[Applied] Rank Removals

[Dominic]

Hey,

 

I brought this up at the community meeting, if I recall correctly the people who were speaking mostly agreed. My last point will be controversial but that's expected. 

 

- Remove the Modding Team

- Remove the Marketing Team

- Remove the Designer Team

- Remove the Streamer Team

- Remove the Internal Affairs Team

 

I'll take it point by point, but the idea is pretty much the same for all of them. The community is not in a good place and we don't need all these moving parts. All these teams are afterthoughts when it comes to actually reviving the community in the first place. None of them do much for actual community growth and anything they do that could actually help can just be delegated to certain people. It's time for everyone's focus to be on getting people to actually join the community and people being apart of these teams and them existing at all distracts from that purpose, imo.

 

The Modding Team is especially useless as it stands because everyone has sort of given up on CS:GO it seems, but as I said, even if their skills are required it's not as if removing the rank removes the people. If anything, it may even be better for this team to be dissolved and for server managers to have the ability to make public requests for any fixes they need, it's a bit more engaging that way. You still have the people who resided on the team able to view them and help and you also may have other people who are into modding chime in and help too. This can promote forum growth.

 

The Marketing Team has always sort of been a sub-species of Community Advisor in a way, imo. Each and every thing they've done from when I was around realistically could've been delegated to the CAs, but it was beneficial at the time to have a smaller group of people who oftentimes had a knack for discussing marketing topics. At this point, we don't really need to be seeking out sponsorships or anything like that. The only beneficial thing I can see them doing right now is discussing a donor system rework, which can be given to CAs and should honestly be discussed with the community as a whole.

 

The Designer Team has always been useful but it's the same premise with the Modding Team. Requests can be made public, it can promote forum growth (even if it's marginal it's worth it), and as of right now anything we do doesn't need a pretty banner behind it, it just actually needs to be useful. Most events have banners already and if public requests don't work, you don't actually need a banner and you can almost always find something decent looking and relevant on the internet. Anything else they do like COTM and the Art Contest if those still go on, as I keep saying, not a priority in the slightest.

 

The Streamer Team has been odd from the jump imo. I can see the usefulness of it if we could really put time and energy into growing our Twitch, but our Twitch isn't going to save the community. At this point if anyone believes in the potential of it, like I keep saying, you can just delegate the responsibility to them. Is anyone even in this rank as it stands? I can also see the difficulty of finding someone willing to stream for our community, it seems to me the rank has struggled since release. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Here's the controversial one.

 

Even though it's the biggest one, I'm gonna keep it short and let people retaliate first. The IA team has three small responsibilities that can be delegated elsewhere with ease. Perm and increase requests can be given to the server managers, they shouldn't need to make them and they should be able to approve or deny them, it's not a difficult task. They're trusted with managing an entire server or two already. Ban appeals always would've made more sense in the hands of the managers of the server the person was banned from. But it'd actually be easier for the server managers as a whole to just discuss a ban appeal and then run it by the LSM for final decision. 

 

The other responsibility you can argue is day-to-day SG drama. I'm very safely assuming that that's died down heavily from where it was long ago. There doesn't seem to be many big ban appeals or important Who Got Banned and Why posts, and it makes sense. People aren't here, and when they are they probably don't care to get caught up in beef. It just doesn't seem like enough to warrant an entire team anymore. The BDs can handle anything that comes up, and it's actually easier that way since you're just removing a bunch of people who need to cast votes. If second opinions or tie breakers are needed, you can look to the server managers.

 

I don't mean to make it out like I'm trying to turn server managers back into AOs, because to the best of my knowledge AOs had a hell of a lot more power and say than just being asked for their thoughts when need be or doing perm requests and ban appeals. I just firmly believe this community should be returning to the barebones of a rank structure while it tries to heal itself, we don't need all of these moving parts on anyone's plate right now. 

 

Now obviously someone in staff can clap back and say absolutely none of these teams are taking up any unnecessary time from relevant parties, and while I'd find it hard to believe I wouldn't be able to deny it. 

[BoM]

19 minutes ago, Dominic said:

- Remove the Modding Team

scrolls says no.

19 minutes ago, Dominic said:

- Remove the Marketing Team

- Remove the Designer Team

- Remove the Streamer Team

Some sort of combined function team. not sure yet.

19 minutes ago, Dominic said:

- Remove the Internal Affairs Team

Other plans for them.

[delirium]

22 hours ago, BoM said:

Some sort of combined function team. not sure yet.

Pretty sure I made an argument for this at the time of creation as it doesn't really make sense to not have these three teams working closer than they currently are. Design team should be involved in more than just rank bars, shitty waifu logos, and server/event banners. I understand the premise of volunteer work and peoples motivation levels though.

[The Real Slim Jim]

In my opinion the structure and amount of roles is detrimental to those who don't hold any, creating a massive terrifying wall for Staff to stand on and tower over us with.

 

I believe it creates a negative exponential experience when you are a member of sg, or like to remain somewhat distant from the constant goings on and drama that brews. 

 

 

     Acceptance required to be seen and heard    

 

                                                                                              Emotional return from peers/outcomes

 

so as people become more settled in they get away with things they wouldn't have if they were new, and have to do more outrageous productive/counterproductive things to get the same reward they once did.

 

take away the singular power letting people be more multi role, and those walls start to get brought down creating a more equal community in the process, not feeding into the exponential one we have currently.  

 

 

hopefully this is more productive to the original post than my last reply, as it was swiftly taken away, and it better shows my support for the idea presented in this thread.

 

 

[Dominic]

I made this thread not only to propose my suggestion to the broader public, but also to promote discussion and posts on the forums because activity is slowly dying. It was then pretty much ended by a post that said all of this was being discussed already. When are these discussions gonna come to the public?

 

I stressed the shit out of this in the first community meeting. If you want people to think you guys are doing stuff, you want people to use the forums more, you want to seem more transparent and close that gap between the higher-ups and the community, you should bring stuff like this to the public. Why does a discussion about how a new team would work need to be so private? If you're comfortable putting it out there that it's being worked out, let people give input. You don't have to release every single little detail about it if you're uncomfortable doing so. 

 

Forums are dead, please give people stuff to talk about.

 

 

[Caution]

I think returning to the roots is important and cutting out 'excess' can be a good idea. I'm not opposed to this, at least for the time being.

 

As far as IA's go...it's almost "six to one and half a dozen to another". Ultimately, we need a group of people making decisions on the things you mentioned: ban increases, ban appeals, and general punishments / drama (admin strikes, banning members that have more status than random people, etc.). These tasks are undoubtedly not going to be handled alone by BD's. We jump in on them and offer input, but it's a huge help having other people chat to the accused / accuser, witnesses, gather evidence, etc. We handle high-high profile ones usually, but that's super rare, far in-between, and not worth mentioning. So, with that being said, I think we can all agree that there needs to be some sort of group handling these tasks / assisting the BD's in handling these tasks for them to get accomplished in a timely manner.

 

I know that you said you said you're not suggesting to bring back AO's....but as I read it, it's pretty much a suggestion to bring AO back. For those who weren't around for AO - it was basically IA and a server manager combined. When we created IA's, the intent was to separate the duties so server managers could focus solely on server stuff, and IA's could focus solely on IA stuff. The thought behind this is there were AO's who had no interest in the drama and just wanted to server manage. Admittedly, it was not a significant amount and a change wasn't 'needed', it was just an interesting change to a decade old rank structure. While some of these responsibilities slightly altered here and there, the gist is that AO's handled ban appeals, player complaints, increase requests, etc. Usually the AO(s) of whatever server the complaint / appeal / was on would handle the situation...there wasn't really a lot of 'toe-stepping'. On occasion, we would have an 'Administrative Manager', who would kinda act like a mini-BD. We'd include them on promotion discussions, punishments among AO's, etc.

 

So, the reason why I say that it's six to one, yadda yadda, is because it ultimately doesn't really matter what you call the group - but one is needed. Shit will pile up and not get done otherwise. I'm actually...not opposed to a discussion of bringing back AO. It would mostly just depend on if the current server managers would want that extra responsibility. I wouldn't want to change that and add more power / responsibility and all of them go 'lol fuck this im out'.

[Revenga]

I agree with Dominic’s original post to an extent, but would push it a step or two further as well. At this time, when forum/server activity is down, I agree with Caution that it is best to simplify and return to our roots. The thoughts I basically have is this…

 

The part I disagree with is the removal of Internal Affairs, which I will explain later on. At the moment, we do not have the population or growth to warrant the elaborate rank structure that currently exists. I think the Modding, Marketing, Designer, Streamer teams should be discontinued until a later time when we have more population. Right now, the focus of the community needs to be on the servers, which will in turn help out our forum activity. If we remove those teams, our rank structure would be as follows:

• President & VP

• Board of Directors

• Internal Affairs Manager

• Internal Affairs Officers

• Technical Manager

• Technical Administrators

• Junior Technical Administrator

• Lead Server Manager

• Server Managers

• Lead Advisor

• Community Advisors

• Server Admins

• Legends

• Veterans

• Honorable Gamers

• Supporters

• Regulars

• Members

...Which, in all honesty, for a community of this current size, is still too many ranks. While we’re in a sort of “rebuilding” mode as far as population and which servers to keep and get rid of and whatnot, I feel it’s best for the BDs themselves to manage each different group, thereby eliminating the “managers” or “leads” of each group.

 

I’d like to pose a question to which I don’t currently have the answer: is there a need for IAM, TM, LSM, and Lead Advisor, and what do the individuals in these roles do? Can these duties be performed by the BDs or other individuals in IA/SM roles, without an actual title? Additionally, could we remove the JTA role, and just combine that with regular TA as well? In the past, TA access varied user to user anyways, so that could be another simplification to the structure. If we remove JTA, and those manager/lead roles, in addition to the above changes of removing the teams, this would be the rank structure:

• President & VP

• Board of Directors

• Internal Affairs Officers

• Technical Administrators

• Server Managers

• Community Advisors

• Server Admins

• Legends

• Veterans

• Honorable Gamers

• Supporters

• Regulars

• Members

...Which is a lot more manageable/understandable than the current structure. However, I think there are still changes that could be made even further than this.

 

Take Community Advisor for example. You could remove this role to make sure input from all admins is taken into account. Why limit ourselves, especially given our current size and server population, to discussing community matters with only certain “senior” admins? Encourage discussion among everyone, and people will want to post more and participate. That would help solve the issue of less forum activity these days as well.

 

I understand CA was talked about becoming a Server Representative instead. While it’s an interesting idea, I think that currently it’s not needed. Server population is the important thing to focus on right now, and while it sounds like a good rank to have, what difference will they actually make? If we want to get the servers popular, are Server Reps going to do that, or is it the combined efforts of all players and admins?

 

Beyond that, let’s look at the responsibilities of the IAO group:

• Handling and resolving admin complaints and ban appeals

  • How many admin complaints and appeals have existed in the last 2 months? 6 admin complaints, at least one of which looks like it was a joke. 5 appeals. Not saying those statistics warrants removal of this group, but these issues do not come up often anymore. Also, only 3 player complaints in the last 2 months as well.

• Handling admin disputes as they arise

  • If this also refers to complaints, see above.

• Participating in promotion discussions

  • Good to have more people than just BDs discussing promotions within the ranks.

• Participating in hosting CA+ admin training and assisting with creating training materials.

  • Having any sort of admin training program is good for those new to any rank.

• Managing member of the month/staff of the month nominations and awards

  • I need to look more into how this works, so no comment at the moment.

Then let’s look at the responsibilities of the SM group:

• Verify that servers are operational

  • This can really be done by any higher up.

• Reboot dead/lagged servers

  • This could be done by any higher up as well.

• Search for new maps for all servers

  • This is important, especially researching what kind of maps players like, and getting feedback on different maps.

• Upload maps to the servers and fast downloads site

  • A necessary step to the map adding process.

• Edit map lists & rotations

  • Another necessary step to the map adding process.

• Maintain dominion over and keep up to date with their respective server

  • Can’t run a server without knowing what’s going on.

As Caution said, what AO, or Administrative Officer, used to be is basically IA and SM combined into one group. When looking at the IAO duties next to the SM duties, honestly you could probably merge them into one group again as AOs, with BDs stepping in as needed. With as few as complaints/appeals come up these days, it would be a workable structure in my opinion, but as Caution also said, don’t want all the SMs to just quit… However, if some just want to manage servers while others don’t mind the extra work, you could just make them TAs, with the same access they have currently so they can keep doing their thing.

 

How the AO group would operate, would be more defined as time goes on. Merging two groups together, you can’t expect everything to be perfect right away. It does take time to adjust to change. However, when people step down, bringing in fresh blood is the opportunity for the Board to define and emphasize their expectations of the AO group, which is why I say it will be more defined with time.

 

Looking at the last structure I listed above, if we made these changes as well, our structure would look like:

• President & VP

• Board of Directors

• Administrative Officers

• Technical Administrators

• Server Admins

• Legends

• Veterans

• Honorable Gamers

• Supporters

• Regulars

• Members

This is just some of my thoughts, and I think this makes more sense and is far more straightforward than the current list of ranks, for the current state of the community. I’ve seen a lot of rank structures at this place, ideas that have worked/not, but we have more ranks now than I’ve ever seen, and we’re at one of our slowest points. I had more typed up for this before, but I can’t find where I saved it, so I’ll wrap it up.

[Dominic]

In response to parts of both @Caution and @Revenga - I hate quoting on these forums.

 

I think the main thing in the back of my mind when I was comparing AO to a fusion of IA / AT was that they wouldn't really have any part in promotion / demotion discussion. I can't speak on how AO functioned but afaik they discussed promotion up to even their own rank and demotions for CAs and below. IA started out like this but got more and more neutered as other ranks were created, managerial ranks in particular. And I remember being in the IA rank as we continued to get more and more "fleshed out" and continuously got things removed from us. But whatever the case, I agree with what Caution said in that I am not necessarily opposed to the idea of it becoming AO again. I think that might actually be a good route.

 

Are the responsibilities of Internal Affairs necessary? Sure, it just felt like the list had become so small that the rank was null and void. Like Revenga said, there's not many ban appeals or admin complaints, SOTM / MOTM is hardly given out and it's not a big one on the list, and CA+ admin training was also moved to specific managers of each team. This pretty much leaves "admin disputes", and any other day to day. If this is deemed enough to warrant the team, I can't argue with that, but I suppose I could've gone a different route than suggesting to pile the day to day onto the BDs. I didn't think of just bringing back AO as a feasible option, but I also can't see why it isn't.

 

I'm also going to be honest, despite being one of the people to create the last manager rank in Lead Advisor, I agree with Revenga's rework idea. Again, I haven't been in staff for a couple of years, but promotion to manager of a team slowly devolved into "you're the best on the team, keep it up, here's some extra power" because they didn't have any real power. No manager had genuine autonomy and promotion requests were more like a glorified suggestion. Demotion discussions always ended up at the BD level no matter what, where we'd check how a manager went about warning, how many times, etc. Even if you argue they have or will be given full autonomy on promotions / demotions, I don't think it's enough to warrant the entire role especially if you just bring back AO instead. I remember working in extremely functional CA teams with no manager, and extremely functional AT teams with shitty / nonexistent managers (lol), and vice versa on the AT point at least. I'd argue that majority of the time the quality of the manager means very little for team functionality.

 

It was a good idea on paper but I think our community is too linear to warrant so many "managers" - I'd like to make an educated comparison here but I think it'd be best if I didn't lol.

 

If we can agree that there's just way too much going on with our rank structure at the moment, then I don't think it'd hurt to turn back time and really go back to our roots. I mean, our community functioned pretty damn well with that rank structure. You can argue the benefits of the changes we made, I think the biggest one is that a lot of people that might be barely ready to be a server manager are absolutely not ready for the power of an AO.. but to be honest, it is what it is. We had shitty AOs, we had shitty IAs. It happens either way. I'm on the side of cutting out all this extra bs and going back to the way we were.

 

I will disagree with one point from @Revenga though, I've always viewed the Community Advisor role as an extremely beneficial rank that also served as a suitable stepping stone / indicator of whether an admin should become an AO, or in my case as a BD, if they should become a server manager. Now I could be biased here just because of how much I always loved being a CA, but I also think all the "bitch work" CAs do would be hard to delegate elsewhere. Piling player complaints, award requests, forum moderation, etc. on another rank like AO but might be too much or just might be ignored. I also think that with where the community currently stands, promoting any old staff that want to come back and help to a rank like CA could be beneficial, like what they did with Prez. 

 

 

[Prez]

I think from my perspective there is some balance to be had between the "old/original" tiers that Revenga put forward and the current system. Obviously I am a bit biased, but the original "team structure" we put forward had one taem for modding/streaming/design in the Media team, and I would agree that MKT has never been fully autonomous and would need to be looked at. The original structure however had a BD that was the head of each  team so that you had some of that influence in each functioning area and to make sure things were able to move forward with some level of "executive authority". I don't think it'd necessarily be a bad thing to put this back into place with some modifications from above.

 

- CA is super valuable and can serve both a server and actually "community discussion" focus (hence why I requested it back, although Ive been inactive in posting lately)

- IA is still valuable IMO and wouldn't hurt to either merge the duties under AO, or have half do AT duties and half do IA all under the AO umbrella

- BDs should head a department/team

- Remove modding/streaming/design and put back into one Media team IMO

- Figure out marketing - either have it headed by Caution and go that way, merge into BD responsibilities again or some other option that I can't think of

[GG EZ]

All of these groups are needed in some type of way whether it is small or big. I would just not remove them but instead put certain teams together and just have sub-roles in them.