Forum mod's

As long as i can remember the forum has been a huge part of my royals experience and some of the most fun i had on royals was from the forum. When i created my forum account in late 2014 it was for the purpose of selling items and buying stuff but i quickly realised the social aspect that came along with having a forum account. Threads like "Latest Accomplishment Thread" gave me a window into the world of the "pro's" (R.I.P illuminate) while "MapleRoyals Meme" (R.I.P koreaboo brice) could give you a good laugh. Things are not like this anymore.

The whole point of my thread is not to bring back the old forum, the game grew and so did the forum and it had to evovle. A growing playerbase also meant an increase in forum members and forum posts but this did not ruin the "forum experience" for me; all of these new players joined in on the threads i once loved and suddenly i was the "pro" that could now look through a window to see what happend with "the new players of royals". My problem is not that the players kept posting in the threads as always, but the forum mod's suddenly starting to treat the forum as it was nazi berlin 1943. My first "quote" is not even a quote because it got deleted, luckily for me i got a screenshot of it.



Raony is a good friend of mine and i personally think he wrote a good post that pretty much talks for itself. The post was not violating any rules and had a nice tone to it, he even offers to help him out "If you need help lmk, peace!". Why this had to be deleted i dont understand, this post would never have gotten deleted 1 year ago or prior to that, but it seem's like our new forum mod's have a secret agenda in mind. The forum had always been a nice "cozy" place you could come and catch up on the latest "maple gossip" but now it feels like we have forum mod's breathing down our necks and deleting posts that prior to them joining the staff would never have gotten deleted.

The "Get it off ur chest" thread has from my experience always been one of the rather quiet threads and it never really caused any drama, yet i have taken a notice that recently posts have gotten deleted. I dont understand why suddenly posts that are doing no harm, posts where nobody takes offense to them are getting deleted? I quoted an example for reference.

We cant even be free to post the memes we want in the meme thread anymore. If the staff can handle to take some heat make a post that tells us that instead of just deleting the posts, that way people would stop making them and you wouldnt seem as strickt or "nazi" if i have to quote myself.

I hope that you at this point understand what my purpose of the thread is, it is not to get the "old forum" back instead i hope for a more open and free social media where big brother isnt constantly watching us and deleting every post that he thinks doesnt suit the kind of forum he likes.

I have two things to show before i leave, the first one is the thing that i find the most disturbing about all of this.

Irmy's post is about Evan and i think it is as relevant as ever to quote it here. Having staff members that enjoy when the players are being inconvenienced makes no sense to me, it feels like the motivation to be a forum mod is power, not helping out the community.

On a final note i will leave with an old post of mine


I know how the staff doesnt like to take criticism and i personally expect this thread to get locked, but that only underlines my point, we lost our freedom of speech.

 

This post speaks a lot of truth and I think William has brought up excellent examples of where innocent posts are being taken down for no apparent reason.

I would also like to touch base on my comment towards Evan; it should be an eye opener for not only the players but the staff as well. The staff is a HUGE part of the image for MapleRoyals and when new players join this server they will inevitably create a forums account. Thus said, having posts like William's and comments like mine on the forums, creates a negative impact on the image of Royals. It looks a lot like player-base vs staff instead of a united community.

I do acknowledge that there will always be conflict but as of right now, I believe it is going to get out of hand at the rate it is going.

 

I feel so bad when I see that it got to this point. People here have something in common, the love for MapleStory. We all are here for different reasons, despite the goals inside de game that of course are distinct for each person we all do love this game. The forum, back then, WAY before those said forum mod's even did act the way they're acting now, we had our fun and felt that the forum was a tool to potentialize (in a positive manner) the interaction between the players. Speaking as an old player that HAS nothing but respect for our current staff, I'm not even comfortable saying it here but I'll say it anyways - please don't give me 'warning points for this': The privilege of having the power to delete posts it's not being used wisely, period. We made this server what it is, every one of us. And shutting our free speech when it's not necessary - the thread itself shows a lot of examples will not take this server any further but to regress. Please, staff, I'm talking to the REAL staff, not some random mod's here. You guys should listen to the players, not shut them. We, the players, are not your enemies, your enemies are the ones who are actually somehow abusing this game in an illegal way, or have you guys forgotten that?

 

I'm not here to comment on whether the forum mods and staff are doing a good job at monitoring the forum because regardless how hard I try, I am going to be somewhat bias and I haven't been active on forums prior to 2 months ago. However I do find problems with the incidents that you have brought up and would like to comment on those in case anyone reads this post and gets the wrong idea. If I have interpreted something wrong please correct me and I apologise. Here we go.

There is nothing wrong with Raony's post nor Perfectsin's post after. The posts concerning the original incident were removed due to being off-topic (and imo patronising) and thus anything relating to that was also removed due to its original context no longer existing. This has been the standard as far as I can remember. If Raony/Perfectsin's posts were unacceptable, they would have also received warning points which they did not.

3 posts were removed immediately prior to Zeno's comment. These were all removed as they were actively replying to someone else's post in the thread or directly mentioning another party, which has always been against that thread's rules. Evan just carried that out.

As far as I can tell, none of the posts deleted in the meme thread were even memes. They were just replying to BangHero's meme about getting warning points, which for the record, was not deleted.

As for what Irmy wrote, I'm not actually familiar with this incident so I have nothing to say. If someone were to enlighten me that would be helpful but I guess having @Evan himself explain would be the best.

 

All of the things i quoted are examples, it is kind of hard to find examples of things that are already deleted. My main point is that posts keep getting deleted and literally nobody likes how Evan is running the forum atm. I will stop sugarcoating it if it helps to prove my point. If this is how the forum is suppose to be these days it's fine, but nobody likes the current state of the forum and nazi modding that is going on.

 

I understand that it would be hard for you to find evidence of things being deleted under a 'nazi like regime' but the problem is that literally none of your examples show that. I went back specifically to check what had been deleted in each one of those scenarios and all I could find was legitimate, good moderation. You'll just have to trust me on that, I'm trying to be as fair as I can. We are completely open to any evidence of wrong doing by a member of staff but we need to have something concentrate and legitimate to go on.

 

Is it an example of Godwin's Law if the grossly hyperbolic Nazi comparison happens in the OP?

 

I discussed with John your post in the thread about the FM button removal, and I had a whole reply written up, but we decided (more, he gave input and I decided) to not post it as the thread was dying down and there was no reason to respond to an off-topic post and possibly bring up a huge off-topic discussion. I also considered messaging you, but between school and some of the stuff here, I never got around to it.

Spoiler: This is what I had ready to reply with

do I like seeing new players hurt? No. Do I like seeing the regular players inconvenienced? No. I don't enjoy seeing people suffer because of changes. However, some people have said some very unpleasant things to and about the staff over changes to the game since the new source has landed (I won't point fingers or say names). Yes, there's been more than a few hiccups and some changes bigger than others, but some people are upset they have to move their mules around now but I don't think that warrants throwing shade or insults at the staff because people can't keep mules in the FM right now. That is what I meant by inconvenience and that is who I was talking about in my other post. I'm sorry that wasn't implicitly clear.

I understand in hindsight it was a tad crude (obviously people think more), but the post was specific to some of the reactions in the thread, and not all encompassing of my view of players here. If my word on that isn't good enough, I don't know what else I can tell you.

Besides posts that were breaking rules, what posts have I been deleting? Also, I don't think calling it "Nazi modding" is appropriate or accurate. I also want to note, I'm not the only one with the ability to delete posts, the GM's and Admins have also been active in doing so because I'm only one person and I can't catch everything. As for the "get it off your thread", the thread specifically states "no replying to posts", it's on the first post, and it's been posted a half dozen times throughout the threads history because people keep replying to posts. I recently went through and cleared out 99% of the replied posts because I had a few people message me asking why in the past people got away with it, and the answer is they shouldn't have (I did however leave quotes/replies when someone quoted their OWN post and added to it.)

If people have more specific issues with me, I am more than happy to answer questions here (as long as it stays on topic and civil) or through PM's, with the rare exception (like when I cleaned up the get it off your chest thread because I didn't feel like bothering people months/years later) every deleted post should send a PM to the poster explaining why, and if anyone ever feels like that it wasn't justified, there are Admins and GM's that you are more than welcome to contact if you don't feel like you can talk to me.

 

When I did debate during high school and college there was an unspoken rule that the first party to draw the "Hitler Card" automatically loses the debate lol.

That being said, I can see both sides here. On one hand a lot of the issues that are being brought up seem to me like standard procedures that have been around as long as we can remember, and I think Stan's explanation in particular of Raony's situation definitely clears up any misconceptions I had with the original post. But I'm also noticing here that what makes a lot of the playerbase uncomfortable is that recently, there has been a greater effort to enforce these standard procedures. I suppose whether that's for the better or worse for our community is the discussion at stake.

I remember that when people would post irrelevant and dumb (albeit sometimes very funny) things in General Discussion or Feedback threads in the past, nothing would really happen. If it started to get bad, a Staff member would simply warn everyone that if it continued the thread would have to be locked. So naturally I was shocked to find out last week that I had a dumb post of mine removed. Was it irrelevant to the specific feedback thread in which it was posted? I mean yeah, I guess. But was it also dank as hell and got me four likes (and more if it wasn't prematurely deleted)? Hell yeah!

As disappointed as I was to see my beautiful internet likes crumble before my eyes, I also very much understand the challenges of toeing the line in which forum rules are enforced. I made a super long Feedback thread a couple of months ago about the Terms & Conditions, and one thing I mentioned was how the in-game rules (especially in terms of harassment and verbal abuse) were not enforced in the Forums. Shoutbox in particular (my favorite place in this server) was especially toxic, constantly filled with abusive chat that simply went unpunished. So in that sense, I'm glad to see Staff take the Forums as a community space seriously. Which is why I also believe that the Staff will take this discussion seriously, especially considering how strongly many members of the community feel about it. It's easy for us to seem like our voices are unheard, especially when censorship is at stake. But I find it very strange that so many of the playerbase constantly complain that their feedback is being ignored, when there have been so much policy changes and feature implementations in this server as suggested directly by us.

I also want to throw out there that we should keep our personal opinions of Staff separate from our objective evaluation of their work. I know Evan frequently likes to debate people on the Forums and has the tendency to play the devil's advocate. But just because you think he's rude, annoying, or "pathetic" shouldn't affect the how you perceive the measure of his performance as a moderator. I've been in that same exact position myself, and it's always a hurdle to balance your responsibility of keeping the Forums clean while wanting to actively engage with the rest of the community without being placed on a pedestal for your every word.

 

I can say the same thing to you. The staff has to trust the playerbase and community when the majority of us feel that there is something wrong on the forum these days. If you look at the like count on my thread we can see that a majority of people agrees with what i say, it might not be a strong example but it is the only one i got atm and i think that it still says something about our current situation.

The issue is not with you Evan, it is with your attitude. You send a negative vibe towards the playerbase with most of your replies which only divides the gap between the community and staff. If we were given replies that didnt say things like "I enjoy watching people squirm at slight inconveniences." this thread probably wouldnt be here.

 

I agree with a lot of the points here. I've always been an advocate for less rules and restrictions and more people acting like mature adults. Obviously not everyone is capable of acting like adults and I understand that requires Staff to keep an eye on the Forums to keep the immaturity to a minimum. The forums for me have always been a place I could kill an entire 8 hour work day at. There was always stuff going on here that interested me. But lately the forums have become less of a place I looked forward to visiting. It felt like many of the different things I found entertaining were gradually locked or even removed. The rules began to get more and more specific towards certain actions and we saw less and less freedom as a result. We even lost one of the more entertaining places to visit in Report Abuse for gossip and drama, as some players decided to go way overboard and report for literally everything or revenge reporting other players. Instead of blocking or banning the players who did that, we just removed the whole section from being read. Baffling really.

 

I'm not here to to make everyone happy and be everyone's friend. That sounds awful, but my job as a forum mod is to enforce the rules of the forums and when people break rules, I have to respond and you can only sugarcoat "You did something wrong, broke a rule, and have to take responsibility for it" in so many ways. You're also throwing words around like "most of your replies", feel free to report those posts and allow an Admin to look at them if you think what I have said warrants a warning or ban per the ToC. I am capable of breaking rules just like everyone else, and I'm not exempt from punishment. I'm offering complete transparency here and I don't know what else I can say on top of that.

Also, as Emo said, I may be staff, but I'm also a player here and while to some degree I am held to a higher standard as part of the staff (as I should be), I am not barred from expressing my opinion in threads, and sometimes others disagree but that's the nature of opinions.

 

Evan i really think you should think about your approach towards the community and part of the staff if you are just going to brush this "wake up call" off and keep acting as usual. Your replies are dividing the community and staff. This is not meant as a personal attack towards you, it is meant as a way to say that we are looking for change and we hope that you will give it a try. I have nothing more to say in this thread.

 

All GMs shares the urge to lock a thread, it's so weird as if that urge is inherited from old GMs to new GMs. They must have briefing/training on some protocols on how to react to thread, and to be extremely cautious looking out for any thread which seems to be slightly off topic or had "served the purpose"

 

If you have nothing more to say, we will lock this thread

 

That respond was literally justified given how OP wasn't answering to our request on how the TNC can be inproved.

So I don't see a point why that thread should continue if all it does is allow more flame posts.

 

I've seen a problem with the Staff for years now and I'm sure everyone is aware of it too because it's been brought up a few times in the past. The real underlying problem (combined with another I'll explain in a bit) here is the fact that the decisions made by the staff are not uniform (this is in regards to bans and appeals too). If even ONE "off-topic" reply is gonna get deleted then get them all deleted. "Hey no one's got the time to check every corner of the forum". Well it's your job and you have to do it right. For this to happen, the definition of "off-topic" would be needed to be explicit somewhere.. right? But this leads me to the other point: what's off-topic about replying to something related to a post that is "on-topic"? Okay I get it, let's not get the thread flooded with messages not related to main topic, but in a real discussion many points come up so, what's the big deal with staying "on topic"? Why does the staff feel like they can intervene in people's discussions as long as they remain civil? I think that's why @William made a fair comparison with a dictatorship.
I'm gonna throw one example regarding my first point: link here: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/mapleroyals-meme.6513/page-32#post-528477


Following @Evan's and @Stan's logic this reply should be deleted (I hope it gets deleted tbh because let's be fair to everyone). But in the end, who cares? If you don't care about it just ignore it, it's not like someone's forcing you to read it.

The last thing I would like to add is that part of the staff's attitude, like mentioned before, isn't helping at all. I kinda wanted to write a similar thread before but since most GMs are most of the time defensive, I knew it wouldn't go anywhere. I noticed this after the New Source was launched and I'm sure others saw it too. I know some players can be sarcastic or even condescending if you wish, but guess what? They're players and they're not the image of the server. But when you see a GM being salty on the shoutbox or threads. You're just like "what.. how did he/she get GM?" and I know I'm not alone on that. Your job as GMs is to stay professional no matter what. That just adds up to the problem.

 

I agree with most of what you said (which is why I'm quoting only the last bit here), but I have to ask: Is it really their jobs to stay professional no matter what? And if so, what does "staying professional no matter what" even specifically entail? Based on what a lot of people are saying here, it seems that professionalism means that Staff aren't allowed to express their personal opinions and emotions, especially if they're not positive ones. Staff members here aren't paid for their work. They're not customer service representatives. And most importantly, they're actual human beings who make a deliberate effort to have a genuine experience being part of this community. I've seen some really salty and borderline toxic players on these Forums and no one bats an eye, so why is it so heinous for Staff members to express similar negative emotions?

I mean, I do get it. I really do. It can be disheartening to see negative attitudes from those who we expect to maintain order within this community space. Especially when they make errors that aren't consistent with the rules they've put into place for everyone else. And I think those things are valuable to bring up and call out (as we have been doing), because those things are what truly constitute unprofessional behavior. But it is equally senseless to tell a Staff member not to pay mind to poor behavior but while demanding that they stay on their absolute best behaviors.

The real irony here is that we're bitching about censorship while simultaneously imposing censorship.

 

A way to solve the problem u mention could be allowing them to have a staff forum acc and a personal acc.
I've seen multiple times ppl be like "oh he's a gm he must be right", or like a gm's post no matter how stupid or wrong the post is. (This is abuse of staff power imo.)
If he/she wanna do something personal (expressing his emotion or selling things), just use his/her personal acc instead of the staff acc.

 

People will be people. Discussions happen, people elaborate, and topics change. I personally have never understood this rule of "staying on topic" within a discussion. I guess it makes it easier for feedback, so that staff do not have to sift through posts that derail from specific feedback. As far as I can see it, the Feedback section is the ONLY place it makes sense (this is my personal opinion) and should only be enforced in the feedback section. It just makes sense to stay on topic there.

As for places like the "General Discussion" and many other sections, it shouldn't have to be held to one specific topic, because thats just what they are. General discussions. There are some threads that specifically state rules for the thread made by OPs, and I think its fine to moderate there if the OPs have since left being active on these forums or the OP cannot intervene themselves. If I'm not mistaken OPs have the right to delete comments from their own threads. I could be wrong. But if it gets to the point that its no longer what the OP intended, they themselves can get the topic back on track. If they cannot, thats when the staff should intervene.

I've only been on this Server / Forum for a fraction of the time as some of the oldies, but for as long as I've been here, I've seen a few different sides to some of the staff. And for the most part if they reply to a thread with a personal opinion they state it as a personal opinion and not a decision that the staff has made. Talking as staff should be held to a higher professionalism, but the staff have a right to respond as a player too. Especially since many of them still play and enjoy being a part of this community. What Evan said was distasteful, but you can clearly see hes posting it as his personal opinion. Maybe he didn't clarify it as that, but its obvious to see. Should he have said it that way? Probably not, but oh well.