Seniors & Creative (repost)

First and foremost I'd like to thank everyone for participating in our town forum and on our Discord channel regarding the fate of the server. Many of you have expressed concerns and have even shared your humble beginnings with us during this event. For this, we're very grateful for your participation.

A little bit of history for you guys:

When I started around a year ago as a Senior the server was not nearly as big as it is now. Players were mostly self-sufficient and did not require Senior-intervention for the most part. The server was quiet, save for a few groups of friends that would chat and play together, and people got along in small communities and could handle their issues themselves. Senior staff mainly consisted of 5 individuals: Hayan, Cobb, Cap, Morgul, and Lordy, and they were accessible for small requests here and there. The forums were in the early stages of development, as was the website, but there was no Discord chat in the mix just yet.

It was probably around the summer that I started moderating that the server began to show signs of failing. By fail, I mean that plugins would become less than reliable, and that this is around the time that our problems would start. Los and myself were active during the summer, and at a later time Laya would join us as well. It was from this point on that we would rush from the forums answering threads about slime chunks, corrupted chunks, market claims, missing claims, missing villagers, missing beacons, griefing, glitches, rollbacks, he said, she said, swearing, unwanted pvp, looting, server lag, and the odd broken Ender Blender.

This is just at the senior level.

Some of my Senior colleagues have moved on to other things, other games, other aspects of life, and so there's just a few of us left to manage our growing community. Some of us are burnt out after spending days replying to the same issues, and some of us have dropped out entirely.

Eventually it became evident that Junior roles would be necessary for sorting out issues between players in-game. Juniors were meant to be the true moderators on the server. Their responsibilities would be limited to muting and kicking unruly players; essentially keeping the peace at a conversational level. Over the summer we've had a good sized chunk of new players join and with that a new source of requests to attend to. Our player community is resilient at times helping new players, but at other times they are as dismissive and annoyed that players cannot read the wall of text in front of them (I'm personally in favour of a Spawn re-design, but I don't have the time to help out right now).

We're always looking for new players to fit our Junior roles and they go through the same vetting process that all of our Seniors do as well. However, a lot of our choices are limited to who is around, how long they've been around, what their longterm prospects are like, and, to a higher degree, are they good at problem solving and handling stressful situations. It's not as simple a solution as adding more Juniors, but making sure that we've got quality people looking out for others as they play as well.

Tired of reading this long reply yet? We're finally at the part where Seniors might actually have a chance to play.

I personally don't see much time where Seniors get to play. Some days are great and no one needs any help. People are able to help themselves, they get along, which in turn means we finally have time to work on our base, or build a public location for some future project. Other days we spend an hour or two fulfilling requests and hunting xrayers which eats up all of our playtime. It would be very difficult to plan out another Market Region-sized project with the amount of time we each have. So when I see posts that say that Seniors shouldn't be able to use creative blocks for their own uses, I think that those players only see the tip of the iceberg of our responsibilities. Moderating the server is at times a very fun job, however when it comes to maintaining a happy and fluid community, it does not pay the bills at home, nor does it come off as very rewarding at times.

As a last point, I'll repeat what I always say to people that approach me about Junior and Senior roles: although you may not have a staff title to your name, your participation in our community is just as important. The most important role that we can't hand out is that of a Community Leader. We can't tell someone to be well liked, nor that everyone should listen to this one person while we're away, but players can do that themselves by helping out and showing kindness to one another. Let the Senior staff take care of the truly unruly players that require bans, and for the rest of you I ask that you simply take care of one another. As a hermit-like server everyone is entitled to living on their own, but as a community everyone has a responsibility to be accountable to each other.

Anyway, hopefully this helps answer some of the points that a lot of you have made. Again, thanks for everyone's participation.

Finally, this thread is being locked and further discussion of this matter is now being discussed by our Senior staff.

tl;dr we hear you, now let us take care of this matter in-house.