I've read through every post and for the most part I agree with basically everything that has been said about age, maturity, responsibility, capability, availability... etc.
In regards to this post:
I'm not going to call anyone out, but to me it seems very contradicting when moderators from ovmk come here and say they weren't told what to do. If you weren't told what to do, then why weren't you listening to the community when we were up in arms about the closure of opinionated threads? I confronted several and never got a response back.
The OVMK forums had strict rules for a reason. Like someone mentioned a few posts back, there are laws and regulations regarding minor children online on forums and games. There are restrictions. That is a lot of the reasoning behind the general forum rules, as well as a lot of posts and threads being moderated. Because of the average age of members falling under 18+ bracket, it's understandable that there would be rule violations and complaints.
For the most part, we weren't told what to do. We had to rely on the forum rules for guidance as well as basic common sense and past moderation experience. A lot of the time I actually agreed with the community when they were outraged over the increased amount of moderating going on around the forums. I often left opinionated threads alone because I feel like discussion is a great way for a community to work out problems and come up with solutions all on their own.
The few times that we actually were told what to do was when an Admin (mainly Grace) would specifically post a thread telling us to get rid of it. We were also told to watch out for certain topics and to immediately get rid of those if we happened to see it. Also, if you hadn't already figured out by now, it was Grace's way or the highway.
I agree with vause in that a lot of what's being said is offensive. I can name a few moderators off the top of my head that were amazing. Grizzly, Aly, Aspiration, Piano, Lucy... From the little time I spent working with them, I could tell they had a genuine love for the community and were all around just great, caring people. To go through the checklist, they were:
1. Mature and professional
2. Compassionate and understanding
3. Active
4. Responsible
5. Fair
It's easy to blame frustration and anger you have from bad experiences (in any situation, real life or online) on a person or group of people in positions of authority. But I think another thing that comes along with maturity is the ability to realize and understand that we're all human and we're going to make mistakes. It will never cease to amaze me how wishy-washy people can be. You're so quick to judge someone that everyone else has deemed worthy of judgement, yet so willing to blindly follow and accept truth from someone only because, yet again, everyone else is. Is anyone else going to point out that one of our admins, Kevin, has not proved to be mature himself? At this point, I have nothing against Kevin. I can't make assumptions about his character (I'm sure he's a great person) I'm just pointing out truths. I saw the twitter conversations going on the night the OVMK forums closed and it made me sick to read. Tweets were nasty and unnecessary and to see Kevin (someone I'm supposed to trust and look up to for information and guidance) actively engaging in this kind of activity extremely concerns me. I don't appreciate when OVMK and OVMK's staffs' faults and mistakes are relentlessly pointed out and discussed in a (sometimes) blatantly offensive manor yet nobody is bringing up worries and concerns about this game that could cause possibly major problems in the future. It's hypocritical and contradicting. VMK had a major impact on my childhood and I want nothing more than to be able to experience it again. If that is ever going to happen, the right way, then the mistakes from OVMK that everyone has so graciously pointed out can't be repeated again. To be honest, I'm not sure this new server will last all that long, either. I'm noticing the same mistakes being made and at this point I have little hope of ever truly reliving the magic of VMK again.
