Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1

What you're trying to do is great though, fair play to everyone involved

Dear @nine2 , it has been about a day since I asked you about the timing of this post and I havent received an answer yet https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1695/council-of-setons-exposed-part-1/48 (or did I miss it?). In case I did not miss your answer, please consider answering my question or give me an ETA when you will answer it (if you you have to give an ETA, I would like to hear a reason for the delay aswell, if possible, since you still have the ttime to make posts on the forum).

Please keep in mind, that, as long as you fail providing a satisfying answer, I will have provide the answer myself, which means I either have to assume that you are not interested in admittting a misstake on your side, or you are not interested in communicating in general, or (the worst case) your post was not aimed to contribute to the debate in a productive way, adressing the topic of toxidity in general and especially in ftxcommando's conduct, but only to lower his chances in the election as much as possible.
Either of these conclusions does not show professional conduct from your side (to various degrees), to a degree which I do not think to be acceptable for a councillor.

I hope you can explain your actions and clean up any possible doubts and missunderstandings. In case it was a mistake on your side, I think it would be helpfull for everyone, if you could explain what consequences you drew from it and how these conclusions will influence your future conduct, to regain the confidence in your ability to manage your role as a councillor with the distance and reasonability it requires.

P.S. From my perspective the issue of you showing inappropriate conduct in your role as councillor keeps getting even more urgent with your conduct in this thread https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1712/curbing-toxicity-in-faf/6 . I wish to stress that no other councillor showed siding towards a single party in the election as clear as this (as far as I remember, please correct me if I am wrong so I can ask them aswell to explain their conduct):

"A dozen very loud angry voices have united recently to take me down about my strong stance on toxicity. But we have ten thousand active players.

If you are done with all the attitude in FAF, show it with your vote on election day."

This statement is not neutral. It lacks any broad reasoning for your position, deliberating why you support the person you are supporting.
I hope you can, in addition to providing reasoning to the timing of your post also provide a reasoning why you think this conduct is justified. If your position on what the the role and conduct of a councillor are supposed to be differ from the position I have (as stated above), I think it would benefit the debate if you could explain your idea of what the conduct of a councillor is supposed to be.

This post is deleted!
  • I am working on a external game at the moment which two vocal councilors have a severe problem with. The rest of the council are neutral/positive and they are ok with it so far. People try to make this conversation about my game, but that's a distraction. I have been anti-toxicity forever since the old forums. I even tried to get biass banned from election, well before any of this drama. Also: I have not invented a time machine, yet.

But nine, you should sort this out quietly and privately in the council
I agree and have tried many approaches but sadly that type of thing does not work, and I think most of the council would support that statement.

But nine, this timing is suspicious
I think it makes absolute sense to talk about an election issue before the vote. Unconsciously, FAF is voting for if they want to reduce or promote nasty attitude, and my duty is to make that a conscious decision. Why is the timing such a big deal? There is a week to discuss it.

FtX and Biass seem to get more done than most people, so maybe their way of acting is actually superior.
You have a point there, but why can't we find people who are both nice and effective?
Could it be that nice-effective people stay away due to nasty-effective people?
I know very solid contributors who left like that.

What percentage of player retention do you aim to achieve before beginning external promotions? Assuming people mainly leave due to toxicity also seems like a big leap
Good questions - I don't know. There are some very obvious things we should work on. Get it touch if you want to discuss.

"Nine2 - I want it publicly stated whether the Russian Discord has the same rules applied to it as the official discord. I then want it publicly stated whether a councillor broke the official rules in relation to postings in the discord."
100%. My position has always been that the council should work out what their rules are and then enforce them. It's true - ask an unbiased councilor. The council moves very slowly.

Toxicity in faf is actually not that bad by any gaming standards.
That may be true about the players but my issue is that the behavior of FAF leadership is unnacceptable. I doubt the people running Fortnite call people names.

"Using the FAF vaults in order to gain playtesting for maps, and then planning to remove the maps later to sell exclusively as a part of said game."
I have discussed this AT LENGTH with the council and even biass himself admitted that it's probably fine now that I cleared up the confusion. Good quality maps from my game were offered for FAF use, I was happy to sign any waiver about not removing them later.

"but nine - you told keyser to get fucked"
I did - in a way that did NOT make FAF look bad, in a PRIVATE chat with just him and me, over an old grudge. Is that my worst offence in my 7ish year history on FAF?

"But nine, you don't do any work"
My work is to reduce toxicity and some other issues with onboarding, which is why I got 2 hours sleep after spending 4 hours writing my opening post, before I had to wake up and pack up my house.
I am trying to fix FAF as I see it. The unbiassed councilors would agree that I am very active in council chat, discussing things with them, passionate, trying to create change.


I'm not really going to go back and forth 100 times in this thread (I have had weeks of that in councilor chat already). Just notice for yourself where all the terrible accusations come from and draw your own conclusions. Also notice that I have NOT been fired as I have so far managed to given acceptable answers to the council. If anyone has any hard questions about my "conflict of interest" game feel free to reach out.

Dear community: You have heard different opinions about toxicity, and you have seen attempts to derail from the actual topic. It doesn't really matter what I think. If YOU personally would like to see less attitude in FAF, then I recommend reducing attitude in the council, and voting for Penguin in the election.

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Do note you posted this in the middle of a discussion about your advertisement on the Russian Discord as well as a conversation on why you are trying to expose the community to games entirely irrelevant to FAF on the FAF news in the FAF Council. Do not act like people “failed to get you fired” when your conduct as a Promotions Councillor was being reviewed.

Also, you locked this thread and then proceeded to post that @biass gave you an OK about uploading your game’s maps on FAF. That is false. He has had to review the entire system of licensing for mappers and modders because of the situation related to your game.

You have worked nothing out “privately with the council” because:

  1. I had to personally investigate that your game exists
  2. I had to personally get informed by contributors that you kept hounding them
  3. I had to personally bring up any advertisement about your game TO the Council.

You worked with the Council because I dragged you into the Council to explain things. And as I said before, we were still in the middle of discussing the 3rd point when you posted this.

Do not lock a thread just to get the final word.

@nine2, you are conflating two unrelated types of toxicity. One of which is not relevant at all to the PC election. The other one is presented in circumstances so poor it should not be relevant either. The first one is general toxicity in this online gaming community, and the second one is the “toxicity” you perceived in the council.

Regarding the first type of toxicity: toxicity is commonly present in any competitive environment—including FAF—and in the best case can only be mitigated via moderation (e.g. someone posts a slur, and a moderator acts to delete it, but some people will have seen it in the meantime). Neither PC candidate will likely have much effect on the overall level of toxicity in the community in general, because, as I said, mitigating toxicity is mainly a moderation issue, and it doesn’t appear either candidate even has a clear plan to tackle toxicity in the community.

Regarding the second type of toxicity: what you perceive as “toxicity” in the council chat. Is it up to us, the voters, to judge this “he said, she said” situation, between you and Sheeo against Biass and FtXCommando? This kind of accusatory “toxicity” (read: being offended) is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder. You claim one side is toxic, and the other side claims the same. What are we, as voters without context, who can only hear what will only be biased views from one side or the other, to make of this?

The finger pointing contest from within the council is not relevant at all to the PC election, and in my opinion airing out your dirty laundry in public at this last minute as a hit piece to try to influence the election is extremely unprofessional and unproductive. Since you said you have had these issues for years, this should have been brought up and discussed far sooner—certainly not one week before the PC election and one day before the discussion period ends. We should, and will, vote for the player councillor based on their contributions to the community and what they plan to do.

I did not lock this thread. More slander

I'm not going to get into 100 slanderous posts that dilute the message. The fact that ftx makes things like this up and gets away with it is shameful. It's almost like someone from the council should take a stand. Oh

I revise it to:
“Do not try to get a thread locked 15 minutes after posting the last word when said word actually does contain baseless claims.”

Do you deny that we were in the middle of discussing your advertisements for both your game and other games when you made this post?

Do you deny that the first mention about anything related to your game was by me in the Council chat?

Do you deny that you did not talk to the Council about your game until prompted to do so?

If you have evidence of biass saying it’s OK to post your game’s maps feel free to show it. I have biass saying he didn’t but he cannot post in a locked thread.

Let me know which particular statement I need to provide evidence for.