Hey all, hope everyone is all keeping well and staying safe. I know there are some people that have been looking forward to this thread for ages, I've had a countless amount of DMS on discord, forums and even twitter about this and I will try my hardest to explain everything as thoroughly as I can whilst keeping this thread clean so it has no reason to be locked or deleted. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if the thread got deleted with an additional forum ban and ingame ban to top it off!
For those who do not know me, I used to be a moderator here, I gave everything my greatest effort, talked with the community, had a laugh on the forums with some of you, dealt with loads of player reports, ban appeals and general help when needed. Unfortunately, my time came to an end where I woke up on the 3rd of August to messages by former staff members asking about my demotion, after loading up my PC and speaking with these former staff members I swiftly checked telegram at which I was messaged by mega explaining this
<Later images will be shown under a link that will redirect you to gyazo to save space or go to attachments below>
A simple copy and paste message he has sent to all demoted staff members in the past. He then continued to explain that the demotion was due to "behavior with other staff members" as well as "continued affiliation with former staff members." Now, I told people that "I wasn't given a sufficient reason for my demotion" which, is by no means at all is a sufficient reason. I'll attempt to break down what has been said; first off, "behavior with other staff members" the only thing I can say is "?" I have no idea where this has come from part from the fact I was known by mega to argue my points and create counter-arguments for every situation I can as I have very strong opinions on situations (use this demotion as an example) Now I am not going to throw staff members under the bus nor give any names as this would give a reason for the thread to be deleted and I do not want that, a certain staff member (that I do not mind in the slightest, nor have anything against) suggested for more tags to be added for when we escalate ban appeals/blacklist appeals for senior moderators. My argument to this is that having pretty little tags will not change a thing and blacklist appeals/ban appeals will stack up either way as it has to be managers that deal with escalation (hence why everyone who has escalated on their ban/bl appeal is waiting 3-4+ months for a response which is unacceptable)
Additionally, I was like to add that I apologized to the staff members explaining I have had a rough week, (I mean we are mid pandemic and I have my life to worry about with A-levels and missing 5 months of the work needed) and I am sorry if my argumentative mood upset anyone <which it didn't because why would it> and then was told by an admin that I had done nothing wrong and the whole point of suggestions is to hear other peoples opinions on it at which I gave. Anyway, I am not going to ramble on about that as it is very opinionated. The other reason for my demotion is "continued affiliation with former staff members" now, there is nothing that states anywhere in the staff handbook that this is not allowed, why should we be told who we can and cannot message in our private DMS, after the last wave of demotions where e_ic, Lauren and S0V got demoted all over 1 staff member <that will be touched up on later> some staff members were told not to message any of them at which why would anyone throw friendship away just because they have been told they cannot message them. For my situation, I have been good mates with epic and Lauren for a while and to be all of a sudden told 1 month after the other staff members that I cannot message them is like me telling you that you have to stop messaging your best mate because I don't want you too?? Bizzare, don't. just to think that I was being told who I can or cannot message aggravates me to the point where I have had to come here and explain the situation of management to everyone. I would just like to simply add to this by saying that I messaged mega about a problem with epic being muted on discord, I checked all the bot logs and there was no reason why epic was muted he was given a rank which only managers can give. Upon asking mega and about 30minutes of arguing epics "muted" rank was removed and mega had not explained to me that I cannot speak with him (a clear warning of him saying, "you should not be talking with epic would have solved this problem entirely" Back to the demotion, I was not given any prior warning, I simply woke up one day to being demoted despite having 4.5k messages on forums (3000+ of them being player reports/ban appeals) and god knows how many punishments ingame. I just find it extremely ridiculous that without warning and with all the hard work I put in to get demoted over something so small.
Now this is where this thread will most likely be on the edge with it being deleted as this is a very beefy topic that I feel extremely strong about, I was demoted on August the 3rd and since then I have sent 5 professionally worded responses to mega at which 2 of them got aired <shown by 2 ticks> (he opened and did not respond) and the rest where has not even bothered to open the message but has been online on telegram a countless amount of times. These chat messages can be shown here or in the attached section below. Please note that the message covered with a red box is covered as it is possibly a reason for why I was demoted but I would not like to publish that or argue against it until I know for sure, I can assure you it is even dumber than the other reasons as it did not even take place on my main account nor on the InvadedLands network at all and there is no way of linking accounts back to me. (But being ignored means I cannot get an answer for that!) Despite being ignored as now a demoted staff member I'd like to touch upon the communication I had with the management when I was a staff member and let me assure you, even part of their staff team I was getting ignored <Important stuff they cared about, like "threads exposing them" would get addressed instantly but the minute you mention "escalated reports, ban appeals or blacklist appeals" they ignore you and hideaway. This can be shown here I can assure you that I am not cutting responses off, mega never addressed what I asked and "pretended" to never see it. Anyone else finds this weird, well, the staff team communication with management is entirely on "how much you are liked by them" and to be "liked" by them is not what people would commonly think it is, I promise you to be liked by the management it clearly is not "how active you are" in fact, I do not know what it is but someone is obviously doing something right
as Nicki (NvsGalaxy) is a manager with mega on a server I am not going to address this here as it should not even be spoken about here but former admin ApexWassabi was told that "No staff can moderate on a server that has similar game modes as IL that is basically a replica" which the server they both manage is an exact replica for obvious reasons. As staff we are however told that we can staff on other servers but it must not affect our activity or we will receive demotions. I'm not here to call her out or anything but I'll let you judge her activity given she has 500+ forum messages on her and Megas server in the past month and only 10-15 here on InvadedLands. Continuing on the topic of the clearly close relationship Nicki and Mega have I myself find it very, very strange now 3 (Maybe 4 Including me) have been demoted over this 1 staff member for absolutely nothing. And when asked we all get ignored, I'll let you decide what is going on between them ? . Speaking with these other staff members we all just find it odd that we do not get the chance to defend ourselves as management clearly know that the demotion was not sufficient or justified in the slightest and clearly know that with enough arguing that we would easily win it and prove them wrong. but what can I say, we don't even have the chance, done and forgot about in less than 30minutes! Well, that's enough about those two, I'm just going to touch up on the communication with mega I had previously before the demotion. When I was staff I always tried my hardest in making sure the community was happy I risked my rank many times to get my point across to mega about how blacklist appeals take too long, how escalated player reports don't even get looked at and ban appeals well, they just sit there and gather dust this can be shown here. I always messaged mega saying "look at ban appeals", "look at blacklist appeals" at which as said above I got ignored! Obviously! Knowing that mega has seen that I'd assume as what managers are supposed to do is take action, go through not even all of them but a tiny majority of them because that alone is huge progress, but nope! Nothing should have guessed. Mega hates the truth, he clearly did not like being asked to do these kinds of things and I can promise you one thing, he does not care what you guys think. Use the suggestions on the forums for a prime example, it took me weeks of arguing back and forth to get these suggestions added to the forums as the suggestions we have as a staff team doesn't even get recognized. Upon being implemented on the forums I smiled as it was probably the first thing that actually stayed in management's head rather than going in through one ear and out through the other. But of course, this was not to last, weeks have passed, I've responded to a countless amount of suggestions and left the good ones up and simply asked mega to "create a tab under suggestions where I can put the good ones for you to look at as they're just stacking up and it looks bad" hmmm does he reply? Nope! This can be seen here I soon after just kept responding to them but unfortunately no activity on management's behalf yet again. No real point of even creating suggestions because quite obviously they don't get looked at! Just to top everything off, I was always there, I'd back players arguments constantly and fight to get all of your points across to management hence why I argued for suggestions to be made, put myself in a risky position just to help with the community, told mega from a staffing perspective the changes that should happen, bringing factions back, creating clans, removing soup, etc, etc. But all of that for nothing, to get demoted without any prior warning.
Now. by no means at all am I trying to blame admins, the admins do a great job, but even the admins get very little say in situations. Admins have messaged mega about the demotions and I believe they were simply ignored just like all the others that have asked. There has always been a split within the staff team, for obvious reasons friend groups form and mega does not want that, he wants everyone in the staff team to be able to work together as one to get work done, and I totally agree, that is how it should be but the line gets crossed when there is one staff member causing all these problems but as that certain staff member is "very close" with mega nothing gets done to her, it's all the people that she wants to go, or all the people that argue and defend themselves against her that are the people that get demoted. In my opinion and other staff members' opinions, the most logical solution to this would be to remove the one staff member that is not active that has another server that is causing all the beef and the division in the staff team. But nope! Because these two are clearly close that will never happen. Not a chance. The entirety of the staff team would be demoted all because of one person if the right scenario occurred.
I know this entire thing came to a shock to some people and I really do hope I have explained the situation as well as I can, it is extremely hard to explain it when you guys do not have an understanding of what being on the staff team feels like, so I do apologize if any parts of this are unclear. Additionally, I would like to add in that trying to bring this entire situation across to the community is a very risky move, I mean I have spent over a day making sure everything here is not eligible for the thread to be locked or deleted, but honestly, I would not be surprised if it were to be. I would much prefer managers to be addressing this situation rather than moderators as not only would it clear stuff up for the community it will clear stuff up for all the former staff members that strongly feel their demotions are unjustified.
I tried my hardest for everyone in the community, I tried to assure everyone here could have a laugh with me, come to me for help and suggestions, just be an overall "good" moderator for you all. Unfortunately, that has all come to an end and still do not have proper reasoning for my demotion and most likely will never have. I hope everyone reading this can understand the frustration and anger I have built up inside me, 8 months for nothing. From simple communication mishaps to the way I was treated going all the way until favoritism, relationships, etc, and unjustified demotions. A question I have seen many times in my DMS is "Are you going to reapply" and the simple answer is no, haha I mean I will most likely get told that I will be unable to apply after this. I will not be reapplying for staff, not after all of this, and the way I was treated but if I were to for some reason get asked to return then I would, hoping the situation will change. I, however, will be staying in the community and will be chatting to most of you, dependant on if this thread unsurprisingly will find me with a good permanent ban followed with a blacklist that will take 5-6months to appeal.
Management does not listen nor care about the community, you have been told.
I do apologize for the size of this, there is lots to say, and believe me, there is so much more that I am unable to say as it would result in a locked or deleted thread, please do not give a reason for this thread to be locked or deleted, keep toxicity to yourself, it would be greatly appreciated.
I strongly encourage you to share this post and gather opinions on the situation as the more opinions the more help it would be for changes that need to take place that would be beneficial for the community. I really do hope this thread does not get locked as epic and I have worked so hard to make sure there is nothing that will get it locked. In my opinion, the community should be left to express their thoughts and feelings about the situation. If this thread were to be locked or even deleted feel free to PM me as I have pastebins with the entire thing in it.
Please do read e_ic's experience down below, a former staff member who was apart of the staff team for 2 years and part of the community for 5.
THIS IS NOT AN EXPOSING THREAD
PASTEBIN
For those who do not know me, I used to be a moderator here, I gave everything my greatest effort, talked with the community, had a laugh on the forums with some of you, dealt with loads of player reports, ban appeals and general help when needed. Unfortunately, my time came to an end where I woke up on the 3rd of August to messages by former staff members asking about my demotion, after loading up my PC and speaking with these former staff members I swiftly checked telegram at which I was messaged by mega explaining this
<Later images will be shown under a link that will redirect you to gyazo to save space or go to attachments below>
A simple copy and paste message he has sent to all demoted staff members in the past. He then continued to explain that the demotion was due to "behavior with other staff members" as well as "continued affiliation with former staff members." Now, I told people that "I wasn't given a sufficient reason for my demotion" which, is by no means at all is a sufficient reason. I'll attempt to break down what has been said; first off, "behavior with other staff members" the only thing I can say is "?" I have no idea where this has come from part from the fact I was known by mega to argue my points and create counter-arguments for every situation I can as I have very strong opinions on situations (use this demotion as an example) Now I am not going to throw staff members under the bus nor give any names as this would give a reason for the thread to be deleted and I do not want that, a certain staff member (that I do not mind in the slightest, nor have anything against) suggested for more tags to be added for when we escalate ban appeals/blacklist appeals for senior moderators. My argument to this is that having pretty little tags will not change a thing and blacklist appeals/ban appeals will stack up either way as it has to be managers that deal with escalation (hence why everyone who has escalated on their ban/bl appeal is waiting 3-4+ months for a response which is unacceptable)
Additionally, I was like to add that I apologized to the staff members explaining I have had a rough week, (I mean we are mid pandemic and I have my life to worry about with A-levels and missing 5 months of the work needed) and I am sorry if my argumentative mood upset anyone <which it didn't because why would it> and then was told by an admin that I had done nothing wrong and the whole point of suggestions is to hear other peoples opinions on it at which I gave. Anyway, I am not going to ramble on about that as it is very opinionated. The other reason for my demotion is "continued affiliation with former staff members" now, there is nothing that states anywhere in the staff handbook that this is not allowed, why should we be told who we can and cannot message in our private DMS, after the last wave of demotions where e_ic, Lauren and S0V got demoted all over 1 staff member <that will be touched up on later> some staff members were told not to message any of them at which why would anyone throw friendship away just because they have been told they cannot message them. For my situation, I have been good mates with epic and Lauren for a while and to be all of a sudden told 1 month after the other staff members that I cannot message them is like me telling you that you have to stop messaging your best mate because I don't want you too?? Bizzare, don't. just to think that I was being told who I can or cannot message aggravates me to the point where I have had to come here and explain the situation of management to everyone. I would just like to simply add to this by saying that I messaged mega about a problem with epic being muted on discord, I checked all the bot logs and there was no reason why epic was muted he was given a rank which only managers can give. Upon asking mega and about 30minutes of arguing epics "muted" rank was removed and mega had not explained to me that I cannot speak with him (a clear warning of him saying, "you should not be talking with epic would have solved this problem entirely" Back to the demotion, I was not given any prior warning, I simply woke up one day to being demoted despite having 4.5k messages on forums (3000+ of them being player reports/ban appeals) and god knows how many punishments ingame. I just find it extremely ridiculous that without warning and with all the hard work I put in to get demoted over something so small.
Now this is where this thread will most likely be on the edge with it being deleted as this is a very beefy topic that I feel extremely strong about, I was demoted on August the 3rd and since then I have sent 5 professionally worded responses to mega at which 2 of them got aired <shown by 2 ticks> (he opened and did not respond) and the rest where has not even bothered to open the message but has been online on telegram a countless amount of times. These chat messages can be shown here or in the attached section below. Please note that the message covered with a red box is covered as it is possibly a reason for why I was demoted but I would not like to publish that or argue against it until I know for sure, I can assure you it is even dumber than the other reasons as it did not even take place on my main account nor on the InvadedLands network at all and there is no way of linking accounts back to me. (But being ignored means I cannot get an answer for that!) Despite being ignored as now a demoted staff member I'd like to touch upon the communication I had with the management when I was a staff member and let me assure you, even part of their staff team I was getting ignored <Important stuff they cared about, like "threads exposing them" would get addressed instantly but the minute you mention "escalated reports, ban appeals or blacklist appeals" they ignore you and hideaway. This can be shown here I can assure you that I am not cutting responses off, mega never addressed what I asked and "pretended" to never see it. Anyone else finds this weird, well, the staff team communication with management is entirely on "how much you are liked by them" and to be "liked" by them is not what people would commonly think it is, I promise you to be liked by the management it clearly is not "how active you are" in fact, I do not know what it is but someone is obviously doing something right
as Nicki (NvsGalaxy) is a manager with mega on a server I am not going to address this here as it should not even be spoken about here but former admin ApexWassabi was told that "No staff can moderate on a server that has similar game modes as IL that is basically a replica" which the server they both manage is an exact replica for obvious reasons. As staff we are however told that we can staff on other servers but it must not affect our activity or we will receive demotions. I'm not here to call her out or anything but I'll let you judge her activity given she has 500+ forum messages on her and Megas server in the past month and only 10-15 here on InvadedLands. Continuing on the topic of the clearly close relationship Nicki and Mega have I myself find it very, very strange now 3 (Maybe 4 Including me) have been demoted over this 1 staff member for absolutely nothing. And when asked we all get ignored, I'll let you decide what is going on between them ? . Speaking with these other staff members we all just find it odd that we do not get the chance to defend ourselves as management clearly know that the demotion was not sufficient or justified in the slightest and clearly know that with enough arguing that we would easily win it and prove them wrong. but what can I say, we don't even have the chance, done and forgot about in less than 30minutes! Well, that's enough about those two, I'm just going to touch up on the communication with mega I had previously before the demotion. When I was staff I always tried my hardest in making sure the community was happy I risked my rank many times to get my point across to mega about how blacklist appeals take too long, how escalated player reports don't even get looked at and ban appeals well, they just sit there and gather dust this can be shown here. I always messaged mega saying "look at ban appeals", "look at blacklist appeals" at which as said above I got ignored! Obviously! Knowing that mega has seen that I'd assume as what managers are supposed to do is take action, go through not even all of them but a tiny majority of them because that alone is huge progress, but nope! Nothing should have guessed. Mega hates the truth, he clearly did not like being asked to do these kinds of things and I can promise you one thing, he does not care what you guys think. Use the suggestions on the forums for a prime example, it took me weeks of arguing back and forth to get these suggestions added to the forums as the suggestions we have as a staff team doesn't even get recognized. Upon being implemented on the forums I smiled as it was probably the first thing that actually stayed in management's head rather than going in through one ear and out through the other. But of course, this was not to last, weeks have passed, I've responded to a countless amount of suggestions and left the good ones up and simply asked mega to "create a tab under suggestions where I can put the good ones for you to look at as they're just stacking up and it looks bad" hmmm does he reply? Nope! This can be seen here I soon after just kept responding to them but unfortunately no activity on management's behalf yet again. No real point of even creating suggestions because quite obviously they don't get looked at! Just to top everything off, I was always there, I'd back players arguments constantly and fight to get all of your points across to management hence why I argued for suggestions to be made, put myself in a risky position just to help with the community, told mega from a staffing perspective the changes that should happen, bringing factions back, creating clans, removing soup, etc, etc. But all of that for nothing, to get demoted without any prior warning.Now. by no means at all am I trying to blame admins, the admins do a great job, but even the admins get very little say in situations. Admins have messaged mega about the demotions and I believe they were simply ignored just like all the others that have asked. There has always been a split within the staff team, for obvious reasons friend groups form and mega does not want that, he wants everyone in the staff team to be able to work together as one to get work done, and I totally agree, that is how it should be but the line gets crossed when there is one staff member causing all these problems but as that certain staff member is "very close"
with mega nothing gets done to her, it's all the people that she wants to go, or all the people that argue and defend themselves against her that are the people that get demoted. In my opinion and other staff members' opinions, the most logical solution to this would be to remove the one staff member that is not active that has another server that is causing all the beef and the division in the staff team. But nope! Because these two are clearly close that will never happen. Not a chance. The entirety of the staff team would be demoted all because of one person if the right scenario occurred.I know this entire thing came to a shock to some people and I really do hope I have explained the situation as well as I can, it is extremely hard to explain it when you guys do not have an understanding of what being on the staff team feels like, so I do apologize if any parts of this are unclear. Additionally, I would like to add in that trying to bring this entire situation across to the community is a very risky move, I mean I have spent over a day making sure everything here is not eligible for the thread to be locked or deleted, but honestly, I would not be surprised if it were to be. I would much prefer managers to be addressing this situation rather than moderators as not only would it clear stuff up for the community it will clear stuff up for all the former staff members that strongly feel their demotions are unjustified.
I tried my hardest for everyone in the community, I tried to assure everyone here could have a laugh with me, come to me for help and suggestions, just be an overall "good" moderator for you all. Unfortunately, that has all come to an end and still do not have proper reasoning for my demotion and most likely will never have. I hope everyone reading this can understand the frustration and anger I have built up inside me, 8 months for nothing. From simple communication mishaps to the way I was treated going all the way until favoritism, relationships, etc, and unjustified demotions. A question I have seen many times in my DMS is "Are you going to reapply" and the simple answer is no, haha I mean I will most likely get told that I will be unable to apply after this. I will not be reapplying for staff, not after all of this, and the way I was treated but if I were to for some reason get asked to return then I would, hoping the situation will change. I, however, will be staying in the community and will be chatting to most of you, dependant on if this thread unsurprisingly will find me with a good permanent ban followed with a blacklist that will take 5-6months to appeal.
Management does not listen nor care about the community, you have been told.
I do apologize for the size of this, there is lots to say, and believe me, there is so much more that I am unable to say as it would result in a locked or deleted thread, please do not give a reason for this thread to be locked or deleted, keep toxicity to yourself, it would be greatly appreciated.
I strongly encourage you to share this post and gather opinions on the situation as the more opinions the more help it would be for changes that need to take place that would be beneficial for the community. I really do hope this thread does not get locked as epic and I have worked so hard to make sure there is nothing that will get it locked. In my opinion, the community should be left to express their thoughts and feelings about the situation. If this thread were to be locked or even deleted feel free to PM me as I have pastebins with the entire thing in it.
Please do read e_ic's experience down below, a former staff member who was apart of the staff team for 2 years and part of the community for 5.
THIS IS NOT AN EXPOSING THREAD
PASTEBIN
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