Dominic

In the nicest way possible, how the hell are we less than an hour from this meeting and there's no sort of structured agenda?

Change your name back assface

I don't personally believe at this point in the community's life that continuing to have belief in the idea that trying things out can't hurt us is healthy. Trying things out can hurt us, especially now. Putting effort into something like a KZ server (which, from the looks of it, has very few successful NA servers with a lot of competition already) can hurt us by wasting our time, energy, and resources. The current staff team already looks extremely stretched thin with 10 server managers and 8 advisors trying to care for roughly 12 servers. We should be cutting that number of servers down until we can pump more life into our higher staff positions. If you were arguing for the return or introduction of some very niche gamemode where maybe we have a chance at tapping into some player base that hasn't been discovered, different story. But it looks like there's a million and one KZ servers already on CS:GO, so while yes it's a popular gamemode.. if we had a server and it came and went between the time I got banned and now, I can't imagine it gave any signs of life. Correct me as you may, these are assumptions after all, at the end of the day my argument will be the same that we should not be unnecessarily stretching ourselves thin. My take on it: cut out everything besides Jailbreak, TTT, ZE.. then keep Bhop and Surf because they seem to get some people and they're your most popular servers as of now. Focus everyone up on reviving these servers and if you get to the point where you have some semblance of population on them, then talk about reopening servers, changing servers, etc. There's probably nothing waiting for us in the movement world of CS:GO, no big influx of population that we're gonna get. If we as a community can't revive our big three, I think everyone will agree that hope is lost. I'd also feel different if we were talking about branching out into other games, I think allocating resources towards a big push in that direction is justifiable. But in regards to CS:GO we should be laser focused on reestablishing ourselves where we were already doing so well.

@kabLe The fact that you still have the passion to push for all this change after all the years you've been here is admirable. I'm a big fan of all your ideas, I think it's a great line of thinking. You're right in saying that building back what we already had is much more realistic than trying to branch out and establish ourselves entirely new. Bringing back server representatives and then allowing people to jump up there immediately is your best option IMO. I don't think there's any time to have people get through the admin application process and then prove themselves as one in order to get to SR to help out. Like I said, you need to get unconventional. Throw some dedicated regulars into the SR role and see what happens. The transparency in your post is awesome - has any of this been mentioned before? The community is on its last legs, the time for keeping things private between higher-ups is past. This is the time to lean on every possible person that is willing to throw an idea or suggestion your way. Wanna bring back the SR role? I say make a public post about it and let everyone brainstorm the best possible way to do so. Wanna branch out into Rust? Make a post and let longtime Rust players chime in and give you input on the best way to do it. Want other ideas for how to branch out into other games? Have a community meeting and let this big ass group of gamers give their two cents. Am I saying stuff like a community meeting is some revolutionary idea or me advocating for transparency should win me an award? No. Yes we've done all of this before but if there's any time to be completely and utterly transparent with the everyday members of the community, it's now. I think it's great that you listed the problems the community is facing - I completely agree with your priority list. Who better to ask about what incentives they'd like to see in order to get them to donate than the regulars? There should be an immediate announcement post about a potential donation system rework and everyone should be allowed to voice their opinion. Sounds repetitive reading it back but you have great ideas and I'm sure you're not the only one. There should be nonstop community feedback threads about what the higher-ups have going on. Rebuilding this community needs a lot more minds behind it than just the people in our staff ranks IMO.

Hey everyone, So I'm completely aware that making this type of post is risky considering my current standing here. This can 100% be taken and twisted into something negative but this is genuinely coming from a place of good intentions. I've also been here for so long and I couldn't even figure out where this type of post should be placed lmao - move if need be. This post is more so a question than a suggestion, but it's quite simple: have we given up? It's been a while since I've been here, I did come to visit the website a number of times while I was banned but I couldn't view many of the subforums. I've been back for a couple weeks and I've remained relatively quiet, just been observing things. I went and read some of the posts that have addressed this problem; Noob's post in the suggestions box about unbanning regulars for instance, though that seemed to devolve into something completely different. Then there was that post somewhere in the CS:GO subforum where a higher-up essentially said staff had given up and had no motivation. This post is coming purely from a place of curiosity, though it does pain me to see a server like Jailbreak in the condition its in. Obviously we've seen this coming for a while - CS:GO is not on a downtrend by any means but communities are, it's undeniable. I've looked at the state of some of our old competitors; majority have clocked out. For the staff here to be unmotivated is not unreasonable by any means, most people don't realize how much it sucks to manage a dead server. However, there seems to still be people in this community that have passion and want to help, so it sounds like people need to be swapped out and others need to be given a chance. I'm also surprised that I couldn't find a megathread addressing this problem, or a post about having a community meeting to talk about it. I also don't see any monumental changes as of late or posts about plans for any. Do you guys as higher-ups have any plans that you can tease at, any hail mary plays for the community? Because let's not sugarcoat this - SG is on its death bed and it does not have long, so anyone with any passion left for this community would need to act fast. I am not one of those people obviously, I did my time and I'm fresh out of passion, but I am taking the time to make this post because I don't care to see SG on a tombstone. I suppose I have to include a suggestion somewhere in all of this, and my best one would be to just become super unconventional if you haven't already. Some of these regulars seem so passionate about wanting to see some of the servers succeed - fuck it, make them a CA. What do you have to lose at this point? Honestly, same thing goes for what Noob suggested about doing a mass unban. SG can't really go much lower before it's quite literally dead, so why not make these unconventional, hail mary plays while you still have something of a community here? I truly hope something good comes out of this.

I was gonna make a detailed post about being a watch collector and loving jewelry to help people understand the passion behind the answer I'm going to give, but I don't actually care that much. I was always taught that you wear it on your non-dominant hand, but I think in any case it looks far better on the left. I don't know why, it just does. I just raised my right arm and pretended to look at the time.. it didn't feel right. Nothing about it felt right, I felt stupid doing it. Off topic, but if you don't have one already, invest in a decent looking watch to wear when the situation calls for it. An Apple watch does not count. Thank you.

I suppose it's fitting for me to say some final words about roux at the place that brought us together.. Roux and I first started playing together when I was a stupid 12 year old kid and here I am a few months away from turning 18. Not many people get the privilege of being told they've made a major impact on who I've become, but roux definitely does. Having such a real, genuine person around throughout my entire time at SG to give me a reality check, advice, and tips on anything I needed was truly a blessing. Roux was by my side no matter what and he quite literally watched me grow into the person I am today. I usually have no regrets when it comes to telling my loved ones how much they mean to me, but it seems that the constant banter and trolling between us made me forget how important roux really was to me. And I'm sad to say that I wish I had reminded roux of the fact that he meant so much to me before time ran out. Roux, I've met hundreds of people on the internet, but no one brought the same energy as you. You were really one of a kind and it pains me that I'll never be able to hear you say another stupid one liner that will have me laughing my ass off. It was only a few days ago that you were under the influence in a competitive match saying some stupid shit in your foreign accent that had me smiling. I'll miss you so much buddy. Love you roux.

These arguments are pretty ridiculous. You want to help kids learn for the real world by willfully ignoring the fact that there's a much better way to go about this? Saying some people may want auto-renewal does not make the fact that a bunch of people are sending money here constantly when they probably don't mean to any better. I can't imagine there's a single person who gives a shit if it's auto-renewal or not, except for the people getting screwed over by forgetting about their donations.

Very easy to use this as a justification while completely neglecting the fact that this is exactly what kids (who are probably the majority of the people donating) don't do.

You're right actually, completely forgot. So just remove the auto-renewal option. Though, the one time donation thing could probably be changed from "how much do you want to donate" to "how many months do you want to donate for", just for the sake of simplicity.

I probably should've elaborated. Change it so people are paying for 3 or 6 months at a time and give them the ability to overlap packages (so if someone wants to send money for the next 2 years, they buy 4 of the 6 month packages) or just allow them to pick how many months they want to donate for as opposed to just renewing it every month forever. You now have kids paying for the equivalent of a Netflix subscription with their parent's money and oftentimes it's up to them to remember to cancel it. Evidently, they tend not to. I don't see any justifiable reason to leave it the way it is besides the undeniable fact that there's definitely some extra funds flooding in due to this. Morals vs. a little extra cash is what it comes down to I suppose.

Consider disabling auto-renewal for donations. If you look down the list of recurring supporters, I think anyone can easily spot out a good amount of people who probably aren't intentionally sending money every month. Some haven't played in ages, some left on bad terms, other times there's banned people who still have their donations being sent. I do recognize there's people (Ngo for instance, most likely) who want to send money consistently, but a bunch of other people are getting screwed over in the long run.

It was a pleasure to manage a server with you, game with you and just chat with you. The same can't be said for many, so thanks for that. I wish you the absolute best of luck moving forward and I'm sure we'll catch up sometime. Fuck you and your Marshall.

Haha guys.. funny joke.. you can promote Kieran now.. ..guys?

I don't think anyone was purposely trying to hide the fact that sexual remarks were thrown, but if you actually wanted to crack down on that you'd punish the people making the remarks, not the person playing a game. (the gameplay was described as the issue) I can pull sexual remarks out of my ass about anything and everything someone does while live. I'd also find it a bit weird that the breaking point is sexual remarks about a female when the most insanely terrible jokes are thrown out in these channels on the daily, with no interjection from higher-ups. God forbid I launch ARK while live on Discord, because you'll be prompted with a female in her underwear while trying to create your character.

Assuming we'll be continuing to use Discord as opposed to TS, I'd like some clarification on some things. Even if we do switch back to TS, probably best to get these things out of the way. Can we maybe just get a little hint of how far "No sexual content" really goes? I was live, playing "Princess Designer" on a website I used in the first grade during computer class and apparently an IA was called, then requested the channel to be locked because it's (paraphrasing here) "sexual content". My profile picture on our forums has been Sommer Ray with her entire ass pointed towards the camera multiple times, with zero (maybe one, actually) complaints over many, many months. I can think of multiple examples beyond that which are much worse than a kid's game. If you want to crack down that far then fine, but after many people in the channel disputed it, nothing was clarified. It'd also be great to understand why images were disabled in #general and what the ruling on posting stuff in there is. Despite restricting the ability to easily post images, it's not impossible to just post a link to an image instead, so it didn't actually fix anything beyond maybe reducing clutter. There's no real concrete rule on posting images in there and what sort of images are allowed and oftentimes posting a random meme would actually fire up the chat. I think there was some drama surrounding it or something, but it was just disabled with no notice. It seems odd that disabling images altogether was the chosen route as opposed to simply adding a sentence somewhere about randomly posting images. Is there any change to the racism rule on Discord? The rule is still cut and dry and states "No racism", so when I was told it's allowed in voice channels I was pretty confused. I think I heard it was posted in a thread somewhere, so if that is the case it'd be convenient to have it clarified on the rules list. If you don't want to respond to all of this, please at least just tell me I can play Princess Designer with my boys in peace. If not Princess Designer, please give me the go ahead to play Princess Spell Factory instead.

Yes, it existed back in 2015/16 as a pop-up menu that actually just directly connected you to a server after you clicked it. That plugin broke on CS:GO and there were replacements that were looked into but none completely replicated what the old one was able to do. You could still have a pop-up menu with the necessary information to find our other servers, but as far as I know it won't be as easy to switch servers. I'd imagine it's also not hard to have "connect ip" pasted into the console upon clicking one with the necessary IP attached so you can copy and paste it quickly.

As sarcastic / not serious as this thread is, it might be a good time to reach out to the community for their thoughts on the fact that the servers haven't been doing so great for awhile now, by either repurposing this thread or creating a new one. @SilentGuns has pretty much already made a decent post to transform this into a productive thread and while Zombie Escape is the most concerning, I'd ask some broader questions about the servers as a whole, personally. Whether that be in this thread or another one, each server separately or altogether, I'd at least consider it.

dude, shut the fuck up

Crazy to think @XeNo had to be hammered enough to think @Zayne was being a real white knight. Lay off the drinks guy. On some real shit since this'll probably be one of the last times this thread gets bumped, thanks for all the well wishes. Just seeing some of the names in here brought back an assload of memories and actually made me nostalgic thinking about when I first joined here. If you took the time to read the thread or actually write a response, I appreciate it. Some of you may never realize the impact you had on me, but I'm hopeful that those people who took the time to talk to me for hours on end about stuff that didn't even have to do with SG will recognize that I'm eternally grateful for it. It's wild to think about the fact that I'll probably never be back here as actively as I was once, but all good things must come to an end. It's been an honor, ladies. make bom a bd

We took it out back. Proud of y'all.

Expect my men. Congrats guys. My boy @drippy is on the move

Negating the lack of vocal opposition to this idea, we can't sit here and act like that means no one will be mad. The plugin has been on the server for more than four years and it was introduced about a year after the server's initial release. I have no doubt that there are people who take pride in their rank and go on the server with the sole intention of increasing it. The plugin is undoubtedly a motivator for people to play, as most ranking systems are. We have ranking systems on pretty much all of our servers. However, I'd argue that it isn't the right motivation for playing and that you should remove it and deal with the temporary anger from those players. The plugin makes no sense. It's akin to one you'd find on an FFA server or something of that sort. Jailbreak is a roleplay mod and people are grinding for points as opposed to actually roleplaying. Gangs makes much more sense, though it's still a ranking system. It arguably ties into the gamemode. The motivation to play T side should shift from wanting to get kills to purely wanting to play as a T; do deathgames, minigames, start riots, etc. That's when Jailbreak is fun. You go to these other servers and the T side seemingly finds their enjoyment from doing stuff like this as opposed to grinding for a rank. I'd actually argue that the gangs plugin should also be changed from counting things like kills and assists to purely counting playtime from the gang's members. Change it so the gang name shows up on the leaderboard in their clantag and now you have a simple system for people to represent their gang while also having a motivation to grind to get their gang to the top by playing the server. The CT rank system is the CT-side equivalent and now you've completely balanced the motivation for playing each side. You might actually end up with people wanting to play CT side more which could end up with a surplus of CT players. Haven't made a post in a hot minute but I'd have a lot of faith in this somewhat monumental change I stated above.