Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1

Does anyone have an opinion about that we should stop toxicity from councilors?

To those that asked me questions I thought some of them were pretty good points. I write up a proper response soon.

@ftxcommando said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

@sheeo said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

I have not been removed as councilor and the council hasn't been restructured; so for all practical purposes, I'm still administrative councillor and will remain so until a restructure has been decided on. That means I'm involved in day to day operations.

Great, feel free to come into the Council now and give input on votes we do now. I'm talking about the long term future beyond the transition period and I respect your intelligence enough to know you also are aware of that. No point in trying to deflect the crux of this paragraph with pedantic timeline arguments.

What "pedantic timeline arguments"?

Another great example of your trolling argumentative style; attack personally instead of actually considering the subject matter.

Throwing an accusation back at a person when it logically fits them better is not trolling. The logic is above and sound. You have not addressed any aspect of the logic. Just attempted to avoid it through a timeline technicality that would be irrelevant in the long term.

The "logic" you're saying I didn't defend is that somehow I'm power grabbing; yet all the FAF time I've spent this year on—outside of utterly needless debates with you— has been setting up the association and facilitating a transfer of the IP to a group of people.

I did not feel like I needed to explain that.

The board cannot and should not "pledge" anything further than they already have. They are not bound specifically to the council structure and legally cannot permanently delegate away control to non-association members. We've had this discussion.

It's a pledge dude. The point is that the Board has total legal control but they need the Council to accomplish anything they actually want to do. If the contributors aren't on the side of the Board, then it's dead in the water. Same as when the Board isn't on the same page with the Council and just flat out say you can't do something like remove SteamLink.

You're not familiar with Danish law; I'm familiar enough to know that this is not something the association should put into writing, or it might risk losing it's association status. Is your egoistic need for retributtal signature of what you're derogating to be "just a pledge dude" so important that you're willing to risk the legal structure of FAF?

You cannot accuse me of power-grabbing and creating an environment where I do not work with anyone when I've literally been arguing to create said environment and this pledge is the literal evidence of it.

The Board is not LEGALLY bound to anything. Doesn't mean that it doesn't have PRACTICAL limitations.

The board will work with and collaborate with anyone who shares the objectives enshrined into the statutes; which you helped write.

It's more than sufficient.

I can be removed. Are you really saying that I "baited" you into making disparaging remarks? How exactly did I do that?

No you are confusing the issue again and in fact contradicting yourself.

Contradicting myself how?

You can be removed as President of the Board.

That's not what I was referring to.

But you still hold essentially total legal rights of FAF.

Who gave you that idea?

So we remove you and then what? Can we remove you as Admin Councillor? No, we cannot.

You could, if you'd opted to become a part of the association and have voting rights at the general assembly. Instead you opted to leave because you didn't get your way.

I know you cannot because we had a discussion on having Admin Councillor voted upon by the rest of the Council to be a "project manager" back when I was moving to make Council seats accountable by who they are meant to represent and you said that would essentially never be possible.

I said that under the current ownership and legal structure that wouldn't be possible.

And in any case, this was all irrelevant to the point. You cannot be removed from the Council room by anyone in the Council room. You are the admin of the Zulip. That is what I mean by you not being able to be removed.

I don't think I'm the only admin of the zulip. I certainly didn't set it up.

Yes, you did bait me into the response that finally resulted in me being removed for disparaging remarks. I intended to have a discussion about the reality between the total legal control of the Board and the actual day-to-day power held by Councillors and their contributive teams. You instead decided to paint it as a power-grab move by me and the accusation was so baseless that I responded in kind.

It's not baseless.

You have been making power-grabbing moves for a long time and refusing to accept when a group of peers disagree with your views; to the point of reacting quite wildly. If anything this is another proof of that.

That's not what that means.

It means that until there's a use for the money; there's no reason to go out there and promote it and ask for more than we need. I did not make these decisions unilaterally. This was made in collaboration until you came along and decided it wasn't enough and wanted to spend more on tournaments, all by yourself, without asking or including anyone in a discussion about it first.

This was never said anywhere and is just ex-post facto justification. It's my fault that I didn't recognize this? Man, it was like a year ago when the Council even realized how much money was in the Patreon and that we lose like half of it due to income taxes! This literally shocked half the Council to total silence in the voice call!

Yes; another reason why I didn't feel like promoting it further until the association legal structure was setup so we didn't have to absurdly high taxes on it. You were present on that call so how is this ex-post facto justification?

You've been pestering me about payment and donations all year despite knowing that the tax situation wasn't resolved and yet you went out of your way to order a payout in my name regardless. Come on.

That's great; why didn't you bring any of this up to the council? Why didn't you come up with actual uses before complaining that there aren't enough funds?

Because I had worked with Promotion Councillors in the past and they had failed to gain access to the Patreon. I considered the move a waste of time and instead went to consider other solutions.

You've mentioned one councilor and I've never refused him access.

This is why I had to talk to Swkoll about whether we need to create a new Patreon.

You never thought to chat with me about this as well? Or ask for a bigger tournament budget?

A logical place to go to regarding a new patreon or other source of income would be me.

This is a part of the reason why we have FAFLive.

And you did go to me for this. You had me sign the tax paperwork and consider it an official source of FAF funds.

Then you went ahead and withdrew it to your personal paypal without noticing or discussing it with me or anyone in the council.

While knowing that the tax situation wasn't resolved and while I had explicitly asked you to await with any payouts until the association bank accounts were up.

There are still plenty of funds that can be used but no way in hell are you getting the right to spend them without discussing with the rest of the council, which quite clearly appears to be what you want — and what you have been doing with FAFLive.

Don't mind it. We don't even have an actual balance sheet of what funds are in the Patreon, where they have been spent, and how much goes into what expenditures. How am I supposed to discuss where to spend money when I don't even know what I'm working with?

The bank accounts are setup and in due time you'll have all this information. The board is going to discuss how that's going to work.

You said you would set this up for the Council by the way. That never happened.

I last gave an overview at the association meeting, which you attended. Anyone else who's asked in the council has received the information; and I have given statements before to the entire council on calls.

15

I have thoughts -

Not gonna get into the nine/tatsu business, gonna focus down.

FAF had a toxicity problem from the top to the bottom, and it has had it for nearly a decade. The toxicity and lack of dealing with it has left a long trail of casualties in the community, myself included.

I am not going to be naming any names, but here are the thoughts.

If someone is toxic/trolling/irresponsible, their contributions should not be considered when weighing removal or censorship. It doesn't matter if they have made 35 commits, or done a bunch of mod work.... Toxic is toxic, and that crap needs to be cut out of the community.

Opening the client should not be a trauma risk. There have been occasions where I regretted opening FAF on stream, whether it's users named for genital diseases discussing the merits of slavery in the main chat, or strings of slurs as game titles hosted in the multiplayer tab, or getting into a game and being abused continually until the offending player throws the game and some slurs on the way out. Why. Is. There. Not. A. Word. Blacklist. In. The. Client. This is incredibly basic stuff in community management, but for some reason FAF doesn't have it and the people in charge of community/moderation do little to reign it in with permanent/decisive actions.

The councilors should not hold their positions if they cannot conduct themselves professionally. Period. Name-calling, derision, inappropriate gossip/public appeals, mistreatment in any way of a player or community member who approaches them.... If they can't conduct themselves decently, they can't hold a position where they affect FAF.

Maybe this time around something will come of this discussion, but I don't hold out much hope. I got tired of trying a long time ago, and at this point I basically don't interact at all with the main FAF community. It just isn't worth it.

@nine2
I think its pretty damn simple to be honest.
This is from a regular players point of view.

Not someone from past council, not someone who is dumb, someone who keeps up to date and keeps informed.

From a players view point.

It would appear that members of the council are "abusing" their powers.
PURE AND SIMPLE.

FTX is the only councillor minus Biass and a few others that actually play or chat to people regarding FAF.

We as players are not even aloud to know who is on the board. Despite being told one of the reasons for the bloody board was transparency.

To a player based on this thread it would honestly appear you care more about protecting yourself, slandering someone during an election, and trying to protect your game in development than you do care about your responsibilities as a FAF councillor.

Using the little work around oh its not the official discord so it does not break the rules.

Im putting this pure and fucking simple.
If you want to stop toxicity in councillors and discussions.
EVERYONE, I MEAN EVERYONE is held to the exact same standard and rules regardless of their rank/position or "Job" title.

There needs to be transparency between everyone.
ALL THE TIME.

I want to see this game develop more and becomes greater than it ever has.
But from a players view point. We have not seen half the council actually do anything.

Sheeo the patreon page was last updated in 2017 - why is this not updated?
Gyle updates more.

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.

The rest of you shut up and learn to work together.
Is it really that difficult.

From players point of view this place is run like scam call center.

Ras Boi's save lives.

@brnkoinsanity said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

I have thoughts -

Not gonna get into the nine/tatsu business, gonna focus down.

FAF had a toxicity problem from the top to the bottom, and it has had it for nearly a decade. The toxicity and lack of dealing with it has left a long trail of casualties in the community, myself included.

I am not going to be naming any names, but here are the thoughts.

If someone is toxic/trolling/irresponsible, their contributions should not be considered when weighing removal or censorship. It doesn't matter if they have made 35 commits, or done a bunch of mod work.... Toxic is toxic, and that crap needs to be cut out of the community.

Opening the client should not be a trauma risk. There have been occasions where I regretted opening FAF on stream, whether it's users named for genital diseases discussing the merits of slavery in the main chat, or strings of slurs as game titles hosted in the multiplayer tab, or getting into a game and being abused continually until the offending player throws the game and some slurs on the way out. Why. Is. There. Not. A. Word. Blacklist. In. The. Client. This is incredibly basic stuff in community management, but for some reason FAF doesn't have it and the people in charge of community/moderation do little to reign it in with permanent/decisive actions.

The councilors should not hold their positions if they cannot conduct themselves professionally. Period. Name-calling, derision, inappropriate gossip/public appeals, mistreatment in any way of a player or community member who approaches them.... If they can't conduct themselves decently, they can't hold a position where they affect FAF.

Maybe this time around something will come of this discussion, but I don't hold out much hope. I got tired of trying a long time ago, and at this point I basically don't interact at all with the main FAF community. It just isn't worth it.

Honestly:
Brink if you believe this you should name names.

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

@noonecares said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

FTX is the only councillor minus Biass and a few others that actually play or chat to people regarding FAF.

I play occasionally; but very rarely. The toxic environment is a big reason why I don't.

We as players are not even aloud to know who is on the board. Despite being told one of the reasons for the bloody board was transparency.

The board isn't managing day-to-day things so why do you need to know who's on it? You can contact me or anyone from the council about any concerns you might have and they will bring it to the board eventually if it needs to go there.

I'm not against having the list be public but precisely because of toxicity I want board members to have the option to remain private; so they don't get hate-mail from random players.

If you want to engage you have the full right to attend the general assembly and be present to vote on the members and know who are elected.

There needs to be transparency between everyone.
ALL THE TIME.

There just can't.

The moderators need to be able to discuss moderation things in private. The exact financial transactions need to remain private to protect personal information. We have to comply with various legislation and can't just make everything completely transparent.

Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to informing everyone as much as we can; and that's always been a consistent point of failure of the council.

I want to see this game develop more and becomes greater than it ever has.
But from a players view point. We have not seen half the council actually do anything.

I agree the council as currently structured hasn't been very effective. It has eroded over time.

If you want to provide input on how you think this can be improved, I for one am all ears — and this is on the agenda of the board to discuss.

Sheeo the patreon page was last updated in 2017 -
why is this not updated?

I explained this above in my responses to FtX. But the short story is:

  • We don't have an explicit need for more money, so promoting it or maintaining it has not been a priority. That being said, I'm not against starting to do that.
  • Until the tax situation was resolved with the formation of the association; spending money from the patreon incurred undesirable income taxes.

The rest of you shut up and learn to work together.
Is it really that difficult.

It's difficult working with someone who constantly attacks your person when there's any form of disagreement.

From players point of view this place is run like scam call center.

At least those have nice people who respond to your phone calls. They go out of your way to not be toxic 😉

Honestly:
Brink if you believe this you should name names.

Naming names turns it into a brawl. If we can't agree that problems exist, and that they should be solved in a certain way, then the names do not matter.

Disagree Brink, if you don't name names, it becomes a generalistic 'community' problem. If its same 3-4 people in Aeolus doing this? Why shouldn't we call them out. I can say "I feel Aeolus is generally toxic as everytime I log in I see the promotion of assault and murder of people in my hometown". But in doing so gives those people cover and makes it a generalist "avoid Aeolus solution" and in doing so avoid the problems and doesn't solve it.

Like I don't think there is toxicity Brink. But I feel there are individuals within Aeolus, Silly_Noob and others that are toxic. Them promoting the views that caused the death of 5 people where I live, whom do make it Toxic.

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

@dragun101 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

Disagree Brink, if you don't name names, it becomes a generalistic 'community' problem. If its same 3-4 people in Aeolus doing this? Why shouldn't we call them out. I can say "I feel Aeolus is generally toxic as everytime I log in I see the promotion of assault and murder of people in my hometown". But in doing so gives those people cover and makes it a generalist "avoid Aeolus solution" and in doing so avoid the problems and doesn't solve it.

Like I don't think there is toxicity Brink. But I feel there are individuals within Aeolus, Silly_Noob and others that are toxic. Them promoting the views that caused the death of 5 people where I live, whom do make it Toxic.

I agree with Brink; and others have— as I mentioned earlier— also left the community on this basis.

Nine is the latest in a long list of persons who have told me about this.

It is very much a community problem and it serves no purpose to call out individuals right here and have it derive into personal attacks. We have to discuss the root of the problem which quite clearly lies elsewhere.

Fair fair Sheeo, I assume will be discussed tomorrow

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

Jesus Christ people what are you even talking about

I know I don't do much dev work, but please, please listen to my heartfelt plea. I know it's hard to do when we're 100 posts deep into accusation and hurt feelings, but it's just a videogame. There's no reason for any of this drama to exist.

I'm not the kind of person that likes the "toxicity + inclusiveness + CoC" HR nonsense, but maybe we can accept some provisional rules to get this thing under control. I don't want another ZeP episode over nothing.

  • Assume good faith, even when first impression tells you not to. We're all adults here, we should assume by default that we're not driven by pettiness, even if we sometimes lash out.
  • Get angry in proportion. Being direct and sometimes offensive is fine, if the thing at hand warrants this approach. If something is bullshit about a thing, call it bullshit. If we ban getting angry, people will vent through underhanded office politics bullshit. OTOH no one is obliged to respond to every rant and people who rant all the time start being ignored, so save them for things that really matter.
  • When in doubt, deescalate. If things get too heated, deescalate first. Get someone else to arbitrate. If you're a bystander, support the person that chose not to escalate, not in what they're arguing about, but in their stance. An argument is a dollar auction game and beyond some point betting higher should be made not worth it.

Can we all agree to this? I hate to see people who contributed this much more to FAF than me lose it over petty nonsense.

Ah lovely shitstorm. And this ugly forum...

Yes, I did post announcement about Sanctuary RTS in Ru discord. Because I considered it to be a FAF project in a first place. It is being developed by people who worked on FAF here and there, it was planned to be free to play an it is being created based on community feedback (which mainly consists of FAF players). (correction i had info about it being f2p by the moment i posted it, but apparently it isn't - my bad XD)

Creating mod based on 15 years old game engine with its source code being held in Square Enix is better?

Then why posting about Plannetary annihilation on forums wasn't a problem when kickstarter campaing took place? If it wasn't for FAF i would never knew about PA. If it wasn't for FAF i would never knew about Zero-K when it got steam release.

The discord post i made is not a problem of this conversation and i'm going to tell you why. What happened to it? It is still there!

It is already second post about Sanctuary RTS and they both are still there! Nobody tried to reach me about it. Nobody tried to give me a warning after posting them. Nobody tried to ask or force me to remove them. Very likely nobody reached ZLO or Sid so they remove it instead of me.

When this council shitstorm started nine reached me and in result i had to change some parts of text.

I was open for chat and waiting for someone knocking on my doorstep trying to threaten me, but nobody did. Because NOBODY ACTUALLY CARES!

Instead some councilors use this post to throw shit at each other in public. This proves that the actual issue is personal relationships between multiple mature people.

And btw, Louvenarde wrote FAF rules and FtXCommando using links to those rules after he pushed her out of FAF is kinda funny...

haha

haha

ha

I had a summer reading goal. Thanks guys for providing me with enough stuff to read so I don't have to go buy books!

I think it's in the best interests of FAF if we as a community try to be cooperative and amicable. We should move away from the personal attacks and toxicity and move towards a constructive dialogue focused on problem-solving. Let's figure out what we should do with friendly and cooperative discourse. Thank you.

pfp credit to gieb

I don't think it's really a good thing to have a separate RTS advertised on FAF related platforms by those financially/otherwise invested in it, but I also don't think that people invested in these ordeals should be discredited when they have a criticism of a part of FAF simply because they could potentially gain finacially/otherwise.

I also would like to state that toxicity occurs in all aspects of leadership, upper management, etc. I believe that is simply just how people who make it to those bigger positions are, you have to have an ego, and egos tend to clash with one another. I will take FTXcommando for example. He spends a lot of his free time invested in this community and carefully crafts his posts about tournaments, balance, general management and the like, while also organizing events, none of which he has to do, because he himself cares about making this community better. I would not expect anyone without strong convictions to be able to do that, and people with strong convictions usually lean towards to the more toxic side of things when disagreements arise.

I don't think airing dirty laundry is really relevant at all to this community, everything should be based on merit, and what you have to bring to the table. Sure, I do believe steps can be taken to make the FAF community as whole a less toxic environment, but I think once you step behind the curtain, that toxicity is irrelevant in the face of actual results. Trying to make the people running FAF less toxic to each other should have a low priority compared to finding the right people to do the job of building up and refining the community/FAF itself.

Part of the issue is that many of the big contributors to FAF have left/stopped contributing as a result of toxicity, and if we allow the toxicity to continue, many more contributors will stop contributing to FAF as a result of toxicity in the future.
Also, some substantial portion of the 21,000 newish players that FAF loses each year are lost due to toxicity. I have talked to numerous people about this, and I believe that the number of people lost to toxicity is in the thousands per year.
Imagine if FAF had 10,000 more active users. Imagine how many of them would eventually become serious contributors.
Imagine how much better FAF could be if we didn't lose so many potential players and so many already great contributors as a result of toxicity.
Surely, something substantial should be done to curb that toxicity.

pfp credit to gieb

Most toxicity folks people referenced are qanon supporters and not Ftx’exs from folks I talked too

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

So when is part two coming out? Can I preorder it?

  • Toxicity in FAF is bad, as lots of people pointed out in my thread about why they would leave FAF. Toxicity repels new members of our community. At the moment we lose 21,000 newish players a year. Once we fix this and few other barriers to entry, we can start paid advertising to get more players and grow. But unfortunately on FAF .. toxicity goes all the way to the top.

Toxicity in faf is actually not that bad by any gaming standards. If anything we are way better off than many other way more popular communities out there.
So no I don't think that the toxicity is the main culprit of people going away from this game.
And no we don't lose 21000 new players each year. Those players are bound to disappear one way or another as no one sane will ever think about having 100% retention rate. If anything we are currently doing quite good if we have 10% retention rate over a span of whooping 2 years. That means that 10 people out of 100 will keep on playing this game for 2 years straight which is amazing.

As a point of contention I will bring up latest TF|2 events that community did together with help of Respawn and a sale.
Before the event we avaraged 2.5k people globally at 11pm. After sale we peaked at good 8k people and slowly started coming back to normal numbers. After 3-4 weeks we were down to good old 3.5k players at said hours and slowly declining to the numbers of hardened veterans.
Seeing that stuff is not looking so great we decided to run a massive social media campaign urging everyone to come and play TF|2 together with us on may 1. Spamming reddit, twitter, forums and trying to expose other FPS players to what TF|2 is and why should they give it a try for the low price of 5 moners.
This is also the moment when Respawn took up our memes and decided to grace us with 4 day period (31.04-03.05)of TF|2 being free to play for everyone on steam and origin. This is where we peak, 22k players online in the EU evening.
After that the free period is over but we still see amazing amount of players averaging around 10k(13k weekends) for the first few days after the free trial. Honestly big success considering the sale is long over and there is this many people willing to buy the game at full price(or maybe on g2a lol). Unfortunately the numbers don't hold up and soon enough people start slowly dropping our one by one and going back to other actively maintained games. Now 1 full month after that event we are at 3k people average (4.k players on weekends). And that is only one month after the our big community campaign with lots of them also being returning veterans.

Now if you compare it to the 10% retention rate of faf over the span of 2 whooping years I think you can finally see that FAF is actually doing pretty well in this departament. Even more when I can 100% tell you that TF|2 community is actually just as prone to salt considering certain balance issues there and a big stigma regarding certain weapons, titans and loadouts which goes way beyond what our usual gap/astro bashing looks like. Also, both games are critically acclaimed but underplayed so we have that too in common lol. Oh, and TF|2 is just as merciless
for new players as FAF.

So no I don't think that your justification of not working on external promotion is anything more than just an excuse for you not doing any other real work apart from setting up news-hub and then more or less maintaining it. Even more when the topic that was supposed to gauge out our problems is so friggin old it's not even funny.
To be honest, I don't believe that you are so inept to only start working on it now after all this months of that data lying there and being useless. It's just that only now you had a bigger stake in all of this than just improving FAF (which let's be frank you weren't so interested in lately)
It's just that now is the best moment for you to actually try to gain as much leverage as you can before being actively removed from your duties due to not doing that much work and most importantly clear problems with conflicting interests due to your work on direct competitor to FAF. Which you never bothered to properly disclose to others together with other folks that are part of FAF. And that is something that you as councilor should have done long ago which only just proves that our mistrust is was properly placed.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

Look at the abusive names our councilors call people on reddit. Sure, the player he is talking to was problematic and was banned, and sure the post has since been moderated, thank god, although it's still there on reddit. But the point here is that our councilor that represents FAF, and a moderator of our reddit, is abusive.

The matter at hand was again and again dealt with politely. To the detriment of whole FAF that was suffering under this persons unhinged and often psychotic attacks. Person in question was politely asked again and again to start behaving as the FAF policy asks to. Not to be a dick to every person he desnt agree with, to not sabotage work of other contributors, to not steal the work of other people, to not harass faf moderators and to not keep on coming with wild demands to the discord moderation.
He was dealt with appropriately time and time again. Each time the moderation team was fully professional and handled his case with utmost care. Unfortunately there was no change in the behaviour of the unit in question which only kept on escalating it's attacks going as far as to again and again send death threats to other FAF contributors while boasting how he is not right in the head as he have the papers and he even won few cases in the court by waving them and proving how he's not mentally stable.
We have done everything we could to end the case politely, unfortunately it wasn't to happen. Perma ban from faf discord and game only brought up more resentment and more attacks onto the good name of our community.
So no, I can't blame bias and other people in that reddit thread for finally snapping and calling him for what he is. If anything I applaud the people who didn't let him tarnish the FAF name, even if they had to use stern words, but unfortunately that unit have proved again and again unable to accept that the problem lies in it, not in the whole faf community.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

It doesnt stop there though. Go search for the c-word on discord and see who's name comes up over and over again. This is not a one off case, this is a system. Sadly, this makes FAF look childish, and it could be so much more.

I know that you all are looking for the nice utalitarian and dystopian future where everyone behaves on the rails and plays to your tune. Unfortunately you have to understand that we all come from different background and as such we are part of different cultures. By extension some of us are more than happy to call each other cunt and other not so derogatory terms as a means of endearing so that at the end of the day we can just go and drink a bottle of beer while laughing happily about our days. Childish? Maybe, but it's by no means harmful and is widely accepted across the world and in many communities. Especially as the people in question use it only when speaking with others who have nothing against it.

To be honest it kind of makes me sad that you never got to experience this type of friendship in football club or other hobby circle when you can tell the other person straight to the face what is weighting on your heart and then reconcile in the evening being the best friends again.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

The council is toxic to the point of being disfunctional, the inner council conversations are contaminated with petty words and walls of text. We can't even converse in a sensible way about topics like elections or the association. Do you know I get called names in formal Council chat?

Can't say what is going on inside council but from my experience there is big underlying issue here being the fact that certain people are having trouble putting some distance between themselves and the words they read. Thinking that everything is meant to attack them and make them suffer. All of that while thinking that they deserve way better. To me it mostly seems like there is underlying lack of humbleness in a big part of the community here.
And yes you are a big part of this problem nine2 which you have demonstrated again and again by being unable to take criticism in any form but the most polite one which only strikes me as something that someone who lacks humbleness would do.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

Click here to see what really goes on in the council. This document shows me getting called pathetic, a sociopath, ftx refusing to cooperate with the new FAF Association, councilors swearing a lot, lot's of really uncool stuff in serious conversations. It went on for weeks. There is way more but you get the idea.

Tbh, what I see here is nothing but lack of being able to take a step back and not take everything as a direct attack at your person. Which is a shame considering that it often goes in pair with too high of esteem about yourself and instead ends up with you looking down on people from your high moral position, when instead you could have tried to understand the other party more and why are they so full of pain when dealing with your person.

What I see are people full of passion for the project that are just full of pain due to others not only not putting as much time and love to the project but also being disregarded by the rest of the people in the know who should be actively working in making this a better place.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

If the role-model Council members are not accountable for their toxicity, how can we expect the ordinary members of the community to have ANY form of respect for each other? FAF will stay like this forever, where people just shit on each other, and 20,000 players just leave.

Again, I don't see anything inherently toxic in there. I see people full of passion fed up with current state of affairs.

As for them being over the faf rules? Unfortunately I don't think that's how it is considering that Gieb should still have the power to remove/ban the post/people that he deems too toxic or to be breaking the rules of faf including FTX/Biass/me and others that you and your people deem to be plague upon the sacred grounds of FAF.

As for the 20000 players leaving, please stop using this statistic as argument as it's nothing but a willingly done misuse of statistics not only in bad manner but also in bad faith. It's clear that you are not willing to use them properly so stop waiving them around like some kind of godsend information that give you heaven legitimacy. Just stop, as you are making a bigger and bigger fool of yourself even more when you clearly said that you will not begin working on externally promoting FAF. Which again brings us back to Sanctuarium which is direct competitor to FAF and which will be sold by you and your friends to make money of it. Sounds like you needed excuse not to promote faf and instead focus on your new baby.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

Many people share my views on toxicity. You won't see them speaking out too much around the place, but they know I am receptive and they message me. They tell me that they refuse to read a forum topic since some toxic person joined the debate. They say that they had to stay away from aeolus chat and make their own chat due to the toxic people there. They say they have had enough and think of quitting their positions. The reasonable people don't tell you they are exiting a conversation due to toxicity, they just quietly pack their bags and go elsewhere, and this will continue until one day, eventually only the toxic people remain, and FAF is dead. This has to stop.

If they don't speak, they will never be heard. Especially when it takes just a moment to message moderators or even tell the apparently toxic one to tone it down. They don't need you to make a change, the tools are already there at the grasp of their hands. All they needed to do is take action.

So sorry if I can't see this but you putting on airs and trying to make yourself a savior of faf that will save it from the bad internet worlds out there. I just don't buy it. If I could get banned when I crossed the line then other will get banned even faster than me.

And then we again come back to the sad reality that people are not perceptive to negative feedback and instead will opt to take it as attack at their face. Even if it wasn't meant as such and instead was just informal response. We have people in place to screen forums so if someone feels attacked then they should just report the offender and await the judgement of people in charge which are far away from being under the grasp of evil FTX and his cronies.

If the moderators don't see the answers as breaking the rules of faf and being toxic then maybe it's time to take a step back and think about putting some distance between yourself and the words you read on internet. It can help a lot, it helped me so I bet it can help you too.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

THESE BEHAVIOURS ARE NOT OK. Aside from the rudeness and hostility, it's like I said, it's disfunctional. Work is impeded.

Again, I don't think it's that bad here as you are trying to make it sounds.
I just feel like you are taking everything as an attack on your person even when it's not which ends up making you feel like everyone is hostile to you.
Which frankly saying is not really what's happening.
And no, we are far away from being dysfunctional. If anything I can't help but see your vision of FAF and world as the dysfunctional one. Hell the more I hear the more I feel like people are trying to make faf one of those dystopias that you see and read about in movies and books.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

I believe FAF can GROW and THRIVE. We have so many cool people, we have new projects, a steady feed of new players and new maps and SO MUCH to work with. If we could just take steps towards limiting the hostility, FAF would grow even more

I mean, funnily enough faf started growing more and more when the toxic contributors like FTX and Biass took over. Maybe their approach is actually the better one and more realistic considering it's grounded and to the face. They will do stuff and tell you what they really mean instead of hiding behind plethora of nice words but in the end not doing anything meaningful.

Also if you were to do your goddamn job of promoting faf externally then maybe we would have even more players here and now? Naaah, you have sanctuary to worry about. No time for FAF lol.

@nine2 said in Council of Setons EXPOSED - Part 1:

"But Nine, you are totally abusing your position of news editor"
There is nothing in my job description to say that I can't post news items for myself. I have posted every single news item for everyone else bar one, which was about a SCTA show match. I should get to talk as well. If someone wants to make some counter post to this they can ask me and I am very likely to put that on the news - just phrase it objectively like 'jerry said nine is dumb' and dont say 'nine is dumb'.

Well gee, thanks for going after my head in this nonchalant way. Glad to know that you never wanted to be objective at all. No wonder I got kicked for this:
image_2021-05-30_015212.png
With this being the peak toxicity, sure the wording is strong but it should be in this day and age when propaganda is running amok. Even more when I get to live and hear propaganda 24/7 from my own government and have dictator running amok in neighbouring country.
All 'cuz I saw a promotion post that used the exact same underhanded tactics of subliminal messaging that my own government employs on daily basis.

And sorry nine2, but what you did is also toxic and unbecoming of councilor position. If anything that's stepping lower than anything that biass and ftx did as when they get abrasive at times they still listen to others and try to help out, even if at times coming of abrasive.
Meanwhile you never took the words I said and instead decided to just remove me from the server while clearly stating that my words were meant to harm you and your person when they were only directed at big ass discrepancy in your treatment of news regarding the PC elections.
You literally kicked me for providing feedback, and then never tried to understand why I reacted the way I did to such blatant subliminal messaging in your news posts. How does it come off better when you did worse than FTX ever did to me(and I had few spats with him and others that you deem toxic), even Rackover was easier to talk with than you.

It comes of as laughable when you preach understanding others and trying to help make bridges then outright state that you don't give shit about my background and why I reacted so strongly to you working like fucking Polish Goverement propaganda tube. Sorry, I just can't see you as someone who actually cares about others. You only care about them when it's good for your agenda.

I'm just sorry, I really feel sorry seeing what you are trying to do, that's what I and how I feel.

On the bright side I'm only more and more in awe of how great of man Giebmasse is. Hope you will become one day half of the man he is.