Shutdown please

Reminder to be respectful in discussions. Giving constructive criticism on staff and the server is absolutely fine and encouraged, but being disrespectful and posting with no intent to be constructive is against the rules.

 

At the moment, our average playercounts are rising. We have grown our dev team and our SMod team, and there are major changes in management (in terms of initiatives shown) currently underway. Even at Brawl's absolute lowest, we are far larger than the average server, despite being small relative to Hypixel, Mineplex, ourselves at our peak, or other servers that we are typically compared to.

As for getting a real job - I am currently a cyber software engineer at the 6th largest defence company in the world, but I appreciate your advice.

 

Here's a pretty comprehensive thread about my thoughts on advertising: https://www.brawl.com/threads/66988/. It's quite an old thread, but is still relevant to today. We are getting over 10,000 players a month, yet none of them are staying for long enough to become regulars. Ideally we should be looking for at least 1% of new players to play regularly for over a month, and we are far below that at the moment.

In order to substantially increase our playercounts, we would need hundreds of thousands of new players to join all at once - something which is completely unobtainable. It's clear why - lack of new and old player retention. The fix isn't easy, but it's doable (and I'm working on a thread, which will be public, detailing everything I think we should do).

That being said, we are currently looking for YouTubers. Even though I don't think advertisement is what Brawl needs, and paying YouTubers is a poor way of advertising compared to other methods we could use, I've still suggested a few YouTubers we could pay (raging from about 20k to 300k subs).

Infinite unbans could be cool - bet if we sold permban unbans for $150, we'd get about a dozen people pay for them. Just make sure that people who broke the rules to extreme lengths (e.g Removers, Abtruse, Feeliq or Triple) aren't able to get them.

 

Out of the ~20,000 bans we've made since the ban wipe, there are 6 people who we have decided will not be unbanned (EDIT: as far as I am aware - there may be more, but certainly not many). This is when people do very extreme and illegal things to other members in the community - at best, threatening to murder someone with the intent to "drive them to suicide", and at worst: https://www.brawl.com/history/MrJayElectro.

Everyone else is able to get unbanned if they demonstrate they are capable of no longer breaking the rules. Our most extreme rule violation is the permban, and most of the time, we will unban players if they go 6 months without breaking the rules. This seems harsh, but to be permbanned you need to have 3 unappealed bans across accounts, and the vast majority of permbanned players who were unbanned pre-emptively during the ban wipe went on to get themselves permbanned again.

In other words - I agree, people can change. Considering I used to be permanently banned from the forums, it's hard for me not to see this. The vast majority of banned players have an opportunity to get unbanned. Those who don't have done very extreme and illegal things, and usually the only people who want these players back are those who are friends with them, and are often willing to deny or downplay the horrible things they have done.

 

Where did I say that I think Removers should be banned forever?

 

I do not agree with every decision we make. "I was willing to unban him" and "changed my opinion on it" is not reflective of the decisions that the staff team made.

I said these people should not be able to get unbanned whenever they want to simply by giving us money. The only people on that list who I am certain should remain banned forever is Abtruse and Feeliq.

I have already given you my response to this screenshot - and I know you know what my response is, because you screenshotted it 30 minutes ago:

I am aware that you are friends with Removers and that you want him unbanned, but it is difficult to work with you when you are intentionally taking screenshots out of context in an attempt to make me look bad.

My current opinion on Removers' ban is that he should not be considered for an unban for a very long time - too long a time to put a specific time-frame on it, or even to be certain that any length of time will be enough. He went to very extreme lengths to attempt to harm a member of the community - lengths extreme enough that I was willing to get the police involved. Since then, he has manipulated dozens of people into believing his alt was not him. He has a very long and messy history of hacking and constantly being one of the most toxic and aggressive members of the community, even while staff. He's made his bed - he shouldn't be so surprised when we tell him to sleep in it.

If you want to argue for his unban, please respond to the paragraph above, rather than intentionally taking things I have said out of context. However, do so in another thread or PMs, as this is beginning to get too off-topic from the original post.