Who am I, but an old player of MM since pre-Prussia, the retired leader of one of MM/NW's oldest groups, and a continuing contributor to the NW community, to include my opinion (as everyone else has before me, without restraint mind you), but I feel inclined as per popular trends induced by this thread but to say what I think...
Hekko has some good points. I, personally, think his evaluation was quite fair. Obviously, any sort of public outburst like this is going to be a little... clunky, at best, and it'll never be as smooth and political as it should be, but the core idea is fair. I think that there just needs to be more common sense with the community. People are happy when everyone understands. What people don't understand, they don't like. McEwan, as I read on one of the pages waaaay back, has a point. There, truth be told, are a lot of good points, and a lot of misinformed points.
I think the generalization of the US admin team was.... eh..... poorly said. It's ill-placed, and there should of been less of a discrimination between the EU and the US admins in the overall message. It shows a few things, which I'll get onto later. But still, it was poorly said. I do think, however, that what the Steam chat showed with the conversation between you, Hekko, and Praetorian was very, very disturbing. I honestly have to agree: if FSE is a company, and they host official servers, and then chooses a group of people to administrate them, then it's only logical for someone who does not visit these forums daily to think that these admins are official representatives of FSE. Honestly, I thought the admins were basic spokespeople for FSE.
That being said, I honestly don't understand what Praetorian was saying, which in a nutshell (to me, anywho) was him saying a disclaimer: that the admins of FSE servers do not specifically represent the ideals of FSE as a whole. This is.... awkward. If you give someone that sort of power to ban people from company-sponsored servers, then you really should be sure that they're representative of your ideals, and that you are on the same page with them as they are with you, or else this sort of debacle can ensue.
Now for the 15e bit: From what I'm reading, Vince is basically making it his ruling that he doesn't want another sort of admin monopoly or something like what happened in ooooooold MM. Eh, it makes sense, but to be fair, most of the admin team knows one another, and truth be told, most of the people I've seen become admins are admins because they have friends on the team itself. So, logically, if you want to uphold that sort of argument about 15e members or whatnot, you'd also have to say that prospective admins have to be dark horses in order for their morals to be legitimate and not compromised.
As for the 51st thing, I have no comment other than how disappointing that is.
Now: onto the bit I mentioned earlier, about the discrimination between EU and US admin teams.
Personal experience shows the most effective way to moderate anything is to have a baseline. I'm not an admin, nor am I in on anything of what the special rules are bar what the official rules of the servers are, but truthfully, if Hekko makes such a distinction between the US & EU admin teams, then it's quite clear that there obviously is a rift. I don't know what it is, but it's probably something like the teams being separated by both this sort of stereotypical generalizations and the logical argument of "time zones get in the way". The latter is realistic, but the former is obnoxious. I say that honestly, this post shows the divide among admins, not just on the core issue, which is the apparent and very inadmissible case of the community's mismanagement, but also the fact that you can see the divide between the admin teams.
What, honestly, is the difference between the EU and the NA teams that makes so much strife? I agree with McEwan, that truth be told, there shouldn't be any divide at all. There should only be the separation of teams in the sense that you need different times because of time-zones. That's fine, but honestly: are the rules for NW_NA and NW_EU really so different? It's the same thing you're enforcing, unless there's like some sort of fine-print rule that no one reads, like "thou shalt not use the symbol % in chat" or something. What divides you all so much that the strife is so apparent? This generalization that NA admins are all power-hungry or something is really rude. It's no wonder there's a divide. Then again, this mismanagement of admin powers on both sides further causes a rift.
If anything is to be taken out of this, it should not be anger, or strife. It should be resolve. Resolve to evolve and adapt. I've seen a lot of NW administrators respond in either support or against, with a large amount of NA admins getting rather disgruntled due to Hekko's comments on the NA admin team.
If the admins have some form of common sense, or at least a basic form of wit, then they could use this to work as a more efficient machine. Hekko's pointed out the flaws. Hekko's pointed out the basic cracks in the skin of the machine. Now fill them. Don't get angry, get constructive. There is nothing that can be done to un-do this original thread. It's been posted, and if it's deleted, I doubt another can of political worms will not be opened. The only thing to do from here on out is to work to fix the issues which have caused such strife. NA and EU should work together. Say what you will, but if you say that they already do, then why is there a large amount of NA admins saying things about Hekko, and vice versa?
I expect this'll blow over. Either Vince will ignore it, or smite everyone (likely including me, sadly) who went with the flow of "viva la revolution" and the calls for blood, or Vince will respond to it. If he responds, I expect it to be a large disclaimer. A blanket statement that'll calm everyone down for a bit, until something else pops up. The real thing to watch for after this is if Vince says there will be change, and if any change is spoken about, if it actually happens.
My actual opinion, no matter what side it's on, is this. I'm interested to see how this turns out:
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=2661.0It'll either end up being paid attention to, and the community will thrive, or it'll become the old MM suggestion board: a place that the devs say they'll check on daily and work with, and in the end it's just a shouting pit for anyone who has a grievance, with it's only function being to give the dev's an alibi when asked why they did not deal with a certain problem.
Check back on this community ~5 months from now to see if anythings changed. If not, necro this thread.
TL;DR 8/10 would read again.
