Who is SG for?

[Gentoo]

4 hours ago, kabLe said:

Id be interested to hear why you specifically prefer SG over another community that you could have joined and worked towards bettering.

I spent about about a year playing our TTT server before I reached out to admins and eventually joined the forums to apply for staff. The forums felt weird and distant at the time, I had trouble adjusting to the culture and making friends as very few of the server regulars were integrated and I was pretty retarded at the time. Joining the Teamspeak helped a lot and I was able to hang out with regulars and staff and better integrate in the community. The majority of my connection to the community and dedication to staff hinged on my love for our server in particular, not sure how common the sentiment is or how relevant it is to the conversation, but take that as it is.

 

Touching quickly on the Discord, I've not been active recently. Mostly due to few times I would poke in and try to join a conversation, it was mostly dead, or people would be tucked away into private channels or playing Destiny together, not streaming or entertaining side conversation. Again this wasn't more than 10 times so this could be chalked up to coincidence, but it looked like staff wasn't making a conscious effort to welcome and include people into the community. During my stint as LA among other things such as pushing events and meetings into channels, we encouraged staff to hang out in public channels, stream games, encourage people into VC, and actively integrate with new and young members. This seemed to work great at the time, but it doesn't seem that this effort is still ongoing at first glance.

 

In terms of joining staff and staff retention, these can be touchy subjects if you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, so I may make a more in depth post at a later time. In short, my perspective is that it could be improved.

[kabLe]

22 hours ago, Gentoo said:

I spent about about a year playing our TTT server before I reached out to admins and eventually joined the forums to apply for staff. The forums felt weird and distant at the time, I had trouble adjusting to the culture and making friends as very few of the server regulars were integrated and I was pretty retarded at the time. Joining the Teamspeak helped a lot and I was able to hang out with regulars and staff and better integrate in the community. The majority of my connection to the community and dedication to staff hinged on my love for our server in particular, not sure how common the sentiment is or how relevant it is to the conversation, but take that as it is.

 

Touching quickly on the Discord, I've not been active recently. Mostly due to few times I would poke in and try to join a conversation, it was mostly dead, or people would be tucked away into private channels or playing Destiny together, not streaming or entertaining side conversation. Again this wasn't more than 10 times so this could be chalked up to coincidence, but it looked like staff wasn't making a conscious effort to welcome and include people into the community. During my stint as LA among other things such as pushing events and meetings into channels, we encouraged staff to hang out in public channels, stream games, encourage people into VC, and actively integrate with new and young members. This seemed to work great at the time, but it doesn't seem that this effort is still ongoing at first glance.

 

In terms of joining staff and staff retention, these can be touchy subjects if you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, so I may make a more in depth post at a later time. In short, my perspective is that it could be improved.

I'd say since all of our staff are volunteers that sentiment is shared whether they want to admit it or not.

 

I'd agree that any form of voice chat will help anyone integrate into a community but we have multiple adverts pointing you towards our forum to start integration. If it took you a year to do it the only thing I would say is on fault of SG is we could make it more apparent that we have the forums. If you knew about them and just didn't decide to sign up for a year what could any of us have done to facilitate that short of one of us picking you out of the crowd and sending you the forums link?

 

I can't speak for how things have gone over the last 6 months to a year since I wasn't paying much attention but what I can say is that for the most part, from what I've observed, most of the staff tends to make private channels but not necessarily lock them. Maybe opening up the ability to make private channels but locking them be a subscriber perk could help with that. I'm not saying that's even been discussed but I'm just spitballing off the top of my head.

 

Whether you want to go into detail or not on joining staff and sticking a round is something I will let you decide. What I will say on this is that we appreciate all the work everyone who steps up does but at the same time burn out is a real thing. People tend to take on multiple roles not understanding or even thinking that eventually you will catch burn out. Once somebody stops putting in that work, it's not conducive to let them hang around just for the sake of hanging around, which I would argue is partly why we are in the scenario we are in but that is just my personal view, one that should be taken with a grain of salt. 

 

At the end of the day, if people don't step up and voice their opinions we can't do anything to facilitate change. I understand some people don't want to for fear they'll get meme'd on but at some point it's just the internet, say what you have to say. If the overall atmosphere is that people don't want to speak because of this fear, we can attack that. If nobody pipes up at all, what are we attacking? We are just shooting in the dark and hoping we hit. Many of the people on the board come from a completely different era of the internet and SG itself so they may not be able to relate to the increasing PC culture that has crept up while also maintaining common sense rules.

[Gentoo]

33 minutes ago, kabLe said:

If it took you a year to do it the only thing I would say is on fault of SG is we could make it more apparent that we have the forums.

I would say that I at least subconsciously knee they existed, but the importance of them didn't feel very stressed. Any quarrels about changes were had on the server, events, sparse at the time, just randomly took place with no mention of how they are decided/announced, etc. While things seem to have come a ways, I still think emphasis should be kept, encouraging all staff to direct people here in regards to any problems or suggestions they have. I'm not sure how the decline in servers and shift towards Discord will affect this, I don't see many motivating factors for a regular in the Discord to hop on here, but I'm sure staff can think things up and new servers will open those gates again.

 

I understand that burnout is inevitable and there's not much you can do about that, but anyone in staff knows there are many more factors at play here. I'll try to elaborate after work on topics such as mentoring, ingroups, disagreements after work, if they're not too touchy, but anyone else is welcome to take a stab at it in the meantime.

[20 scrolls]

Dom and Creten have been removed from the SGLEL. I am not happy.