Caution

What you did is 100% allowed under the current rules, and I’m not even encouraging you to use a loophole. Literally nothing says you can’t do what you did, and it’s completely 100% reasonable.

Stemming from when I managed PB for several years, special orders were basically ‘Everyone go to pool but Henry has a free day’. It was basically people doing a homie hookup and allowing others to deviate from what the T’s were doing. Dominic May have had a slightly different standpoint when writing that, but I doubt it, because that’s basically what it has always meant. Ensuring you don’t get smoked by telling someone to drop a gun isn’t a special order, it’s doing your due diligence as a CT. This is how PB works lol, T’s find a way to create a fictitious loophole and use it to their advantage to try and confuse CT’s. Sometimes it gets to the point where people make forum posts like this for clarification, which is fine. The line gets crossed though at admins enforcing something that doesn’t exist - so hopefully that isn’t what’s happening.

So it doesn’t even exist. Telling a T to drop a weapon is by absolutely zero means a special order lol.

Is ‘special order’ defined anywhere in our rules?

Just so I understand correctly: Under the current rules, if you’re not selected as the first CT giving orders, you can’t tell a T to drop a weapon? That seems pretty absurd.

Yeah work has been pretty crazy today with the crash. Curious to see what happened. Weather was reported pretty bad all around that area today.

Instead of figuring out whatever the total amount was after PayPal fees, I just went ahead and did the full amount upfront. Gary Sinise is a great person and the foundation is amazing; it's honestly astounding to me that he's never been Time's person of the year.

Just my two cents (PB people can make whatever rule they think works), but I always thought directional orders were dumb. Sometimes people get glitched, a map has a glitch, or settings interfere with whatever is going on. It's so much easier IMO to just say 'face (insert inanimate object here)'. There's no drama associated with it. While someone's settings or a glitch can be argued, map unfamiliarity is not a valid reason to not follow an order. Just my opinion.

I've never really been a fan of the whole 'this is how we used to do it' type of argument, because it's typically nothing more than anecdotal. My experiences playing in a server may be completely different from another person's, depending on an infinite amount of factors. Anecdotes don't really mean anything, which is why it's always good to reflect back on what's actually in writing and posted. While I'm not dismissing that admins have, in the past, punished players for things they did not witness, I'm going to comment specifically from my eleven years or so of administrating the servers, managing servers, managing the community, and ultimately being the Generalissimo (from a factual standpoint, not an anecdotal one). There has never, to my knowledge, been any type of sanctioned policy where admins are allowed to just punish people based on nothing more than hearsay and circumstantial evidence. If someone can find some sort of written rule that says something to the contrary, please let me know. Even referencing the original 'Admin Rules' thread made back in 2009, there is nothing in there listing where that is allowed. At some point in time, whether gradual or rapid, certain admins took it upon themselves to start punishing players based on the aforementioned. This led to an increase in admin complaints, to the point where it was rapidly becoming an onset issue: the juice of letting admins investigate is not worth the squeeze of breaking down the multitude of legitimate complaints that follow for admin misuse. If an admin uses their power in an incorrect manner, to include punishing a player that they have no idea on if an actual rule was broken or not, they are (and always have been) subject to punishment. Plenty of strikes have been issued for admins doing this. While we're not here to really investigate admins on if they knew the player committed an offense, if a complaint is submitted from the standpoint of the person being punished and it is clear there was no wrongdoing on their end, the admin is at fault - whether or not they were acting with honest intentions. Us stating 'stop doing this' is literally nothing more than a reminder that it shouldn't be happening in the first place. I'm not going to go into hypothetical situations on why punishing off of hearsay is a bad idea; that's been outlined several times, and me repeating that isn't going to get the point across if it isn't already there. I will reiterate though that it has never, in the history of SG, ever been okay for admins to punish people based off of anything shy of concrete wrongdoing. I'm sure most of us have done it at some point in time or another (myself included), but that absolutely does not mean that it was the right thing to do, nor that it was an established policy. This is not something that will be changed, as the bad outweighs the good...by far.

I pretty much agree with everything posted here except IA. I personally think ‘Investigator’ would be better). Makes more sense as it holds a real-world connection to what people in IA are actually called.

dfw

Good luck dude!

donate $20 and I’ll forgive you

He wouldn’t die in a plane crash because a great controller works the airspace.

I had literally nothing to do with your demotion, nor did I even vote on it. Your passive aggressive pettiness that led you to making an OTF thread instead of actually PMing someone to figure something out (even though a PM was sent to you) makes me regret not voting in favor to demote you.

Not sure who’s an old school player, but there’s only one map I’ve ever seen have this: Fox River. It was honestly super hectic, and we’d have to throw a grenade at the base of the switches to trigger them all open. Even if you included the ability to open all or close all as well, the individual cell thing was never used except for cells that had secrets. I would honestly say it’s not worth your time. Just my opinion though.

Hello everyone, First, before we start with the promotions, we'd like to recognize Mad Doggfor his work here at SG. Unfortunately, he is no longer a member of the Board because real life is taking over and we have to respect that. He has dedicated countless hours to this place and we are extremely grateful for everything he's done for us. As a token of our appreciation, he is also receiving the Presidential Award. We hope to see him back in the community soon and we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. Additionally, we'd like to give a thank you to vinyl for his work here as a member of the Internal Affairs team. He's been back in our staff ranks for a while now and has been doing a bunch of work as a higher up. We truly appreciate all of it and wish him the best. Now let's get into all these promotions! First up, to Community Advisor, please join me in welcoming Dong, Tyymunk, nV, and delirium! All four of these people have been doing great work in their current ranks and have shown that they are dedicated to moving the community forward. Their new responsibilities will include: Work with the higher staff on implementing important decisions and projects Handling player complaints and issuing bans Moderation of the forum Give awards to members on request Send group invitations to members on request Post in-game server problems on the forum Help in any way to make the servers fun Handle reported posts on the forum Next up, to the Administrative Team, we have Greggy, Fuze, nick, fantastic and Montag! All five of these people have put a ton of effort into bettering our servers and we are pleased to have them on board. Their new responsibilities will include: Verify that servers are operational Reboot dead/lagged servers Assist in training new admins Monitor the Teamspeak 3 server Grant access rights to Teamspeak 3 Search for new maps for all servers Upload maps to the servers and fast downloads site Edit map lists & rotations Issue permanent bans to players via request from SA's We're also going to be filling the Events Manager position, but with two people. Given the size of the team and the fact these people are completely ready to run it, we've decided to promote both of them. Nedand Strayyz will both be filling this position and will be running the team side by side! Their responsibilities will stay the same, with the addition of managing the rest of the team. We also have some new members of the Internal Affairs team! Fuze and nick will be our newest additions. Both of them have expressed their interest in participating in higher up discussion to benefit the community and have shown that they are ready to do so. Their new responsibilities will include: Handling and resolving admin complaints, player complaints and ban appeals Handling admin disputes as they arise Participating in promotion discussions Participating in hosting CA+ admin training and assisting with creating training materials. Managing member of the month/staff of the month nominations and awards Lastly, joining the Board of Directors, we have eXtr3m3! eXtr3m3 has been around SG for a while and has gone through our ranks many times. He has already done great work as the Administrative Manager and as a member of the Internal Affairs team and we have no doubt that he'll do just as great as a BD. His new responsibilities will include: Support/build/fix servers Approve admin applications Set up new Admin and Subscriber access Issue admin warnings/punishments Keep the community updated of any changes Final say in all admin disputes Plan for growth (website/servers) Support forum/plugins/logos Review and implement community suggestions Promote/demote server admins Handle admin complaints Handle disputes among fellow admins Be a role model to all admins/setting by example Collect donations, manage subscriptions, and pay the bills Manage the website, forums, and bansite Manage AT staffing and responsibilities ... anything else that needs to be done Congratulations everyone!

Such as: https://gyazo.com/9e93fd82c7d54a967d717cd55948b2a6 Apparently the message is not getting across, so a month is issued to him.

I love how people assume things without having any actual facts. That player was spamming a group meant to be a douchebag towards me multiple times in ZE chat. Everything that is said in chat is logged publicly - so anyone can go check that out. You should probably fact check a bit before coming on here speaking out of your ass. Yes and no. While no, you typically will not be banned for something like that - I / the BD team reserves the right to ban anyone at any point in time for anything we deem necessary. This wasn't the case in this situation, however, as it was spammed in chat. I don't give a fuck who likes me / doesn't like me - I really don't. But you are out of your fucking mind if you think I'm going to allow you to come onto a server that I own and spam a group meant to be a douchebag. Go somewhere else and do it, and don't act surprised when you get banned for it. I would ban anyone doing that towards any of our admins or players (which we have done in the past; see MichelleC). Plain and simple: if you spend time here as a player, server manager, admin, a mixture of these, or something else entirely, you don't deserve to put up with that bullshit. I don't give a shit if you guys have 'freepika!' or whatever, but don't be surprised if you get banned when you step over the line.

but you didn't even tell them about the other promotions next week

It varies on the year. $125,000 -$200,000 or so, depending on the amount of overtime he works if i had to guess

To further expand on that: Its my honest belief that regular users of SG won’t give a fuck of post count is removed. Why? Because they don’t want people getting admin who shouldn’t get it, and don’t want people being denied if they deserve it. The only thing it’s going to deter is people bullshitting for a post count. Might as well be a happy birthday thread or a welcome thread lol, it’s just empty BS to gain a post. But the people who put blood, sweat, and tears into the place are going to voice their opinion on an applicant who is deserving (or undeserving), regardless of post count. tldr i said politely that the people who contribute and actually matter / care about the overall success of SG will still post

This is what I posted in a higher up thread and is more or less my take on abstains. To further expand on my abstain stipulation that I was fine with: While ‘abstain’ was never a thing during the first portion of SG’s lifetime (or so I remember), conditional approvals were - ie ‘I’d support you if you got your activity up, you are a great person but don’t have enough server time.’ While there may be an argument that this can be considered ‘no’, this is just an example and some of the posts have been tricky to depict whether a person was saying no or abstaining. The additional upside is that it allows someone to see where they are lacking and need to improve. We could have CA’s sift through and gather specifically ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but I don’t really think it’s needed. There are meaningful ways to contribute without officially giving a ‘yay’ or ‘nay’, especially when we don’t even require a specific vote count / ratio. ’Dont know you, abstain’ type posts I can agree are worthless and provide nothing, however I don’t think every abstention is black and white worthless and provides nothing. Does it in a raw vote count? Sure. But we don’t approve people based on a specific number of votes, there are multiple factors that come into play. At the end end of the day I don’t really care. I don’t think it’s a big enough problem to restrict people from giving somewhat of an opinion. I’d rather just restrict ‘i don’t know you’ type abstains...but even then, making the section not count toward post counts would probably limit the amount of those, in my opinion anyways. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t.