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Introductions & Farewells / Why I no longer play
« on: June 10, 2018, 11:57:25 pm »
Some of you are probably curious about why I left given that I've played emps the way I did for years, I'm going to clarify in this thread. A lot of you probably know already, but that's not going to keep me from making a final statement. Tl;dr at the end for people that suck at reading.
If you do not know who I am because you joined the game after I quit, I spent a bit over two years in the staff team and wrote wiki pages, guides, suggestions and feedback.
Direction
Emps has had a couple of big problems since it came back, and while the problem of endgame content got solved with the addition of new bosses there are plenty of problems left. The economy is in shambles due to the low amount of new players, the lack of attempts to help it with updates and due to the effects of stakers on the market. The amount of trading that goes on would almost force people into ironman mode if it weren't for the grand exchange. The sheer amount of money and items that gets rwted by stakers not only takes away huge amounts of donations but also means those players don't participate in the market regularly. Ironman mode doesn't have this issue, but they don't exactly participate in group content the same way regular players do.
New boss drops are done in a way that creates more powercreep, powercreep harms pvp, pvp shapes a lot of demand for gear and supplies and this is why nothing is worth jack shit anymore. The lack of balance in exp rates is making rs3 an actually bearable alternative for emps. It's becoming more and more of an impossible task to fix these issues in a realistic manner with the current conditions. If there is no major change in game direction it will be what kills emps.
Community
Let's analyze two important aspects of the community. The forums and the staff team.
The forums continue to drop in post and topic activity, not only that but the counting to 10k thread makes up for a significant fraction of the posts nowadays. To top that off, the important sections of the forum (guides, suggestions & feedback) are dying rapidly in activity. This makes it a lot more difficult for a developer to connect with his playerbase. I don't know why nobody is doing anything about it. There seems to be very little motivation from players to improve the state of the game.
The staff team, oh boy where do I start. The way the staff team is set up in terms of recruiting and policy is what has caused the team to be in it's current state. In the past recruiting anyone that stood out in terms of quality worked because we had the playerbase for it, however this is no longer the case. We've had seemingly more random promotions and a lot of staff members that were in the team shorter than I was game admin. And rather than putting effort into creating a new system the standards for new staff members continue to reach new lows. And here I thought promoting Mario all the way to admin just to keep him from breaking the rules was a bit of a weird way to do things. The lack of transparency is also something that makes things very difficult for the staff team. There's a huge barrier of entry to it due to the sheer lack of information on what being a staff member actually entails.
Rules continue to be enforced very little if at all, and you can see it's effects on the community. The topics for rules aren't kept up to date. The issue of the report abuse button not doing anything is still unresolved. Real world trading is more rampant than ever, people really seem to want to liquidate their banks, I wonder why? A botting issue was "solved" by just cutting everyone's supply, just making the bot a bit less profitable. I wonder how easy it would be to become the richest player in the game by creating a few scripts, it's not like staff members can do anything if you just get your bot to reply to them.
The current way the staff team is set up continues to make conditions worse for them. If nothing is done about that there won't be a functional staff team left. You can host events all you want but it's not going to make up for the absense of proper rule enforcement. I won't take shots at any staff members, Martin is ultimately responsible for the team and should be held accountable. Not that I expect that to happen, criticism is met with censorship, demotion or punishment. The only time Thomy interfered was when he was told Martin was checking through staff members personal skype accounts using teamviewer and that this was mandatory else they'd be demoted, this was in 2015 for those of you that joined the staff team more recently.
Tl;dr:
It's not a single decision or event that made me quit, rather it's certain things that kept happening. The direction that updates are headed in makes the economy suffer, the forums are rapidly dying and the staff team is set up in a way that makes it hard for them to positively affect the community.
Just like Jp I've found a better alternative to emps in RS3. I don't like that emps is like this, but I'm not adamant about changing that anymore. I've come to terms with it, and in time so will everyone else.
That's all. If this thread gets censored I'll put up the original somewhere so everyone can read it.
If you do not know who I am because you joined the game after I quit, I spent a bit over two years in the staff team and wrote wiki pages, guides, suggestions and feedback.
Direction
Emps has had a couple of big problems since it came back, and while the problem of endgame content got solved with the addition of new bosses there are plenty of problems left. The economy is in shambles due to the low amount of new players, the lack of attempts to help it with updates and due to the effects of stakers on the market. The amount of trading that goes on would almost force people into ironman mode if it weren't for the grand exchange. The sheer amount of money and items that gets rwted by stakers not only takes away huge amounts of donations but also means those players don't participate in the market regularly. Ironman mode doesn't have this issue, but they don't exactly participate in group content the same way regular players do.
New boss drops are done in a way that creates more powercreep, powercreep harms pvp, pvp shapes a lot of demand for gear and supplies and this is why nothing is worth jack shit anymore. The lack of balance in exp rates is making rs3 an actually bearable alternative for emps. It's becoming more and more of an impossible task to fix these issues in a realistic manner with the current conditions. If there is no major change in game direction it will be what kills emps.
Community
Let's analyze two important aspects of the community. The forums and the staff team.
The forums continue to drop in post and topic activity, not only that but the counting to 10k thread makes up for a significant fraction of the posts nowadays. To top that off, the important sections of the forum (guides, suggestions & feedback) are dying rapidly in activity. This makes it a lot more difficult for a developer to connect with his playerbase. I don't know why nobody is doing anything about it. There seems to be very little motivation from players to improve the state of the game.
The staff team, oh boy where do I start. The way the staff team is set up in terms of recruiting and policy is what has caused the team to be in it's current state. In the past recruiting anyone that stood out in terms of quality worked because we had the playerbase for it, however this is no longer the case. We've had seemingly more random promotions and a lot of staff members that were in the team shorter than I was game admin. And rather than putting effort into creating a new system the standards for new staff members continue to reach new lows. And here I thought promoting Mario all the way to admin just to keep him from breaking the rules was a bit of a weird way to do things. The lack of transparency is also something that makes things very difficult for the staff team. There's a huge barrier of entry to it due to the sheer lack of information on what being a staff member actually entails.
Rules continue to be enforced very little if at all, and you can see it's effects on the community. The topics for rules aren't kept up to date. The issue of the report abuse button not doing anything is still unresolved. Real world trading is more rampant than ever, people really seem to want to liquidate their banks, I wonder why? A botting issue was "solved" by just cutting everyone's supply, just making the bot a bit less profitable. I wonder how easy it would be to become the richest player in the game by creating a few scripts, it's not like staff members can do anything if you just get your bot to reply to them.
The current way the staff team is set up continues to make conditions worse for them. If nothing is done about that there won't be a functional staff team left. You can host events all you want but it's not going to make up for the absense of proper rule enforcement. I won't take shots at any staff members, Martin is ultimately responsible for the team and should be held accountable. Not that I expect that to happen, criticism is met with censorship, demotion or punishment. The only time Thomy interfered was when he was told Martin was checking through staff members personal skype accounts using teamviewer and that this was mandatory else they'd be demoted, this was in 2015 for those of you that joined the staff team more recently.
Tl;dr:
It's not a single decision or event that made me quit, rather it's certain things that kept happening. The direction that updates are headed in makes the economy suffer, the forums are rapidly dying and the staff team is set up in a way that makes it hard for them to positively affect the community.
Just like Jp I've found a better alternative to emps in RS3. I don't like that emps is like this, but I'm not adamant about changing that anymore. I've come to terms with it, and in time so will everyone else.
That's all. If this thread gets censored I'll put up the original somewhere so everyone can read it.
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