So I didn't really expect myself to be posting this, but in light of recent events I've had enough of the inaccurate stories thrown around and people giving unfair blame towards each other.
After reading this, I know many of you will be like, why didn't you post this earlier if this would have been that benefiting for you to say this. I have my own reasoning, I mainly didn't want to add more fuel to the fire and some information that I'm going to talk about right now, were probably never meant to be heard by public ears. But recently, I've had enough of the dirty games being played here and sometimes even my patience can run dry - this will be the first and the last time I'll ever speak about this and before I begin, I wish to say I do not mean to throw dirt at anybody, witchhunt, asslick or hurt anybody's feelings or their public image, but I despise the fact there should be negative things said for the eyes of public only for them not to know the full story. I'd also personally like to apologize to people I'll mention in this topic, I know it probably would have been easier for you to not get dragged into this and I know I'm sharing some discrete information about you, but I think it's crucial to portray things as they truly are and I think the members deserve to know what truly happened.
I'll start off with the most recent of things, the Next leaving and the bandwagon that followed. Now I'd to begin with saying, I nor any of us ever wanted Next gone or whatever you seem to think there. In recent two weeks if you had access to UC boards, there were constant arguments between Next and tai (fragment). They were really at each other's throats. We have spoken to both of them in order to drop the arguments and start working as a team, but I guess people don't always get along after all. It all escalated into a big argument when 2 days ago Next messaged me saying that unless tai will be demoted, he and ray are posting a resignation. I've spoke with Next, trying to reason with him for roughly 3 hours I believe, we didn't really come to an agreement. Basically, next's reasoning for demoting fragment is the fact "that he leaked information from highstaff board", which in a sense is truth - if you remember the drama, when tai was demoted out of nowhere and then added back to UC, it was exactly due to the fact, he did leak confessional information from the highstaff board. Thing is, we had a word with tai, Raven explicitly stated that tai will be under his personal guidance and that he promised it not to do it again and sincerely apologized for his personal mistakes. It only was to our surprise, when the day after Raven posted this, Shark ordered a demotion out of nowhere, that's why it was also later reverted - tai did apologize for his misdeeds and we were happy to give him another chance - but I'll speak more about Shark stuff later. To this day I do not understand why it bothers Next so much, yes what fragment did was not right, but I much more am of belief it is just a excuse to put a reasoning due to the fact he refused to work with tai any longer, due to the arguments they had. Don't tell to me, that the reason why somebody should be demoted is because of something he did and apologized for - the reason why this all is happening is because you two didn't get along and refused to cooperate as a team and I'm sorry, I'm not going to demote one of my colleagues in staff team just because you are not capable of putting your pride away and being able to work as a team. If tai asked me to demote you in a private conversation, I would say no to him as well. Both of you are adults (or almost) and if saying sorry or not paying attention to each other while focusing on your own work is that much of an issue - then I'm sorry but maybe this is not the right fit for such cut-throat environment.
I think it's stupid how we are getting blame for letting Next leave, when we stated many times, that we never wished for him leave, but at the same time, we do not believe that demoting tai just to comfort his ego and inability for the two to work as a team would have been the right choice and I stand by that. This is no longer a kindergarten and you will never be friends with everybody, this is how communities work - there are friendships to be formed - but when it comes to management there should be a strict regime if you ever want to be successful and I refuse to demote somebody just because you have an argument with him. I already told Next many times that we truly appreciate the work he's doing and we don't want him to leave, it was his choice to - he put the ultimatum of blackmailing us saying that it's either tai gone or him and ray gone - and I have too much morality in me in order to demote somebody just to comfort somebody else, if you can't understand that, then I'm sorry but I guess we had to part ways after all. I find it a shame you rather ran away from the issue, than facing it. I do not question you for leaving, but I question the reasons you left under and I think it's a waste of potential and good ethic for the community, when all you and tai had to do is simply learn to focus on your own stuff instead of arguing with each other. I'm not saying you're the bad guy in this, but neither is tai as you portray him to be. Honestly you both behaved childish in it and there's no putting it otherwise, no matter what you say to your friends.
Since I already poured my heart out on one thing, I might as well open up with another for completion sake. The Shark / Roni / Sami departure.
This pretty much all stems from Shark, so I'll mainly focus on him as all the stuff has some correlation to him, so I don't see much point on going deep into what truly happened with Roni and Sami because I'll pretty much mention them anyways if I'll talk about Shark. I hope this doesn't come off as some sort of personal revenge or anything, I'm in good terms with Roni and Sami and even after their departure we're in friendly terms and I sincerely wish them all the best with their new community, but I wanted to bring some light on what happened because lately, I've seen too many people with false imaginations on what truly happened and it was sort of tearing me apart from inside. The demotion of Shark was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to go through - real life included - not only from gaming perspective. Shark is essentially the reason how I got to some of my first ranks and in a sense it felt awful that I felt like I'm pushing my own mentor away, but on the other hand, I think it was albeit tragic but a must-do deed.
It all started when first Demolition was started a rival community started by our former owner Piranchas. It really happened out of sudden, Ambrosia was doing fine, but just one day Piranchas decided to leave things for reasons to this day I do not understand. He just decided to leave the community out of nowhere and start a new one. Luckily Ambrosia ended in good hands - Casper, but it could have died because of the what happened. I do not mean to inflict guilt on Piranchas doing it, it was his community after all, he was paying the bills, so he could do what he wanted with it. I think he maybe could have informed us about his intentions of leaving prior before doing so, but that's not of my business, it was his community so he could do with it what he wanted to - however with start of Demoltion, Piranchas was not the only Emperor I've grown weary of. It was evident, Shark was helping his close friend Piranchas in Demolition - although he still was Emperor in Ambrosia. At first I was okay with it, they were long time friends after all, but when I've seen Shark with Emperor rank on Demoltion, knowing he's there but he still is Emperor in Ambrosia, as if we were some sort of back up plan for him, a place he would return to if things didn't work out a secondary community to him, it was the first step for me when I felt like our relationship started to slowly but surely diminish. I still was okay with him coming back to Ambrosia, after all he was a long-time friend for me, that I knew for over 5 years so I was happy to welcome him back, but it's when I first started to feel a bit bad about it and it was a small piece in the big domino that started to crumble.
Once Demolition proved unsuccessful and was closed - mainly due to internal issues that I'll not reveal here out of respect and Shark inevitably returned to the backup he had in form of Ambrosia, things got only worse. We had some inactivity / loss of motivation issues, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, we had an inactive emperor team - I think everybody from it, be it Ezza, Raven, Shark or me (Casper is owner not an emperor) didn't really give it our best. We got all sort of worn out after the many years we spent here working on the community and the fact we didn't make any major progress felt very demotivating. Luckily after time we got our motivation back and were ready to work on the community again. Unfortunately things didn't go as smooth as we would have hoped - this was mainly due to either internal issues (argument between Daniel and Einstein, ended in Daniel leaving, argument between CC/tony and a lot of community members, or lately arguments between next and tai). In addition to that, we had some shenanigans with Shark. I'm not sure why, but ever since Shark came back, we had major issues with him taking decisions alone. There were a lot more than I'll name here, i'll just name a few, probably the biggest ones, be it the unexpected CC to CL promotion, surf to gungame change, Roni to CL promotion or the tai demotion. Now before Roni/CC get offended what I just wrote, I do believe they would make good Community Leaders - in fact I think community gave them more backlash than they actually deserved to receive and I saw both of them as future adapt Community Leaders, I just think during the time they were promoted they were not 100% ready yet and to a certain sense I feel sorry for them, because they got so much shit, when it could have been prevented when Shark waited, discussed the promotions with us on meetings or even by posting a topic so we can say our opinions - it was not really their fault they got received by the community how they were, that's like throwing an unarmed youngling into a pack of wolves, but the decisions he did were questionable at best. It was hurting the community, to a certain degree, I was annoyed by the fact I was getting blamed for Shark's decisions which in many cases I was either not agreeing with, or in certain cases downright against, but I couldn't really side with the community - because that's how being in a team works - you back them up, I'm not going to talk shit about Shark because he did a bad decision in front of all of our members if I wish to maintain a healthy working relationship inside the highstaff team for logical reasons.
For me was the last straw when I found out Shark tried to convince Casper to kick me, Raven and Ezza off the team for him to take over with new management. as some sort of coup. That's when things truly started to fall apart, I also remember in his leaving topic, there were a lot of things that were either taken out of context or just downright incorrect and some other things not mentioned which they should have in order to provide a fair story to everybody. I also remember, how it was pointed out, that I threatened to Casper that if he doesn't kick shark that I'd leave the community. That was a blatant lie and I'd be an absolute hypocrite to Next if I did this to Shark and not to do it to him with the tai argument. It was an although hard unanimous decision ard there needed to be changes in the highstaff team in order to keep the community running and as the relationships between interns of highstaff team were already shattered. It never was easy, but in retrospect I think it was the right choice and something that sadly needed to be done.
Not to mention, I find it sort of cheap what he posted in his leaving topic. It is full of lies or either things out of context at the very least. I remember I was initially quite pissed after reading it, but I kept my cool and didn't respond to it publicly. It came off a bit baffling to me, how he said that I threatened to leave if he didn't. I remember I may have said something along the lines "Times have been hard and I've been thinking about leaving, but I'd rather put up with a fight rather than let the communtiy die not doing anything". Now I understand it may suggest I was quite fed up with him and honestly, I was - I found it really silly when he demoted tai, especially since Raven posted in highstaff board that he apologized and tai will be under his personal supervision - there literally was no reason to order Roni to demote him and nobody from Emperor team agreed with it, Shark just did it out of nowhere - that's why the demotion was reverted as well. It was really annoying, because after each decision Shark did I remember myself and the rest of the Emeperor team asking Shark not to do it again, but for some reason, he kept on doing it. So yeah, we all agreed that Shark needed to be suspended, thing is - we never wanted to get rid off Shark completely as he says in his leaving topic or that we back-stabbed him or anything. In fact, when I informed Shark about the sad news - with the rest of the Emperors - we wanted to give Shark a honorary rank of Ambrosia Legend, he would still have access to highstaff boards as the original founder and would keep admin on both forum and servers - he would just not be the one directly taking decisions directly, as an Emperor, because clearly it wasn't working out and we needed to move forward and not solve silly issues which many of originate from his solo decisions he did, which could have easily been prevented if he talked to us beforehand.
About Roni / Sami. Roni was initially fooled into thinking that for some reason I would blindly hate him for no good reason, I believe he was told that I talk behind his back, calling him a useless retard and that I say to everybody that the reason he was promoted was a mistake (both of which are a blatant lie, second one is even evidenced - if you check Roni's promotion topic, you can actually see me defending him there, not talking shit about him like the big irony of a claim it was) and you can pretty much ask anyone, that although I may sometimes not always have only positive things to say, I never talked bad things about Roni behind his back and if anything, I mainly spoke nicely about him, giving him the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure if the stories like that were a some form of revenge against me, because Shark believed I had something inexplicably evil to do with his demotion, although it was a team decision or what, but yeah. Roni initially wanted to leave, because of the lies said about me in order to hurt my reputation in his eyes. After I had a word with him, explaining everything he was bound to stay as everything was cleared up. The night later, it came to a bit of exchange of opinions between Roni and Ezza. We agreed, it probably would be for the better for both the community and us - there was no bad blood between us when he left. I respect his decision and we said our farewell to each other as friends and to this day we talk every now and then. Sami left as well, following Roni, since they are good friends, reasoning it with, if Roni leaves I'm leaving - I respect his choice and likewise left in good terms.
If anything it saddens me with what happened with Shark. I took and still take the fellow as my friend and it's a shame he doesn't see it likewise. I've known him for many years and where I am today in Ambrosia is largely also his effort - unfortunately sometimes it comes to moments where you have to put friendships aside and decide, whether you want to continue with the community, want to keep it alive for all the members out there, or continue with your personal bromance. I'll gladly take the blame for his leaving, I played a role in it after all, but if anything, I did it with my best intentions for the community and as you can see, if you read my post, things were much less functional than they may have looked like. I was deeply pained when Shark's leaving topic was mainly a large victimization of himself and not really a farewell.
What I did right now will probably leave bad blood between me and him for the rest of the days and I'm sorry for going open with all this, but members deserve to know the truth and I refuse to play the blaming game any longer. I also, by this way, hope to wish Roni and Edgars best of luck with the new community and thank them for their service they've served here throughout the years and it was a pleasure to work with them.
All in all, Ambrosia went through a lot of hard times and yes, I know sometimes it can look like we neglect our members, but I want you to know, that we never wanted to hurt anyone's feelings - what we're doing is out of the love for the community and we often have to go through decisions which will always hurt someone, one way or the other. Next's leaving was no exception and honestly it saddens me a little people were so quick to jump ships, because of the story they've heard from Next, without really listening to the other side of the coin. I understand Next's and terrabon's reason for leaving and although I may not agree with it, I respect it, but I fail to comprehend what was up with everybody yesterday or the hivemind mentality shown right there, but I'm not going to dwell on it. It's your choice, if you wish to leave, then I'm not going to stop you, but I personally feel like many of you were too quick on the judgement.
We did some stupid decisions, we did f*ck up a lot of times, but if I see members saying that we don't care about the community, it feels like the biggest insult a member of the highstaff team could receive. I've spent over 5 years here, working my ass off on many of little things, just so I can bring smile to the fact to many of our members, I may not be available for friendly chit chats with everybody who approaches me, but I treat the community with love and care and I know all of my friends in Emperor team do as well. You have to realize, in life you can't please everybody and sometimes we have to simply cut the losses and carry on. It feels a bit tragic that a lot of people overreacted, also because they are not patient enough to wait for an official response and will rather listen to one-sided interpretation than think on their own and try to understand also the other side of the story. All in all, I do not feel devastated, if anything, motivated to prove a lot of people wrong who wrote us off recently.
I think the community went through a lot of hardships in recent months and I feel like this was the final chapter of it a cycle that needed to finish so we are ready for a fresh start. I'm not going to stop a single one of those bandwaggonners from leaving. If you are naive enough to believe one portrayal without being neutral to the other, then I guess you are not ready for being in a gaming community. It may be sad to see some of your friends leaving, but I'm only positive about what the future holds in store for us and I'd rather have some of the people leave now, rather than holding hatred within themselves, being not content with what they are.
To sum it up, I hope this post, although of annoying lengths, helps to explain everything, why were certain decisions taken in the fashion they were and I just want everyone to know, that me and rest of the staff team will do our best to work on the community despite of all the struggles we had to go through recently, we do not plan on closing anytime soon, I can guarantee you that much. We're thankful to those, who have decided to be a bit more smart about the decisions and patiently wait and stick with us, you are exactly the people we do this for, we have no personal gains from running the community, other than hopefully bringing smile to faces of our members and that's all we ever asked and hoped for.
So... hopefully with the new year coming, it can be a new year of success and as a fresh start with new goals for many things in our lives, so it could be one for the Ambrosia Community.
I hope nobody was offended by this post and take it with sportsmanship and respect, I just couldn't hold it inside me any longer. This is after all the last time I'll talk about this stuff and will rather focus on more positive things that are ahead of us. See you on forums and servers boys and girls, take care <3
Topic: "The full story" or "Why people are silly to jump to conclusions" (Read 659 times)