My Unholy Nation Experience

[Mark Sir Link]

So trials were now able to play in events, which I would have thought would have been a decision made by myself and the Events Team Admin to begin with. I believe Absolut_Cron was still unsatisfied with this change but I point-blank refused to undo the changes, and it is likely he was unable to find another scripter willing to do it since scripter activity was very low.

I have seen several trials come to Unholy Nation and play in events and decide to upgrade, but this could be undone by the whim of the current Manager, who feels Trials should not play in events, the only thing there is really to do on the server. If the Manager is unable to make a good decision on whether Trials should be able to participate in events or not, I can't understand why anyone would believe he'd be able to make a good decision elsewhere.

Near the end of Gamerkid's term as manager, I was also given full NC control, and I guess by things Gamerkid has said ex post facto, he intended for me to end up with full level rights as well.

I began to make changes to fix things beyond the realm of Events Team related scripts, and a good number of players began to come to me first whenever they had a concern with something that needed fixing, which I took pride in. At the very least, it made me feel that players felt I was actively working and felt that I was as good a contact as any if they felt something needed to be done.

I won't even begin to list the changes I made because there were a lot of changes, and I can't even begin to remember what all of them were. However, I remember making a few changes to the forums that players had been requesting for a fairly long time, namely the ability to disable or create their own hotkey for opening the forums, and disable the forums from opening every single time a player logged on.

These changes were met with open hostility from the Manager, who had in the past publicly questioned why I had made certain changes, why I had certain rights (as if I had somehow assigned them to myself and was able to answer that question), and why I was doing anything beyond Events Team related work.

He even went so far as to post in an in game forum thread, questioning why I had made a change and claiming it didn't work. His claim about it not working was valid for three people - Luca, Rage, and himself. As I only had a limited view of the additional moderation tabs and such, I had not realized that the width of the GuiTabCtrl was expanding over the options button and preventing it from being clicked.

This incident alone tremendously shook my faith in the current manager of Unholy Nation. He told me he expected me to personally report any changes I made to him, but felt it was acceptable for him to publicly question my ability and decisions rather than taking his concerns straight to me. He questioned me in front of staff, and worse yet, in front of players for everyone to see.

I had always conducted myself with quite a bit more professionalism than the majority of Unholy Nation's staff. Nearly every night, there would be another argument about who should be fired, who isn't doing enough work, who was being corrupt.

I found these conversations ridiculous because over the past 3 months, there had been literally 2 people who had done any sort of development work that had made it into player's hands - Gamerkid and Myself. I didn't bother to jump into these conversations to remind the people pointing the fingers that they also were just as useless, just as lazy as the people they wanted removed. The entire driving force of Unholy Nation seemed to be participating in political issues on Unholy Nation, which Absolut_Cron allowed to build and did nothing to prevent during his time as PR Manager, and Manager.

I quit within days of the forum changes, and since then have made no attempt to stay out of Unholy Nation's political issues, openly pointing out to players and staff alike what problems there are with Unholy Nation, and informing players who submitted bugs precisely how long it would take for their problems to be fixed.

At this point I can only hope the PWA will make sort of serious effort into reviewing Unholy Nation. There is literally no guiding direction to Unholy Nation from the top-down. There are very few self-motivated workers remaining on Unholy Nation who will find work to be done on their own, and they aren't even development staff. I know Unholy Nation's management team is actively a turn off to many high caliber developers in Graal's community, and I am hoping the PWA will do something to change that. Unholy Nation still has a (relatively) high playercount, but I can only see the playercount continuing to lower if things continue as they are.

[kia345]

Originally Posted by Mark Sir Link

At this point I can only hope the PWA will make sort of serious effort into reviewing Unholy Nation

They won't.

UN has players and along with Zodiac (also plagued with mediocrity) and Era (look what happened last time with PWAs), it doesn't need to be fixed as far as any authority figures are concerned. It's much more productive to egg on a server that's behind and threaten them by pointing out they're not contributing than to try to fix something that is broken below the surface, where potential customers don't see.