that's funny. I even have EU guys talking to me on steam and being amazed at how shitty and corrupt the NA admin team is. The actions revealed by that chat log just show that the NA Admin team as it currently exists is a total joke. I also find the reaction to this revelation on the part of the higher ups to be hilarious; rather than trying to fix how bad the NA Admin team is all the effort is being put on tracking down the individual who revealed how bad the NA Admin team is, probably so they can go back to being awful without being afraid of someone pointing out how awful they are. Here is a solution for you guys... Don't be fucking awful and say stupid things and then it won't matter at all if people post logs of your conversations because you won't have said anything damning. If people are expected to have faith in the NA admin team then the NA admin team needs to be held to a higher standard than they currently are. This whole situation is a result of the NA Admin team being shit. They allowed three admins all of whom have personal grudges against Kesh and all of whom have been fighting against Kesh to some degree in strat to ban him without providing any evidence.
I feel as though I must respond to this. The IRC channel is, partially, a boys' club for admins, devs, and (up until last night) beta testers. Much of what is said there is simply blowing off steam from having to
manage a community that mostly does not respect you and your decisions. The logs that were posted publicly, for example, can't necessarily be taken at face value because it's not a guarantee that everything that was said was entirely in earnest. To take what Shik said seriously is a discredit to him and his sense of humor, for one thing, because it really is the kind of joke Shik would make. The fact that Smoothrich acted on what he was saying was a surprise, I think, to everyone.
If by a higher standard you mean the fact that Smoothrich was already being probated for egregious bans (one against badplayer) and that he has since lost admin, then I'd say we're on track, here. Also, I assume you mean me for your third when you say "three admins ... to ban him" - when even in the snippet of logs all I said was that the supposed "item-bombing"
wasn't against the rules. I didn't initiate the ban, Shik didn't initiate the ban, and the only agreement I personally had with it was that it was beyond reasonable doubt that Kesh
could have had access to his girlfriend's strategus account and seemed to have played on her characters. Under such circumstances at the time (and the fact that I didn't feel it was my place - we have a rule of thumb about tampering with other admins' bans) I didn't, at least, contest it.
It's true that I may have actually been the first to raise the possibility of Kesh account-sharing with the Trillian/Clever/Busty/Akira account, but I was content with leaving the decision and remaining investigation (beyond the strat battle where Kesh was in teamspeak talking under the name Clever while Clever was playing, and the original suspicious forum activity) with the people above me, which would've meant possibly Shik, but probably Meow or the devs. None of them, incidentally, even looked into it as far as I know. Smoothrich took it upon himself because he felt that nobody else cared or would bother to check.
Anyways... More transparency for the NA Admin team. If they didn't say stupid shit they wouldn't have to fear people revealing their chat logs. Maybe the NA admin team needs to be shaken up a bit, get some fresh faces at the helm and have them review the current admins and see if they are still doing a good job or not.
Maybe an analogy would be a good idea... you would think it wouldn't be a good idea for the jury in a court trial to deliberate
directly in front of the plaintiff, the defendant, the lawyers, the judge and the public, would you not? If you can't see any reason why the fact that the admin IRC logs are getting leaked is bad then you are making a mistake in your reasoning. (We also have our own forum section, by the way, which I assure you is much more formal and serious)
I won't defend everything said in the channel (to say that anything said that was incriminating was in jest would be stretching the truth), but there's more reason for the higher-ups wanting to catch a leak of information than simply keeping the NA admins from looking bad. It's not the NA admins that are actually trying to catch the "mole". The people most concerned are the devs.
edit: I realize I sound a bit harsh towards ALL NA Admins; which is not fair since I'm sure many of them are fine, but the visible admins who are leading the NA Admin team are clearly not doing a good job. Perhaps someone with a higher code of ethics who is already an admin could take over leadership and improve things... or someone with a higher code of ethics who isn't already an admin...
Call us out, at least. You mean Shik and myself. Shik is the head NA admin currently, and I'm the only other admin beyond him who has higher access level than any of the other NA admins.
either way, I would just like to see the leadership of the NA Admin team improved as the current leadership allowed for this whole mess to occur and is focused entirely on rooting out the source of this information instead of improving their own conduct.
No. We're not the ones trying to secure the leaking of information, and any case where we've tried to root it out, like Shik's plea bargain to Kesh, for example, came directly from a dev, in that case cmp.
Sorry if we're slow, but we have been in the process of sorting this "whole mess" out. Smoothrich's ban on Kesh was lifted (by Shik, by the way).
I'm not sure if his global ban is still active because I can't see those. edit: nevermind... We're not just scrambling to save face after letting the roof cave in, here, we're actually trying to discuss the situation before we act again - because taking swift action is certainly not the way to go, as we all can see.
We "allowed" this mess to occur insofar as one person was "allowed" to be an admin that gets to make his own decisions, and that we "allowed" each other to talk together about it before we come to a conclusion on the matter.
Canary has been mostly in charge of NA for a while, Shik barely plays.
Not officially and not in deed, I haven't been. I'm merely more active than Shik.
i vote for Tears of Destiny.
The guy who blew up on us and resigned because he couldn't take it and felt like he was all alone being an admin amid the rest of the "
inactives", "shitmins" and people who aren't as strict as he is on chat abuse? Or maybe you're being facetious?
Canary is good admin but I don't think he makes a good head admin.
...or perhaps not. Ah well.