These past few months I've been getting a little annoyed by how little time I'm able to put into the server, and how inactive I'm becoming, especially when it comes to actually getting in-game. I'm going to address it a bit here, and I do plan to improve things soon.
Firstly, 2022 has not been a good year for me so far. I'm still on my year out of school, still unsure of what direction to take my life in. Obviously as many of you know, I was due to lose my job on February 26th, a date which agonisingly crept up on me for months. It was only a 12 hour a week job, but I dunno, it felt more to me than that, I genuinely loved what I did and could've easily done it for years. I let managers dump shit on me and arguably exploit me just because I kind of enjoyed the extra responsibility and extra trust that was bestowed upon me when it came to counting tills and organising the shift and shit. I was a supervisor at a supermarket, not something I ever thought I'd be saying. And that's where it hurt the most, I wasn't just standing at a till serving customers, I was on the front line, the person you called when something went wrong, an entertaining and enjoyable yet stressful juggling act that I would've done for half the money. I knew I'd lose that part I loved, because as much as I'd proved myself as a leader in-person for the first time in my life, I knew I that it was mainly down to the over two years I spent building experience with the way things worked and most importantly the years building good relationships with my colleagues.
I've found a new job, for what it's worth, a few weeks ago. And I am enjoying it okay, but the dark cloud still kind of looms over me in that regard for some reason.
That's the only issue I'll go into great deal on personally, but I've also been sort of put off by the recent events these past few months on the server. Now for this I accept this is a circumstance that affects the entire community, not just me, but I just want to vent my feelings about it.
The first thing I wanna note is constant fucking drama. Feels like every week there's a massive community split and/or some major crisis event going on that sucks the fun out of being here. There's many of these events and too many for me to bother going into detail about but the ones that stand out were the very recent episodes of a staff member assisting a ddoser (and multiple other more recent alleged things such as further attacks on the forum and doxxing), then you've got the whole rampant problems with the moles crashing the server and using their alts and VPNs to make themselves virtually impossible to whack as they just keep popping up and crippling the server before we can react. Granted, the recent patching of many of these exploits has been a great help and I thank those responsible, but it still kind of demotivated me a little.. and still kind of does.
And then aside from these two major ones, it feels like there's another big bit of drama or some huge argument every week. For example yesterday the whole situation around a players ban came up to light again and has sparked more discussions and tension around the entire community. Im not going to comment my thoughts on the situation but I just.. don't like the conflict. I'm not implying that the conflict is bad or anything - I understand we can't all get along all the time, but I.. don't like it when there's clashes. Especially at the rate they've been happening in this community the past few months. I feel there's too much negativity floating around. I'm not innocent by any means from that. I like to keep people happy, which is why I often try to fence sit, since I hate the idea of me picking a side and annoying the other side.
I haven't proofread this thread, and I'm finishing this over an hour after I started it, so this is probably a fucking mess. But a TL;DR is that I apologise for being inactive, and that there are issues on and off the server that have been getting me down recently.
Thanks for taking the time to read - as much as I believe all of what I've said above, I can't help but still be appreciative of how I've been treated by all of you, and the wider community in my time here.
