PkHonor

Brief introduction, many of you know I've been playing since 2016, some of you know I have a history with the game from a bit before that. I started moderating in 2020, somewhere along the way I became a developer, I still do both. I have seen a lot of very good contributors (staff and devs and other people) come and go. And I've experienced being a contributor from a number of different perspectives, like having too much free time because I was being paid to work on personal projects, or having too much free time because I was unemployed, or working on this game alongside full-time engineering work.

After having done all of this, again as both a staff member and moderator, my take on the way this server operates is a bit complex, probably exceptionally unique. Most things that are in bad shape are understandably in bad shape. The nature of this game is that it's not one where we can afford to pay devs to do the rapid development we need to keep up with OSRS.

The issue is that in addition to the fact that there is zero compensation to working on the game (as a matter of fact it incurs an opportunity cost for mid-level developers), the devs are also consistently shit on by the community, with no protection from the staff team.

Now here's the thing, I'm also a seasoned staff member like I mentioned. And to be fair, this isn't a problem unique to devs. The staff teams also gets shit on by the community. Although, obviously respectfully because I'm also a staff member, it's just not the same. The title of moderator kind of comes with an implicit acknowledgement of verbal abuse, because finding typical moderators is easy. Typical moderators have not been making this game run though. Some staff go out of their way to progress the server and did it for a very long time. Like the Adam's and the Matt's and the Church's and the Lieven's (RIP bro). Alex comes to mind too. Many others I've forgotten I'm sure. And I'm sure this strategy of letting your best volunteers get shit on for incurring costs to work for you and cutting them loose and replacing them worked back in the day, but it is not back in the day anymore. There really does need to be considerations made for retaining people who are exceptionally useful in the grand scheme of things.

Anyways, with an exception for Lieven, every single one of those staff members who did much more than was expected of typical moderators resigned. No advisor ranks as thanks, just a news post, if that. Ryan hasn't even had his resignation accepted yet, which is a bit funny cause like what's he gotta do, go on a ban spree? And we know that essentially the same has happened on the developer side. And, the worst part is, it seems no one intends to step up on either side, with a couple exceptions, God bless their souls.

For anyone in an administrative position at all, staff or owners, if we want to take steps to resolve this, we should be moderating for constant negativity in the Discord and on the forums. It is absolute garbage to go to do volunteer work in your off-time and just see people ragging on the product of your work output, in the same place the administrative channels are. And we should moderate any case of people targeting volunteers who have given excessive amounts of their time more harshly than for others. I don't care if it sounds biased, it's actually very reasonable. I will concede that in-game probably shouldn't be moderated for constant negativity towards the game, but the administrative channels like the Discord and the forums 100% should. Or your volunteers will leave and work on projects where this is the case and they will stay there. "Pays nothing besides moral feelgoods and protects the volunteers" is not exactly a restrictive filter. And we have found recently that apparently everyone is not replaceable. I expected someone to step up after Lieven and Church left, literally no one has. And probably no one will either. Who in their right mind, in their mid-20s, would be like "yeah, sign me up for that in my off time".

For the players, the only reason this game exists is because many of the devs understand that you would be very sad if they didn't do what they do. As I mentioned, work on this game provides literally nothing besides moral feelgoods. At this point any learning happened long ago, for me at least, probably for everyone except Brant. Unfortunately, entitlement is a really big issue with today's gamers, and I would urge you to consider the way that impacts various devs of the games you enjoy (which literally would not exist if not for their efforts).

I am personally not doing any development until I feel the staff are doing better at protecting their contributors/volunteers, primarily their devs, but also themselves, from negativity towards their work in the administrative communication channels. The end goal is that it's actually not a horrible sounding offer to work on the game, but this is a first step.

I know there is one specific person waiting for cannon fixes in the combat achievements bugfixes, and probably a bunch of people who want a variety of other changes and fixes. Sorry to those people, it's not happening. Not enjoying my work on the game. You guys can thank Nazuths and his tag-team of clanmates Greggg, Wir3d, and Dismayed for that. We have reached the endgame of clan toxicity; they have the green-light from ownership to remove contributors from the game as long as they do it over Discord, or in ways that are even slightly ambiguous, because again, we have no concept of protecting said contributors, forcing them to protect themselves or leave.

Yeah I think we change moderating and incorporate it into discord and if need be into PM’s of dev’s and staff members.

Without dev’s + staff the game dies (as it has been) and this option wouldn’t even be able to be considered.

this server is cooked isnt it

Lets not point fingers and call people out especially baiting them. If YOU feel like you have been baited\flamed, why can't you make a report and let another staff member handle it? I don't even know why you even uttering my name, you started all this drama about calling us Low IQ individuals, losers, and much more cuz we like to have a few laughs at each other in discord. If you are so sensitive to that, why can't you just block people so you can't see their messages? All this is what's told to the common player when they are being flamed and baited constantly, so why can't you follow that?

If you want to be held up to some standards, I urge you to follow those yourself too. If you can't handle a joke or troll, block them and move on with your day and stop playing the victim. I have more than enough ss to post here of you being toxic, flaming, baiting people also, the reason I don't post or make a report is that I could careless about you and your feelings. At end of day, people joke and have fun in their own ways, if you find it unfit, just block them.

There are already some regulations in discord that are in place for the rule breakers. You are wanting to ban\timeout\mute people for clown reacting to your messages. No one is keeping you here, we appreciate the work you have done but no one is going to kiss your feet for "keeping the server alive". If you feel unfit to do the tasks mike has entrusted you to do so, then I suggest you move on and find things in life that bring you happiness.

Raj wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 7:33 pm The nature of this game is that it's not one where we can afford to pay devs to do the rapid development we need to keep up with OSRS.

I think this brings up an important point that is not related to the topic of this thread. We really need to get away from the mindset of keeping up with and/or copying OSRS. I think that is a big reason for developer burnout (correct me if I'm wrong). We should focus on unique content that gives each developer creative freedom.

Raj wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 7:33 pm And I'm sure this strategy of letting your best volunteers get shit on for incurring costs to work for you and cutting them loose and replacing them worked back in the day, but it is not back in the day anymore. There really does need to be considerations made for retaining people who are exceptionally useful in the grand scheme of things.

Completely agree with all this obviously. We have rules that should prevent this behavior, but they have rarely been enforced for the past few years. When you give these types of people leniency, they will continue to escalate and push what is considered normal/acceptable behavior. The result is people who treat the volunteers of our server like crap and then rage when they actually get punished for something. Then they have the audacity to complain when the human behind the screen lashes back out at them. Things have obviously been especially bad now with the mounting frustration within the community regarding the current issues facing the server.

Wir3d wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 9:26 pm you started all this drama about calling us Low IQ individuals, losers, and much more cuz we like to have a few laughs at each other in discord. If you are so sensitive to that, why can't you just block people so you can't see their messages?

Bro stop playing stupid. You seriously expect us to believe that Raj came after all of you completely unprovoked? No. The constant "joking" and "banter" gets under people's skin. It doesn't make them "soft". It doesn't make them "sensitive". Like seriously just stop. I get it, trolling and banter is fun. But when you have absolutely nothing but negative things to say to someone, they are going to react negatively. Like this is middle school level social norms.

Also voted no on the poll, cause I doubt anything will change. (Word it better next time idiot developer)

Iron adam wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 9:48 pm

Wir3d wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 9:26 pm you started all this drama about calling us Low IQ individuals, losers, and much more cuz we like to have a few laughs at each other in discord. If you are so sensitive to that, why can't you just block people so you can't see their messages?

Bro stop playing stupid. You seriously expect us to believe that Raj came after all of you completely unprovoked? No. The constant "joking" and "banter" gets under people's skin. It doesn't make them "soft". It doesn't make them "sensitive". Like seriously just stop. I get it, trolling and banter is fun. But when you have absolutely nothing but negative things to say to someone, they are going to react negatively. Like this is middle school level social norms.

Also voted no on the poll, cause I doubt anything will change. (Word it better next time idiot developer)

I can say the same about you? Why dont you just stop with your trolling then? Show me one post or discord message where "I" started the bait\flaming. If you don't know the whole story, who are you to judge who came at who first? Want me to disclose the discord dm that was sent by raj that shows how toxic he really is? Again, I don't know why you group me with people that shit on him for not being a better dev, I have never questioned his ability to provide updates for server and I even thanked him for his time dedicated to server. I don't start shit, I just finish it. He's just upset because I never baited\flamed him and he banned me and timed me out on discord and his discussion got overturned by higher ups, because guess what, He ABUSED his powers to harass me treat me unfairly. Every punishment he set upon me was overturned because it wasn't a justified punishment rather just him in his feelings and upset at me. If I deserved the punishment then so be it, but if i'm targeted because I am friends with certain people, that is called abuse of powers.


Also voted no on the poll, cause I doubt anything will change. (Word it better next time idiot developer)

Iron adam wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 9:48 pm

Raj wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 7:33 pm The nature of this game is that it's not one where we can afford to pay devs to do the rapid development we need to keep up with OSRS.

I think this brings up an important point that is not related to the topic of this thread. We really need to get away from the mindset of keeping up with and/or copying OSRS. I think that is a big reason for developer burnout (correct me if I'm wrong). We should focus on unique content that gives each developer creative freedom.

Thing is, we will never be 100% just like osrs. If we were, we would have to rewrite the entire server code to handle the osrs client. In theory, it's not impossible but would take maybe a year or 2 to handle, given how few people are actively coding (which currently, it's just me.) Before Lieven passed away, we had envisioned a plan. I would focus on the client trying to replicate it to osrs and help with custom content such as Death rework and a new custom boss (which I still want to do at some point). Lieven would have done QoL updates, as example from the update that he did. We were hoping Raj and Mike would do more of the technical stuff, such as TOA, Group Ironman, and that type of stuff. Sadly, Lieven passed, Raj seems like he's stepping away, and Mike has mental health problems making it hard for him to do any programming. That leaves just me. I've had the new client ready for a bit, and I needed Mike's help with remapping npcs and objects, after that, I would be ready for a beta version. That was about 2 weeks ago.

In the meantime, I've just been working on trying to add in the remaining music tracks, jingles, and adding in sound effects, and area effects (like the magic tree hum). Between that and trying to trim down the client and remove obsolete stuff, I've been staying busy. Whenever the client does get released, I'd love to start working on my backlog of ideas, such as the death rework and the custom boss idea that I had which would be all custom mechanics never seen before in Pkhonor or in OSRS

Edit: Side note, I do think that the whole, only Mike or Rapsey can push an update live thing has changed on me recently. Before I was fine with it, but from what I see now, I don't think there has been any dev that has ever had malicious intent against the server. Especially since the server is barely holding on by a thread, I think now is the time to let devs push updates themselves. Every update that gets pushed onto the client, server, or even the cache is all logged, with who did what via version control. If something ever goes wrong it takes less than 1 minute to revert said changes and push them. For most of us devs, this is a passion thing, to work on a server that has given us so much joy in the past. To make us rely on two people who have been recently hard to contact, even for us devs, really devalues our work. I could be pumping out update after update. Hell, I had the construction update within 1 month of actually having the source code, in which the first few weeks I was working on something else, so it only took a couple of weeks.

I really do think someone else needs to have true executive privileges on pkhonor. It's Mike and Rapsey's baby, but the server is a special needs kid and there really won't ever be a point where it can be left on its own. Right now it's just kept alive, and people still have motivation to do more. This game is only meaningful because of the people in it. If it were empty then there'd be no point besides as a monument on some forgotten corner of the internet. If that's a desirable route then save a version of this server and keep it online, but give someone the ability to develop on a copy or something.

We've got a loooot of people with their heads on straight and true motivation to keep this thing going (Adam, Raj, Jayden, and others), but the supers will have to relinquish their philosophies about how to run things a bit because life support and gradual death is not preferable to growth (or hell, even the status quo at this point). Right now the the only potential left is to go up, going down is happening in real time.

We can't compete against OSRS, we should take any criticisms about not being OSRS in stride and instead attempt to have our own identity. Titan events were among the last good examples of this unique identity.

If there's resistance to making a new update because we're worried about players being upset over having their progress or banks invalidated, we now have to compare that to the worry of players being upset because there's no community left. Not to mention, it's not like we've done much to cherish veterans or long time contributors (though I'm still happy we eventually got a YouTuber rank). We can comfortably ignore short term dissatisfaction for long term gain, just need to rally behind someone with that kind of vision.

Ryan got angry that I didn’t raise this issue back when he was being dragged, so he removed me from the staff team because I wouldn’t entertain his argument. You read that correctly, I tried to avoid an argument with the ex-staff manager, and he demoted me, because he is still the staff manager, because no one has even accepted his resignation. Anyways, this game is doing very well

I’d like to reiterate that it’s absurd to ask people to report issues before it impacts them personally, lol

Raj wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 11:26 pm Ryan got angry that I didn’t raise this issue back when he was being dragged, so he removed me from the staff team because I wouldn’t entertain his argument. You read that correctly, I tried to avoid an argument with the ex-staff manager, and he demoted me, because he is still the staff manager, because no one has even accepted his resignation. Anyways, this game is doing very well

I’d like to reiterate that it’s absurd to ask people to report issues before it impacts them personally, lol

lol?