You've read the title right, I'll be taking my 'leave' as far as these forums and the servers go. Firstly, the forums themselves. Quite frankly, there's just no interest for me to be had anymore. Next to the occasional giveaways and random shoutbox messages, no one is ever on there. While Koga has made an attempt to spice it up with a new contest, the appeal is still nowhere to be found. As far as the servers go, I've been HA on the custom TF2 servers for a while now. I've seen quite some things change, in terms of both server structure and removals. After Surf got the boot, I was left with two servers: Jailbreak and VSH. VSH is still okay in terms of activity, in the meantime Jailbreak is not. To add insult to injury, Jailbreak was completely screwed over by broken patches and updates. Despite many threads and remarks by both players and admins, nothing happened. The boiling point, however, is the overall attention this community has for it's players. While there are still inactive admins without notice, they still keep their position. Some of them are still not integrated properly in the community, yet nothing is done about it. I get the feeling that FoG does not take it's own rules and values seriously, which is a shame. I've never agreed with the limpdick handling and ridiculous waiting times of reports and appeals either. At this point, I don't intend to even try anymore. Tl;dr I'll be resigning from FoG entirely. The only thing that ever kept me going were the awesome players I've met through FoG. Both regulars and admins alike. I feel like the players contributed more to this community than anything. With the creation of the Discord server, it actually feels more like a community. I'll gladly spending the rest of my days there, until I lose interest of course. So anyone who feels like talking to me can always pop in. I'm sorry for this long post. Oh wait, no I'm not.
Well. Honestly they isnt totally unexpected. At least i know we'll keep in touch, fam. Adding to the issues Starfish has mentioned, i feel the need to say more. I've always been going on rants about how regulars gets "ban immunity" due to being friends with admins. Admins and regulars have always been an extremely tough subject to report on simply due to that fact that EVERYONE immediately sides with either the regular or admin due to said people being known. If, for example a newcomer comes and reports an admin who is doing something wrong. People will go "oh yeah you just dont know the people on the server" said reporter will be insulted and zoned out due to reporting someone who they think is doing something wrong. The reporter will then see this community as toxic and just plain shit, person will spread the word and people will slowly realise what is going on around here. Now the main problem isnt really that people are leaving, more the reason people are leaving. This has been an issue ever since i joined FoG and nobody has made an effort to change it, i personally have gone on rants about it, but everytime i just get shut down in one way or another.
kthxbai lol. Gon miss you. But i'll see ya around discord. He does make very good points though. Really, look at it. Look at the tf2 side. Full of inactive admins, admins that barely visit this forum or the discord channel. Half dead servers. Shit that we want to happen but never does. I know you inactive admins have your reasons to be inactive. But some of you just go inactive for a really fucking long time. Like, honestly just resign instead and realize that you can't be on here while dealing with your irl stuff. Then once you feel like you can really come back. Apply again.
Good bye Starfish-senpai! You were a big part of custom until the end. Because of you I became a jailbreak admin(not sure if that's a good thing). I will try to keep Jailbreak alive long as possible. see ya in discord
Fishstar, Take care my friend, glad to have had you around here. Added you on steam if you ever with to talk And you have made some good points, and i agree. But it's not different in CS:GO. Yes, a lot of players, but not many people to talk to inside the community.
Sad to see you go and thanks for trying to keep JB alive! To your points: a) forum activity - was always a problem with this community. Despite us practically spamming adverts to our forums, nobody bothered to sign up. It kinda is a vicious cycle - nobody posts because activity is low, and vice versa. Hence why we only required you to visit the forums and sometimes post (not like 10 posts a day). Gotta admin, I am more the backend type of guy instead of marketing. But well, I gotta agree that there is no appeal in posting here. b) servers being dead / jb broken: this is mixed fault between Downie and me. The original reason for it becoming broken was because Downie installed the latest version of JB, which is bugged and no longer developed. I admit to not have recovered to an earlier version soon enough, so far too many people left (had to restore from about a month ago). But in that regard, the server should work fine again (apart from the known bugs in the current version). The servers being dead in general is mostly Valve's fault, for they redirected 95% of quickplay traffic to their own servers, slowly drowning community servers. Latter one is a general problem, as you may have seen several good communites die because of under-population in the past 2 years. I doubt it's really getting better anytime soon, unless Valve fixes QP. c) inactive admins, not going to say anything regarding that, as I have transferred all admin management over to the Downs, so that you don't have to wait 2 weeks or longer for an application. Therefore, I did not do anything in that regard in the past 6+ months. d) reports/appeals - you have to agree that most of the reports/appeals have insufficient evidence, for which the original authors get called out. What we could improve is the handling/process of them (like we have with SR reports/appeals atm), which I will have to discuss with the Downs.
Thanks for joining with us on the Forums Starfish. You were the best Admin and Head Admin ever. Anyways, farewell Starfish.