[cherry (2)]

Ok so now that I actually read the thread and am not memeing gabe - there is a whole analysis on where problems lie. The core of it is that the “community” and “staff” are not on the same page when it comes to expectations. Bluntly, there is no longer a high standard expected of staff. Probably not even moderate. Staff ban each other and players Willy nilly, whether “joke bans” or just wrong bans. An no I don’t mean just hacking. A lot of staff we get now stems from friends of staff, so yeah they stick around and get along with other members but you get things like this joke ban spree or staff not wanting to hold each other accountable. There are times where it’s just been hive minding.
Response time is a *massive* issue. Be it admin decisions, unbans that go longer than they should, whatever, response time for various reasons has led to older community members leaving and a general tension towards higher staff. I personally have time again; if I had just stayed on as an inactive admin I’d be back. But at this time, I find it hard to imagine being staff again. Apathy has settled in me, so it’s a good thing I didn’t stay. (Insert illegal discussion of inactive admins). These are the problems
Now on the positive, we actually do have some really good old staff that are popping up again lately helping out. Some of these members have a lot of experience with our current issues, make use of them when they offer. Over the year terms with PH and TTT and much better, even though TTT is still superior.
My suggestion: work on the community issues. Discord is a constant dumpster fire, forums jumps around but tbh are a lot more dead than past. (Insert strong opinion on discord mods). Fuck whether or not this gun has 3% higher dps, community shrinking is going to be a bigger problem any day. It’s an old game, I know not to expect balance and frames (tho yeah hitreg is still ass). Corral the discord so people don’t regret still reading it, so that we can actually hold conversations again without constant shitposting. Forums will just reflect community activity so not really a lot that can be improved there? Tho I’m down to look into something if it’s brought up. How we staff server should be straightened up, and how we interact with each other needs some cleaning in general.
Well at this point I’m monologuing  so bleh

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Slight note: we aren’t going to gain access to promote or demote with all this tension and joke banning and whatnot. At this point I’m with dink on that. Once dink sees things straightened up maybe, but for now I wouldn’t.

Yeah, we realize that. Hence why we started the whole strike thing. I've had to individually warn some people prior to it, but whether it stuck or not is something I'm not sure on. 
The strikes though are yeah, something that will stick. Not sure where the feeling that it's necessary to ban/kick each other started to have fun came into play. I've seen it before, but it's just grown recently.

On the note of hive minding, it's just something hard to escape from my experience in all the servers I've been in. Cliques form in all communities. Silence one and you have another growing already. 

Also in my specific response, I'm more so talking about donor abuses as they were also increasing in the past few months. None of which we were given guidance on. 
At some point so much time had passed we felt our options were very limited. As they're donors, that money is going directly to dinkleberg so just trying to be careful and seeing what we can do to prevent them from charging back with dinkleberg being on board was very pressing.