Bring back monthly meetings

I can completely understand why these were dropped, Donkie/Bayrock sometimes didn't attend and with the move to discord it is indeed easier to actively discuss topics, there is nothing better than talking and engaging in active discussion. I also feel that these meetings actually encouraged interactions, getting the entire community together to actually speak is absolutely paramount to a community without drama. As an example: The thread I recently made about dawson would've been a lot less "dramatized" if I brought it up at the end of a meeting and I think that my point would have been better understood, as many of you thought I was calling for his immediate demotion. (I understand it can be hard to read textwalls (Like this one))

1) Involvement with the community:

The forums have declined in usage since the move to discord and there has been a substantial distancing of the staff from the active playerbase, not just for me personally but the staff certainly seems a far lot more disengaged and in some ways secretive.This isn't necessarily a criticism, I understand that this may be for a reason with SS and all, but it's harder to snoop on an active meeting than it is to snoop on text posts.

This would also help to bridge the gap between discord and the forums, the forums still remain the front page for anybody who visits the community, but unfortunately much of the activity has shifted to the discord. Seeing announcements in both the new posts section and the frontpage would encourage players to come and engage more. Obviously previously it's not as if new players turned out in record numbers but there were always a few newbies at every meeting, and I think it gave people more confidence that what they had to say was heard instead of it going to a fairly inactive forum.

2) Keep staff doing things the community actually want:

Obviously nobody's perfect, but when I was staff I found that staff meetings were very important, along with other reasons it gave me a gauge of how strongly people felt about some suggestions they had put forward, it's hard to tell by a forum post how critical an issue is, but you can usually tell if half of the chat is complaining about how broken the predator missile is or how understaffed the servers are. Sometimes it can be tempting to work on things you enjoy, but sometimes it's important to talk to the community.

I'll bring up as an example the stricter approach to moderation that the staff team seems to be segwaying into, I've heard "Kick is the new warn". And I'd like for things like that to be actually discussed instead of having to make a potentially toxic thread about it.

3) Encouragement for staff:

Another thing I found about the staff meetings was how rewarding they were, I think that sitting and talking to a community and what the recent changes were, where the community was heading and what people wanted to see was SO much more encouraging that just reading text posts, the environment for these meetings was overwhelmingly positive compared to the forums and it cut the bullshit as there was limited time. I think that the community greatly benefited from directly hearing feedback and being able to ask "What do you think about this recent change?" instead of waiting for things to become so bad that people had to make threads about the minority of large issues when sometimes an issue/change didn't have to be hugely controversial to hear a response.

Thanks if you actually read the whole thing, very impressive, hopefully we can talk about monthly meetings at the next monthly meeting.

 

I like this idea a lot and I do miss these a lot.

If Donkie/Bayrpck can't attend, we can just discuss without them! Like Rick said this is a good way to keep the staff and community closer a long with causing less drama for topics.

These were also really fun. The post gaming session was lit.

 

I've asked for a conference quite a few times, but they felt everything that was discussed could be/already had been discussed on Discord.

Essentially I got the "#theresachannelforthatnow"

 

Everything is covered...yes. But it would be a nice get together for everyone to be aware of all changes made. I would be willing to document and discuss all changes/ideas made every month. I really would like to see these again

 

Me too. Chances are very low due to timezones and everyone seems to be more busy then in the past. Back in the day we had to make time for these, now its simply not worth it to most of the staff. Cant really blame them. Not to mention the meetings are really pointless without at least one dev and neither Bay or Donk can usually make them. Last one we had was like 6 months ago i think.

 

You guys need meetings, It's important to tell your thought to each others, to make the community "better".

 

I tried to have meetings. Only like 2 people actually volunteered. So I gave up.

 

I feel like a lot more staff would be willing to be incharge/help out with arranging and running a meeting.

 

Having meetings not take place wasn't intended really.

It's been as you said, discord has taken over a bit and having them feels unnecessary, everytime it has come up I'm not sure what we'd talk about.

But sure we could try having one again soon.