of Directors, Division Leaders, and Community Advisers are making all the decisions and such to benefit the community (yes, this includes coming up with ideas). I hope to be called a "highly trusted" Technical Administrator by then (no, I won't be "stepping" down neither)  

 

Anyway, other than that, I've been spending a lot of time into building the Linux back-end of a possible system we'll use when we slowly move to OVH. There are many other things on my to-do-list as well and yes, I'm aware of the long delays I'm causing (e.g. @Amelie needing access to our social media accounts). I'll try to get that all done (so many things at once).

 

Lastly, I would just like to give a big thank you to all the people who have contributed to GFL in the past four months. It has been a very, very rough ride and there are many gaming communities who wouldn't have survived it. While we still need to improve in areas (e.g. getting more donations, completing the IPS 4 application, etc) and a majority of our servers are suffering in population, I would say our back-end is more stronger than ever. Once we get a ticket system, there shouldn't be issues going unnoticed. I'm happy to say that GFL is indeed, a "strong" community.

 

If you have any questions/concerns, feel free to reply with them!

 

Again, thanks!

 

Hate to disagree with you on 2 things but I feel like they're worth reiterating. It's going to sound a bit whiny since it's something I've been experiencing a bit this week.

 

Anyway, the first thing is that we definitely can do more to populate our servers.

 

One thing that I've brought up before is holding admins more accountable for playing on their respective servers or else they risk losing their admin. Currently, some admins can not play on their server for months without being demoted and that's honestly not a good way to run a server. Because then the admins aren't going to feel like they need to play. Obviously, it's hard to keep track of them all the time, and I understand that it's really draining to try populating a server when it seems like your efforts are in vain, but we have to make an effort to hold admins more accountable. Also, it would help if everyone wasn't trying to populate their own server and only their own server. 

 

This is going to sound a bit whiny, but it's hard for me to get people on DB when some of them have to be populating their own server whether that be ZM, Purge, JB, etc. The problem is that our resources are spread thin and we can't make a concentrated attempt. The way I think of our servers is that they're like an organism "budding" to make more versions of itself. We start off with 1 server and populate that one. After that one's populated, we can take some of our new found players and use them to "bud" off and make a 2nd server which we then populate. By the end of the process we should have 2 healthy servers which can both bud off to help populate a 3rd and/or 4th server. Afterwards we should be able to bud off more and more and more. The way I see our current process is that we have a few good servers that can bud off properly to make new servers, but they tend to come off premature and wither and die which don't help us grow. ie. We get a new server that ends up wasting our resources but dies off. Which is why I always say that we should slow down on trying to make new servers when we have old ones that need work. If ALL of our servers were at the level that ZE's at right now then we'd be a powerhouse and could be making new servers left and right. But right now we've got a bunch of servers that don't have the necessary attention to succeed. We could/should cut some of the dead servers. I guess I'll defend db a bit right now since I'm sort of advocating cutting it. DB is currently one of the only two decoy dodgeball servers that exist in the world. The other one is running 1 map 24/7 so it doesn't even really count. So in reality, we're the only db server that exists right now in CSGO. So it shouldn't be too hard to populate once I make the Reddit post at the end of this month. 

 

When we make a new server it shouldn't just kind of release one day. A server being released should be an event and not just something that occurs. I'd say that we should do at most 1 new server a month. Or at the very least, we shouldn't make any new servers while we have a server that's struggling. There's no point in releasing 2~3 new servers in the same month just to have them compete for attention. 

 

And this brings us into my 2nd disagreement. And that's that we're NOT a strong community. We're actually a rather weak community, imo. Admins from 1 server almost never want to help out admins from another server. And pretty much everyone's in their own clique which creates a very weak sense of community. If we were in fact a strong community then we wouldn't have had things like the CSS division leaving and we wouldn't have as many dead/dying servers as we do. The GMod division, TF2 Division, CSGO Division, and what is left of the CSS division could all break away 1 day and it wouldn't bother anyone else in any other division. The old CSS division was admittedly a bit of an outlier in that they were conservative in their views on how a server should be run compared to the rest of the community. ie. Let the players do more or less what they please.

 

And the problem even goes down a bit worse into server admins not caring about servers within their own division. Earlier this month we had a post by a GMod Admin about how the GMod admins had problems working together. Some of the CSGO admins probably laugh it off like "oh, that's just because they're GMod admins" but that's honestly hypocritical. Within the CSGO division, we have a lot of dead servers which get no love from their fellow servers. There's a huge disconnect between a lot of the admins from different servers so I honestly don't think we're a strong community. We're a weak one and we need to be a lot more cooperative or else the community won't be able to bud off any new good servers and eventually all of our good servers will fail until we're down to our strongest 2 servers (ZE and TTT).

 

I, for one, always do my part in helping out with populating new servers and I'd like to see our current admin team get more involved with populating new servers. Obviously they have to take care of their own servers (especially if they're dying) but the way things are currently is not something I'd describe as strong. 

 

 

I posted quite a few solutions on another thread but almost no one replied to it which is quite sad since I think that some of the things I listed can be quite beneficial to the server. Once I get DB populated, hopefully by the end of this year, I'm going to go back to helping out with populating our servers.

 

tl;dr: We can do A LOT more to populate our servers despite how shitty Valve has been. I don't think that we should use the "It's valve's fault" excuse to explain why most of our servers are dying when there's a lot of internal failures. And we're NOT a strong community. We're pathetically weak as a community and part of that has to do with the fact that admins from 1 server don't care about the admins on another server. I listed quite a few things that I think can help here: https://gflclan.com/forums/topic/5372-some-suggestions/

 

We kind of have a crab mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality). We all want OUR server to succeed but don't want to help out the other servers because it doesn't immediately help us and since everyone thinks this, none of our servers get populated. And just like those crabs aren't a community, nor are we. We need to help each other out and then when we need help, we'll get it. This will require EVERYONE to work together.

 

 

If we don't step up as members of this community to become a stronger community then we're going to crash and burn eventually. And I'd really not like that.

 

 

I know it sounds hypocritical but mind you that I've been saying this for at least 2 years now.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

1 hour ago, Major_Push said:

 

Hate to disagree with you on 2 things but I feel like they're worth reiterating. It's going to sound a bit whiny since it's something I've been experiencing a bit this week.

 

Anyway, the first thing is that we definitely can do more to populate our servers.

 

One thing that I've brought up before is holding admins more accountable for playing on their respective servers or else they risk losing their admin. Currently, some admins can not play on their server for months without being demoted and that's honestly not a good way to run a server. Because then the admins aren't going to feel like they need to play. Obviously, it's hard to keep track of them all the time, and I understand that it's really draining to try populating a server when it seems like your efforts are in vain, but we have to make an effort to hold admins more accountable. Also, it would help if everyone wasn't trying to populate their own server and only their own server. 

 

This is going to sound a bit whiny, but it's hard for me to get people on DB when some of them have to be populating their own server whether that be ZM, Purge, JB, etc. The problem is that our resources are spread thin and we can't make a concentrated attempt. The way I think of our servers is that they're like an organism "budding" to make more versions of itself. We start off with 1 server and populate that one. After that one's populated, we can take some of our new found players and use them to "bud" off and make a 2nd server which we then populate. By the end of the process we should have 2 healthy servers which can both bud off to help populate a 3rd and/or 4th server. Afterwards we should be able to bud off more and more and more. The way I see our current process is that we have a few good servers that can bud off properly to make new servers, but they tend to come off premature and wither and die which don't help us grow. ie. We get a new server that ends up wasting our resources but dies off. Which is why I always say that we should slow down on trying to make new servers when we have old ones that need work. If ALL of our servers were at the level that ZE's at right now then we'd be a powerhouse and could be making new servers left and right. But right now we've got a bunch of servers that don't have the necessary attention to succeed. We could/should cut some of the dead servers. I guess I'll defend db a bit right now since I'm sort of advocating cutting it. DB is currently one of the only two decoy dodgeball servers that exist in the world. The other one is running 1 map 24/7 so it doesn't even really count. So in reality, we're the only db server that exists right now in CSGO. So it shouldn't be too hard to populate once I make the Reddit post at the end of this month. 

 

When we make a new server it shouldn't just kind of release one day. A server being released should be an event and not just something that occurs. I'd say that we should do at most 1 new server a month. Or at the very least, we shouldn't make any new servers while we have a server that's struggling. There's no point in releasing 2~3 new servers in the same month just to have them compete for attention. 

 

And this brings us into my 2nd disagreement. And that's that we're NOT a strong community. We're actually a rather weak community, imo. Admins from 1 server almost never want to help out admins from another server. And pretty much everyone's in their own clique which creates a very weak sense of community. If we were in fact a strong community then we wouldn't have had things like the CSS division leaving and we wouldn't have as many dead/dying servers as we do. The GMod division, TF2 Division, CSGO Division, and what is left of the CSS division could all break away 1 day and it wouldn't bother anyone else in any other division. The old CSS division was admittedly a bit of an outlier in that they were conservative in their views on how a server should be run compared to the rest of the community. ie. Let the players do more or less what they please.

 

And the problem even goes down a bit worse into server admins not caring about servers within their own division. Earlier this month we had a post by a GMod Admin about how the GMod admins had problems working together. Some of the CSGO admins probably laugh it off like "oh, that's just because they're GMod admins" but that's honestly hypocritical. Within the CSGO division, we have a lot of dead servers which get no love from their fellow servers. There's a huge disconnect between a lot of the admins from different servers so I honestly don't think we're a strong community. We're a weak one and we need to be a lot more cooperative or else the community won't be able to bud off any new good servers and eventually all of our good servers will fail until we're down to our strongest 2 servers (ZE and TTT).

 

I, for one, always do my part in helping out with populating new servers and I'd like to see our current admin team get more involved with populating new servers. Obviously they have to take care of their own servers (especially if they're dying) but the way things are currently is not something I'd describe as strong. 

 

 

I posted quite a few solutions on another thread but almost no one replied to it which is quite sad since I think that some of the things I listed can be quite beneficial to the server. Once I get DB populated, hopefully by the end of this year, I'm going to go back to helping out with populating our servers.

 

tl;dr: We can do A LOT more to populate our servers despite how shitty Valve has been. I don't think that we should use the "It's valve's fault" excuse to explain why most of our servers are dying when there's a lot of internal failures. And we're NOT a strong community. We're pathetically weak as a community and part of that has to do with the fact that admins from 1 server don't care about the admins on another server. I listed quite a few things that I think can help here: https://gflclan.com/forums/topic/5372-some-suggestions/

 

We kind of have a crab mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality). We all want OUR server to succeed but don't want to help out the other servers because it doesn't immediately help us and since everyone thinks this, none of our servers get populated. And just like those crabs aren't a community, nor are we. We need to help each other out and then when we need help, we'll get it. This will require EVERYONE to work together.

 

 

If we don't step up as members of this community to become a stronger community then we're going to crash and burn eventually. And I'd really not like that.

 

 

I know it sounds hypocritical but mind you that I've been saying this for at least 2 years now.

I apologize for not responding to your suggestions thread, while reading this post I remembered I was suppose to read it. I will read it soon (as long as nothing important comes up again).

 

While I do agree with a lot of the things you're saying, I do believe you highly underestimate how difficult it is to "keep" a CS:GO server populated. Yes, short-term populating isn't an issue, especially with having ~5 - 10 GFL members on the server, but keeping it populated without those ~5 - 10 GFL members is the rather difficult part. I guarantee you that if we "cheap'd" out and put weapon skins on our servers, they would immediately receive a ton of population (but no, we will NOT do that since we're a fair community). With that said, I do believe having admins and such help on other servers will help us but if they don't, that wouldn't make them a bad admin. As long as they are actively helping the server(s) they are assigned to (e.g. playing on them daily, etc), I don't have any problems.

 

I'm not going to go into much more. But like I said before, I do agree with you on how admins need to start actually playing their server, etc. Once we get a nice admin tracking system, I hope this becomes easier. With that said, if there are any admins who haven't played their server for over a month with proof and no notice, I'll gladly demote them from that specific server (it SHOULD be the Server Manager's job).

 

Thanks.