Resignation - Leaving staff as Dev

Been fun for the most part! Although I nearly posted this back in January, I’ve decided a staff role is not for me and I’ll be much happier as an ordinary member of the community. When taking the Dev role, not long after I resigned as Mod, I was led to believe it was part of Upper Management, alongside the Admin team but with a different remit. Since the role was eventually set up, unfortunately it was not what was expected and it has been a challenge to implement ways to improve the server and the lack of communication whenever anything was suggested.

I will say there needs to be a serious rethink about how staff is run, however there is nothing I have to say that hasn’t been said a million time before, except it should be about the players (the customers). I almost finished the inter-gov city motorway but after spending a year on that, some of it has now been undone. Been lovely working alongside you lovely mods. As always you have been a fab bunch and even if you get treated badly by upper staff, know that I was always thankful for stuff you do. Good luck, I hope things improve.

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Following a second post where the same senior member of the upper management made a public statement regarding my actions, I would like to make a clarification. The previous one on discord was unnecessary and I don’t believe a staff member had been treated like that before in front of the community. It took a lot of working through my distrust of that person to continue in staff. As for this second post, this is what I’m claryfing.

World edit has been allowed in gov cities by staff who have access and I had previously been given permission to use it for minor purposes due to the scale of the refurbishment project, including moving only a few builds to greenfort and updating the roads and making space for future development (such as the 203 edits to get the suburbs ready for an updated layout). All of the work had been me manually digging and replacing blocks, except where discussions had taken place. I had made admins aware of this on numerous occasions. The project was ongoing and my more recent work was discussed with various current staff members. In fact it had only been a problem when you wanted to make it a problem and after the greenfort mishap, which was easily resolved and staff were fine about after I apologised. As you know, admins have done much worse accidentally.

As you may be aware most of the admin team do not log into the server regularly and weeks and sometimes months pass between logins. They also do not take part in the community consistently or communicate with each other, so I am putting this down to mostly a miscommunication. The odd member of staff does so this doesn’t apply to all, just generally as a whole.

In the past, gov city mayors and managers have been a mix of staff and ordinary players. Whilst I was a Mod I was given the role of Mayor of HC and made a number of changes that were complimented by the staff, including improving the layout, reviving the front row, and adding some new features.

Upon leaving staff I made it clear that I would be resigning in all gov roles, apart from Mayor and the only other major project I would continue would be the inter gov city highway, which I had been using my own mats and all built manually. Afterwards, the boss had also requested that I continue the highway further round and demolish one of the two bridges near RC (which was on my list to do). I had spent over a year working on this on my own to get this completed. It is sad, this project will not be finished, but most projects on HM are disrupted eventually, due to the changing directions of staff and personal interests.

In January, I had been Dev for some time, having been given the role in August not long after leaving as Mod in July, although for most of this time the role had not been set up due to upper staff inactivity. I received a message from an upper management staff who had been on a hiatus to say I was restrospectively being removed as Mayor as this was now only relevant during my Mod time half a year earlier (this wasn’t communicated when I said I wasn’t resigning from this at the time) and that an Admin would take over the gov city running as the admin team now wanted to redo all gov cities and take away the player focus.

This resulted from that different Admin coming back from a hiatus and asking what is going on with HC and the other Admins who were also on a hiatus didn’t know and started saying to each other, maybe it’s unmanaged. That admin offered to take it over and then when someone saw in-game I was running it, they proceeded to tell me my role no longer existed and had been retrospectively removed.

After speaking with that admin as a result of these events, it was agreed I would continue as city manager (a demoted role) as long as I kept that person updated for any new directions. Unfortunately that admin went on another hiatus, however I have only been working on the same projects from what was discussed recently. I did however take a short break from working on HC to focus on my private cities and to recover from my rude demotion from Mayor, without any thank you whatsoever. So as not to appear corrupt, I recently enforced the apartment rule on skyscrapers in HC in the effort to get people to actually start doing apartments and had to apply this to all owners (including that admin now overseeing HC). I believe much of the problems I had in the last week were a result of that admin being unhappy with this and making a number of things up and exaggerating things recently in staff chat.

My only goal was to revive conserve and continue HC in some form, as the community had voted for CB to become the events city.

As for my dev role, much of what has been posted about this is correct, although when taking the role it was not clear. As I stated, the role is alongside an admin. I didn’t say it was equal to.

I tried to give being a staff member the benefit of the doubt over Xmas when discussions were ignored in upper staff discord and I made a very brief statement above to save face (yours and mine). I’m fed up with the one-sided approach and the lack of communication and the constant coup d’etats so I offered my resignation privately in discord some days ago as well as the day before yesterday on the forums here. I also left upper discord as it became apparent some staff discussions were being kept separate from devs.

I was informed it was a given I would be removed as HC city manager. I have not been demoted/fired from staff, I simply left due to the way the staff were talking about me in their discussions as that meant I have no trust left to give them and wouldn’t want to carry on in staff anyway.

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