Before reading ANY portion of this post, please understand that these first few sentences are critical to fully understanding everything that I am about to state: This is merely my opinion, there is no intention to start any drama here, and this is a heavily critical analysis of the present state of mono. If you find any part of this post mean, disrespectful, or dramatic, PLEASE re-read the entirety of the post before responding or taking administrative action. Every portion of this post has been carefully worded and crafted as to not incite drama or violate community rules, but to provide critique that can help Monolith improve as a whole. If someone in the staff team feels as if this is not the case, please contact me immediately so I can correct it.
Please also take note that you may see more "ugly's" in this post than good. I will give praise where praise is due, but there are some things that need to be fixed both Internally and externally before Monolith is off to better days. Additionally, certain portions of this forum post may address some experiences that I had while on the Monolith Staff Team, but if you are expecting me to leak things, I won't. Here we go!
The Good
Upper Management
Lots of people have been giving upper management lots of hate lately and while I will express some critique later, this is a section for praise. Back when I returned to Monolith about a year or so ago, I felt extremely welcome by upper management. PMX reached out to me personally through my trial period to check in and ask how things were going. Additionally, the majority of upper management has always felt very approachable. I trusted that whenever I reached out to them about anything that they would make an effort to remedy whatever the situation was at hand. Sadly, I don't think other members of the staff team felt this way at all. Contrary to popular belief, I do believe that there is a desire to make things as great as they possibly can be that is shared throughout all of upper management.
The Staff Team
As with any team, there are always a couple of bad apples, which I will discuss later, but a portion of the staff team felt extremely welcoming and acted as if they were part of a team. Lots of staff members have gone above and beyond what was expected of them to try and make mono better. That effort is something that is greatly appreciated by members of the community. To all of the great staff out there, keep it up!
The Game Mode
Monolith truly delivers an experience that is unlike any that I have ever played on Garry's Mod. To all of those that have played an active part into the development of Monolith, thank you for your service. I'll leave it short and simple here because I don't want things to get too long.
The Ugly
Upper Management
Like I said above, there are lots of things that upper management is doing right in my opinion, but there is also massive room for improvement in this department. I'm going to start off with the big one here: transparency.
Up until recently, upper management has made next to no effort in being transparent with things. Why was somebody removed from staff? Why was so and so banned for third party? Why are we doing this? Why did so and so get back on the staff team? I understand that certain things are best left private, but being able to trust in your leaders is incredibly important and if I am being honest, there were quite a few times where I did not feel confident in some of the decisions that were being made.
I am going to give Upper Management some credit here, but also point out what to me, seemed like a simple solution. When the last large ban wave happened (rxsm, fridge, etc.) the whole community was thrown into chaos. Surely half of our active community at the time could not have been involved in cheating/doxing/alting/extreme harrassment. Well, turns out they 100% were. Upon requesting transparency from upper management, the whole situation was immediately explained to both me and other higher staff members along with evidence of the whole situation that occurred. This was an excellent step in the right direction and a few days later I decided to suggest that this information should be released to the whole community, in hopes that it would calm the endless messages of "Why the heck did you just ban them, they did nothing" and DM's from banned players stating that "I didn't do it" , despite there being clear evidence of them doing so. I was told that it would be looked into, but nothing happened after that. I sincerely do think this would have been the best course of action and that it would have helped to reduce the Staff V.S Player mentality, but upper management did not seem to think this way. Whatever their reasons may be for that, I do respect, but I still encourage them to heavily rethink this matter.
Another thing that upper management should improve upon is policing the activity of inactive staff team members. We were always told to monitor the activity of our mentor team very closely, ensure they are responding to help tickets, etc., but the activity requirements for staff are arguably even less than that of mentors with some staff members barely even touching the server or taking tickets and then in extreme cases there are some members who have not touched the server in months. Upper management has constantly told the team that our activity would be reviewed, but I don't think it ever was.
My last point of critique for upper management would have to be policies behind promotions, demotions, resignations, and admittance of members to the staff team. Starting off with promotions, I feel as if Upper Management does not pay enough attention to the members of the staff team who are truly carrying the server on their backs. Members who have taken ludicrous amounts of tickets are left on trial while previous members of the staff team who have rejoined do not do nearly as much (not that they were not doing anything, but that in comparison to the amount of work from other newer members is less) are promoted while the others wait for months. It took me leaving the staff team before someone who has done much more work than I have in the past couple of months to be promoted to the position that they rightfully deserve and then it has taken others being on the brink of resigning before they get promoted. I don't know if it's management not paying enough attention or if it's internal policies on the amount of members of each rank, but whatever it is, it is a serious issue in my opinion.
In regards to demotions, we have a double sided sword. As a staff member, it is incredibly hard to be demoted, which is both a good and bad thing, tiny little misconceptions or genuine mistakes will not get you removed, but at the same time I have also observed people violate staff guidelines multiple times, act very inappropriately, and directly and deliberately disobey their higher up's, only for them to receive a slap in the wrist. This should not be the case. If someone makes genuine mistakes, keep them on the staff team. However, once you begin to move past the second and third chances and onto the fourth and fifth ones, that member should no longer be a member of the team.
Now, looking at resignations, I do feel as if there should be some more streamlined process. About 6 or so months ago, Instead of contacting a member of upper management, I posted a resignation message to the staff team discord. 2 minutes later, I received a message from a former member of upper management who seemed genuinely concerned about me departing and encouraged me to consider it a little bit more. After consideration, I did decide to stay. However, this time, I reached out to a member of upper management stating that I wanted to resign and was basically granted with a "I understand, bye" While I know that I was greatly appreciated, the tone and presentation of that message did not make it seem so. While I do understand that this is a volunteer position on a video game, I think there should be a little bit more of a streamlined process for resignations.
Lastly: Admittance. The process of admitting someone to the staff team is great when it comes to admitting new members, but when re-admitting previous members to the team, some issues do arise. In my example, I was readmitted to the staff team after not touching it for years. Unlike, new members, previous ones do not go back through training. Quite a bit changed since then and it was incredibly difficult to adjust to. Other staff members who were re-admitted also had some trouble getting back up to speed with things. I think it would benefit upper management to require re-training of members who have not been in the staff team for a while.
I also think it would benefit upper management to require previous staff members to go through the same application process that everyone else is required to go through. It only seems fair. There have been a couple of times where previous staff members magically appeared back on the staff team without anyone's input but upper management's. Some of these members were part of large controversy's in the past that were never properly addressed by the member or upper management. Additionally, many of them treated their higher up's in a very disrespectful manner simply with the excuse of: "I was *insert position here* before, do this." This simple change may very well help both those who are returning and the perception of the staff member's among others.
Staff Drama
Outside of Monolith not being a part of the plan for my life right now, Staff Drama was probably the largest and most prominent reason that I left the staff team. As stated at the top of this post, my intentions are to not incite additional drama, so descriptions of said drama will be incredibly vague. For the past few months, the staff team has felt nothing like a team as nearly everyone was out to get one another. What can I do to get this person demoted? Ooo look at this idiot! This member is the sole reason that mono is dying!... I'm going to be transparent and say that I even got caught up in it. However, in hindsight all of it is pathetic. It's a garry's mod server for gosh sakes. To all members of the staff team: It is not that hard to be nice to one another. Lots of you scream that the server is dying, but don't realize that you starting drama is making the situation worse and further contributing to the server's decline. Wake up!
Event Team
Where do I even start... About 4 or so months ago I was contacted in regards to taking over the event team. I agreed and the journey began. I gave what time I had to try and make the best events that I possibly could, even when everything was starting to decline. However, the big issue that I had was that I had next to no help. There were plenty of event team members, but almost no one on the team who wanted to actually do anything. This, in turn, led to me planning and hosting nearly 90% of all of our events entirely by myself. You can very quickly see how large of a toll that this can take on a person.
To further add onto this, out of the few people who did actually help, some of them decided to directly go against the wishes of both me and other staff members, leading me into a very interesting situation. Do I kick them off the team and further contribute to the staff drama that is mentioned above or do I oversee every single one of their actions in events?
Then, even when I was super stressed out and truly trying my best almost all of what I heard from other's was "Crap event", "More TDM", "This sucked". Do you realize how disheartening this can be? To add onto this even more, we would also have scheduled events that have been made known almost a week in advance, with multiple people pledging to attend only for Half Life Synapse (more on that later) to announce a stress test a couple of hours in advance that steals all of the players who were pledging to attend that event.
Please, please, please, do not put the new event team leads through the same stuff that I had to go through, it's only going to make things worse.
Development
I'm going to make this one nice and simple. There is a very clear willingness to want to fix things and make the server better throughout the development team, but they simply do not have the ability or resources to do so. As of right now the only moderately active developers are PMX and GM, both of which are fantastic. However, almost everything they have been done have been incredibly small QOL changes or bug fixes. Where is the content? It has been promised over and over again. Just a few months ago we had a community meeting in which we were promised that 2.1 work would begin soon, but then that turned into let's work on a map change, then another map change, which then got scrapped last minute for a different map change. While southside was the right move for the server, why are we focusing on map changes instead of more features? If it is a time issue (which I completely understand, dev work is not full time) I truly feel that if we spent that time working on developing more content instead of changing maps over and over again we would be in a much better state.
Then to address the other elephant and the room: Monosuite. For those who don't know, Monosuite is basically the administration tools that are used on Monolith. Things break with it constantly, which is to be expected as the whole thing is still under active development. However, what is not expected or acceptable is leaving things like offline logs broken for months, promising to fix extremely important features (warning points) and not fixing them, and responding to half of all bug reports with "Not my department, let me tell the person who isn't in our discord looking for bugs what is going on and hopefully they will fix it." I respect the effort and appreciate it, but replacing fully functioning systems with broken ones and not fixing them make the lives of staff members extremely difficult and has a negative effect on the server as a whole.
Half Life Synapse
I'm going to start this off by admitting that I have a tad bit of bias here. While I really do like Half Life, I wouldn't call myself a junkie or a hardcore fan nor do I find the idea of Half Life RP all that interesting. However, I do very much respect the work that is being done on that project and I am super glad that the developers there have the opportunity to work on something that they truly enjoy. With this being said, what it took to get to that point needs to be spoken about and not ignored like it has been.
My problems start with the poll that followed the event. Asking players of Mono if they would like to see a HL2 Server, despite already having made up your mind on the matter did not seem like the best move, nor did responding to the possible critique with "not going to be an issue" seem like the best move either.
Staffing issues, which were promised to not be an issue, have became an issue. Synapse has pinched a significant amount of Monolith staff members. Development, which was promised to not be an issue, has become an issue. One of Monolith's most prominent developers has seemingly moved exclusively to Synapse. Player base issues, which were promised to not occur, have occurred. Players who were dedicated to coming to events that were announced days/weeks in advance on monolith, decided not to come after a Synapse stress test was announced mere hours before hand. Then, whenever someone attempts to bring any of these issues up, they are silenced because it is enticing drama. Now don't get me wrong, there are some individuals who have tried to start drama with this, but there are also others who, like myself, are bringing this up in a respectful manner and do not get a proper response.
Our Player base
Lastly, the main thing that I would like to say to our player base is: Be nice. Other people, just like you, want to enjoy Monolith. However, when you begin to yell, scream, and act like jerks to one another, Monolith becomes an extremely uninviting environment for everyone that wants to participate in it. Toxicity runs rampant throughout our community and I am pleading for you to consider thinking before you speak.
And that concludes my thoughts. Monolith has been a home to me for the past year or so and I would absolutely hate to see it fade and continue declining. For those of you who are reading this, please consider doing your part to keep the server alive. I wish all of you the best!
-heyitskev
(Any and all edits made up to this point have been to correct minor things and to fix typos)
Please also take note that you may see more "ugly's" in this post than good. I will give praise where praise is due, but there are some things that need to be fixed both Internally and externally before Monolith is off to better days. Additionally, certain portions of this forum post may address some experiences that I had while on the Monolith Staff Team, but if you are expecting me to leak things, I won't. Here we go!
The Good
Upper Management
Lots of people have been giving upper management lots of hate lately and while I will express some critique later, this is a section for praise. Back when I returned to Monolith about a year or so ago, I felt extremely welcome by upper management. PMX reached out to me personally through my trial period to check in and ask how things were going. Additionally, the majority of upper management has always felt very approachable. I trusted that whenever I reached out to them about anything that they would make an effort to remedy whatever the situation was at hand. Sadly, I don't think other members of the staff team felt this way at all. Contrary to popular belief, I do believe that there is a desire to make things as great as they possibly can be that is shared throughout all of upper management.
The Staff Team
As with any team, there are always a couple of bad apples, which I will discuss later, but a portion of the staff team felt extremely welcoming and acted as if they were part of a team. Lots of staff members have gone above and beyond what was expected of them to try and make mono better. That effort is something that is greatly appreciated by members of the community. To all of the great staff out there, keep it up!
The Game Mode
Monolith truly delivers an experience that is unlike any that I have ever played on Garry's Mod. To all of those that have played an active part into the development of Monolith, thank you for your service. I'll leave it short and simple here because I don't want things to get too long.
The Ugly
Upper Management
Like I said above, there are lots of things that upper management is doing right in my opinion, but there is also massive room for improvement in this department. I'm going to start off with the big one here: transparency.
Up until recently, upper management has made next to no effort in being transparent with things. Why was somebody removed from staff? Why was so and so banned for third party? Why are we doing this? Why did so and so get back on the staff team? I understand that certain things are best left private, but being able to trust in your leaders is incredibly important and if I am being honest, there were quite a few times where I did not feel confident in some of the decisions that were being made.
I am going to give Upper Management some credit here, but also point out what to me, seemed like a simple solution. When the last large ban wave happened (rxsm, fridge, etc.) the whole community was thrown into chaos. Surely half of our active community at the time could not have been involved in cheating/doxing/alting/extreme harrassment. Well, turns out they 100% were. Upon requesting transparency from upper management, the whole situation was immediately explained to both me and other higher staff members along with evidence of the whole situation that occurred. This was an excellent step in the right direction and a few days later I decided to suggest that this information should be released to the whole community, in hopes that it would calm the endless messages of "Why the heck did you just ban them, they did nothing" and DM's from banned players stating that "I didn't do it" , despite there being clear evidence of them doing so. I was told that it would be looked into, but nothing happened after that. I sincerely do think this would have been the best course of action and that it would have helped to reduce the Staff V.S Player mentality, but upper management did not seem to think this way. Whatever their reasons may be for that, I do respect, but I still encourage them to heavily rethink this matter.
Another thing that upper management should improve upon is policing the activity of inactive staff team members. We were always told to monitor the activity of our mentor team very closely, ensure they are responding to help tickets, etc., but the activity requirements for staff are arguably even less than that of mentors with some staff members barely even touching the server or taking tickets and then in extreme cases there are some members who have not touched the server in months. Upper management has constantly told the team that our activity would be reviewed, but I don't think it ever was.
My last point of critique for upper management would have to be policies behind promotions, demotions, resignations, and admittance of members to the staff team. Starting off with promotions, I feel as if Upper Management does not pay enough attention to the members of the staff team who are truly carrying the server on their backs. Members who have taken ludicrous amounts of tickets are left on trial while previous members of the staff team who have rejoined do not do nearly as much (not that they were not doing anything, but that in comparison to the amount of work from other newer members is less) are promoted while the others wait for months. It took me leaving the staff team before someone who has done much more work than I have in the past couple of months to be promoted to the position that they rightfully deserve and then it has taken others being on the brink of resigning before they get promoted. I don't know if it's management not paying enough attention or if it's internal policies on the amount of members of each rank, but whatever it is, it is a serious issue in my opinion.
In regards to demotions, we have a double sided sword. As a staff member, it is incredibly hard to be demoted, which is both a good and bad thing, tiny little misconceptions or genuine mistakes will not get you removed, but at the same time I have also observed people violate staff guidelines multiple times, act very inappropriately, and directly and deliberately disobey their higher up's, only for them to receive a slap in the wrist. This should not be the case. If someone makes genuine mistakes, keep them on the staff team. However, once you begin to move past the second and third chances and onto the fourth and fifth ones, that member should no longer be a member of the team.
Now, looking at resignations, I do feel as if there should be some more streamlined process. About 6 or so months ago, Instead of contacting a member of upper management, I posted a resignation message to the staff team discord. 2 minutes later, I received a message from a former member of upper management who seemed genuinely concerned about me departing and encouraged me to consider it a little bit more. After consideration, I did decide to stay. However, this time, I reached out to a member of upper management stating that I wanted to resign and was basically granted with a "I understand, bye" While I know that I was greatly appreciated, the tone and presentation of that message did not make it seem so. While I do understand that this is a volunteer position on a video game, I think there should be a little bit more of a streamlined process for resignations.
Lastly: Admittance. The process of admitting someone to the staff team is great when it comes to admitting new members, but when re-admitting previous members to the team, some issues do arise. In my example, I was readmitted to the staff team after not touching it for years. Unlike, new members, previous ones do not go back through training. Quite a bit changed since then and it was incredibly difficult to adjust to. Other staff members who were re-admitted also had some trouble getting back up to speed with things. I think it would benefit upper management to require re-training of members who have not been in the staff team for a while.
I also think it would benefit upper management to require previous staff members to go through the same application process that everyone else is required to go through. It only seems fair. There have been a couple of times where previous staff members magically appeared back on the staff team without anyone's input but upper management's. Some of these members were part of large controversy's in the past that were never properly addressed by the member or upper management. Additionally, many of them treated their higher up's in a very disrespectful manner simply with the excuse of: "I was *insert position here* before, do this." This simple change may very well help both those who are returning and the perception of the staff member's among others.
Staff Drama
Outside of Monolith not being a part of the plan for my life right now, Staff Drama was probably the largest and most prominent reason that I left the staff team. As stated at the top of this post, my intentions are to not incite additional drama, so descriptions of said drama will be incredibly vague. For the past few months, the staff team has felt nothing like a team as nearly everyone was out to get one another. What can I do to get this person demoted? Ooo look at this idiot! This member is the sole reason that mono is dying!... I'm going to be transparent and say that I even got caught up in it. However, in hindsight all of it is pathetic. It's a garry's mod server for gosh sakes. To all members of the staff team: It is not that hard to be nice to one another. Lots of you scream that the server is dying, but don't realize that you starting drama is making the situation worse and further contributing to the server's decline. Wake up!
Event Team
Where do I even start... About 4 or so months ago I was contacted in regards to taking over the event team. I agreed and the journey began. I gave what time I had to try and make the best events that I possibly could, even when everything was starting to decline. However, the big issue that I had was that I had next to no help. There were plenty of event team members, but almost no one on the team who wanted to actually do anything. This, in turn, led to me planning and hosting nearly 90% of all of our events entirely by myself. You can very quickly see how large of a toll that this can take on a person.
To further add onto this, out of the few people who did actually help, some of them decided to directly go against the wishes of both me and other staff members, leading me into a very interesting situation. Do I kick them off the team and further contribute to the staff drama that is mentioned above or do I oversee every single one of their actions in events?
Then, even when I was super stressed out and truly trying my best almost all of what I heard from other's was "Crap event", "More TDM", "This sucked". Do you realize how disheartening this can be? To add onto this even more, we would also have scheduled events that have been made known almost a week in advance, with multiple people pledging to attend only for Half Life Synapse (more on that later) to announce a stress test a couple of hours in advance that steals all of the players who were pledging to attend that event.
Please, please, please, do not put the new event team leads through the same stuff that I had to go through, it's only going to make things worse.
Development
I'm going to make this one nice and simple. There is a very clear willingness to want to fix things and make the server better throughout the development team, but they simply do not have the ability or resources to do so. As of right now the only moderately active developers are PMX and GM, both of which are fantastic. However, almost everything they have been done have been incredibly small QOL changes or bug fixes. Where is the content? It has been promised over and over again. Just a few months ago we had a community meeting in which we were promised that 2.1 work would begin soon, but then that turned into let's work on a map change, then another map change, which then got scrapped last minute for a different map change. While southside was the right move for the server, why are we focusing on map changes instead of more features? If it is a time issue (which I completely understand, dev work is not full time) I truly feel that if we spent that time working on developing more content instead of changing maps over and over again we would be in a much better state.
Then to address the other elephant and the room: Monosuite. For those who don't know, Monosuite is basically the administration tools that are used on Monolith. Things break with it constantly, which is to be expected as the whole thing is still under active development. However, what is not expected or acceptable is leaving things like offline logs broken for months, promising to fix extremely important features (warning points) and not fixing them, and responding to half of all bug reports with "Not my department, let me tell the person who isn't in our discord looking for bugs what is going on and hopefully they will fix it." I respect the effort and appreciate it, but replacing fully functioning systems with broken ones and not fixing them make the lives of staff members extremely difficult and has a negative effect on the server as a whole.
Half Life Synapse
I'm going to start this off by admitting that I have a tad bit of bias here. While I really do like Half Life, I wouldn't call myself a junkie or a hardcore fan nor do I find the idea of Half Life RP all that interesting. However, I do very much respect the work that is being done on that project and I am super glad that the developers there have the opportunity to work on something that they truly enjoy. With this being said, what it took to get to that point needs to be spoken about and not ignored like it has been.
My problems start with the poll that followed the event. Asking players of Mono if they would like to see a HL2 Server, despite already having made up your mind on the matter did not seem like the best move, nor did responding to the possible critique with "not going to be an issue" seem like the best move either.
Staffing issues, which were promised to not be an issue, have became an issue. Synapse has pinched a significant amount of Monolith staff members. Development, which was promised to not be an issue, has become an issue. One of Monolith's most prominent developers has seemingly moved exclusively to Synapse. Player base issues, which were promised to not occur, have occurred. Players who were dedicated to coming to events that were announced days/weeks in advance on monolith, decided not to come after a Synapse stress test was announced mere hours before hand. Then, whenever someone attempts to bring any of these issues up, they are silenced because it is enticing drama. Now don't get me wrong, there are some individuals who have tried to start drama with this, but there are also others who, like myself, are bringing this up in a respectful manner and do not get a proper response.
Our Player base
Lastly, the main thing that I would like to say to our player base is: Be nice. Other people, just like you, want to enjoy Monolith. However, when you begin to yell, scream, and act like jerks to one another, Monolith becomes an extremely uninviting environment for everyone that wants to participate in it. Toxicity runs rampant throughout our community and I am pleading for you to consider thinking before you speak.
And that concludes my thoughts. Monolith has been a home to me for the past year or so and I would absolutely hate to see it fade and continue declining. For those of you who are reading this, please consider doing your part to keep the server alive. I wish all of you the best!
-heyitskev
(Any and all edits made up to this point have been to correct minor things and to fix typos)
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