It's true that you don't really owe anything to the community, but if you're really going to do nothing, you don't get to act like you're some sort of saint who tried to create a place for the community in TF:R and then was betrayed. I really don't think you or any of the staff deserve to be able to complain about the community so much.
We do have the right to complain about the community because
we were the ones who dealt with it at the absolute worst.
You never got death threats, harassment or anything else over decisions you made (such as banning someone toxic and an active threat to the community) because oh wait, you were never in a position of leadership like we were where any decision you make has the potential to start a riot. You tell us
we have no right to complain, but
you have less of a right to complain about the leadership or the state of affairs here because by your logic since you never dealt with anything regarding the server in any meaningful capacity. We also were in a way "betrayed" because no matter how much we did (including bringing the server back for an event), there were people who took it for granted or complained incessantly about the littlest things we did, even if the intentions were to make the place better or do something fun for everyone.
The community was also more active then than now because most of the player base was teenagers or children. The people who played TF in its prime are now mostly adults who are in college, starting careers, etc. who have more important priorities now and don't have time for playing Minecraft as they did in the "best days" of TF so they moved on. While a lack of marketing TF also played a role, there are changing interests in what people choose to play on when they join a server. You can also do google searches and see that many other servers are shells of their former selves as the community/multiplayer scene in Minecraft evolves and the community grows up as it has here on TF. Overall, TF's decline is due to various factors, some of which were outside our control.
This community was built on the base of a server that allowed them a place where they could cause a little mischief and witness the spectacle of others' stupidity and poor decision-making. It's the only reason TotalFreedom wasn't like every other forgettable Minecraft server. I can tell you with 100% certainty if you had placed in 2014 the "improved" version of TF with actual rules and the patches and whatever else you guys put in so much unnecessary effort to do, I would have left immediately and never came back. And pretty much everyone else would have too. The server would have died years earlier. These things you guys think are improvements to the server that take hard work actually just make the server unremarkable and similar to every single other lame, watered-down creative server in existence. It's extremely obvious that's why it never had success past the point where these changes were made; TF abandoned the core principles that originally made it interesting.
The community liked the server most when it was a poorly secured, loosely managed dump. How long has it been that you guys have been brushing off anything the community complains about as "the community always wants more and can never be satisfied?" It's no wonder that people display a distaste and hatred towards this ridiculous attitude that results in the toxicity you created this thread to complain about in the first place. To me, none of you have the right to complain until you actually nut the fuck up, purge the ban list, and just allow the community to be the shit show it is supposed to be. That's why I am still talking about the idea of anarchy on this forgotten husk of a forum.
TF was definitely
not "built on the base of a server that allowed them a place where they could cause a little mischief and witness the spectacle of others' stupidity and poor decision-making." Probably the only time TF was truly "lawless" was the early days when Mark founded it. There is a reason Mark would eventually create a conduct policy when the original forum came online:
To keep a modicum of law and order. Why else would you, like many others get permbanned? Because even then there were rules about fucking shit up and going out of line. Even in 2014 when I joined there were rules and fucking other people's shit up was grounds for a ban - it explains why I got banned for crashing the server with worldedit. There were exploits then (remember invalid item ID exploits such as the sunflower? I'm sure you do. People got permbanned for things such as exploits then as they are now. There were rules
then and now. It's just now we actually have tools such as Scissors or Coreprotect to
handle or
prevent some of the shit more effectively when it happens. If we had had Scissors back in 2014, the server would probably be an even better place because many incidents that have occured in the past with exploits would have never happened or would have had less severity. The patches are in place to prevent game-breaking exploits and ensure the server is remotely playable. Before the introduction of Scissors the server could easily get crippled (and it did many times) for days on end because of creative-mode exploits. Our patches at least reduce the time the server is down while we clean up people's messes and allow for more consistent uptime but they overly restrictive to the point that people cannot create custom item kits, etc. Gone are the days when the server's getting knocked offline for the stupidest of shit. You weren't one of the people trying to help Ryan recover the flatlands after the server was sent into instant crash loops for days due to severe game-breaking exploits. I was, so I am grateful that I got to help test Scissors when it was first developed, show it was effective against exploits and get it on the server. It made the server more resilient against many common methods to crash the server and was extremely beneficial.
It's also very ironic for you to tell us to "embrace the shit" when your server is 100 times more restrictive than TF - with you using exploit-fixer software as well. You're telling us how to run a server when yours is more locked down than TF ever was. You've also done nothing significant for TF so you have no right to complain about the community or how people have run things. You didn't ever help recover the flatlands when some exploit skids fucked it up, serve as the ban manager and deal with a variety of shit associated with the role including investigating people responsible for a series of attacks against the server to ensure the right people get banned, dox attempts, experiencing targeted harassment or death threats because someone didn't like a justified ban. All of us who have served in a position of leadership have experienced the community at its worst so we
do have a right to complain about "how toxic" the community is because no matter how transparent we made policies, issued rightful justice, gave freedom or added features, people would complain or start needless drama over it.
No. This is such an
incredibly stupid idea and there's a reason we have a ban list that includes unappealable and indefinite bans. There have been genuinely dangerous players who have been banned and rightfully so. Allowing these individuals back into the community puts many people at risk. Why should we subject ourselves to individuals who wish harm upon other members of the community, manipulate others to get their way or take advantage of them for personal gain, have organized attacks against server infrastructure, attempted to dox or intimidate staff they had beef with, exhibit stalking behavior or
worse? Then again, you have never been on the receiving end of any of this so you wouldn't understand how foolish and dangerous wiping the ban list is.
You want to move on? Move on. But don't act like you righteously fought for the community and for TotalFreedom. You fought for your and the staff's vision of a regular ass creative server that had absolutely nothing to do with what makes TotalFreedom actually interesting, and dragged along the dying community for the ride.
We did move on. That's why the server closed. Ryan shut down the original TF because the community became selfish and toxic, and he saw that there was no point in salvaging the server when all these people were going to do was complain or attack staff or the server infrastructure because they didn't like a decision. We went through the same shit so it came to the same point that the server needs to shut down. It was brought back up for 3 days last month for a birthday event last month and we saw the same shit that prompted the decision to shut it down in the first place. Only
four hours into the first day of that event and members of the community already started stupid shit even with many rules relaxed which made us remember why it was shut down in the first place. It's just you never actually managed to deal with the TF community in any significant matter or were in a leadership position to know what the TF community is
actually like when it is at its worst.
Just cut the stupid "if I were king I would have done things better" act and move on like you tell all of us especially since you're incapable of doing the shit you preach to us on your allegedly "better" version of TF yet you criticize us for how we ran things here.
