Okay, prepare for a long post, as being the community leader I'll be adressing all the issues myself, post my thoughts on things pointed out, as I'll be also the one adressing any changes that may occur after this topic is done. This is somewhat of a self-burden :p
Also, just because I've answered doesn't mean the topic is over. If there's something you didn't post yet but want to, I'll happily adress them in my next reply. So let's go through everything one by one.
Everyone should be treated equal. Just because you're admin doesn't mean you can treat everyone else like shit, same with HA, UC, etc..
I've seen a lot of people agreeing with this. This is a rather difficult one for two reasons. First of all, it's important to understand, that the concept of "Everyone is equal" while it may sound brilliant on paper doesn't really work all that well. Last time we saw it being run was after 2nd World War in a form of communism. While people certainly weren't equal during communism, it was the ideology behind it which allowed few people who had no business in certain positions to ruin economy and livelyhood of many countries and families inside them. Now here's what I'm trying to say, imagine a country where there would be no goverment, no president and would be ran by whoever would feel like doing it at the very moment. While everyone would enjoy equality for a brief moment, it would turn into one big chaos. There simply need to be some authorities that need to keep an eye over the place - same applies here - there needs to be some authority else this place would become a mess. We certainly try to maintain the community player friendly and not as a strict business, but there are some things which simply have to be handled the hard way. There's a reason why the certain individuals in the high-staff team are in the positions they are, instead of some random girl / guy because hey, everyone is equal. Here's what I'm trying to say, everyone should be treated equally no matter what's their position / colour / gender / age but there also has to be some order, that's also what separates Ambrosia from low-quality communities which are run by people who barely can even speak English and their staff team consist out of bunch of 12 year olds. Now, don't get me wrong, there are some bright exception despite their young age, but most of time many of them are immature and make the community a giant joke. See, there's this equality, it's a very vague term. Even in real world we want to keep equality in human rights, where everybody has free choice of religion, sexuality and so on, but there are some authorities that need to keep order in our world else we'd become just a bunch of uncivilized rogues fighting over territories and power and that's exactly what would happen here if everybody would be treated equal. It's one of those things, that sounds good on a paper, but if you think about it longer, it's not all that great of an idea.
I do understand though, it was not meant so literally and you were rather asking for a more friendly environment, rather than actual equality. First things first, it's important to understand that it's impossible to babysit each and every individual in this community to ensure everyone is treated equally in a community of this magnitude. I'm trying to watch over our staff members and make them represent us with pride and in a good light, but as I said, it's not entirely possible. I just honestly feel like, that this is one of things that we all as human beings have to work towards and not just a team of staffs from Ambrosia trying to create an illusion of everyone is treated equallly - because that's not how things work. I think it all comes down to the relationships between individuals, which reminds me of a lot of members think of highstaff as some shady guys running the business from behind the scenes. With all honesty, we're all friendly gamers after all, we just don't have too many chances to show it since we have to keep some order in the place. I feel like we as staff team should try to socialize a bit more with our members, because atmosphere between staff members is certainly good, it's just I don't feel like the atmosphere between HS and your typical everyday visitor of the community is all that ideal and that would certainly help us achieve the feeling of equality - or what I feel like is better formulated - a lot friendlier atmosphere. I think there's a room for improvement in this matter and I'll talk with my colleagues to see what we can do. On second thought, I' also have an idea how to get the best results out of this topic, stay in touch @ forums guys coz I'll post a new Announcement soon (probably today or tomorow)
[Also you may find more about this matter in my reply to *PL* in this same topic]
an Highstaff warns somone for doing something like: Insulting/Spamming/Going Off topic.
They should at least NOT do the same thing. As it's ridiculous.
Rest is fine. "
I feel like that's just error of ways of certain members rather than something we all could improve on. I certainly agree and sincerely try to achieve a fair process for every case, but sometimes it's impossible. I'd personally recommend, if you feel like a decision was taken unfairly, just send us a message over Helpdesk or PM any of the Community Leader(s) or Emperors and they will assign this miss-treatment appropriately. More onto this issue can also be found at my reply to fragment.
Freedom of speech. I can't even say 'g-a-y' (***) without being censored. Makes me thing Ambrosia is homophobic.
Also can't say ga-y but can say lesbian.
Double standards.
You might just stop censoring any words, this isn't kindergarten is it?
Uhhh, yeah this one cracks me up a little, as this wasn't even intentional. This actually originates from a censorship plugin we are using on the forums. I remember that a every single word used to be simply cesonored, such silly ones as queer or stupid. Those certainly are not swearwords, recently I've even taken away censorships from words that are generally considered lighter swearwords: eg. "Shit" "Bullshit" or even "bitching" because I feel like as long as they are used in a friendly way they are just a part of the conversation. The reason behind censorship of 'heavy' swearwords such as f*ck et cetera is to keep the discussion civlized and not turn this board into smaller 4chan. The reason why gay was censored is because, quite frankly, I simply overlooked it when loosening up the unnecessary censorship few months back. Now that I think about it's actually sort of offensive towards gays as gay is not even a swearword but a lifestyle - sexuality. I'll definitely take a better look at the swear words filter and will make sure not to overlook any unnecessary swearwords like last time around. Censorship of this word was not even intentional rather than just overlooking it by accident. We're not stuck in 1700s where everything but 100% conservative was considered a sin and deserving death.
Problem I'm being fed up with one specific member of high staff and his ridiculously useless and/or non related posts in threads. Why am I fed up with him and his actions is because he himself warns and punishes people for talking trash or simply spamming yet he does basically the same thing however he is a part of the staff team and the person warned is simply a member of the community.
I know there is a report section but I didn't want to make so much fuss about it however if you want to improve few things then why not mention it here 
Solution - Have a word with the guy if he doesn't improve kick him out as it really tiring to look at the posts he makes everyday. Make sure that other lads in the team follow as I've seen others do it as well.
Thanks
Uhm I sort of adressed this in my reply to Fisu but I understand what you're trying to say. I'll have a word with the one guy to actually change his ways as I've seen a lot of negative feedback in the recent days - not only in this topic. About others, I feel like they're doing a fine job keeping a healthy discussion. I' personally am find with offtopic as long as it's somewhat related to the topic (Blimey! What a terribly formulated sentence - offtopic related to topic...) but I hope you get what I'm trying to say. It indeed is stupid to be punishing others and then you do the same 'sin'. There's one old saying in my language that I wish existed in English because it perfectly goes with the problem (or maybe it exists and I just haven't heard of it yet). Basically it is - "Vodu káže, víno pije" which would be translated into - A guy orders everyone to drink water, while he drinks wine. I'm not sure if that makes any sense to you, but basically, you should not order someone to do something, while you have the benefit and have more but frankly just don't realise it.
(Sigh.. what a terrible translation and explanation, I'd be surprised if least one guy got the meaning of it, well.. I hope so because it actually applies to this situation very well, it's just my brain feels dead after all the constant studies and I couldn't come up with a better explanation).
It is extremely important to create a process that provides clear analysis of a person when promoted to admin and higher ranks. When I say process, I refer to every side of the criteria required. For instance, when accepting a new admin, you should normally have a secretive position that is unknown to the public, having him monitoring the the person when treating people.
Obviously, I do know that you have some sort of a 'system' that allows you to collect those data, but I don't think its that effective. This is due to my observation of the recent/old promotions which kind of affected the 'admin service efficiency'. With that being said, those observers (if this idea goes real) need to be extremely talented and educated; they should be able to reveal the true image of a person. Although this seem to be impossible, but you might just pick the perfect person, and ofcourse, there has to be atleast 1 in every server- specialty is important.
If you wondering why would we need such a strict process, it is because of the fact that it was greatly increase the chances of having the perfect staff. Ultimately, we will see long-term effects such as the number of reports being reduced, massively and that would make Ambrosia, the perfect gaming community. However, an admin re-check process is really essential if this were to take place.
It certainly isn't a bad thing and in a perfect world we'd be running on this system, but this isn't the perfect world. We have to stay realistic and while keeping realistic, we not only have to state - that in reality Card is tremendously ugly
, but also the fact that such thing would be impossible to pull off.
Like, the suggestion would be working perfectly - but who would feel like spying on every applicant. Not only it would discomfort players to be spyed on, but differences in time zones preferences in server and availbity of this spyes would make such a process impossible to put to realisation. We'd want to run this, trust me we really do, but I don't feel like it's possible, certainly not in this World and Dimension.
And after all, I still feel like our staff team still contains out of many high quality admins who are one of the best and well-organized admin teams you can find in any gaming commnity to this date. There surely is always room in improvement, but hey, if the the everybody in the world woud be flawless with everything they'd want, then the life would be shallow and we'd become hollow (heh.. another Dark Souls reference slipped in), we'd have simply nothing more left to live for and that life would be a endless boredom - just like watching Golf (
10/
10 joke)
Right, I'm not really gonna give such a radical suggestion, but reinforce or weaken some suggestions, and possibly might appear that I'm repeating the suggestions so I apologize in advance.. I hope it's not a waste of your time if you invest more time into understanding my thoughts from my 3.5 years experience.
I always have been seeing quite extraordinary behavior cycles from ambrosia members in their community timespan. I do understand that higher ranks asks for higher obligations and the unconscious consequence of bigger ego for respect and loyalty. It can be argued that it's part of their gradual adaptation under new circumstances, but it's obviously the first step into generating the possibility of the backstab effect. To Elaborate how this effect works let's go back at 2011-2012, and remind ourselves at the dark time of ambrosia when mostly every member had "dirt" on somebody else for something he did wrong. This is because of the spark which tasha and sammi created with their daily reports against players and admins. Meaning that they somehow acquired a "special voice" in ambrosia following many members to somehow represent it by using that emergency blackmail. So I would like to ask the staff in ambrosia to forbid the validity of any acoustic and optical misconduct older then 15 days.Recently I have talked with numerable highstaff about this and they seem to allow this. Recalling that in the past, when jf reported arne for some "admin abuse" ezza immediately responded with forbidding blackmail(yes keeping really old evidence to prove somebody has misbehaved was claimed terminologically "blackmail") . Sadly this forum doesn't have the archives of those "Really" important posts meaning I cannot Prove it that it really happened. It's just parts and segments of my memory. I'm sorry if the previous information is wrong or misleading, but that's how I remember it.
Ultor has a decent point about appointing psychiatrists(or people with some degree in psychology) to people who are moving higher on the rank list. I think is a great idea to see how is their development proceeding over the time and report any problems and issues to the emperors so they can prevent it in time. It should never happen that a promotion like a head admin can somehow bypass the ambrosia emperor filters and freely create misconduct and mayhem in the forum/server until is too late and spotted. And those(psychiatrists) people appointed for such a position should not in the most threatening situation reveal their true nature.
The only exception that applied for a highstaff that had the biggest freedom was arne in my eyes. He had such a trait that allowed him to be seen as a normal player and his mistakes always under the disguise of great humor. He was the mediary between any ambrosian member and the highstaff. (Something like rawrplus now). If a highstaff does not have that trait, he should not risk to freely treat lower-ranked members in what ways he like. It's a general attempt to mimic his(arne's) way of management and I have never seen somebody close to his style(not yet, for sure). There has been a lot of examples where 2 highstaffs could talk something quite unknown to the normal members and not relevant to the topic but when 2 members go offtopic, then the highstaff will certainly highlight them for moderation or warn them. As many people before said, a highstaff should be an example from his head to his feet. That's how any low-ranked members in any community can see examples and try to orientate to them thinking for their future in the community.
Thank you for reading.
First of all, I'm delighted that you see me as some sort of connection between highstaff team and the "casual" members. But there are some things I have to disagree with. First of all, I'm not like Arne and more importantly never wanted to be one. Not to be mistaken, I'm not trashtalking Arne, he's actually one of my very close friends and to this day I'm in touch with him, but I feel like at those days the community was a lot worse and everything that went went. I feel like at that age, community was a lot smaller and that's the reason he could get away with doing stupid shit and being irrational a lot easier and while so called "Arne's Management" may seem like a nice laid-back style of running a community, it backfired horribly at one time. The rules at that time weres non-existent, not many people have taken the community seriously, it was an unprofessional mess and most importantly, since it was so disorganized we paid the price with numerous drama moments in arguments between highstaffs, all sorts of issues public didn't even know about, lacking any sort of ddos protection and so on. I'd like to think of that age as the period of Ambrosia being in it's teenage years. Young, innocent, not caring about image and ran with no caring what-so-ever. Yes, it may be fun and you may grin when you think about the 'ol' good times' but you know you've grown to the better. It's just you've matured up, so did me and so did Arne and we both prefer the things are now rather than the past. Without changing we'd never make it as far as we did today, because the way things were run really backfired us more than you'd realise. It's like doing your finals for 4 (D grades), sure enough the 4 years spent partying were a lot of fun, but maybe just maybe your future would be better if you took things the mature way and did them properly.
You still can have fun a an adult, but a lot more adequatly and understand the difference when you can be laidback and when situation calls for you to act accordingly to situation and help out in rough times. I think that's one of main differences between me and Arne. People know I'm a type of guy who likes to have fun and can be the biggest troll ever, but I understand (least I like to think I do) the importance of proper reaction to what you're facing. While it may be fun to take everything laidback, it is certainly not the smartest thing to do and I feel like I have the ability to understand this, which is very important.
On the other note, I perfectly understand what you're trying to say. I wouldn't say that just because now that not only me, but many members of the staff team understand the importance of social / gaming etiquette - we can't have fun. We are just serious when situation calls for it and the problem is, we never really show our fun face in public. Allow me to set example, Raven is a brilliant friendly chap who I have spent numerous hours talking about non-gaming related stuff, but you what your average joe sees, is the serious face of Raven when deciding upon unban request. Heck, Eric (Ezza) is one of the funniest lads I know but 90% of the community didn't have the chance to find out. I am happy that the community changed for the better and is now a lot more professional (and enjoyable to be in). Funnily enough, me and other mates from staff team actually had a little meeting some months back and one of the hot topics were socializing more with members. I feel like that's one thing we could certainly work on and it would really create a lot more gaming-friendly atmosphere. I almost feel like, some members are afraid of us which is a shame, because we're just gamers after all - just like them.
[You can find more about this matter in my reply to almighty Dominic (if you haven't read it already)]Regarding other things mentioned in your reply, I feel like I sort of gave all the necessary you need to know in my reply to Ultor
About the validity of proof of 15 days - I just feel like there's no reason to overcomplicate the system and I'm sorry for using a somewhat offensive real life parallel, but you also don't forgive somebody for bombing a metro and play it cool just because a certain period of time has passed.
If you could improve 1 thing in Ambrosia what would it be?
1- i love playing little and fast maps , like aim maps, awp maps etc... fast funny and always full in some servers, generally 16 ( max) players so if Ambrosia add it, it will be a lot of fun, but it is just an opinion (dont attack me lol)
there is other things , ill add them later
We will be expending our server list (we already are), but with all honesty, we don't feel like expanding our CS 1.6 server list at the very moment is the best possibility. I'd say that moving into other games like CS:GO, DayZ etc is a much better and attractive choice as financially so happiness wise.
Well that's probably it. I hope I gave you a pleasing answer to all of you. If you have any other questions or even things you disagree with, feel free to ask. I also apologise for any gramatical / spelling errors beforehand, but it's not all that easy to write such a gigantic wall of text without one (for a non-native English speaker especially) and I've also been exhausted with studies lately.
If you have any other questions, feel free to post them, I'll adress them later. Thanks everybody for your input, highly appreciated and I also hope that the insight into mine (and in many cases my staff team partner's) mindset gave you a better understanding of how much we love this place and what we think about certain issues. I really enjoyed this topic, because some of you have brought up very good suggestions and it's always good ground to build upon, so yeah, thanks for your time everybody who posted here :-)
Topic: If you could improve 1 thing in Ambrosia what would it be? (Read 1589 times)