My Side of the Story (Wall of Text Alert)

Hi,

This post is not to try and cause drama or to target anyone. This is just my side of the story and my summary of what happened ever since I joined staff. As a safety precaution, I want a staff member with powers to this section to close this thread ASAP. I tried to not direct anything towards anyone.

Warning…. This is a Wall of Text.

My experience on vBulletin forums came from another company. The company had about 20 games and each had its own forum with its own staff team; and each language had its own staff and forum as well. So there were about 100 different forums for this one company with 100 different teams. Each forum has no connection to the other and none of the Staff Teams communicated with each other. I started as a Forum Moderator on one of the forums for one specific game. Throughout the 4 years I was part of this company’s game staff. I was promoted 7 times. From regular forum moderator to Super moderator to Board Administrator to Game Administrator to Ticket mod for the support email team to Ticket Admin to Community Team Leader. There were about 10 other Community Team Leaders as well who spoke their own language. But we didn’t talk to each other much. So basically, I was incharge of about 200 – 300 English volunteered Staff members (That includes all Moderators and Admins of every game.) with an overall community of about 200,000 active users across every forum. I quit that staff around November of 2013 and started focusing on GamezNetwork forums. Even though I was staff on this other company, I was still playing Gamez and reading the forums everyday. I just rarely posted.

I joined staff right before New Years last year in 2013. I applied 2 times over the 3 years I was part of the community as a GamezAion player. Once in 2010, I think 1 month after I joined the forums and once in 2011 about a year after. Both of my applications, I bet never been viewed but they were there the entire time.

What got me accepted was my last application that I sent through PM to Lautaro as I was told by a few people in the game that he was the one who looks at Mod applications. So I took a shot and rewrote my application a third time after 2 more years of being part of the game and sent it to him. My application, explained my experience with vBulletin and that I wanted to be part of the forum team. The application was decently created and did not have any info that I personally did not want to see on an application I was reviewing if I was selecting my own staff.

A few days later. I was PMed by Lautaro and was asked for my Skype information. We exchanged our contacts and started talking about my hire process. He explained to me what he needed and I told him what I could do for him. I told him that I know every single mod tool on the vBulletin and as well as many of the Administrative tools. He asked me if I know how to code and I told him that I know bits and pieces of HTML and was pretty well experienced with Python. After a few moments of talking, he said he would hire me and place me in Serious Discussion section only and work up from there and depending on how well I do, it will determine if I become a Super Moderator or not. I was offered the position of Super mod and I did not ask for it.

I was given my mod rights that day and I started working. What I did, was went through every page of that section and moved threads to correct sections and deleted spambot threads and removed all permanent redirects that were accidently applied when other staff members were moving threads and moved all soft deleted threads to the “Old Threads Section”. Overall, the process to go through the 52 pages of threads took about 1 hour for me. Of course, throughout the process, I was asking Lautaro questions about what he wanted and how he wanted it done and I tried to be pinpoint accurate on the tasks.

After I reported to Lautaro that I was finished and I told him I had nothing else to do. He gave me General Discussions in the community forums and told me to do the same thing. And without question, I started going through the 372 pages of threads. This task took me a lot longer since there were a lot more threads.

But in 2 days, I was able to get the job done and I reported to Lautaro. He liked what I was able to do and according to the Moderator Log Plugin that we had on the vBulletin board, I had about 4500 actions done. These actions all were moving and deleting threads. This amount put me on the top 5 staff with most actions done since joined staff and we had a plugin that showed that “leaderboard”. The top of the list of course was Alente with about 13000 actions and DeathAngel (Ari) was 2nd with about 9,000 actions at the time and Guille was 3rd with 5,000.

Lautaro explained to me that he wanted to revive the Forum Moderator staff and reorganize and clean the forums and have a steady working Mod Team. At the time, we had about 3 moderators not including myself and all of them were not really active enough to become a Super moderator and MrKonete was only focused on Spanish section.

He appointed me Super Moderator the 3rd day I was a moderator to help him accomplish the goal he had in mind. Around this time. I was invited to the Staff Chat where all the AMs were at.

As a fresh super moderator, My role at the time was to continue doing what I did as a regular moderator but do it for as many sections as I can and to learn about the other staff members. But when I was a regular moderator, I was on vacation and had plenty of time to do what I did. So continuing my job in other sections took longer since I went back to work.

The first month I was a super moderator, I had to be away from the forums most of the time. At that time, I was going through a major training exercise with my unit and we were in the field and had no service out there with my phone. But I could use the extremely slow wifi that took me 1 hour to connect each time just to check up on the forums.

When I came back from the fields, I was able to log in more often and continue on the forums. At the time, as the new Super moderator, I was trying to fit in and help out as much as I can. For the first 4 years on the server, I was not much of a participator on the forums or was talkative. I was an antisocial person who hated talking to people. But as a super moderator, I knew that I had to connect to the community as much possible, so I started trying to “fit in” by participating in discussions and talking to random people on the forums. I wanted to be funny and make people laugh so I started posting “Waka” things at random times in Hot spam and bumping Trade threads and when to hopefully get a laugh and to make people think I am an easy going person and fun-loving.

Of course. Even though I was trying to fit in, I was still trying to be strict on the rules as well when it came to major sections like all the subsections of GamezAion Forums and Serious Discussions and General Discussions. Every other sections, I tried to be more lenient.

Around March Time, I was looking for a new moderator as one of the old moderators who was on staff retired from staff due to his inability to log in. And I felt like I was doing everything by myself. At this time, I was around 6500 moderator Actions and no one else on Forum or AM staff was making a difference in the Moderator Logs so I asked Lautaro if I can hire someone. With his approval, I was searching for a new moderator. Ironically, when I started looking for a new Moderator, Dementa made an application for Moderator Staff. I knew Dementa for a few years already. He was the only person I actively talked to throughout my life with Gamez and I met him the first month I played the server. So I instantly picked him just because I knew him. This is the first time I have ever recruited someone because I knew them. But I don’t regret it. Dementa never argued. Stayed out of drama. He fit along with everyone and he did his job.

One month I found out that the girl I had feelings for a while ended up with another guy. I was sad and depressed and posted in Serious Discussions about my problems thinking that the community might be able to help me feel better. I got a few honest answers but then this is when my first drama started and people started attacking me saying how my feelings don’t matter and started spamming the thread. I asked nicely for people to stop spamming my thread of pictures of Hentai and then they started trolling me posting saying how I spammed hundreds of times and making a bunch of drama posts about how I am allowed to post spam and they not and how I should infract myself. Even though I tried to explain what I do and did, things got worst and I ended up getting mad and I started to argue. Ultimately, I deleted the thread and left one guy banned for trolling me. (His ban was a system ban due to his infraction adding up and only lasted 3 days.)

The drama continued when people started posting in random sections about me power abusing. My natural instinct from my last job is to delete drama threads to end the discussions and infract for spamming. Ultimately, the drama died down and the forums were able to continue on. This was the month when we had 6 new AMTs. But of course, 3 of them were removed due to multiple reasons. One was the fact that s/he pushed Ari’s buttons too hard and s/he got fired pretty fast and another left to follow him/her. The other three stayed on staff. 2 of which were more active than one.

I have stopped trying to be funny by ending my “Waka” postings mostly since I realized that they were not that funny and I grew up. One day a few users were making fun of a Filipino player’s english and I posted 3 times for them to stop. They ignored me and I ended up deleting the posts and infracting 2 of the members and one of them got banned from the system for having too many infractions. Then one of them opened up a new thread in hot spam insulting me thinking that because it was hotspam, they were allowed to insult people. I gave that user an infraction and that infraction ended up banning him as well. 15 minutes later. My actions were all reversed by another staff member and the users were unbanned. None of the reversed actions were done by a CEO or myself and I found out who did it. I did not like it so I reported to Lautaro who talked to those two staff members.

An hour later, in General Discussions, a few other users tried to spam a thread with Binary and another moderator was trying to clean the thread but they kept spamming the thread. I jumped in and asked them to stop posting in Binary. The response I got after I posted were insults while they were typing in Binary. I ultimately banned one user and deleted all the posts and closed the thread. After that user got banned, they started creating drama threads saying “Free (Username)” and posting insults. Those drama threads were ignored by everyone. In 24 hours, these two users who got banned made multiple new accounts, which I found out using their IP and rebanned them since I do not allow multiple accounts to be used while the main account is banned. Ultimately, I was nice enough to lift the bans of both accounts as I personally hate banning people and I talked to the users on Skype.

July Finally arrived and this is the month that I became a fan of Lindsey Stirling. At the end of the month, I created a thread about String instruments and wanted the opinions of users of how hard it was to play a string instrument with a bow and if anyone owns one. Eventually, this thread targeted by a user who likes to troll me and other members on the forums. The discussion on the thread had sidetracked to Lindsey Stirling and he started being a Grammar Nazi and started to attack me and started to attack my taste for liking Lindsey’s music “too much”. So one infraction given then another and he got banned and the drama continued in Hot Spam section after people started saying I was power abusing.

I decided to create an apology thread after these few events to hopefully calm down the community and bring peace to the Server. I apologized for being too strict and I promised to be more relaxed. I gained some good advice from a couple members. It was all going well. But that user who I banned in my String instrument thread came back to the forum unbanned and started trolling me again. Then eventually, users started attacking each other. So I closed and deleted the thread to end the drama.

I hired Illusions in August. A couple weeks after the “Apology Drama” I needed more help around the forums as I was doing everything by myself. He didn’t have much experience as a mod and I never met him in my life or talked to him but the way he posted on the forums and presented himself showed me that he was more than capable of doing the job.

A couple days after the drama ended in July. Lautaro told me he was going to change the forums to Xenforo. I asked him, what I can do to help. He trained me how to use the admin tool the way he wants. After he trained me, we began our transfer to Xenforo. During the downtime for everyone else. I was helping Lautaro fixing problems he had with errors, forum sections, ETC. After hours of fixing the problems on the forums. Lautaro said he will not give anyone on staff Forum permissions since the Usergroups were not completed for Forum Moderators and AM staff except for me, Himself and Carl. I told both staffs that their powers will not be available and the AM staff started to get mad that I was getting forum powers and they were not. After a couple hours of them complaining. I talked to Lautaro and we extended the maintenance for another day so that we can fix the forum permissions for the rest of staff. We open the new forums with everyone with full forum powers.

The only thing different at this time now was the fact that I had admin permissions at this time. I got the Admin Permissions since I was helping out with the forums. Throughout the first few days, AM staff started complaining that they did not have all the mod permissions they originally had on the old forums. For example, some AM staff members had mod powers in both Aion section and Community section in the old forums. They were not supposed to have Community section at all since that was for only Forum Moderators. They also noticed that they did not have a “spam button” button to get rid of Spam bots. This power was only supposed to be given to super moderators and Admins. After a couple days. DeathAngel found out that I had Admin Permissions on the forums. I was able to instant ban people and use the spam button. At the time, only me, Lautaro and Carl had Admin CP as Lautaro was not finished fixing the Admin CP. DeathAngel made a big fuss in staff chat about how he was on staff longer and I had permissions to Admin CP and he did not. I tried talking to him in a private chat to calm him down but it did not work out. So I talked to Lautaro and asked him on the plans for the Admin CP and whether or not Ari will get the power. After a few minutes of talking, I agreed with him to have my Admin Permissions removed till Ari and Alente get access as well.

After all staff powers were rectified. Lautaro explained to me the roles of All staff members.

AMs on the forums were moderators on the GamezAion Section. SAM were in charge of AMs and also were moderators of GamezAion section. HGM are in charge of all AMs and SAMs for the game and have super moderator powers. Forum Moderators had mod access to only Community sections. And I was in charge of all staff members with mod powers for the forums only.

After a couple weeks, I wanted to do a deep cleaning of the entire forums. I wanted to go through every single section of the forums. This was a huge job. I hired Saruayu in preparation of this task. So at this time, I had Dementa, Illusions and Saruayu and MrKonete on the Spanish section. Mrkonete is a great moderator and he manages Spanish section with no problem and I let him do what he does without my supervision as he doesn’t need it.

I started the mass cleaning by giving each of my moderators a task. I gave each 2 sections. Their job was to clean their section by going through each page and move threads to their correct section and deleting unnecessary threads and close all threads that are 1 month or older. With the help of my mods, we finished cleaning the Community section in about 1 hour. Alone, it would of taken me 6 hours. While they were doing the Community section, I cleaned all the other sections except GamezAion sections. GamezAion section was the biggest section on the forum with about 10000 pages of threads. I needed help. So I went to AM staff since they had mod powers in that section. I asked in Staff chat. “Can a few AMs help me with a few sections of the GamezAion forums?” and the responses I got were disappointing. I was attacked and told to fuck off by multiple staff members when I asked for help. This was one of the first times out of 9 months that I asked for Modding help and I was told to shutup and fuck off.

Ever since I joined staff. I was shunned and attacked and insulted. Not one thing I did or say was not trolled. They even broke a few rules such as creating a new forum account to troll another staff member on the forum. The clever thing is they created new accounts while using a VPN or a IP program to cover their IP. But you know what, I just let it go, treated the new accounts like a normal user and infracted and banned them when they broke the rules multiple times.

Yes. I did unban Starstruck from the forums. This was my action that I took upon myself because as a member on the forums, his account has nothing to do with the game. I know that plenty of players here on this forum has cheated, hacked, or broken plenty of rules and are still using their forum accounts. So I thought this was unfair for him since he did nothing wrong on the forums.

After the staff chat incident. I went to a couple AMs privately and asked them to help me. One helped me without saying why or questioning my method. The other, he had a smart mouth. Saying “I am doing this because I am nice not because you are telling me to do it. “ After a few minutes of talking. He started back talking me. This user was on staff for a lot less time than me and he was speaking to me as if I just joined yesterday.

Here is how it ended:

[9/30/2014 9:43:06 AM] Kyle: Yea. But when it comes to forum mods and all staff with forum mod rights. I'm in charge of that.

[9/30/2014 9:43:26 AM] Kyle: I'm not in charge of you

[9/30/2014 9:43:48 AM] Kyle: But I do have the ability to give you tasks to do with your sections

[9/30/2014 9:44:25 AM] (USERNAME REMOVED): You don't give me shit xD I do it because i'm a nice guy. I could aswell tell you to fuck off like others did

[9/30/2014 9:45:23 AM] (USERNAME REMOVED): and you don't take my powers either. Ari's my boss

[9/30/2014 9:45:26 AM] (USERNAME REMOVED): you're just a coworker

[9/30/2014 9:46:23 AM] Kyle: And in extreme cases that I think you are abusing your powers or not using them or I feel disrespected. I can take the powers away

This was me explaining my role to this staff member. I did not once say I was going to demote him. I told him what I could do and what I will do if a staff member abuses his power or disrespects me.

What this staff member does is tells Ari that I was threatening to demote him from AM staff and twists my words around. Which in turn makes Ari remove all the mods and myself from GamezNetwork Chat.

I reported to Lautaro and Carl everything I said and Carl and Lautaro did not like how I was treated. Lautaro made a note to all staff that when it comes to the forums, I am the most superior when it comes to Staff with Mod powers. That means, I was more superior than Ari on the forums and I had authority to task out AMs with things to do. But also, Those who do not want to be a “Moderator” they can ask to get their mod powers taken away.

Carl responded with a similar response saying that the forums is my responsibility and I had complete control on what goes on the forums where Ari has his duties the game.

With this being said, a few staff members lost their mod powers and business went on as usual. A few weeks went by and I was noticing that a lot of my posts were being removed and a lot of my actions were being reversed again. When I investigated, I found out that a few AM staff members were deleting my posts and reversing my mod actions. This ticked me off. I talked to one of the staff members and they started to insult me in the private chat. He appointed himself to have more authority than me. He replied that since he was on staff longer that he can delete, undelete, and edit my posts whenever he wants. I told him he cannot because not even Ari is allowed to do that. After that argument, he started making Ari delete my posts and reversing my actions. This got me mad so I told Lautaro what the AM staff is doing. Lautaro ends up talking to Ari telling him that he cannot do what he did without my permission or one of the CEOs. Ari ends up backtalking Lautaro and telling Lautaro that Lautaro should start respecting him for being on staff for 3 years and since he was on staff for three years, he can do what he wants on the forums. He ends up insulting Lautaro. This ultimately gets him removed from staff.

For the 10 months I was on staff. I have done over 62,000 mod actions. The second highest is Guille with 21000 actions and 3rd highest is Alente about 13000 actions.

As a super moderator. I was in charge of all staff with Moderator powers. That included AM staff. I have never demanded respect. I have a few times asked people to respect the position, not the person. But that was because they were attacking me as a super mod.

I have mentioned multiple times to the CEOs that alot of the AM staff are immature and unprofessional and are friendzoned. I been asked "why are you staff and you don't even play"? I don't need to play to be a super moderator or a moderator. I do not need to answer questions or solve problems. When I post in GamezAion section, I am posting as a normal user unless I am correcting someone for breaking a rule.

Alot of users or staff members do not understand how much I have protected them since I joined staff. Alot of staff members tried issuing out multiple points to users on the forums. Alot of them were issued out but I reversed them and gave out 1 point instead.

There are times where users on the forums attacked me for things I did not do but I pretended that I did so that the real staff member who did it would not be attacked. For example. There were a few times another staff member deleted a few posts in a thread or a few threads in a section a drama started to stir up. I went into the drama and took the blame. To this day. I bet those 4 Staff members still do not know that I protected them.

I also protected alot of users. There were a couple that were being targeted by staff members because those staff members didn't like that user. So I PMed those users to explain to them what was going on so that they can avoid being banned from the forums or even the game. There are also a few users who I "abused my powers" to mess with their account to hopefully teach them a lesson about trying to get people mad on the forums. I could of easily just banned them for the countless times they posted "fuck you bitch" or "fuck you cunt" but instead, I took the time to talk to them and correct them through PM and since that PM, they have no been issued an infraction.

As a super mod. I was the one who was suppose to take the blame that everyone else did. It was part of my job. Now that I am gone, Everyone is now blaming the CEOs.

All drama that started between me and the community or staff is always when someone insults me or attacks me.

Sorry for the long Wall of Text.

Kyle