Ok I've read through Hekko's post, skim read the revolutionary + 1's
and also looked at Death by EMP's post, some of the trolling and then Rogov's post and Spearing's post.
I suppose I'll give my thoughts to Hekko's post as best as I can.
I am finally fed up with the idiotic way this community is ran by. The way justice and bans are handled, the way threads and criticism is met, how people are promoted within the community and the hypocrisy of the top level leadership.
Justice is blind, it is often impossible to get a full fledged overview of how well certain admins do their job 24/7 and its difficult to always feel empathy or emotional sympathy for what players may be going through or for what is perceived as a ridiculous abuse of power.
Currently I play quite often on the Australian Servers and I swear every admin action that is taken whether reasonable or not (and the Aussie server Admins tend to be pretty reasonable) is met with an outcry of outrage by those on the sword end the received justice. It therefore becomes pretty easy to decensortize yourself to the notion that every complaint has a significant amount of validity. P.S. I am not an admin on said servers.
Typically admins are loved by some and hated by others, just from looking through this thread the community is oft split in opinion as to the merit of individual admins. In any case admin abuse is something that can and should be reported but I suggest it is done so in a mature manner in order to be taken seriously.
Lets first discuss the current events. The choice to retire the 51st name, it was a ridiculous proposal and was both unpragmatic and unfair.
On the Australian servers; regimental names are protected and regiments must be unique in name from one another afaik by punishment of temp/perm ban (this is not an FSE thing but a LCC community rule which imo works well but may be unpragmatic or even unfair to impose as a whole). This is however intended to stop trolling of/in someone's regiment/regimental name in the LCC community, which is sadly a common occurrence amongst competitive regiments and it gets pretty damn ridiculous. While I agree that you have some legitimate concerns, (Afaik the 51st apparently had guys adorn the 51st regiment tags on servers for trolling purposes) and given that there may be the possibility of beta testing in the future with the 51st, I would be concerned if people outside the reg got in without permission or someone gave the 51st a bad name thus making the confidence in the testers for the FSE somewhat questionable during development.
In any case I am not saying that the decision to close the 51st is right or wrong but personally I can't seem to find my rage button over it especially when I see the level of ridiculous competitiveness, ages old pretty rivalries and jealousy amongst individual regiments flare up every other day. On these forums alone I see a ton of reported posts because one regiment member is claiming that another regiment member has stolen either a) Thread resources, b) the regimental name c) guys from his/her regiment (stolen recruits etc) or d) is just plain trolling another regiment.
In the time that I've spent in the 1stAVR (formerly known as the 104th) I've seen some ridiculously immature actions and reactions from the community and various regiments and their members including my own.
The 51st are getting a special privilege for the sake of their contribution to the game. Lets get one thing straight, the reason the 51st has contributed to the dlc is because of the closed-shop nepotistic ways of the developers got help for it. I am sure that the mapping done by 51st members could just as well have been done by people from the 84e or the 1er etc, as long as they would have been granted the Chance to do so. What few people know is that the 51st during the beta actively impeded allot of testing by being hellbent on playing commanderbattle whenever more than 4 people were on. I came to the beta fairly late, yet still the game had a gamebreaking flaw of a fixed height up-stab, which meant that you could duck under the up-stab by holding in a downstab. However, since I didn't belong to the cool kids I was ignored at first when pointing out that this was a serious problem. Infact I was probably the most active poster about gameplay in the beta, and alto of the stuff I posted about has gotten implemented since, just that it took several months after the release for it to be done. Once again because I didn't belong to the cool kids.
Its difficult to find ways to repay community contributions. FSE has chosen to honor the 51st in its own way. Your argument is that the 51st a) do not merit such an honor b) your initial beta test point changes where ignored because you where not part of the cool kids and that advancement in FSE is based on favoritism/nepotism. Personally I am in no position to argue that the 51st deserved or did not deserve any honors but I don't believe you where ignored, rather that fixes don't always come overnight especially when your working to deadlines while attempting to prioritize key issues and not being able to fix a particular critical item in a short time frame. The issue you mentioned was eventually fixed in patches, while later-than-one would have wished, it was none-the-less fixed and not game-braking to begin with. As far as favoritism vs merit goes; I think your argument is valid in a professional context and I think that FSE is still very-much in the transition from a bunch of highly-skilled fun loving guys to a professional company that will hopefully one day employ more than just a few devs.
While on the topic of professionalism however, Death by EMP did have a point. I can't see that you've raised this issue in the admin forums, if I am wrong then I take it back but I don't see any topics from you on this issue, instead you kind of went out of your way to vent your frustration directly to the community, which in turn has created a shit storm. However, every cloud has its silver lining.
Perhaps, this is for the best momentarily, so that FSE can better gauge that the less it involves itself in the community or decisions pertaining to the community management, the better. I have suggested to Vince previously that FSE focuses on the work at hand rather than doing any micro managing of the community because the community tends to get easily excited/incensed over issues that may sometimes be deemed as trivial to some of us (given differing priorities and circumstances in life) but that will come across as being extremely rude to others and given the pace of development there is little time, as it is, to deal with shit storms.
Thus as far as admin oversight goes, FSE cannot always be in all places 24/7.
Anyway suffice to say a few changes are being made which will hopefully be for the better.
