I've decided to leave WGZ

Retirement
In life, the only certainty is death. The end of a good thing. I think what was going on at WGZ was a very good thing in principal and for the most part in practice. Though I feel that one of the people solely responsible for the welfare of the site, Woody, has strayed so far from these good and wholesome principals that there is no way I can tolerate it or stand by idle and do nothing about it.

I wish his actions and words were so that simply talking about them and trying to work out a resolution was possible, but sadly, it is not. What was done was done. What was said was said. There is no taking it back.

And so because of that, I’ve been thinking about it a lot these last couple of days, and I’ve finally come to the decision that it’s best for me to move on and leave WGZ.

The reasons are numerous and I want to emphasize that each one alone is not a sole reason for my decision; it’s the collective of them all that did it for me.

A Brief History Lesson
I joined WGZ in early 2005 because I was simply fed up with how bad and deteriorated the shape of the Promisance community had become during my years of absence. The site was horrible. The game UI didn’t change an inch since 2001. There were bugs everywhere. There were no more than 70 players. It was just crappy, to put it simply.

Being someone with a web development background; having 2 years of experience with developing Promisance code; being the community manager for Promisance when it was at its best; and having the desire and vision to make it a once again great community, I gladly offered my services to Woody.

Terms of Service
The deal we agreed to then was simply we will be partners in this venture, and that if by some fluke we got extremely big or acquired, we would split any and all profit down the middle 50/50. One of the reasons for my retirement relate to this. Not only did he denounce my status as an equal partner, but then took action and used the “I’m the sole owner” card as some sort of justification for whatever he wanted.

That is, without a doubt, the biggest load of crap. It clearly contradicts our agreement, and though we may technically be equal partners in this venture due to our agreement, I have by far done the most actual work in the game, with the site (releasing 2 versions of MyWGZ), with regards to rule enforcement and by producing the official guide to the game (TPL). And to take it a step further, I’m paying for all expenses related to the site, while he pockets the pretty much all of ad revenue. This has been the case for many months now.

Woody disputes this “equal ownership” concept, but logic dictates if one has a 50% stake in equity and a 50% stake in profit, one has 50% ownership. The reason for this dispute has nothing to do with money, since we operated at a loss. It has everything to do with justification for his dictator-style decisions and attitude and justification for not respecting decisions members of the team make. And it also boils down to feeling as though he’s above the law being a dictator, and so can run multies, spy on enemies, and boost his empire stats as he did without punishment by anyone.

Finances
If it was not for my efforts in generating more interest in ad clicking and producing the MyWGZ 2.0 site and the Pro service level, we would be well below breaking even financially these last few months. I’d be paying expenses monthly and what little income we’d generate would be pocketed by Woody.

Luckily thanks to those things, and a code innovation of mine that allows people to get no ads (and then later, smaller ads) for clicking, we were able to generate in excess of $650 during 2006; and an impressive $477 in just the last 4 months of the year. I say impressive only because we did it with less than 100 actually active people playing of the nearly 3,000 people who’ve registered accounts. So that averages out to $6.50 per person in revenue for the year.

Most sites would kill for that sort of an average from their users.

I’m apparently not a “people person”
I’ve been told time and time again that my in-your-face style, my very blunt communication, and strict rule enforcement was not something that’s good. I’ve always disagreed with this and I remain to do so. At times, I do admit, I did things I probably shouldn’t have and I said things I shouldn’t have said, and to those people that were affected and/or offended, I apologize.

In most cases, I’ve where a serious dispute arose involving my administration of WGZ, I later talked it over with the party and we were able to get over it and became friends.

In any and all cases, my actions were not based around a “hate” that I had for someone, nor a bias or a vendetta. The rules are written fairly straight forward. By playing everyone agreed to play by them. And where there was some gray area or a need for administrative judgment, I feel I did my best to ensure integrity in the community by banning & deleting those that did not play by the rules, or did things that I found in violation of the rules according to my discretion.

Simply put, my style of administration for “repeat offenders” was much like most criminal court systems in real life deal with such cases. The first time someone screws up, it’s not a severe punishment. The second time, it gets worse and it carries on from there until ultimately the need for long-term bans is required.

So with that said, because someone is constantly the subject of rule enforcement, it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with the rule enforcement authority. It means something is obviously wrong with the person which causes them to get into trouble more often than most.

The banning of Apollo & Nitemare
Before the December round started, Nitemare was placed on the ban list. Shortly into the December round, Apollo was also placed on this list. As an administration team, we discussed the bans in one way or another, and came to the understanding that they would both be gone at least until January 1st.

To my surprise, both of them were playing inside Woody’s clan, TD, while restricted from game play and even after we had talked about them being banned. So I did what was right, and I removed their empires.

Later that day, Woody came to me on MSN rather mad that I did what I did and re-instated their empires, and in doing so proclaiming their bans are over.

That, as you can imagine, was rather frustrating and infuriating because the reason he did that was rather obvious. He simply doesn’t want his friends & clan mates banned no matter what they do. An obvious bias. And it’s fair to say that he was manipulated into that action by them because I could tell from my conversations with both them and Woody, that a lot of it had to do with the pressure on him to do whatever he wants because originally it was only his game and his say. You could also tell by Nitemare’s confidence when he says “you do know Woody’s going to unban me, right?”

The concept of the council
Because of this obvious disagreement we had in regards to bans, I suggested we should form a council that will handle bans by vote. Originally it was agreed that it would include the 2 site administrators, the 2 community administrators, and the forum moderation team. It would also include 3-4 long-term/respectable players so we had a more diverse opinion. This was announced and people started to offer their names into the hat so the existing council members can vote on who should join.

Where it gets ugly is here.

When the re-instatement of Apollo/Nitemare occurred, Woody took it upon himself to name 6 people to be members of this council and quickly announced his new list before anyone even knew about the decision. This went against what we talked about and it totally shows a lack of respect for the rest of the team.

It’s a lack of respect mainly because when asked why he did this and went against our agreement, he stated that he did not want to Adam (Thanatos) and myself to have a vote, because we’d outnumber him 2-1. This made absolutely no sense, because the agreement was not a 3 person council, it also included SeXy and the moderators. He then later disclosed that we are bias, whereas he is seen as some sort of a messiah and everyone will instantly like the choices. Uh, whatever.

The only problem was that these choices were all friends of his, Apollo, & Nitemare and some of which openly support Apollo no matter how blatant his actions violated the rules and the spirit of the community. So this was obviously just another way to keep them un-banned no matter what they did and keep me, the main rule enforcement for WGZ powerless to suspend rule violators.

Revelations of questionable conduct
If all that occurred wasn’t enough to show something wasn’t quite right with him & his actions, what I discovered later on should be convincing enough. And note that he did admit to cheating and violating the rules to Adam and me in private discussions.

After looking at his activity logs (see them here) you can clearly see his “brother” has been playing from his home along with him. What gives it away is just how often they seem to play together and the fact that not only does his brother play from home with him, but he also happens to play from Woody’s workplace. This is obvious multi-running and cheating, as he admits.

Digging deeper, I found an admin page usage notification e-mail that said an empire in TNA was looked at, but it wasn’t updated. I noted the IP and matched it by using the logs to Woody’s IP. Woody’s clan and his friends were at war with this empire. After this admin abuse occurred, that empire was attacked.

And going even further, logs show that altering the database to boost his empire and the empire of his multi occurred. So these are yet another example of him doing whatever it takes to make the game more enjoyable for himself by any means necessary.

Cause and effect. Au revoir.
For every action, there is a reaction. For every decision, there is a consequence. And so it is clear by his desired course of actions that he willingly set in motion the inevitable destruction of the community.

That’s simply sad because I’ve come to love the game of Promisance. And what the game does not need is a corrupt administrator who’d rather pay for a World of Warcraft subscription rather than to pay for the fees required to keep the game running. The game does not need an administrator who’d rather ignore the rules and violate them himself, than to uphold them and rightfully punish those who violate them. The game does not need an administrator who’d let his emotions and feelings inside the game impact his decisions as a community leader and one with power. And the game most certainly does not need an administrator who isn’t willing to do everything in his power to see to it that the community grows, isn’t willing to maintain integrity at every level, and isn’t willing to make sacrifices for the sake of players.

Now I did everything I could to strive for those good things, but working with someone who upholds absolutely none of those is hard, and what’s worse is when things are taken so far that they force me to take a stand to stand up in what I believe in and make the hard decision to resign. Unfortunately for the WGZ community, this is a case and simply put I have no other choice.

You made the bed, now sleep in it
With my departure, I’m not going to allow Woody to continue to use my community management system. This was a tough call, but of the nature of this resignation, I feel it’s not wise that I allow him to benefit financially from my work while he continues to slowly kill the Promisance community with his actions, attitude, and behavior.

If my work is used, made available in any way, or is the basis for a clone without my consent, I will be taking legal action & I will see to it that the host shuts down the site, as it violates the DMCA and other international copyright law. Not only that, but if my work is used without my consent, as I have mentioned to Woody, the game source code will be made publicly available which would essentially ruin the community’s main attraction point, due to clones popping up all over. And that would, inevitably, kill the community.

And so with that said, I’ve reverted the site back to how it was before I got involved in WGZ administration. I didn’t want it to come to this, but sadly, this was Woody’s will.

And on that note, I’ll end this epic rant.

So until next blog post, ciao.

-m3mn0n
// aka Sami