Post by Nina on Sept 8, 2014 23:27:03 GMT -8
Hello everyone. This thread is certainly a bit overdue, and I apologize for not creating one earlier. I gave notice in the staff section about my departure, and kept mostly away from MapleStory for a week to clear my head, so I think that I am now ready to start typing this extremely long betch of a thread. It will probably be multi-parted with the additional part(s) likely coming sometime in the near future when I have more time. In those future threads, I will at the very least provide a short personal note/message to as many players as I can remember, in addition to some final words/thoughts. For this first part, I will give some reasons and explanations as to why I resigned and some history of my role here at NobleStory. I should warn you that this thread will have a bit of an angry and rambling tone since I will be finally releasing much of the frustration that I have kept mostly to myself, which may end my stay on a bit of a sour note. Apologies in advance.
By now, I assume that most of you have figured out that I am sadly no longer a part of the NobleStory staff. I should make it perfectly clear that I chose to resign on my own and was not forced out by any means. I have had the intention to resign and quit multiple times in the past, but always ended up coming back after being convinced by certain players and staff members to continue, with Kim probably having been the biggest influence in keeping me from quitting.
My decision to resign was due to many things that built up over a course of the 11 months that I have been a staff member at NobleStory (FYI: I became a GM in mid-September 2013). Primarily, I was bored of game and have been for quite some time now. For instance, I haven't truly played my F/P Mage, Flame, since last November (FYI: I reached level 125 in November 2013, and today am still only level 127), and I really only created my I/L Mage, Frost, to help find/fix quest bugs and record videos of various PQs and other aspects of NobleStory for the Youtube Channel.
Additionally, my final semester of school also began shortly before the day of drama, and I wanted to prioritize my time more with both schoolwork, club activities, and career-related tasks coming up. I mainly pushed through all of my boredom (despite my time constraints) because I enjoyed making the server grow and making the community happy, so I have very few regrets about the time I put into NobleStory.
Although I have a lot of respect for current and past NobleStory staff members, one of the biggest reasons that I nearly quit months ago was because I truly disliked how the work was being distributed between staff members here at NobleStory.
As previously mentioned, I was hired as a GM in mid-September 2013, primarily as an event and community GM. Before I was hired, Adam always hosted the events, and no offense to him (I think he would probably would agree with me) but he wasn't very good at it. Weekend events were basically Russian Roulette and Jump Quest every time, which got boring very quickly. Since I took over, I was able to test out as many as 15 different events (with a few being player suggestions; e.g. Evasion was Camila's idea), and improve the variety and hopefully the fun that weekend events provided for the community. What some newer players may not know is that between September 2013 until February 2014, I was pretty much the only GM hosting these events, and had a nearly spotless record of making it on-time to every event (FYI: Until recently, events used to all be scheduled). Up until February this was because the staff list was comprised of only Adam, Denny, and I (and two relatively inactive owners in Kalyb and Erik). If you haven't been able to tell, Adam and Denny obviously hated events, so the event work was pushed to me 99% of the time. I believe in total, Denny hosted 1 day's worth of events between the aforementioned time period, while Adam hosted 2-3 days or so. This is out of all of the events that were hosted from September until February. I also kept a pretty detailed log with the specific events hosted on each day in addition to all winners (including a hall of fame with total wins) on the old forum (which appears to now have gotten wiped by Adam "GG Wipe GG") up until earlier this summer. Beginning in February Alex and Liz were added as the newest NobleStory GMs, and I was hoping to have them take over more of the events, since by this point I had other tasks at NobleStory with the biggest being coding (more on that later). Unfortunately, however, while Liz and Alex did help out much more than Adam and Denny did, in the few months that followed (up until Kim's acceptance), I was still forced to host the majority of the events, which I disliked since I felt I was unfairly forced to do the vast majority of the work on the server already. However, I continued to host them because I was under the impression that if I did not host them, nobody would, which would then lead to an angry community (again I always put happy community first). Despite this, I always did try to put on a positive attitude and put maximum effort regardless of how I was feeling because nobody wants to participate in an event with a debbie downer GM. Once Kim was accepted, she helped out much more on the event hosting, although I do reckon that I was still forced to do a sizable portion of them when she was away. All in all, although I didn't show it (har har har no emotions because Nina is a robot har har har never gets old), I greatly disliked that I had to do so much of the event hosting work, especially after I started doing most of the coding.
Likewise, since October 2013, I was basically the only person putting together the monthly events month in and month out. From what I can remember Adam and Liz contributed a total of 4 events between October 2013 until August 2014 (Tree Decorating and Snowman Madness in December 2013; and 2 Anniversary Events in August 2014). While I certainly have enjoyed creating the monthly events (and I hope the community enjoyed participating them as well), I was always unhappy about the fact that whenever I asked other staff members for event suggestions, nobody ever had anything to provide. Thus, I quickly burned myself out trying to always make the next month's events even more interesting and fun for the community. This, unfortunately, led to certain events being a bit overpowered (e.g. Saint Patrick's Day), and of course all of the blame and the complaints came to me since I was the only person with new ideas and who put those events together. Likewise, even when I asked for other people to help out on some minor things such as iSpy, none of the other staff members ever voluntarily put up new images, so once again I was forced to do it, which combined with the Weekend GM Events, essentially bound me to the server week in and week out. These were my main issues with how events were distributed between staff.
As for coding, the main reason why I believe NobleStory experiences a lack of growth is because when it was first released (late July 2013) everything was broken and for a very long time, nobody bothered fixing them. Thus, any players who played NobleStory early on have a negative perception of the server already. No offense to him, but besides the adding of some custom content and fixing a couple basic NPCs, I don't ever remember Kalyb (who was supposed to be the coder at the start) ever making improvements on the server. This may be due to the fact that if there were improvements, the staff never bothered to make announcements about them, which was extremely annoying for me as a player, so if that is the case I apologize. Once I started coding for NobleStory in late December I changed this policy and made update threads with some detailed notes on everything that I had fixed or changed.
The reason I have such fond memories of Denny is because whereas early on, Kalyb (from my point-of-view) wasn't doing anything to fix bugs, Denny ended up fixing a lot of previously broken aspects in the game. I remember many times staying up very late into the night to help Denny fix quests since I knew what each quest was supposed to do (given that I'm a massive quest whore), and Denny knew how to code them. If it had not been for him, I likely would never even have tried bothering to learn how to code. The biggest reason why I got into coding was because I felt bad that Denny had to do all of the work, and wanted to help take some of the weight off of his shoulders. Thus, I started learning in early December, which was around the time when the first Cody/Spindle revamp was about to occur. I guess I've told this story multiple times now, but the event which really ended up making me a coder for NobleStory was when I sprained my knee while snowboarding over winter break (it was a couple days after Christmas). For the remainder of Winter Break I pretty much just limped around my house and couldn't do much, so I figured that I would give coding a shot so I could at least be somewhat useful/productive while at home injured. I started with NPCs and essentially coded all of the exchange NPCs in NLC, then fixed monster drops including all bos drops, and after I set up my test server, Power Guard (which Kim bugged me about forever), Party Quests, weddings, and various other skills and broken features. Denny eventually quit in March (I think), which left me as the only developer actively working on anything at NobleStory. While I disliked that I was the only developer here who did anything, I never really complained because I thought coding was fun, and enjoyed seeing the community grow as a result of the changes.
Furthermore, although I won't go into great detail of the other stuff that I had to do, I was also the one who had to redesign the entire website (which was almost entirely from scratch), nearly all of the wz editing (the first wave of Wz Edits in May 2014 was all done by me), do most of the forum work, do all of the advertising (for RageZone, Youtube, etc) and do all of the graphic design on new event banners and whatnot. All in all, I was generally quite pissed about how much work that I was doing relative to all of the other GMs - Events (Weekend and Monthly), Web Design, Graphic Design, Advertising, Coding, Wz Editing, and Forum Moderating. But it wasn't really only that, it was the fact that I was doing this much work for a server that I wasn't even an owner. I was especially mad with regards to how little work both owners did for the server that they are supposed to own. This became very much evident when in a span of a few weeks I had players who had been around for weeks already come up to me and ask me who the owners were. Whenever I replied that Kalyb and Erik were the owners, they didn't even recognize those names because both owners rarely interacted with the community either on the forum or in-game.
This picture of the moderator history from the old forum sums up my thoughts pretty well: i.imgur.com/cB80fAr.png
However, even after the drastically unbalanced work load, I pushed through because I loved the server and wanted it to succeed, which in a way it did when it hit 40 online earlier this summer. It was an accomplishment for me as it signified that something was going right - all of the work I put in was worth it.
I guess I should make it clear that I did not resign specifically because of the Zakum drama. I have taken a fair share of criticism over the 11 months, and it really doesn't bother me. Although I would have liked to see it handled better, I acknowledge that I should have probably asked for feedback on it beforehand. I did realize that a lot of players were quitting and wanted to see some changes for the better, so I voluntarily stepped down, but that wasn't really the cause of my resignation. I really had planned on leaving even a few days before the Zakum changes. The Zakum drama simply accelerated the time frame. The real gutshot came from the fact that after I put all of the work into the server, there ended up being staff members who took advantage of their position on the staff. I can safely say that I have never abused my GM for anything. I may warp myself a lot but it is all for testing purposes (as you can tell by Flame's 2 amazing levels since November 2013 and my epic clean level 4 Maple Hat that I wore for 10 months). There is a level of trust that should existentially be there and should not be affected. If it's gone, then the spirit of the game is completely ruined. It also leads to accusations of abuse from other clean GMs. This is especially the case at Noble where by complete coincidence, the vast majority of the staff (who applied) all had legits above level 160. While most players will probably think that I am talking about Denny here, it goes deeper than that. While I was devastated about Denny, I still appreciated the fact that he actually provided value to the server through all of the coding contributions he made. I generally won't go into it because it will cause more unnecessary drama, but the staff should know who else I am talking about.
I think I'm done ranting for now (I've typed about 2 hours straight). Thanks for reading, and I hope I cleared up some reasons as to why I resigned. I should make it clear that I enjoyed every moment that I've had while at NobleStory, and I hope that the recent changes push it back in the right direction. I apologize again if I threw some people under the bus. That was not the intention of this thread. Just giving my thoughts and frustrations. I will post probably one final thead (or just a reply to this one) in the coming days/weeks with aforementioned notes to everybody memorable that I've had the privilege of talking to, and my final thoughts. See you then and Happy Nobling.
By now, I assume that most of you have figured out that I am sadly no longer a part of the NobleStory staff. I should make it perfectly clear that I chose to resign on my own and was not forced out by any means. I have had the intention to resign and quit multiple times in the past, but always ended up coming back after being convinced by certain players and staff members to continue, with Kim probably having been the biggest influence in keeping me from quitting.
My decision to resign was due to many things that built up over a course of the 11 months that I have been a staff member at NobleStory (FYI: I became a GM in mid-September 2013). Primarily, I was bored of game and have been for quite some time now. For instance, I haven't truly played my F/P Mage, Flame, since last November (FYI: I reached level 125 in November 2013, and today am still only level 127), and I really only created my I/L Mage, Frost, to help find/fix quest bugs and record videos of various PQs and other aspects of NobleStory for the Youtube Channel.
Additionally, my final semester of school also began shortly before the day of drama, and I wanted to prioritize my time more with both schoolwork, club activities, and career-related tasks coming up. I mainly pushed through all of my boredom (despite my time constraints) because I enjoyed making the server grow and making the community happy, so I have very few regrets about the time I put into NobleStory.
Although I have a lot of respect for current and past NobleStory staff members, one of the biggest reasons that I nearly quit months ago was because I truly disliked how the work was being distributed between staff members here at NobleStory.
As previously mentioned, I was hired as a GM in mid-September 2013, primarily as an event and community GM. Before I was hired, Adam always hosted the events, and no offense to him (I think he would probably would agree with me) but he wasn't very good at it. Weekend events were basically Russian Roulette and Jump Quest every time, which got boring very quickly. Since I took over, I was able to test out as many as 15 different events (with a few being player suggestions; e.g. Evasion was Camila's idea), and improve the variety and hopefully the fun that weekend events provided for the community. What some newer players may not know is that between September 2013 until February 2014, I was pretty much the only GM hosting these events, and had a nearly spotless record of making it on-time to every event (FYI: Until recently, events used to all be scheduled). Up until February this was because the staff list was comprised of only Adam, Denny, and I (and two relatively inactive owners in Kalyb and Erik). If you haven't been able to tell, Adam and Denny obviously hated events, so the event work was pushed to me 99% of the time. I believe in total, Denny hosted 1 day's worth of events between the aforementioned time period, while Adam hosted 2-3 days or so. This is out of all of the events that were hosted from September until February. I also kept a pretty detailed log with the specific events hosted on each day in addition to all winners (including a hall of fame with total wins) on the old forum (which appears to now have gotten wiped by Adam "GG Wipe GG") up until earlier this summer. Beginning in February Alex and Liz were added as the newest NobleStory GMs, and I was hoping to have them take over more of the events, since by this point I had other tasks at NobleStory with the biggest being coding (more on that later). Unfortunately, however, while Liz and Alex did help out much more than Adam and Denny did, in the few months that followed (up until Kim's acceptance), I was still forced to host the majority of the events, which I disliked since I felt I was unfairly forced to do the vast majority of the work on the server already. However, I continued to host them because I was under the impression that if I did not host them, nobody would, which would then lead to an angry community (again I always put happy community first). Despite this, I always did try to put on a positive attitude and put maximum effort regardless of how I was feeling because nobody wants to participate in an event with a debbie downer GM. Once Kim was accepted, she helped out much more on the event hosting, although I do reckon that I was still forced to do a sizable portion of them when she was away. All in all, although I didn't show it (har har har no emotions because Nina is a robot har har har never gets old), I greatly disliked that I had to do so much of the event hosting work, especially after I started doing most of the coding.
Likewise, since October 2013, I was basically the only person putting together the monthly events month in and month out. From what I can remember Adam and Liz contributed a total of 4 events between October 2013 until August 2014 (Tree Decorating and Snowman Madness in December 2013; and 2 Anniversary Events in August 2014). While I certainly have enjoyed creating the monthly events (and I hope the community enjoyed participating them as well), I was always unhappy about the fact that whenever I asked other staff members for event suggestions, nobody ever had anything to provide. Thus, I quickly burned myself out trying to always make the next month's events even more interesting and fun for the community. This, unfortunately, led to certain events being a bit overpowered (e.g. Saint Patrick's Day), and of course all of the blame and the complaints came to me since I was the only person with new ideas and who put those events together. Likewise, even when I asked for other people to help out on some minor things such as iSpy, none of the other staff members ever voluntarily put up new images, so once again I was forced to do it, which combined with the Weekend GM Events, essentially bound me to the server week in and week out. These were my main issues with how events were distributed between staff.
As for coding, the main reason why I believe NobleStory experiences a lack of growth is because when it was first released (late July 2013) everything was broken and for a very long time, nobody bothered fixing them. Thus, any players who played NobleStory early on have a negative perception of the server already. No offense to him, but besides the adding of some custom content and fixing a couple basic NPCs, I don't ever remember Kalyb (who was supposed to be the coder at the start) ever making improvements on the server. This may be due to the fact that if there were improvements, the staff never bothered to make announcements about them, which was extremely annoying for me as a player, so if that is the case I apologize. Once I started coding for NobleStory in late December I changed this policy and made update threads with some detailed notes on everything that I had fixed or changed.
The reason I have such fond memories of Denny is because whereas early on, Kalyb (from my point-of-view) wasn't doing anything to fix bugs, Denny ended up fixing a lot of previously broken aspects in the game. I remember many times staying up very late into the night to help Denny fix quests since I knew what each quest was supposed to do (given that I'm a massive quest whore), and Denny knew how to code them. If it had not been for him, I likely would never even have tried bothering to learn how to code. The biggest reason why I got into coding was because I felt bad that Denny had to do all of the work, and wanted to help take some of the weight off of his shoulders. Thus, I started learning in early December, which was around the time when the first Cody/Spindle revamp was about to occur. I guess I've told this story multiple times now, but the event which really ended up making me a coder for NobleStory was when I sprained my knee while snowboarding over winter break (it was a couple days after Christmas). For the remainder of Winter Break I pretty much just limped around my house and couldn't do much, so I figured that I would give coding a shot so I could at least be somewhat useful/productive while at home injured. I started with NPCs and essentially coded all of the exchange NPCs in NLC, then fixed monster drops including all bos drops, and after I set up my test server, Power Guard (which Kim bugged me about forever), Party Quests, weddings, and various other skills and broken features. Denny eventually quit in March (I think), which left me as the only developer actively working on anything at NobleStory. While I disliked that I was the only developer here who did anything, I never really complained because I thought coding was fun, and enjoyed seeing the community grow as a result of the changes.
Furthermore, although I won't go into great detail of the other stuff that I had to do, I was also the one who had to redesign the entire website (which was almost entirely from scratch), nearly all of the wz editing (the first wave of Wz Edits in May 2014 was all done by me), do most of the forum work, do all of the advertising (for RageZone, Youtube, etc) and do all of the graphic design on new event banners and whatnot. All in all, I was generally quite pissed about how much work that I was doing relative to all of the other GMs - Events (Weekend and Monthly), Web Design, Graphic Design, Advertising, Coding, Wz Editing, and Forum Moderating. But it wasn't really only that, it was the fact that I was doing this much work for a server that I wasn't even an owner. I was especially mad with regards to how little work both owners did for the server that they are supposed to own. This became very much evident when in a span of a few weeks I had players who had been around for weeks already come up to me and ask me who the owners were. Whenever I replied that Kalyb and Erik were the owners, they didn't even recognize those names because both owners rarely interacted with the community either on the forum or in-game.
This picture of the moderator history from the old forum sums up my thoughts pretty well: i.imgur.com/cB80fAr.png
However, even after the drastically unbalanced work load, I pushed through because I loved the server and wanted it to succeed, which in a way it did when it hit 40 online earlier this summer. It was an accomplishment for me as it signified that something was going right - all of the work I put in was worth it.
I guess I should make it clear that I did not resign specifically because of the Zakum drama. I have taken a fair share of criticism over the 11 months, and it really doesn't bother me. Although I would have liked to see it handled better, I acknowledge that I should have probably asked for feedback on it beforehand. I did realize that a lot of players were quitting and wanted to see some changes for the better, so I voluntarily stepped down, but that wasn't really the cause of my resignation. I really had planned on leaving even a few days before the Zakum changes. The Zakum drama simply accelerated the time frame. The real gutshot came from the fact that after I put all of the work into the server, there ended up being staff members who took advantage of their position on the staff. I can safely say that I have never abused my GM for anything. I may warp myself a lot but it is all for testing purposes (as you can tell by Flame's 2 amazing levels since November 2013 and my epic clean level 4 Maple Hat that I wore for 10 months). There is a level of trust that should existentially be there and should not be affected. If it's gone, then the spirit of the game is completely ruined. It also leads to accusations of abuse from other clean GMs. This is especially the case at Noble where by complete coincidence, the vast majority of the staff (who applied) all had legits above level 160. While most players will probably think that I am talking about Denny here, it goes deeper than that. While I was devastated about Denny, I still appreciated the fact that he actually provided value to the server through all of the coding contributions he made. I generally won't go into it because it will cause more unnecessary drama, but the staff should know who else I am talking about.
I think I'm done ranting for now (I've typed about 2 hours straight). Thanks for reading, and I hope I cleared up some reasons as to why I resigned. I should make it clear that I enjoyed every moment that I've had while at NobleStory, and I hope that the recent changes push it back in the right direction. I apologize again if I threw some people under the bus. That was not the intention of this thread. Just giving my thoughts and frustrations. I will post probably one final thead (or just a reply to this one) in the coming days/weeks with aforementioned notes to everybody memorable that I've had the privilege of talking to, and my final thoughts. See you then and Happy Nobling.
But anyways to not compete with you on having the longest post ever I'll try and summarize mine abit lol. 
:F15: 
this is the year for them #Yosted
