AMA Lobby and Counting Wars Manager. AMA

Title.

Will answer anything not too personal. Please ask tough and interesting questions. And to get this over and done with - @Carnotauros, no, I do not like Versions. L

Will only give opinions if you ask a decent question, unless you are @Tjocko.

 

I do not like Versions. L

None. And I would do an all-nighter tonight to get to -1,000 but someone isn't responding to the counting wars thread anymore :V

 

Same thing I'd do when @MoistMayonnaise @TheMafias @Droiid and more resigned shortly after I did. Push for more power, to make up for our sudden shortage of very good staff members.

I'm not on the staff team because I like management, I'm on the staff team because I'm willing to deal with it, I'm willing to improve the management, and I'm willing to improve Brawl despite it's management.

You know what I think of you 6 months ago. A flaming, toxic player who I'm surprised hasn't been permbanned from the forums yet, considering my own experiences with forum punishments. That being said, recently you have shown a lot of improvement and a lot more civility. This hasn't happened enough for me to be sure you've changed, but I am hopeful this behaviour will continue.

Also, good luck with staff on Krymo's server. I hope you are able to help HG's revival more than I am able to.

Never heard of him. Any previous names or alts that I might know of?

This ultimately boils down to the capitalist system that most countries have.

All businesses solely exist to make money. Hell, this is their legal duty, in the US and the UK at least. There is a huge shortage of cyber security skilled people at the moment (hence why I'm trying to get a career in it). Due to how economies work, when there is a shortage in supply compared to demand, the cost goes up. This remains true with people.

People who are experienced with cyber security costs a lot of money. I am currently 18 years old - I do not, and haven't even started, my degree yet. However, if I specialise in the right field as well as cyber security, I could expect £400,000 a year in a stable job in about 10 years. It costs a lot to hire proper cyber security people to defend your company. That being said, that's because I'm going to be specialising in a very advanced area - machine learning and AI applied to cyber security - a person properly qualified in cyber security would set a company back £100,000 in salary alone.

The simple fact of the matter is this - governments aren't strict enough when punishing companies for consequences occurred due to lack of proper cyber security. This means companies would rather not focus on cyber security, and rather deal with the consequences that happen as a result of this. Look at the privacy scandal that Facebook is dealing with at the moment - they are going to be fined $5 billion. They make $16 billion (ish) a year at the moment. This is the equivalent of fining someone who earns $20,000 a year just $5,000, when they comprised the privacy of over 80 million users. That is f*ck all. If justice existed in this world, Facebook would be fined about $50 billion in total (but should be expected to pay it back over a certain amount of time - about $15 billion a year for 3 years, then the final $5 billion after).

So, to summarise - I don't blame large companies for their lack of cyber security, because their sole existence is to make money. As proven by the largest scandal in history regarding privacy and lack of cyber security, companies will lose more money by being cyber security conscience, rather than leaving themselves defenceless and facing the consequences as a result. Until governments start holding companies accountable to their f*ck ups, companies will not, and should not, change. The blame lies entirely in governments. While Mark Zuckerberg is very sh*tty, it is the governments who enable and welcome this sh*tty behaviour.

Mostly how specialist of an area cyber security is. My aspirations are to own my own company, and working in cyber security will not give me the relevant skills to do so. I'm currently speaking/negotiating with HR to move around the company so I can pick up relevant skills, and it's going great so far because they know they can't afford to lose me, but it isn't exactly working in cyber security.

For most people, the only downside in cyber security will be how technologically advanced of a subject it is. You really need to think logically in order to think of your own attacks without relying on pre-existing tools, and most people aren't capable of this. For me, this doesn't tend to be a problem, since I love to think as logically as possible and people in my company that I've worked with have essentially trained me to be as logical as possible.

To be honest, most ban pointless ban appeals result in a skim-read and a deny, which takes all of 30 seconds. When people start their appeal with "My brother hacked", it doesn't take long for me to figure out what conclusion their appeal should see.

The most time-consuming part of appeals is when a complicated IP check is needed for me to resolve it myself. Complicated IP checks take upwards of 15 minutes for me to do, but when I'm trying to trace back what another staff member has seen and trying to figure out their thought process for an IP ban, it can sometimes take over an hour for me to resolve an appeal. This is a process I typically go through at least twice a week.

Personally, I believe in optimistic nihilism. This video can explain it far better than I could, so I won't bother to explain the concept here.

The UK is putting in far more to the EU than it is getting out of it. However, for those who aren't in power and for those who don't directly benefit from the well-being of the UK, having everyone in Europe more well-off will benefit them.

This is probably a controversial opinion (and definitely one I'm willing to debate, as I'm fully aware there may be a flaw in my thought process that causes me to believe in this), I completely wish that all of humanity will come together and just work together. There is barely no difference between me, an American, a Russian, a Chinese, an African, an immigrant, or anyone else that most western governments would try to convince me is my enemy. And if we are all well off, even if it involves reducing my current quality of life, we will all benefit from it, including the elite.

To summarise - the UK is directly losing by being part of the EU, but the general public will, in the long term, benefit by being in such an organisation, and I hope we stay in the organisation and it expands to more and more countries, enabling more and more people to work together with the UK's workforce to allow us to do much awesome things.

As for how the government is dealing with Brexit - it feels like May decided to do everything possible to screw us over. It is clear that she does not have the negotiating skills to allow us to have a Brexit that will directly benefit us in the short term. While orangutans have shown impressive intelligence compared to other species in the animal kingdom, including when compared to crows, dolphins and gorillas, I have doubts that Johnson is capable of managing to find his way to 10 Downing Street safely, without being put in a zoo, or ideally a safari park in a different continent to Europe.

Given my opinion on xGhale and good ol' Boris, but now time for the USA.

The USA is, quite frankly, almost indistinguishable from other worldwide powers and enemies, such as Russia and China. I say almost, because competency can clearly be differentiated - Russia and China are literally dictatorships, whereas Trump could hardly collude with the Russians and obstruct investigations into it without being blatantly called out upon his actions. As far as I am concerned, the USA is as much of a bad guy as Russia and China, but because republicans are mostly compromised of rednecks and people with the intellectual capacity of what I plan to eat for lunch tomorrow (both the many of the supporters and the party itself), they are unable to cause as much harm as the other bad guys are capable of doing.

And, for those reading - I am completely open to political debates, as they improve my critical thinking skills quite a lot, which will be important in my field and what I intend to do with my life. PM me, and try to prove me wrong. :v

 

In such an extreme and extraordinary situation, I would PM every single staff member who resigned asking why they did so. I would then act on this feedback, including if this involved acting against higher-up instructions.

Too easy.

Mostly the old admin team, especially Llamas, but with the 1 strong exception of BBH. I'd also like to see fmb and cheaterkonsti return.

It's clear to me that you lack self-confidence and that you completely underestimate yourself. This is a real shame, because you have a lot of potential in this world and you are capable of doing very great things.

I strongly urge you to ignore the voice in your head which is telling you that you are not good enough. This is the same voice that I experienced, and by ignoring it, I was able to completely change my life. You are an incredible person, and you are capable of achieving incredible things.

Definitely. Minecraft hasn't really ever died - even during it's "low" times, it had 80 million players a month. Most the "MiNeCrAfT iS dYiNg" is from pessimistic players who refuse to do their own research.

As for whether Brawl will benefit from it - I don't think so. At the moment, we're just not releasing any new content updates exciting enough to keep players interested for much length of time. We are seeing increased numbers of new players, but our player retention (both short-term and long-term) is terrible, so we are not going to benefit from it.

We could get 1,000,000 new players tomorrow, and in 6 months, we would be back where we are today.

Wild West and WarZ - mostly because there is still a community waiting to play it, and they only quit because Brawl royally screwed them over. Whether or not they are sustainable in the long term, they would still benefit us greatly if we brought them back, and it would increase our playerbase that would be exposed to new projects and content updates that we should be working on.

As for what I personally want - I originally applied, and am still on the staff team, for the sole reason of reviving the old McPvP gamemodes. Reviving HG, CTF, KitPvP, Sabotage, Main, Elite, Badger, Smash and Maze are my main goals in the long term.

After a very stressful few months, @Lord_Roke has given birth to a baby boy. He has my eyes, and Roke's nose. We are now settling down as a happy family - Roke is currently paternity leave and looks after the baby while I work hard and do several hours of overtime to ensure our new family has a stable income.

 

Very strange band - not the kind that I'd normally listen to.

I don't know enough information about what happened to have an accurate opinion on who is right and who is wrong. That being said, I think Trump is hugely hypocritical to accuse Sweden of "failing our African American community", while his country's law system is rigged against PoC, and no president since I was born has seemed to do anything to try and fix it. Trump should focus on fixing his own country.

 

I still think their music is terrible, but I have a lot of respect for them after hearing about this, especially in a country which literally has concentration camps for LGBT people.

@Colonel_Graff, and quite a few ex-Brawl staff members.

At this momentum, 300+ players again is possible. It completely depends if we play our cards right. We are finally doing advertisement right, but as I've said for the majority of my time as staff - until we fix our player retention, there's no point in advertising. I'd say we'd be doing badly if we're getting less than 300 players by 2020, and good if we're getting more than 300 players by then. It's entirely possible for us to hit 500+ players by 2020 if we finally sort out our player retention and start delivering exciting content updates for players again.

Yeah. I've never really owned a PC because my dad refused to let me buy a computer made by anyone other than Apple, so I was mostly limited to console gaming, which none of my friends did. As a result, the main games I played with IRL friends were mobile games, Fallout Shelter being one of them. I raced a couple of friends to see who could get to 200 dwellers first on survival mode, which was a lot of fun. Used to love playing Bloons Tower Defence and Stickman Golf too.

I thought it had a nice ring to it. I don't really like the username anymore - pretty much everywhere else, I use TheMightyHead now, which is a nickname I have IRL with some friends from high school.

Either Yinscape, Paul or Redslime. It's hard to go into detail without saying stuff that I shouldn't, but I know Putty wouldn't give the server to someone who doesn't have the technical skills or activity to run it, and I'd be surprised if he would give it to an SMod.

WarZ. Due to terrible and preventable mistakes, Brawl has completely and rightfully lost all trust from the WarZ community. To earn this back, we need to show that we're willing to work with them to improve, and the best way to do that is by promoting people from the WarZ community to staff, even if it means bending the requirements a little bit.

You are a very hard-working and dedicated person, and someone that I've looked up to since I started to know you. You're the kind of person who, when passionate about doing something, will do whatever it takes to achieve it, and the attitude that you have is something I'm trying to adopt. You have a bright future, both on Brawl and IRL.

I'm not being mean - it's character building.

Nope, I want one now. :v