Caution

Hey all. So, given the circumstances of Roux, I'm going to cut this short by a few days. There was also a lack of interest, with only one person buying raffle tickets. Instead of cancelling the whole thing and doing it again another month, I'm actually going to give the skin to the one person who bought raffle tickets. Which I think is a better route to incentivize buying some tickets! Additionally, after running that poll, we're going to move in the direction of steam gift cards instead for next month. Congrats to @FanServicefor winning by default! Send me a request on steam so I can give it to you.

Seeing him log off steam for the last time hit. I'm free all day tomorrow and will play with the streamers all 12 hours if there's room.

Good evening everyone, I am writing this thread to inform you all of a recent tragedy here at SG. It is with great sadness that I have to tell you all that Roux has passed away. For those of you who may not have met Roux, he was a former BD, a longtime member, and a great friend to many of us here. You could always find him making funny montages, spamming to subscribe to him in the chatbox, grinding PayDay2 achievements, or talking about having intercourse with people's moms. I didn't think the news about Roux could get much worse when his house burned down last year...but unfortunately here we are. Currently, those who were close to him are trying to reach out to the family to see if there is anything we can do as a community to help, like we did with the unfortunate burning of his house. Please be respectful, and do not push for further details surrounding all of this, as it really isn't anyone's business beyond this. Love you buddy, thanks for all the hard work, laughs, and memories.

I think that the workload increasing = playtime decreasing can definitely be true in some aspects. As basically a manager of managers, a BD's workload can get even heavier when we had ranks like AO staffed full of people with...well we'll call them 'unique personalities'. Because that HAS to get handled at the BD level, we can't delegate that out at all. Now that we've opened up ranks a bit with some more specific purposes, it's been a lot better. The other thing (for me, anyways) is that I've been playing SG for 14 years; a forum member for 13 years; a higher up for 11 years; a BD for 8 years; and the owner for 6 years (something like that). It goes without saying that the people I played games with all those years ago are mostly gone. While I still keep in touch with a few people from back in the day through various platforms, as life pulled me further and further away due to growing up, graduating high school, joining the military, deploying, etc., I felt like I was constantly having to make new groups of friends, as the old ones were just constantly cycling in and out through bans or just life catching up. 95% of the fun of playing games online is playing them with people you know and enjoy, or people you know and want to troll - the other 5% is the actual game itself. With that being said, it stopped becoming fun for me for the most part. Throw in having to learn a new game (CSGO), and it's kinda meh. I'm not saying it's not fun at all now, but I feel like I'm having to work for the fun instead of it just coming naturally, if that makes sense. Some of the most fun I've ever had in my life was 2008 - 2009 prison break with the old school, simple maps...and the few summers we had a CSS scrim server that we had completely full all day every day full of SG people. Think that was like 2012 - 2013 ish.

I never understood the correlation some people make between working out / being big and hand-to-hand combat training. Additionally, there’s a significant difference between being taught how to defend yourself and / or subdue an opponent vs. being taught how to take their life. Most forms of training do not teach the latter...unless you joined the few and the proud.

Nope, it has nothing to do with supporter, as mentioned. It's roughly 1/10th the cost of the skin.

Hello everyone, In an effort to continue finding ways to hit our goals and expand into other game modes as you've seen recently, I'd like to have SG venture a bit further into the world of raffling skins, separate from what we currently do with our raffle system. This new raffle would be completely separate (and, to be less confusing, would eventually be staggered in terms of time) from the current raffle system we do here via play time. For now, I'm just running a trial to see who would even be interested. Ultimately, it would be cool to have several skins going at once ranging in value, but for now we are just going to do one skin: a Factory New AK-47 Frontside Misty. Not only would I like to add additional skins to the raffle in the future, but also I would like to do things like taking suggestions from you guys and voting on skins that I purchase to put into the raffle. And having the big monthly winner choose the random method in which I draw the following month's winner(s). There really aren't a whole lot of limits to what we can do with it. The current ground-rules for this trial: It will be open from the moment I post this thread to 11:59pm PDT, March 31st. Each raffle ticket is $5. There are no limits to the amount of raffle tickets you can buy. Eligibility: You must be a forum member as of the time of this post, and you must be in good standing (not banned). If you get forum banned at all, for any duration of time, I will refund you your ticket and you will become ineligible. All ranks allowed to participate. You may buy tickets for other people, so long as they meet the eligibility requirements. I will fully refund any number of tickets you request, as long as it's done prior to the end of the raffle. Winner will be drawn shortly after; most likely the next day, unless something comes up for me. This will be to ensure that everyone who got in during the window gets sent a raffle ticket. I will draw the winner, and it will be done live (in some manner, haven't decided yet). Unless participants inform ME of a situation where they will be AFK, the winner(s) will have 72 hours from the time I post the results to claim the prize(s). Send me a forum PM for further details to claim. I am not going to hunt people down. In the event where a prize is unclaimed after 72 hours, I will publicly inform everyone that the person did not contact me and will immediately hold another live drawing to determine the winner (the person who did not claim the prize will still be eligible for the redraw). The minimum amount of raffle tickets purchased TOTAL, among everyone, is 10. In the event where there are not at least 10 total tickets purchased, I will either refund everyone's money or I will do the raffle anyways: that will be up to my discretion. If the minimum number is met, I will run the raffle. You MUST PM me on the forums with your PayPal email you used to purchase the ticket(s), so I can verify and give you the ticket(s). If you do not hear back from me please follow up. Anything not mentioned here that comes up later will be handled, disputed, resolved, etc., by me. Being that this is a trial run, I don't have any fancy new PayPal buttons just yet. For now, you can pull up this QR code on your phone's camera and it will redirect you to PayPal where you can purchase a raffle ticket. In the note, it would be helpful if you put what it was for, who you are on the forums, etc., for easier identification later. While I am in conversations with fellow BD's about my goals and expectations for this raffle, I am running this on my own...so please direct any questions to me. Hopefully there is a good turn out, and we can continue to move forward each month making it better and better as we see fit! Good luck and thanks everyone!

lol my favorite thing in that ddis thread: bruhhhhhh real fuckin talk. It's been years for me and I still get anxiety driving next to trash, pipes, etc., or when people are (what I deem as) following me. If I think someone is tailing me I start taking like random turns and exits, or do evasive shit to get super far away from trash on the side of the road.

I was in the Marines for five years with a deployment to Afghanistan... it's going to take a lot more than dicks to scare me away

they wanted to make admin apps require a 90% approval and a $50 down payment this is the best i could talk them down

moon base alpha

how did you get that picture of me

Good afternoon everyone, As I have mentioned a few times now, we are actively engaged in expanding SG. This is starting to branch out into several areas - many of which are leaps of faith, trial and error, etc. New servers, expanding beyond PayPal (on my to-do list is creating a bank account for SG since a lot of things require one of my personal debit cards anyways), new policies, etc. It may seem like it's taking awhile to push stuff out, but we're just getting to it when we can. The ban system was a major overhaul, and next on the list is probably revamping how we handle admin strikes. There's a reason that I am trying to get some of this stuff pushed out soon, or at least begin conversations of what it looks like. It's not really a secret, I just haven't shared it publicly yet I guess, but I intend on resigning from my position in the federal government to pick up contracting in the Middle-East for a few years - starting sometime in the next few months. What that looks like for my activity...I'm not entirely sure. I'm hoping it actually allows me to be a bit more active because it seems the schedule is much more consistent. Having been to the Middle-East before, I know not to plan on that too much though until I get there and see what's up. As always, in the event of my extended absence where I cannot be reached, Gator has the ultimate and final say in any and all matters pertaining to SG. I feel like it is important to start getting a lot of these changes started, if not to at least see what works for us and what doesn't. Moving to a better automated payment system was a huge load off (thanks Liam) - but I do want to initiate some sort of 'If you're not set up in x amount of days, we'll give you more' type of official policy before I go. What that looks like...I'm not entirely sure. I've kind of already been doing that as is once it hits 2 weeks, but it hasn't been much of a problem lately save for a few oddballs. Anyways, if there are some major changes to the overall community you'd like to see or bring up, feel free to post a thread or send me a message. If it's worthwhile, I'll add it to the discussion and maybe purchase a game or something for unique ideas that haven't been brought up. While SG is a great place that many call home, there is a lot we can still do to better this place. We're all in this together and we are our only limits to how far we can take SG. salam alaikum Thanks everyone!

this entire album though. early - mid 2000's vibe

yeah when you match with someone, say 'Oh thank God I'm finally able to reach you. Look, the mission went all wrong. I managed to get into the vault, but I've tripped the alarm.' 90% respond with someone back like getting into it, and the other 10% are dumb and don't get it. wait for the response doesn't really matter what they respond with, but lead into something along the lines of 'This is weird, a prompt came up to disable the alarm...it says 'Hint: (their name) 's phone number. what should I type in? Help me out here' usually always works

I promised responses not results

oh yeah don’t listen to anything i say then

the hilarious thing is people talk shit, but on tinder that line will 100% of the time get you a response from your match

i want to paint you green and spank you like a disobedient avocado

still waiting on the new 'realism' patches - mopping in the rain, endless formations, demotions, depression, divorce, etc. gonna be sweet

Anything can be appealed, and the warn in chat or kick policy prior to banning is not discussed our brought up here, so it is not changed. Anything not specifically mentioned can be considered to be unchanged.

Good morning everyone, As I referenced in my previous announcement, we've got some major community changes slowly being implemented. I've got two topics on the list today: Ban policy & Racism. I'm going to talk about our change in our stance on racism first, because it will lead into the next portion regarding bans. For those of you that have been around for awhile, you saw how hardcore our 'No Racism' rule was. People were instantly-banned in some scenarios, or banned heavily oftentimes. In an effort to try and see if there would be some comfortable breathing room by relaxing on that rule, we changed it up to allow racism - but give admins the discretion on how far is too far. The intent was basically to allow light joking, banter, etc. We knew that there would be a few people who took it too far (like with anything), but after letting it play out for awhile, we're ready to change it up a bit again - mainly because it caused confusion among members and admins alike on how far is too far. While the old mentality was too far in one direction, our rule as it stands today is a bit too far in the opposite direction: so we're trying to find the spot in the middle. Racism Effective immediately, we're changing the stance on conduct normally deemed as 'Racism' in SG. Admins and higher, there will be additional threads listed in the admin sections to reemphasize this. Moving forward: Forums - Not allowed in any capacity, meaning no slang, jokes, etc. Music and whatnot in the appropriate section(s) is fine. Discord - Not allowed in any capacity. In an effort to partner with Discord, we are not allowing any and all racist slang, jokes, pictures, etc. However, if you're in a private channel among friends and no one reports anything, did it actually happen? I'm going to leave it at that. Servers - To be straight up with you guys, I had a hard time wording this. I can explain the point we're trying to get at all day and night, but someone will always loophole around whatever we post. We stole this from another community's rules because, honestly, they worded it better than what I could think of. Blatant or extreme racism is NOT allowed. Small jokes are fine. Use of the N-word with the hard 'R' is strictly prohibited. To be frank, the hard 'r' was a huge issue, and that's what we're trying to solve. We all like to mess around and tell jokes, but that in particular is not what we stand for or what we encourage people to do. If this continues to be an issue, we will reevaluate our stance and discuss as needed. We have also done away with the 'Bannable Words' list. We all know what should and should not be on that list, so there isn't a need for us to publicly display that. In addition to this, the ban length and general punishments for 'Racism' are going to be lessened, which leads into the next topic: change in ban policy. Ban Policy This is going to be two-part, covering ban policy in general & ban lengths. As it stands now, here are the basic admin rules regarding ban lengths and whatnot: Moving forward, this is what it shall be: You're going to notice a few changes here and there. Mainly, some time lengths got swapped around, we added a 'case-by-case' section, and also incorporate bans that are less than 12 hours. The point of this is not only the aforementioned, but also to restructure the actual '3 strikes, you're out' process we have here. From now on, we're going to handle bans a bit differently as a whole, including leading up to an eventual perm. So, let's dive into it: Time-out bans / Cool-down bans: Any ban length that is less than 12 hours. These bans will not count against somebody's 'record', and are meant to sort of serve as a period of time for a player to chill out for a bit. Sometimes 5 minutes works, and sometimes a bit longer is needed to get the point across. The equivalent to this is how sometimes we will issue a warning to an admin prior to issuing an official strike. These will typically be (but not limited to) handed out on a real-time basis in the servers. There will be situations where someone will be issued multiple cool-down bans without the admin knowing, and at that point just make an increase request. This is not saying that someone can't get multiple cool-down bans, but that it really shouldn't be continuously used if the point is not getting across. Ban #1 & Ban #2: 12 hours to 7 days. These should fall typically closer to lower-end of the spectrum, with the first offense being inside of the windows listed in the table above, and the second just being somewhere @ 7 days or less, depending on severity. Ban #3: 2 weeks to one month. If it is the same offense committed three times, this should be one month. If it's different crap, fall somewhere along the two week line. Ban #4: Three months, regardless of same or different offenses. Ban #5: 6 months, and we will stop saying 'permed' in these instances, instead simply saying 6 months. Someone who is actually 'permed' will be decided upon by the Board (with the possibility of extending this decision to the IA's) and listed in a Do Not Unban list in the higherup section. These will be a bit more uncommon. Extreme offenses, such as doxxing, DoS threats, harassment, sexual harassment, death threats, etc., will be handled on a case-by-case basis. While there are definitely times where these will be permanent, there are also situations that have arisen where we issue something shy of a permanent ban; it's completely dependent on the situation. Additionally, 'alting' on a server after being banned will issue a kick to the player instead of a perm. The point of this is because we may not know if someone is intentionally going to the extent of alting, or is just genuinely confused about why they can't connect to the server. Someone going to the lengths of resetting their IP, changing connection locations, using a VPN, etc., will probably be deemed as intentionally alting and will be bumped up to the next step in the banning process, meaning if they were on ban #3, they will now go to ban #4 for intentionally alting. This will be deemed by the board and / or IA's. Ignoring admins has been moved as well to bans that are less than 12 hours - ie, cooldown bans. While there is merit in the frustration that can occur behind somebody not complying with what you are asking them or telling them as an admin, 'ignoring admins' is a gigantic, catch-all loophole that can be used to circumvent one of the appropriate ban reasons listed above. Instead of taking this away entirely (because of the aforementioned merit), we are just reducing the length of time in which people can be banned for it. If it happens multiple times, it will be addressed - but the point is that people shouldn't be being banned for days on end for 'ignoring admins'. If there isn't a legitimate reason outside of this to ban someone, you should check with an IA, a BD, or just another admin on the legitimacy of the ban itself. The Board fully retains the right to change this process, apply it in a different aspect, or make exceptions when deemed absolutely necessary. While this policy is meant to cover 99% of ban situations, there are going to be people and offenses that will be handled differently due to whatever the unique nature of offense is that may come up. It's a huge change, but ultimately we are hoping to have a tad bit better player-retention by allowing a bit longer of a punishment before going straight to the perms. What this means for players currently permed on a three-strike process (or other): We will need to reevaluate the situation, but they did commit the offenses while the old policy was in place. This will be a case-by-case basis, but anyone may feel free to appeal their ban, regardless of when your appeal date was given (unless you were told not to appeal at all because it is simply 'no'). We will evaluate how they fall into this lineup, but we are not going to go out of our way to unban people who do not appeal. Please let us know if you have any questions.

We are currently looking into expanding our options with Stripe. This may take a little bit of time, but I have an account up and running. I'll work with Liam about getting it integrated.

Just sent it out a few hours ago. The original goal we had set among BD’s was $1500, so it’s awesome to see that we doubled it...and then some. Roux, I wish you and yours nothing but the best. While money can’t replace everything, hopefully this helps replace a few things. We understand your need to step down and focus on real life; just know that you will always have a place here as a BD, should you want to come back. Thank you for hard work and dedication here over the past few years. Good luck, buddy.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to speak real quick about the recent bans that took place, our interaction with GFL, and in general our interaction with other communities. We have a thread about this to staff members, but I wanted to just get the entire community on the same page. A long, long time ago, we used to have a mindset of 'if it didn't happen on SG, we can't ban for it'. This existed since I started playing on the servers in 2007, back when it was ZM. I'm not really sure where this line of thinking originated from, but it existed all the way until pretty recently - arguably within the last 5 years or so. This sort of caused a rift between communities, which caused raids, griefing, trolling, etc., even to the point where higher-ups were involved and it was considered fine because it didn't happen on SG. People would get banned from a community and then a raid would ensue. It was taken so seriously that even steam messages would be thrown out and not considered proof. When this mindset changed, it was a huge deal - and occasionally I will see people arguing 'well it didn't happen on SG' regarding a ban about something. While this topic can certainly transcend into a ton of different ban reasons, I am going to keep it strictly about outside communities. To be completely honest, I've never cared much about outside communities in the sense of seeing what they do and how they handle business. This is a fault of my own for several reasons, but after GCC (which was basically a community platform filled with leaders of different communities), I thought it made sense to look a little more into having relationships with members of outside communities. With the ability to reach out to people becoming easier (mainly due to Discord), there are definitely times where community leaders get together, especially to discuss problem members. When I say 'member', I mean members of staff; typically, no one is going to reach out to anyone about some random person connecting, trolling, and getting banned. The issue becomes having people in a position of trust that go off and act like idiots to another community, for a plethora of reasons - but mainly because that's not us, that's not what we represent, and that potentially burns a bridge for us in the future if we ever wanted to collaborate with that community. It goes even further than that - such as if we want a developer, mapper, coder, etc., to make us something specific, but they have ties to a community that we acted like assholes to. Now, this is not saying that I'm going to let another community dictate how we handle business, and we're not going to try and dictate how another community handles business; that's not what this is about. This is where our relationship with SNG went sour, as they came out and demanded that we demote Dominic. I refused to do that, and we were actually not allowed to be a part of GCC at first because of that. But I will always, 100% of the time sit down with other communities if they want to discuss members that are griefing or causing problems. This is also not saying that if you get permed somewhere else, it's a perm here (that actually got brought up at the GCC meetings - a perm at one community being a perm at all communities), or vice-versa. It is mainly used for more extreme situations like intentional griefing, poaching, advertising, etc., where the person doing the alleged actions is in a somewhat higher up role at a community...and mind you, what a 'higher-up' is considered at one community, may not be the same at another community. I can tell you that most owners and community leaders do not support poaching members, myself included. There's obviously a line with that - I don't consider poaching reaching out to a friend or two and seeing if they'd like to try out another community. What I do consider poaching, is intentionally reaching out to people of SG, giving them perks for signing up for a competing server, intentionally inciting drama among us, and then advertising said community on our own servers. To be very straight-forward: GFL was the community in particular, in this situation. Unfortunately, it was involving two of our previous higher-ups (Dominic & Zayne), who both seemingly left SG on a good note. I know it's kinda been tossed around as 'hush-hush', but I don't really think it needs to be. I want to be up front that the board, IA's, myself, or SG as a whole have absolutely no ill-will towards GFL or any of their people. We do not condone, nor will we tolerate any dumb crap to try and grief their community. We have already reached out to GFL and explained the situation with the proof we have - what happens next is up to them, but we are actually using this situation as a reminder that we'd love to partner up with them on inter-community events in the future. One of the other accusations being thrown around by Dominic during this is that we were forcing members to resign from their roles here if they were over at GFL as admins, which isn't true. A long time ago, a few members were banned and they formed another community. These members were friends with a higher up, and there were accusations thrown around about stealing server files, because the server they opened mimic'd one of SG's initially. This is where we came into the rule of being a higher-up at two communities being a no-go, simply because it's a conflict of interest. 'Higher-up' used to just mean AO, but obviously that fluctuates a little bit as we change ranks and responsibilities around a little bit. After a discussion, we found it to be a conflict of interest having a CA who is directly involved in a particular server's development being in close communication with someone creating the same server at another community - to the point where it was said "I was just going to help kickstart their server." Obviously, this is blatantly a conflict of interest. No one, however, is forcing anyone to do anything; users are free to make that choice on their own. In the past, we have had a few people who were higher ups resign and go start their own community or go to another established community, and there were no issues (such as b0red with b0red gaming - perfect example of how to do it)...this situation was not done professionally at all, however. So, just to reiterate: community leaders are in contact with each other. Someone knows someone somewhere, and if they don't, it doesn't take much to find that info and reach out. I get that sometimes people go in and fuck around, but if you are holding a position of trust / responsibility, you are directly representing SG, tag or not. If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to myself or another Board member.