Changing My Role In The Community (Somewhat Resignation)

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hi, I've been wanting to make this post for some time now and I've been thinking very hard about this. In the past, I feel I've acted as a BoD member with "special" access. Today, I just started a new job and after looking at my schedule, it appears I'm going to be more busy than I thought. While I won't be working as many hours as I did in the Summer, the schedule isn't consistent. Basically random (a lot of jobs are like this). For me, this won't work out well for GFL because with the type of projects I work on, I like having consecutive days off (e.g. in the Summer, I had every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off). With that said, I am also going to be focusing on other personal things. 

 

After months of thinking about this, I think I am just going to have take a step back from GFL. Therefore, I would like to resign from the "Board of Directors" role in the community and perhaps become an unique Technical Administrator. I would still take care of the financial side of GFL along with the back-end, but I just can't spend time working on things such as:

• Fixing game server issues.
• Expanding.
• Constantly doing my absolute best to discuss the issues in GFL and on ways we can improve.
• Other GFL issues.

 

While from time to time, I may occasionally work on things in general for GFL, nobody should expect me to perform these tasks from now on. In fact, if you have anything related to GFL, you should go to a valid Board of Director first. If the following services are experiencing issues, you may contact me first:

• Web server (e.g. website, FastDL, MySQL server)
• TeamSpeak 3

 

If your problem does not have anything to do with any of those services, please contact a Board of Director member first. If your request/issue isn't related to those services listed above and you contact me first, I will tell you to go contact a BoD first. If the BoD team is inactive, then private message them on the forums (feel free to include me in it so I can see you are trying to contact them, basically proof). I am no longer accepting the excuse "The BoD team won't respond" anymore because 86.33% of the time, the person messages one BoD member while they're offline and understandably doesn't get a response.

 

I would just like to highlight a few things before I end the post.

 

General

GFL is generally doing okay, however, I do believe we could be doing much better. We've made many back-end changes including promoting new BoD members, but at the same time, I feel our servers are slowly dying more each day that goes by.

 

More work needs to be put into GFL from all ranks.

 

Financial State

I've explained this many times but personally, I feel nobody is actually listening to me or taking me serious. Our current financial state is still bad. We were under our $850.00 goal just a few days ago, which, in my opinion, is scary. While I did do some things to cut down on expenses, we need more money. I will still be working on trying to move our servers to OVH and the geo-location IP change is finally getting done. However, we're not going to risk buying a $80.00 machine when we have the chance of it failing. If you want OVH (which, I'm sure a majority of the staff in GFL does knowing the benefits if it works out), we need to do things to get donations so we don't have to worry risking $80.00 to try to move our servers off of NFO to OVH. As of right now, there are periods where we go 1 - 3 days without a single donation. Back when our financial state was strong (2015), we received 5 - 10 donations daily. Perhaps that should be a goal (getting an average of one donation a day is not acceptable).

 

Garry's Mod Division Leaders, I would highly recommend working on how we're going to display MOTDGD ads. I am not going to be looking into this so the MOTD Ads integration is going to be relying on you guys. Once you're done, I can give you the MOTDGD account ID so we can finally get ad money from Garry's Mod (I very highly recommend doing this).

 

As for CS:S, I thought MOTDGD ads were already setup, but if some reason it isn't, you can simply download my plugin from GitLab here.

 

Battle of the Communities

As a few of you may know, a couple months ago we were invited to participate in a tournament including seven other communities. This was for CS:GO and we accepted the invitation simply because we wanted GFL to branch out and become more "social" by playing with other gaming communities.

 

While @Dano made multiple announcements saying we are taking part in this tournament and that we needed a team, unfortunately, we couldn't find enough team members (we had over a month to do so). Personally, I am highly upset over this and angry because it's a very terrible feeling having the "hosts" (in this case, the main leaders of Edge-Gamers, a very large gaming community) ask us if we had a team and we having to say "No". We were understandably forced to (forfeit?) from the tournament because we couldn't get 5 - 7 GFL members on our team (they didn't want eSports team members since they would understandably have an advantage over other players in the tournament). This gives GFL a terrible reputation and I doubt they will be inviting us back in.

 

There is not one single individual to blame. What is to blame? GFL's staff as a whole. Nobody was talking about it or advertising it anywhere. Things like this should be a big deal and people should be looking forward to it along with talking about it. If we ever do get an opportunity again (which, with the current state of GFL, I am never doing anything like this again), I hope GFL's staff becomes a little more "involved" with the tournament.

 

Stress, Etc

I wanted to end this post in talking about how GFL is affecting me. The things I've been doing in GFL have highly benefited me. However, I've been very stressed out as well. Ever since the responsibility of the entire back-end was given to me, a lot more load has been put onto me. While @denros and @setup.sh has been helping me, there is still a lot of load that goes on me. With that said, dealing with general GFL problems definitely doesn't help. 

 

I've also somewhat lost interest for community servers. The reason is personal and has to do with conflicts with Valve (e.g. they are basically killing our CS:GO servers). Community Servers are just not a thing anymore in most newer games. Personally, I think the developers of these games are literally idiotic for not developing modding tools and allowing community servers, but I guess it is what it is (the reality is game developers make games for the money, not the quality now-a-days).

 

To sum up, I'm sure you're aware that I am generally stressed out a majority of the time in GFL. The truth is yes, I am stressed out and perhaps unhappy (GFL isn't doing all that great at the moment and that for sure doesn't help).

 

If you have any questions, feel free to reply as usual.

 

Thank you for understanding.

[Cypher 1,187 / 11,383]

Much love brother. 

[Darkling 2,041 / 23,470]

It's upsetting that your leaving dude!

You were always polite and didn't see your position as something which was necessarily above me, instead you chose to listen and to offer advice.

 

I figured your not much of a talker in teamspeak when it comes to the public channels, other than the day me you and @Dano were sat in the public room just chatting about what we could be doing and what was happening at the time.

 

Technically im about to donate 3 times for 2 months of VIP each for the winners to my giveaway

I'm definitely glad you aren't fully leaving and hope to keep chatting to you 

I won't delve into the issues you posted as that's for a different forum to discuss

 

Right now we need GFL's staff to provide a little stability including the current BoD!

 

Good luck Roy!!! Nobody ever expected to be saying this to you but fingers crossed at some point you will want to come back to the thriving community of GFL full time!

 

No matter how hard the climb we will make it to the top!

Edited November 2, 2016 by Darkling
Poorly written in the middle of the night

[Rena 2,779 / 33,652]

Sad to see this happening. We understand your situation and wish you best of luck with everything.

 

I believe GFL will get better if we all decide to work together on it.

 

Goodluck on your job, Roy. I know you're not entirely leaving, but thank you for everything you've done for GFL. 

[Chormee 2,973 / 29,227]

What is GFL without our boy @Roy...rest in rip my dude

 

Good luck on your life my man.

[BunnyFox 318 / 8,341]

I may not have known you very well, or even at all, but it is clear the impact you have around here.

 

I can understand why so many are disappointed with your decisions, but it sounds like you made the right ones

 

I wish you all the best with your future endeavors

[rapperdan 2,323 / 0]

@Roy, you are breaking my heart man, I could not stand to read that. please @Roy, please don't leave for good also please just keep people in line, GFL needs you for that exact reason. Anyway in my eyes if you leave for good, I personaly think GFL will crumple inwards around it's self. FYI you are the greatest person I've met in GFL.

Edited November 5, 2016 by rapperdan