Random thoughts and comments

If you have one bad staff member harassing and abusing players, and seventeen staff members who protect him and do nothing as it goes on for years, you have eighteen bad staff members.

Yeah... I'm not ready to say the game is even on the path towards being fixed just yet. The staff changing the rules they have to follow is completely irrelevant when they have proven time and again that they just disregard the rules or change them quietly to suit their own needs. What they need to do to fix the game is actually be more open about what they're doing day-to-day, not just about what their policies supposedly are.

It is very, very telling that they are doing their best to dissuade the community on the idea CirclelessBard brought up on making staff visible on the wholist. The most minor possible change on giving ground to players on letting them know at any given time who an animating staff member might be or who is around to witness staff abuse at any given time is just pathetic, really.

I think staff thought they could just slam-dunk this problem by posting their policies on the GDB instead of the IDB, when what they actually need to do is prove that they're going to follow their own policies. A nearly insurmountable task considering what they have done to community trust, but doable in the same way trust is repaired in any relationship.

That is correct but for literal decades this rule was violated. It was always explained away with things like "oh nobody apped for the last templar role, so someone has to take it." I remember one noble allowed because he had had his noble prior to becoming staff. As if they couldn't have insisted he store his character first. And now there's the most recent hysterical excuse of "he's a resource PC". That one's my favorite.

This is only a slightly more restrictive set of guidelines for staff playing their mortal avatars than the previous versions.

The real issue is that staff, gradually over the years, behind the curtain, eroded all the previous versions' restrictions and decided those self-serving modifications were covered by an informal policy of not reporting about staff's internal policies.

The time for congratulations is when they include a system that provides proof-positive assurance that abandonment of those restrictions can't happen again in the dark.

A system of accountability that does not depend upon "trust us, we'll do better," because fool us multiple times, fuck that.

So, no April Fools gag on the GDB this year, I'm guessing.

Real question, because I don't pay enough attention to know...is the GDB missing like everything except Announcements and the help and feedback sections? Is it just me and other guests who aren't logged on who can't see general discussion?