Regarding the recent "PropHunt Incident" & current state of GFL Administration.

[sntt 9 / 0]

Replying to https://gflclan.com/topic/80925-recent-incident/ (good choice locking the comments, lol. wouldn't want any questions or criticisms).

First things first, any negative statements towards any individuals that is not solely focused on the topic at hand (that being the supposed 'incident' slandering two previous managers & the state of GFL) is not the topic of this post and any replies of that will be promptly ignored. I am also not looking for a nerd to give me a ten-page thesis on how what I said isn't true even though it doesn't tackle the problems at hand or address any of the concerns.

Before we get into the main topic of the post, let me address one thing first - GFL has your IP Address if you ever joined a server or created a forum account here. Complete random strangers, the server managers could very well have them. I always recommend a VPN and using browsers with built-in VPNs. These two managers have absolutely zero malintent to abuse your IP address due to their resignation. If they wanted to, they would've already.

Slandering two people who have dedicated much of their time to the community and managing (what was once) an extremely active server is both disgusting and insecure. The directors are more focused on their emotions and taking every constructive criticism to heart (ex: GFL - GFL and a "Mentality of Stagnation") than actually addressing the valid concerns of the community. Everyone is way too focused on Roy leaving the community and creating LBG (and accusing Roy of poaching staff members). If you want the hard truth, GFL is not on fire; for it to be that it will have to be active. It's not. It's more of a silent rotor spewing out its last coughs as it runs out of gas. Let's not fuck around here and say, "we're breaking records". Breaking records of inactivity, it's easier to hide it when you delete the dead servers that had their player base leave because of Anycast / AS2 Cache removal or toxic community environment. They left because this community sucks. GFL has been on a downward spiral ever since they decided to run it like a company when Roy backed away. What gaming community is run like a company? You mentioned in the example post I provided that a lot of communities do; they don't, but please provide an example of one. It's ran by a singular or two community managers with administrators assisting. This is run like a board of shareholders deciding if they should split GFL stock in fours.

There are genuinely good things being done that I have seen; I can see the effort that went into the Surf event. What isn't more of that done regarding how SUCCESSFUL it was? Why go back to making useless servers like Physion Unturned? Who made that decision? Why not a more active game like Squad or Battlefront 2 (a lot more examples)?

My question, like MANY OTHERS IN GFL, what is being done? What events are planned? Where is the transparency? (Besides the yawn-fest of Director Meetings. You know you don't share everything there, let's not lie.) Why are we still focusing on what LBG is? Where can improvements be made? Why aren't we getting the help we need? What is causing the stagnation/decline? Can we remedy it? Can we address the community in a formal way? Why are we permanently banning managers with no malintent for meaningless violations which every server manager and above can also access? Borderline accusing two members who worked their ass off for the community is not the way to do it. Getting defensive when there are valid criticisms is not the way to do it. Pussyfooting around the conversation is not the way to do it.

Just a casual observing for the sidelines. 🙂

You can also just delete this thread, as you have done many others. Silencing seems to work out until the community dies for good. 😄
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, it's false progress.

(tagging those relevant: @Infra, @Salad, @Aurora, @Ben, @Liloz01)

 

 

 

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

I agree that any system needs to be questioned and be criticized. It is necessary to hear grievances if you truly want to minimize harm. It is sad that censorship has pushed you to this level of anger, but remember that almost nobody wants to be a bad person and they make mistakes like any human.

 

Secondly, I think the lack of transparency in this community is astounding. I wish the active players had more of a say in how servers were managed and that the whole division system wasn't some schoolyard dramafest.

 

Hope this topic sparks a discussion and not a reactionary action. 😕

Edited July 16, 2022 by Sir_Ross
changed word post to topic

[AtomicHeadphones 270 / 6,326]

GFL TRUCKS!!!!

[Infra 714 / 12,401]

I'm not interested in deleting your thread, in fact, I'm a bit surprised that you have that impression - could you please point me towards threads of a similar nature that have been deleted recently?

 

Anyway, I want to answer the questions you've posed and explain certain things:

 

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

Complete random strangers, the server managers could very well have them. I always recommend a VPN and using browsers with built-in VPNs. These two managers have absolutely zero malintent to abuse your IP address due to their resignation. If they wanted to, they would've already.

 

I want to make this explicitly clear before going any further: GFL has a strict Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for a reason. Player data hosted on GFL need to remain within GFL infrastructure for obvious reasons - for example, if were to be audited for a potential GDPR violation, having no control over where and how this data is used is an immediate major violation. It's also a shitty thing to do to have player data be shuffled to external infrastructure in general, and players deserve to know if something like this were to happen, because it is a fault of ours. This is not intended to be slander, we are merely keeping players informed of a mishap on our part.

 

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

Everyone is way too focused on Roy leaving the community and creating LBG (and accusing Roy of poaching staff members).

 

I will be very honest and say we genuinely do not have much concern or spite for LBG, even though I know me saying this is going to piss off certain people that insist we do. If we did, we'd have just banned everyone that went there and not thought of it twice. Plenty of people left GFL to support them, and did so on very amicable terms. Besides, they have quite literally done nothing to us negatively as a whole, so we have near to no reason to be concerned, apart from the fact that Roy threatened to end us when he got mad that we wouldn't ban him - but those are his personal actions and not LBGs.

 

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

What gaming community is run like a company? You mentioned in the example post I provided that a lot of communities do; they don't, but please provide an example of one.

 

(In no particular order) EdgeGamers & IceFuse are both very large, and they are both run relatively the same - the simple reason is that they, like us, have grown to certain extents and their needs have changed: you cannot treat large communities (that have sub-communities within) the same with 1 or 2 sole people responsible for them. If anything, we need to be learning from other similar scale communities on what works better. It's just better this way - it allows these communities to stand together and do things that they find better for themselves. It's happened many times in the past and its a sentiment still shared today: no one likes someone like myself coming to their community and trying to interject themselves into how things are run, especially when I have no experience playing the game or anything like that.

 

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

What isn't more of that done regarding how SUCCESSFUL it was? Why go back to making useless servers like Physion Unturned?

 

We definitely will be pursuing events like this more from now! This was our very first step into that scale of initiative, and clearly a lot of players really enjoyed it - we will definitely be pursuing this more. Furthermore, with regards to Physion, I think an average of 60 players every day isn't useless at all, but we will try our hand at other games too: of course, not everything will succeed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. For example, Unturned has a rather good standing on Steam Charts, so we gave it a shot and it seems people quite enjoy it. If we hadn't tried, wouldn't we never have known that such initiatives would go well, right?

 

I fully agree with you when you say that transparency and communication is an issue at the moment. We just aren't doing good enough, and I will fully accept that as a major fault, largely on my part - I take responsibility for that. I have been dealing with quite an amount of IRL responsibilities and I haven't been able to be as quick as I would have liked with discussing and rolling out changes to these systems - but I will admit that we need to be doing better at this. I understand that the public meetings are very boring, but I do still think they are an important part of it all, as its far more natural to sit down and chat about things rather than just be monotonous on a forum post. But even there, we are missing on some core parts that could very easily be better - for example, we should be doing post-meeting threads with summaries so people can read and easily throw ideas/criticism/feedback at things, and it can all be kept track of.

 

All this said, I will be hosting a discussion w/ a major status update on GFL as a whole in the upcoming public meeting. This will cover a brief overview of how we're doing and our current standing, our current focuses, things we will be improving on immediately and long-term - all to be discussed in the upcoming public meeting (which will be announced in a day or two). If you'd like to be a part of that, please do attend so we can chat about it.

 

Besides that, we truly are trying to improve things on this front and a few others, I sincerely apologise to everyone for the delay on this. I know I've said in the past that things will be improving, and while things have slowly improved since then, we will be trying to do better and I hope to have updates on these improvements soon. 🙂

[Salad 1,132 / 18,982]

Going to address this in sections, bare with me, you said a lot so I will be doing the same.

 

Infra beat me to the punch and addressed the Prop Hunt situation better than I could have worded it, so we're covered on that.

 

39 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

The directors are more focused on their emotions and taking every constructive criticism to heart (ex: GFL - GFL and a "Mentality of Stagnation") than actually addressing the valid concerns of the community. Everyone is way too focused on Roy leaving the community and creating LBG (and accusing Roy of poaching staff members).

So, I'm not quite sure you read the thread you linked based on this take, and if you did I suggest rereading the comments Infra and I made, I believe that will help clear up some of the misconceptions you seem to have. As for concerns of LBG, we treat it like any other community, we don't really care. We're doing our own thing, and we don't typically care or feel a need to worry about others. We do tend to care in specific instances of course, but generally we tend to stick to ourselves.

 

48 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

There are genuinely good things being done that I have seen; I can see the effort that went into the Surf event. What isn't more of that done regarding how SUCCESSFUL it was? Why go back to making useless servers like Physion Unturned? Who made that decision? Why not a more active game like Squad or Battlefront 2 (a lot more examples)?

So, the Surf event was very good I agree, but these things take time and we can't really constantly do things like that, it's just not feasible. We do have plans for more big events and similar things down the road, but these things take time, and nothing is set in stone as of yet. As for Unturned, it may surprise you that Unturned has quite the dedicated playerbase.
If we just compare the last 6 months, you can see the stats (Unturned is the blue line):

Expansions to further games are always good, but as it stands I am focusing on improving what we have currently before any expansions to new games (This may change depending on circumstance).

Ok rapidfire time for your last paragraph:
 

55 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

what is being done?

A lot, check out our plans and what Infra and I are working on accomplishing in our responses on this post: 

 

57 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Why are we still focusing on what LBG is?

We aren't, touched on above in this very post I'm typing.

 

57 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Where can improvements be made?

A lot of places in our various divisions, as mentioned in this thread by Infra and myself: 

 

58 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

What is causing the stagnation/decline? Can we remedy it?

 

Quick summary is this: GFL, and all communities go through waves, ups and downs, cycles. It's natural, we have plans to help improve areas of GFL, as mentioned on the above thread. Read my reply on this thread for a bit more on my thoughts because it's far too much to rewrite:

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

You can also just delete this thread, as you have done many others. Silencing seems to work out until the community dies for good.

I can't remember a time where we've deleted a thread like this, but maybe we have and i forgor.

 

 

If I failed to address any of your points, please let me know and I can try to reply more on it 🙂

[sntt 9 / 0]

Hey Infra, thank you for taking time out of your day to respond in a professional manner.
 

4 minutes ago, Infra said:

I want to make this explicitly clear before going any further: GFL has a strict Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for a reason. Player data hosted on GFL need to remain within GFL infrastructure for obvious reasons - for example, if were to be audited for a potential GDPR violation, having no control over where and how this data is used is an immediate major violation. It's also a shitty thing to do to have player data be shuffled to external infrastructure in general, and players deserve to know if something like this were to happen, because it is a fault of ours. This is not intended to be slander, we are merely keeping players informed of a mishap on our part.

If there is a strict private policy & terms of use, these should be way more upfront then hidden away once you sign up to the forum or join the Discord. How would one go about accessing that information? Can there be an easier way to read & access them or is it only pertaining to Server Admins+? (i.e in the Discord #rules chat). I highly doubt, if ever, the European Union will audit a gaming community that does not even break the active membership of smaller scale businesses for any GDPR violations. This would also only apply to European users, but to point this further, GDPR only states you have the right to view and delete your information; nothing about unpaid "managers" having access to it. Is GFL following this within GDPR procedures? 
 

9 minutes ago, Infra said:

I will be very honest and say we genuinely do not have much concern or spite for LBG, even though I know me saying this is going to piss off certain people that insist we do. If we did, we'd have just banned everyone that went there and not thought of it twice. Plenty of people left GFL to support them, and did so on very amicable terms. Besides, they have quite literally done nothing to us negatively as a whole, so we have near to no reason to be concerned, apart from the fact that Roy threatened to end us when he got mad that we wouldn't ban him - but those are his personal actions and not LBGs.

I will not debate the truth of this paragraph; however, I will go by the public actions and screenshots that have been shared (as well as Roy's rant the day the incident occurred). It seems a lot, if not all, people who left to LBG have been outcasted by the others in GFL which would lead them to doing things they normally won't do due to feeling unappreciated/jaded. Everyone is human but people who left GFL for LBG have felt very jaded in GFL for a long time or underappreciated for the work they do. As controversial as this is, Roy has the right to threaten. At the time, he did have access & is the founder of GFL. If he saw fit to ban everyone, he very well could've; it's his brainchild at the end of the day. Now? No, but I can see the line of thinking back then. (he was also drunk).

 

13 minutes ago, Infra said:

(In no particular order) EdgeGamers & IceFuse are both very large, and they are both run relatively the same - the simple reason is that they, like us, have grown to certain extents and their needs have changed: you cannot treat large communities (that have sub-communities within) the same with 1 or 2 sole people responsible for them. If anything, we need to be learning from other similar scale communities on what works better. It's just better this way - it allows these communities to stand together and do things that they find better for themselves. It's happened many times in the past and its a sentiment still shared today: no one likes someone like myself coming to their community and trying to interject themselves into how things are run, especially when I have no experience playing the game or anything like that.

In regard to those two communities, they are far more active with way more transparency on what goes on to their day-to-day tasks. If what they are doing is working, are we able to copy/improve upon what they built upon? It seems the system GFL is using is at a much lesser extent. My philosophy is a community is best managed by one-two people with assistants but I'd love to be proved wrong so I can improve my own communities. I know you mentioned you want to learn with/from them, are you in contact with any of their representatives/owners to see what worked well for them to be able to successfully implement it into GFL?

 

 

17 minutes ago, Infra said:

We definitely will be pursuing events like this more from now! This was our very first step into that scale of initiative, and clearly a lot of players really enjoyed it - we will definitely be pursuing this more. Furthermore, with regards to Physion, I think an average of 60 players every day isn't useless at all, but we will try our hand at other games too: of course, not everything will succeed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. For example, Unturned has a rather good standing on Steam Charts, so we gave it a shot and it seems people quite enjoy it. If we hadn't tried, wouldn't we never have known that such initiatives would go well, right?

 

I fully agree with you when you say that transparency and communication is an issue at the moment. We just aren't doing good enough, and I will fully accept that as a major fault, largely on my part - I take responsibility for that. I have been dealing with quite an amount of IRL responsibilities and I haven't been able to be as quick as I would have liked with discussing and rolling out changes to these systems - but I will admit that we need to be doing better at this. I understand that the public meetings are very boring, but I do still think they are an important part of it all, as its far more natural to sit down and chat about things rather than just be monotonous on a forum post. But even there, we are missing on some core parts that could very easily be better - for example, we should be doing post-meeting threads with summaries so people can read and easily throw ideas/criticism/feedback at things, and it can all be kept track of.

 

All this said, I will be hosting a discussion w/ a major status update on GFL as a whole in the upcoming public meeting. This will cover a brief overview of how we're doing and our current standing, our current focuses, things we will be improving on immediately and long-term - all to be discussed in the upcoming public meeting (which will be announced in a day or two). If you'd like to be a part of that, please do attend so we can chat about it.

 

Besides that, we truly are trying to improve things on this front and a few others, I sincerely apologise to everyone for the delay on this. I know I've said in the past that things will be improving, and while things have improved since then, we will be trying to do better. 🙂

I'm glad action is being taken after @Dragoon's post, or maybe even before that. I wish (and to not put all blame on you), the other directors could've been transparent about the actions happening behind closed doors so the common member can put in their two cents. Physion is not as active as some games I have mentioned, I just don't see what the urgency of going for that before going for the more heavily populated games. Thank you for taking responsibility but this all doesn't fall on just you; you have a support system of administrators, directors, managers, leaders & moderators, utilize the people you have to help you bring the community to the best it can be. 

As for deleting posts, it happens. Maybe before your takeover but I have seen it a lot. I will be at that meeting.

(I will edit or reply if I feel I needed to say more, it's currently 11 PM.)

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

16 minutes ago, Infra said:

We definitely will be pursuing events like this more from now! This was our very first step into that scale of initiative, and clearly a lot of players really enjoyed it - we will definitely be pursuing this more. Furthermore, with regards to Physion, I think an average of 60 players every day isn't useless at all, but we will try our hand at other games too: of course, not everything will succeed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. For example, Unturned has a rather good standing on Steam Charts, so we gave it a shot and it seems people quite enjoy it. If we hadn't tried, wouldn't we never have known that such initiatives would go well, right?

 

 Out of curiosity, where does the leadership sit on the issue of community fun versus profitability. To elaborate: on a sheer monetary scale, some of the servers (notably the CS:S servers) do not turn much, if any, profit; however, those servers are thoroughly enjoyed by a lot of people. Tradition can be a burden, but I think it is important to remember that a gaming community isn't for making money, but rather to provide a community for gaming. 

 

What I am getting at is: how much do you and others value player's entertainment against profit?

[lobsterpaw 174 / 3,327]

r/gfl_cj

[Anathema Device 236 / 6,863]

2 minutes ago, Sir_Ross said:

 Out of curiosity, where does the leadership sit on the issue of community fun versus profitability. To elaborate: on a sheer monetary scale, some of the servers (notably the CS:S servers) do not turn much, if any, profit; however, those servers are thoroughly enjoyed by a lot of people. Tradition can be a burden, but I think it is important to remember that a gaming community isn't for making money, but rather to provide a community for gaming. 

 

What I am getting at is: how much do you and others value player's entertainment against profit?

I think it's an interesting and tough question, because at what point do servers that were fun become servers that don't drive the community anymore, so they lose-lose (demoralizing seeing the server dying, while also wasting space on the server machine).

Also I don't think GFL leans super into monetization in a way that would destroy community, and it isn't like they're yanking servers out from underneath people. To roughly quote Salad (pls don't ban me pls) "Hi I'm Salad and GFL pays for hosting banks, not individual servers"

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

18 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

In regard to those two communities, they are far more active with way more transparency on what goes on to their day-to-day tasks. If what they are doing is working, are we able to copy/improve upon what they built upon? It seems the system GFL is using is at a much lesser extent. My philosophy is a community is best managed by one-two people with assistants but I'd love to be proved wrong so I can improve my own communities. I know you mentioned you want to learn with/from them, are you in contact with any of their representatives/owners to see what worked well for them to be able to successfully implement it into GFL?

 

I have also seen that a 1-2 person leadership works best. I have been a part of a Minecraft community since 2012 and I am basically the second-in-command since 2014. We tried to decentralize and our community collapsed. We rebuilt with leaders of each of our different servers, and we collapsed. We then went to a more unified approach where one main leader basically delegated and directed the admins on how they should maintain the servers, and it has been doing better. 

 

My point is that I think councils are the worst possible solution to leadership, but I would love to be proven wrong as well.

 

8 minutes ago, Anathema Device said:

I think it's an interesting and tough question, because at what point do servers that were fun become servers that don't drive the community anymore, so they lose-lose (demoralizing seeing the server dying, while also wasting space on the server machine).

Also I don't think GFL leans super into monetization in a way that would destroy community, and it isn't like they're yanking servers out from underneath people. To roughly quote Salad (pls don't ban me pls) "Hi I'm Salad and GFL pays for hosting banks, not individual servers"

It is a difficult question, but it is ever more relevant to the CS:S servers. GFL is the last bastion of American CS:S servers (that aren't stupid like GP), and I struggle to think what would happen if GFL did pull the rug. I know some servers that might take in a wayward community, but I really hope it doesn't have to come to that. I just worry that, sorry to be so blunt in advance, CS:S ZE will have to leave GFL again just to even exist (assuming the worst case in that GFL cuts support)

Edited July 16, 2022 by Sir_Ross

[Infra 714 / 12,401]

23 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

these should be way more upfront then hidden away once you sign up to the forum or join the Discord. How would one go about accessing that information? Can there be an easier way to read & access them or is it only pertaining to Server Admins+? (i.e in the Discord #rules chat). I highly doubt, if ever, the European Union will audit a gaming community that does not even break the active membership of smaller scale businesses for any GDPR violations. This would also only apply to European users, but to point this further, GDPR only states you have the right to view and delete your information; nothing about unpaid "managers" having access to it. Is GFL following this within GDPR procedures? 

 

These are agreed to when signing up, and terms apply to all members, staff or not. Furthermore, while it is true that GDPR is an EU policy set and applies to specific points of data security, there are other data security requirements that we are entitled to fulfill to protect our players, and not just for legal requirements. It is just not right for us or ANY entity (be it a gaming community or a business) to throw that to the side, and people are completely in the right to report and/or take legal action if one were to engage in unethical practices or not tend/be honest about mishaps.

 

Staff of GFL are considered as a part of GFL, and thus we have policies (internally too, with the Code of Conduct and other infrastructure policies) to protect players.

 

23 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Everyone is human but people who left GFL for LBG have felt very jaded in GFL for a long time or underappreciated for the work they do. As controversial as this is, Roy has the right to threaten.

 

True, it is completely understandable that some people felt underappreciated, I would do the same too. (Fun Fact: I almost did leave because our efforts over at CS:GO were going to waste due to our networking issues at the time and because things were not being addressed when we reached out for help. I think a lot of ex-staff remember this time, mainly from Rust lol)

 

However, no one has the right to threaten an entire community of people and all their work over petty shit like that. No one. GFL did not come this far because of just him, and I highly doubt he would ever say that either - GFL is the result of everyone's collective efforts until this point and over the many years that have passed. Threatening to ruin nearly 11 years worth of something that amazing is beyond unacceptable, no matter who does it.

 

23 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

In regard to those two communities, they are far more active with way more transparency on what goes on to their day-to-day tasks. If what they are doing is working, are we able to copy/improve upon what they built upon?

 

I will not comment on specific communities, but a lot of them are actually far less transparent than us - however, there are plenty that we can learn from, and we really should be learning from them and adapting to better practices. As for relationships, we do have contacts at a lot of these major communities, and we often do share and talk about things that worked for us and them so we can collectively improve ourselves. After all, we're all pretty much nothing without these different communities, so improvement for one is improvement for all 😄

 

23 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

As for deleting posts, it happens. Maybe before your takeover but I have seen it a lot. I will be at that meeting.

(I will edit or reply if I feel I needed to say more, it's currently 11 PM.)

 

It may have happened in the past, but we try not for it to happen ever again. I'm glad to hear you'll be there, looking forward to discussing stuff further! For anyone else reading this, I hope this encourages y'all to attend too - I know it can be a bit boring, but it's a great opportunity for all of us to sit together and talk about stuff.

 

@Sir_Ross

22 minutes ago, Sir_Ross said:

What I am getting at is: how much do you and others value player's entertainment against profit?

 

Not a lot, our standing is: if we are sustainable at the moment as a whole, and we can provide experiences that people enjoy, we should keep them around even if they aren't profitable. For example, and no offense to any division or anything like that, TF2 and CS:S (like you mentioned) may not bring in a lot of donations, but they are enjoyed by people and so they should be supported as long as GFL, as a whole, is able to support them.

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

4 minutes ago, Infra said:

Not a lot, our standing is: if we are sustainable at the moment as a whole, and we can provide experiences that people enjoy, we should keep them around even if they aren't profitable. For example, and no offense to any division or anything like that, TF2 and CS:S (like you mentioned) may not bring in a lot of donations, but they are enjoyed by people and so they should be supported as long as GFL, as a whole, is able to support them.

This is the most reassuring thing I have read all year ❤️

[Dragoon 385 / 10,460]

1 hour ago, Bretoni said:

Breaking records of inactivity, it's easier to hide it when you delete the dead servers that had their player base leave because of Anycast / AS2 Cache removal or toxic community environment. They left because this community sucks.

I don't know how best to start this off, so... Hello...? Anyways, I'm active across multiple servers and multiple divisions, and while I'm not going to dispute your opinion on the latter sentence, there's one thing that I'd like to ask. I've seen quite a few people point out that GFL has has some servers which were deleted and that it's dying because of that. There are indeed some servers that are on trying times, but they're still kicking despite the general odds that people give them. Are you okay with mentioning some examples (Maybe something like TTT MC, if that's what your opinion is)?

 

7 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

It seems a lot, if not all, people who left to LBG have been outcasted by the others in GFL which would lead them to doing things they normally won't do due to feeling unappreciated/jaded. Everyone is human but people who left GFL for LBG have felt very jaded in GFL for a long time or underappreciated for the work they do.

Yeah. I know a few people who tried to do their best, but they really just felt like they couldn't do anything (Even though there's a lot more than what's on the surface). It's really all just complex, you know?

[sntt 9 / 0]

Before we delve further into the topic, I want to re-address points not clarified. If they have, forgive me.

The two server managers who have worked their ass off to help GFL thrive was essentially tossed to the side after they made the transition over to LBG (or after they resigned). This is extremely ironic considering an active director has done what you are accusing them of in the past, but he was allowed back in and even allowed to take higher positions with GFL internally. (Not exactly, but well enough close). This makes it extremely hard to believe that no one in GFL cares for LBG, as the bans just seem more of an "about time lol we got rid of them posers" than a proper punishment. I feel like more talks could've taken place with a better transition of power instead of slandering their name into the mud because of a "possibility" that didn't happen. I hope this situation was studied much more in detailed internally, but that also goes back to your point. If you are working on transparency, can't all details be released so we KNOW what exactly happened and can protect ourselves per any regulations an agency may enforce?
 

7 minutes ago, Infra said:

Not a lot, our standing is: if we are sustainable at the moment as a whole, and we can provide experiences that people enjoy, we should keep them around even if they aren't profitable. For example, and no offense to any division or anything like that, TF2 and CS:S (like you mentioned) may not bring in a lot of donations, but they are enjoyed by people and so they should be supported as long as GFL, as a whole, is able to support them.

Back to the Physion Unturned point that @Salad provided activity history on in comparison to GMOD. (Which is a very skewed graph, why not make it against a more active community like Minecraft, TF2, etc.?) Is Unturned more profitable than other potential games so we can have fun servers that do not make a lot of money?
 

9 minutes ago, Infra said:

I will not comment on specific communities, but a lot of them are actually far less transparent than us - however, there are plenty that we can learn from, and we really should be learning from them and adapting to better practices. As for relationships, we do have contacts at a lot of these major communities, and we often do share and talk about things that worked for us and them so we can collectively improve ourselves. After all, we're all pretty much nothing without these different communities, so improvement for one is improvement for all 😄

I was going off by the two you provided, and their front page is easily way more transparent than ours. I'm happy talks are in place, but how long have these talks been going on? Has there been zero change since then? I feel like a Trello (or more-over a board) of what has been changed so far can help a lot of us put our doubts away and have full faith behind the team supporting GFL.
 

10 minutes ago, Infra said:

True, it is completely understandable that some people felt underappreciated, I would do the same too.

 

However, no one has the right to threaten an entire community of people and all their work over petty shit like that. No one. GFL did not come this far because of just him, and I highly doubt he would ever say that either - GFL is the result of everyone's collective efforts until this point and over the many years that have passed. Threatening to ruin nearly 11 years worth of something that amazing is beyond unacceptable, no matter who does it.

I should've word it better, of course he shouldn't do what a community collective helped build towards; no denying that, however throwing it under the bus like that in reply to my message is deflecting blame. Could it have been possible to have talks with him more in-depth before it went way too public or was it essentially impossible without going into grimy details? The issue shouldn't have been community-knowledge either way, as the founder will always represent the image of their company. (Take the creator of Minecraft for example and how Microsoft scrubbed him out). However, you are right; I will retract my statement on that front.

Blaming users who left because they did something slightly/somewhat/highly sketchy and banning them is not the way to go then proceeding to shift the blame on why they left GFL to LBG isn't the way to go either. They left because they felt jaded, not because they were being rude/demeaning to staff. I'm sure they would've all loved to see GFL thrive so much.

 

14 minutes ago, Infra said:

These are agreed to when signing up, and terms apply to all members, staff or not. Furthermore, while it is true that GDPR is an EU policy set and applies to specific points of data security, there are other data security requirements that we are entitled to fulfill to protect our players, and not just for legal requirements. It is just not right for us or ANY entity (be it a gaming community or a business) to throw that to the side, and people are completely in the right to report and/or take legal action if one were to engage in unethical practices or not tend/be honest about mishaps.

 

Staff of GFL are considered as a part of GFL, and thus we have policies (internally too, with the Code of Conduct and other infrastructure policies) to protect players.

I just noticed it, but as for people who do not use the forum, how would they be able to see the policies & code of conduct? Can we also see the code of conduct for moderators+ so we know if there are any biases, we can escalate to the proper people in charge and we know the steps they take before dishing out any punishments? I know GFL Internal Discord use to be a great place to shit-talk users' moderators did not like, is it still like that? I sincerely hope not.


Hi @Salad, thank you for taking time on this as well but many of your points was also addressed to Infra. If I missed any, someone please let me know. It is true that all communities go through waves, but this wave is going on far longer than previous ones. I have read that thread, and a lot of it was tap dancing around the conversation or an extremely wordy statistic post that did not correlate to the issues at hand at all. Which is why I am making this one to make it more concise & cleaner.

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

8 minutes ago, Dragoon said:

I don't know how best to start this off, so... Hello...? Anyways, I'm active across multiple servers and multiple divisions, and while I'm not going to dispute your opinion on the latter sentence, there's one thing that I'd like to ask. I've seen quite a few people point out that GFL has has some servers which were deleted and that it's dying because of that. There are indeed some servers that are on trying times, but they're still kicking despite the general odds that people give them. Are you okay with mentioning some examples (Maybe something like TTT MC, if that's what your opinion is)?

Where is GMOD Zombie Survival? It is the first GFL server I played on and it is missing from my server browser (and my heart).

Edited July 16, 2022 by Sir_Ross

[sntt 9 / 0]

6 minutes ago, Dragoon said:

I don't know how best to start this off, so... Hello...? Anyways, I'm active across multiple servers and multiple divisions, and while I'm not going to dispute your opinion on the latter sentence, there's one thing that I'd like to ask. I've seen quite a few people point out that GFL has has some servers which were deleted and that it's dying because of that. There are indeed some servers that are on trying times, but they're still kicking despite the general odds that people give them. Are you okay with mentioning some examples (Maybe something like TTT MC, if that's what your opinion is)?

A lot of GMOD servers which were once extremely active became dead then deleted. It's not because GMOD is dying (it actually is rising in popularity according to YouTube statistics), it's because other servers offer better experiences with easier communities to adjust into, this resulting in an active playerbase that stays for the server. It wasn't touched upon, and I know it was deleted due to Roy's departure and him being the only one that knows it, A2S Cache & Anycast did help a lot. Was it not possible to have someone train themselves/get experience with using Anycast? It only crashed a lot if there was no one to maintain it.

[Dragoon 385 / 10,460]

44 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

A lot of GMOD servers which were once extremely active became dead then deleted.

I've been around in GMod as a whole since 2020 (Even though I joined HNS in 2017), and since then, I remember that there were 7 closed servers. Firstly, there's Zombie Escape. I don't know why it was closed, but there were definitely reasons that led to its closure. I'm sorry for being rather airheaded when it comes to GMod's ZE. I wasn't really around during that early point in 2020. More closed servers include nZombies, Among Us, and Minigames. To my knowledge, while a couple of them were active around launch, these three servers didn't or couldn't gain enough traction or direct management going forward. Next up, DarkRP. From what I know, it was sort of similar to the previous two servers, but it ended up being closed for reasons I don't know. Besides that, there was also TTT MC, like I mentioned before. Though the circumstances regarding its initial closure were highly complex, I'm not so much aware of why it was closed again. I believe that it didn't get high population, but please don't hold me to that.

The last server I'm going to touch on is Half-Life: Co-Op. Frankly, I feel that this server could have been left up since it didn't take all that much to manage. I was an Admin there for a bit (As well as one of the three people who were most active there), and I never had to mute or ban a single person. It was a low moderation type of server, and even though it only had the original maps for Half-Life, it had a high replay value (I'm unaware if the maps for Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Decay have been added, but if they have, that'd be really cool). There weren't any staff there, and so it eventually got taken down. When it comes to a low population server hosted in GMod, Horde has been a good successor to it.

This post is really wordy, and I'm sorry if it has been hard to follow. Of the servers I've covered, some of them closed before Roy left, and others closed for reasons unrelated to Anycast. If I either forgot a server or was mistaken in any reasons related to Anycast, please feel free to correct me and I'll admit fault for messing up there. Besides this, something I can definitely tell you is that we're looking to prop GMod up to be in a better position. While it might take some time to get down, I personally hope that it can work out. 

Edited July 16, 2022 by Dragoon

[Infra 714 / 12,401]

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

I feel like more talks could've taken place with a better transition of power instead of slandering their name into the mud because of a "possibility" that didn't happen. I hope this situation was studied much more in detailed internally, but that also goes back to your point. If you are working on transparency, can't all details be released so we KNOW what exactly happened and can protect ourselves per any regulations an agency may enforce?

 

I would like to make clear that one of the two people you are talking about specifically with the more "questionable" violation, no names, was reached out to by me 2 days before the ban was considered, as I know talking things through is what's required - I was intentionally ignored until the ban was placed.

 

Also, I hold the opinion that posting details of what people did can go the wrong way - while these people were banned, it is also not right that we "expose" them in public and turn it into a shit flinging contest, it may even come off as if we're crucifying them in public, which could set a worse impression. Not everyone has the worst intentions, you're right, a lot of these types of situations could just be mistakes made in the heat of the moment - that said, actions have consequences.

 

Since you would like more information however, I will state that one of them was permanently banned for security practice violations and the other was permanently banned for being an accomplice AND for intentionally disrupting/disabling a live server.

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

This is extremely ironic considering an active director has done what you are accusing them of in the past, but he was allowed back in and even allowed to take higher positions with GFL internally.

 

I know you're talking about @Salad. He was banned for a little over 4 years, and has been 6 years since the ban was placed. He came back with the intention of helping out and the chance was given. Again, not everyone has the worst intentions, but actions have consequences and even he had to deal with that.

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Back to the Physion Unturned point that @Salad provided activity history on in comparison to GMOD. (Which is a very skewed graph, why not make it against a more active community like Minecraft, TF2, etc.?) Is Unturned more profitable than other potential games so we can have fun servers that do not make a lot of money?

 

Am not Salad but I figured I'd just respond since I'm anyway here lul - I think the purpose of what Salad showed was to demonstrate that the game is not as small as people think it is, and that there was significant potential to build something there: and that was true. We should explore more games down the line too with a similar mindset.

 

Here's a comparison with TF2, CS:S and GMod (Three of our other divisions. CS:GO was excluded because it makes the graph unreadable):

 

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Has there been zero change since then?

 

There hasn't been zero change, but it has been slower than ideal for sure. I think compared to about 6-12 months ago, communications within the community, including internally, have improved significantly - we've gone from literally no one knowing what was going on to a significant number of people knowing what's going on. There is plenty of room for improvement however, and we need to continue working on that. Things kinda slowed down when people got busy, which is natural, hence why I brought that up in my first response - just as a simple explanation for why things have slowed down recently.

 

A Trello board could be a good way of going about it, it may be a little messy to keep track of if it becomes too long - currently, I am working towards "roadmapping" things in the form of articles/update posts. We somewhat already do this with statuses in Council meetings, but its not exactly the best in its current state, that'll be the first place these changes come to as there is an immense amount of potential there.

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Could it have been possible to have talks with him more in-depth before it went way too public or was it essentially impossible without going into grimy details?

 

Well, we did - he came to us asking to be banned for no reason, we said no, we then hopped in a call for 50 minutes where he ultimately threatened us because we wouldn't ban him. So we gave in to his demands, isolated him from GFL like he wanted, and moved on.

 

We actually did not want to make it public (in fact, we did not make a statement or anything on the forums, although maybe we should have). The reasoning for that is already highlighted at the beginning of my response, but maybe we should have, idk - still indecisive about it. On one hand, I really wanted to be upfront about it so people know what happened, but I also didn't want to seem like we were dragging Roy through the dirt. It's just an icky thing to do.

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

Blaming users who left because they did something slightly/somewhat/highly sketchy and banning them is not the way to go then proceeding to shift the blame on why they left GFL to LBG isn't the way to go either. They left because they felt jaded, not because they were being rude/demeaning to staff. I'm sure they would've all loved to see GFL thrive so much.

 

We have not banned anyone simply because they left. Anyone related that has been banned was banned for specific serious violations and nothing more. Again, if we did have spite for them, we would've banned every single person that left - we didn't, because again, most people left on good terms and didn't harm us after the fact.

 

Again, I fully understand a lot of people felt jaded and underappreciated, that's on us. If they're happier elsewhere, that's great for them, and it's a fault on our end that we should improve on.

 

51 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

how would they be able to see the policies & code of conduct? Can we also see the code of conduct for moderators+ so we know if there are any biases, we can escalate to the proper people in charge and we know the steps they take before dishing out any punishments? I know GFL Internal Discord use to be a great place to shit-talk users' moderators did not like, is it still like that? I sincerely hope not.

 

Anyone using ANY service hosted by GFL is protected by our Privacy Policies and Terms of Service. Any staff on GFL needs an account on the website + must acknowledge that they will follow the Code Conduct. The Code of Conduct used for any staff is already fully public: https://gflclan.com/topic/70631-gfl-staff-code-of-conduct/

 

 

Furthermore, that has absolutely changed - that changed quite a while back, especially with the introduction of the Code of Conduct. The olden days were rather shite lol, you're definitely right. I can assure you that has changed significantly, and we will not be going back to those icky practices.

 

43 minutes ago, Bretoni said:

t's because other servers offer better experiences with easier communities to adjust into, this resulting in an active playerbase that stays for the server. It wasn't touched upon, and I know it was deleted due to Roy's departure and him being the only one that knows it, A2S Cache & Anycast did help a lot. Was it not possible to have someone train themselves/get experience with using Anycast? It only crashed a lot if there was no one to maintain it.

 

I agree, and I said this in the Stagnation thread - other servers offered better, and so we lost out. Removal of our previous A2S caching system showed this. Of course, we can just start doing the same thing we were doing back then (i.e spoofing pings half way across the world), but the ethics of it is still very icky and we can get very far without needing to resort to such means.

 

And no, it was not possible. I actually offered to learn about it to assist Roy way back then, but he never had the time and so it never happened - just wanna make it clear that's not really his fault, he was a busy guy with a new job at the time. It was just an unfortunate set of circumstances, so we instead moved to a commercial solution maintained by an actual team of on-call networking professionals.

[Sir_Ross 42 / 3,192]

I’m a little too drunk to do the proper formatting for quotes and I am on my phone.

 

@Infra 

Here is an anecdote from my community management experience to reinforce what you said about @Salad:

In 2010, a Minecraft community was made. It had a lot of growth until one day, in 2012, a founding member had a breakdown and “rm -rf /“ the whole server.

We lost everything except our website and the community hard died. It wasn’t until 2014 when I joined the ghost of a server and ran into another player that it started to revive. I messaged a bunch of old players and the person I bumped into helped me revive the community from the ground up.

Jump forward to 2017, we have many servers running and thousands of players who have joined. The guy who deleted the original server comes back. We know he is a good programmer and he has a job, wife, and a kid now. We decide to put faith in him and assume he was being a dumb teenager.

In 2022, I am so happy we gave him a second chance, because he is a foundational part of our community and he has more than made up for his past mistakes. At this point, he has added more than he ever deleted.

 

Sorry to hit you with a wall of text, but I thought it might be relevant ❤️

[Liloz01 1,256 / 19,845]

I'm not all that sure why I was tagged in the O.P. The post seems to be mostly related to Prop Hunt and server stuff which I'm not really a part of (not Council, not server staff) but if you would like for me to respond to anything specific anyway please let me know.

---

Regardless, I would like to touch this quote and one other quote later on:

4 hours ago, Bretoni said:

The directors are more focused on their emotions and taking every constructive criticism to heart (ex: GFL - GFL and a "Mentality of Stagnation") than actually addressing the valid concerns of the community.

I'd like to try to clarify the emotion discussion on the quoted topic, from my POV:

 

Emotions should be taken in to account if your goal is to be effective in influencing positive outcomes, but I'm not all too sure they are properly considered to the extent they should be by most. All staff are humans (I hope) and if humans are treated well, the outcomes are generally: motivation, focus and happiness; which should be strived for if the goal is to get a positive outcome.

 

The quoted topic resulted in quite a few people feeling demotivated and, imo, it had a general "negative vibe" (not saying that @Dragoon is solely to blame - by the way. Tensions were heightened by many people (including myself to some degree as well)). I think the posts on the topic and the topic itself could have negated or avoided some of the negative emotions by paying closer attention to how the topic be received emotionally. I pointed out this, and hoped to somewhat set "the vibe straight" from there on but quite frankly it got worse almost immediately. I do believe I could have been clearer and I'll try to do better in future.

 

That being said, I do not believe any Director has their emotions as a priority above progress as the quote states. Despite this, it is still a priority of course, one that should not be ignored. Staff are not robots; if you want to make Directors, or ANY level of staffs role a lot easier and fulfilling - being kind is the general way forward. ("General" because some people thrive off of toxic motivation... which is... fine I guess, if it works and doesn't cause harm to others, do what you want really).

 

Besides, to be a staff member you currently can't have your emotions be a primary focus in order to survive in the role, you would quickly spiral into insanity if you took what is thrown at you every day to heart (which is quite the odious truth... that certainly needs some rectifying, I do think, in general, most staff take an erroneous amount of kicks and punches every day, often disguised as "constructive criticism" (especially those "on the frontline" - Server Admins/Managers/Discord Moderators)).

 

Emotions are just something to keep in mind if the goal is to be effective in influencing positive outcomes (or negative, if you want to try and harm and not help).

Spoiler

---

The "other quote":

4 hours ago, Bretoni said:

You can also just delete this thread, as you have done many others. Silencing seems to work out until the community dies for good. 😄

Could you please provide some examples of the "many others" please. I would like to see what went down there to avoid it in future. Topics are usually not deleted, simply hidden, so I could probably dig them up if an accurate description is provided. I do not know of any such cases of this happening though!

---

TL:DR: I believe we all can work on keeping emotions in mind (or start keeping emotions in mind) to be effective (hopefully in a positive direction!) as they do play a not insignificant part in progress and @Bretoni please provide substantiation for the silencing claim as I'd love to investigate!

 

Thanks.