i think it's unfortunate that managers have the ability to close down their servers whenever they feel like, just because they are the manager. speaking strictly about servers who are either public or close to being public, it's very unfortunate that at any point a manager can simply shut down their project whenever the feel like it, no matter how populated and active the server is
i'll recount to two personal examples of this rule that i have experienced to really outline why this rule sucks. the first would be in the case of doomsday, where tifakhan was able to shut down the server even when the population was reaching an average of 60 players on a regular basis with higher numbers during more active hours of the day. instead of passing the server onto another manager, the server was shut down for good at the egotistical whims of the manager, resulting in the loss of my home server, making many people quit graal for good, and forced me to try and bring back the server multiple times as well as many others attempting the same feat. it was just bad all over, when it could have been avoided by having a global staff member simply remove tifakhan and replace her with a more active/enthusiastic manager
the second example would be the recent demise of armageddon, the server that i was managing with decus owning the actual server. as you guys know, we were about 90 (percent) done with the foundations of the server which would have allowed us to go public within a couple of weeks (if our staff was working to fix things up). however, the owner of the server (and hence considered the 'actual' manager in the eyes of graal) decided that armageddon would fail in comparison to other UC servers such as delteria, and that making a server that would only be used for 60-or-so players wouldn't be worth the time and effort. this was decided by one person, whom shut down the entire project even though the rest of the staff, especially myself, still wanted to complete the project. i could predict that had armageddon not been shut down, that we would either have applied and been on the classic tab at this point, or we'd be incredibly close and waiting for inspection. instead of a global staff member taking control of the promising and almost-complete server and pushing it to completion, it would closed at the whim of a disgruntled manager who seems to have quit and never signed onto graal since, thus making it virtually impossible for myself or any other staff to finish it
while these two examples are very different, they both outline the same problem with graal's server policy: managers can close down their servers pretty much whenever they want, and no one can do anything about it except perhaps stefan. if streety wanted to close down unholy nation, he could probably do it tomorrow if he felt it was a good idea, and then we'd have no more unholy nation, ever. if (whoever is managing era after deo left, squirt or chris vimes or salesman or whomever i don't know anymore) decided to close down era because they felt the server was going down a road it wouldn't recover from, they could do it, and it doesn't seem fair to the players who play on those servers
my suggestion is that we remove this ability from managers (or owners, whatever) once their projects have reached a certain stage of maturity. it's a better opportunity for graal if we instead establish new managers in the place of these server-shutting-down managers: graal gains no advantage from allowing managers to close their servers forever. it seems a better option to let them quit and for global staff to step in and either manager the server for awhile until a predecessor is found, or to appoint a new manager when the time comes. let's not let one person's decisions decide the fate of a server that multiple people contribute too |