I have no knowledge of what the phrase "Et tu, Brute" actually means, but if I'm not mistaken, I am the certain friend that you speak of. I hereby apologise, in front of the whole community for making you feel this way, and I hope that our friendship can survive a storm of this magnitude. - Smegged
Yes, you're the one, smegged. I accept your apology.
"Et tu, Brute?" is a quote from Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare. At the end of Act II, the Romans conspire to kill their leader. A group of them assassinate him with knives. Caesar, that is. According to the play, Brutus was Julius's friend, but he joined in on the plot. Caesar realized he had been ambushed and would not survive. His last line: "You too, Brutus?"
That's probably the second-best-known quote from William Shakespeare's works, behind "To be or not to be" from Hamlet.
I'm still fond of you, smegged. You're young, young enough that you don't yet realize how much more there is to know than what you already know. You understand a lot, but you overestimate the ratio of what you know as compared to what you need to know to be successful.
The problem with aging is that making mistakes leads to more caution, sometimes too much caution. The blithe enthusiam of youth is more prone to making spectacular mistakes, including some where you smack your head afterward and wonder what you were smoking to have made those decisions, but being bold also leaves room for spectacular success. I believe you will find, over time, that this is your biggest challenge: to temper that enthusiasm with more wisdom, without losing your will to take risks. The mistakes of youth come from too much confidence in one's judgement. The mistakes of maturity tend to come from too little of that confidence remaining. Finding the right balance is a lifelong pursuit that only seems to get harder over time, as you have more and more mistakes to look back on and try to avoid repeating.
Most of the time when you step in to more than you realize, it won't be a big deal. Occasionally, however, it will be. That's why it is important to be careful. Don't assume. You don't have to be afraid to go forward, but you do have to understand that you have impact, and that if you make mistakes you can cause harm. Do your homework, and try to think ahead.
You quoted conventional wisdom, cliche, and platitudes in your post. Consider this an opportunity to reevaluate all of those and see if they are as true as you believed.
Sirian if you need any Support just look at how many people had joined the Epics and are happy and eager to play by rules you had worked out. And see how many people are trying to play RBE-games, how many are trying hard to qualify for them.The simple fact that so many people want to play according to your rules is a bigger support for you and your ideas then any wellworded post can give. - Rowain
I agree that's a form of support, and an invaluable one. Customers. Consumers who desire the product, and loyal consumers who have tried the product and liked it, and keep coming back for more. That allows the group to stay in business, but it is not the kind of support I'm talking about here.
There are any number of possible threats to a business. One of them is competition. If there was a competition going on for the players' time and attention, for their "business", then customer loyalty and volume of participatory support would be the issue of the day. There is also location. If the store being leased to me (CivFanatics forums, Realms Beyond, or my warpcore account) were to dry up, then I'd need to move the business to a new location, and in that case customer loyalty would still be crucial, for folks to choose to take their business to the new locale. Might even need someone with available space to take the business in and give it a home.
There's another kind of threat to a business, however. That's the threat of crime: those who would prey on the business, its owners, its employees, its customers, for their own selfish ends.
In a nonprofit venture like this, the only "payoffs" to the owners or operators come from either the satisfaction of serving for its own sake, or from participation in the very service they are providing. For me personally, both are important. I'm interested in serving others, but not, in this case, as a charity. The situation needs to be win-win, or I'm not going to continue with it.
There are some customers who are a royal pain in the @ss. They come in, they make a lot of demands for attention or special treatment, and they are often much more concerned with their own personal satisfaction than in being responsible with their participation. They seem to believe they are owed a paid level of service, when in fact they are paying nothing, and lucky the owners don't throw them out on their @ss. If they make too much trouble, they might get barred, or... they might raise the "costs of doing business" too high, and see the owner close shop rather than put up with them any more.
Then there are bona fide crooks: those who trash the store for no good reason, who throw a temper tantrum; those who may threaten or assault the employees or owners; and those who make false accusations, who sue without cause, just to extort their way to some unearned benefit.
The consumer has the choice of whether or not to do business. Paying money is the primary way to get a quality product. What happens, though, when there is nobody on the face of the planet who is offering the product that I, personally, desire? I see that I can settle for a different product, or do without, or... I can go out and try to create what it is that I want. I make the product and look for supporters. The kind of support you describe is essential, but the resources that are being expended have to come from somewhere. Charities have to raise money, to work to get people to GIVE THEM the resources they need to operate. Businesses have to generate profit. They have to get the customers to provide the resources (money) in sufficient quantity to maintain the operation, plus enough profit for the owners to decide its worth their while. For a nonprofit group taking in no money from donors, no money from advertising sponsors, and no money from the customers, it is quite simply not enough support just to have consumers. Those consumers also need to volunteer some of their resources (time, work, energy, money, support, and more), in sufficient quantity, or they risk doing without, because the venture needs enough collective support from the community to stay in business.
The support is not owed. It's a choice. Do you want the product enough to do what is necessary to keep it in production? The answer may vary depending on how much support is necessary. However, if the customers are, collectively, "too cheap" -- that is, not forthcoming enough with the resources and support -- they risk losing the group and its products.
Like with Civ III diplomacy, there is a hard value to what the AI's will accept in a deal. If the player is willing to pay 794g but not 1g more, while the AI will simply not accept anything less than 805g, the deal is not going to go through. In a certain sense, looking at the margin between what was offered and what needed to be offered to make it work, it's almost irrational. If you'll pay 794g but it's not worth an extra 11g to close the deal, isn't that taking miserliness to an absurd extreme? Well, real life isn't like Civ III. You don't have an omniscient advisor telling you the minimum price the other side is willing to offer. In Civ III, the AI's will put up with you making offer after offer after offer until you can miser them down to the last gold piece, and there are no consequences. In real life diplomacy, doing that is going to make you some enemies. It's going to lose you some deals. It's going to save you pennies often, but occasionally lead you into wars, seeing whole alliances collapse.
The community was too miserly with its support. When I have someone in the store wrecking the shelves, I need help. I need a lot of help in a hurry. If you all leave me to challenge them alone and a fight breaks out, I may get wounded in the process and either be out of action for a while, or limping through unable to do as much as normal, or I may even close the shop. Just as importantly, if there are loud customers throwing a fit, making accusations or demanding special treatment, they might as well be suing. That imposes a "defensive cost" on me, not unlike what it costs to hire a lawyer. I have to spend (waste?) a chunk of time fending off the lawsuits. If the grievance is real, then I have a responsibility to answer to it, but if it is frivolous, then it's going nowhere at all, has no prayer of going anywhere, and is just draining the (limited) discretionary budget. You all may not have realized it, but you have the power to make a difference with these kinds of issues. You could tolerate less of the haggling on the part of the misers among us; you could actively intervene if someone starts trashing the store; you could take time to express support about policies and ideals you see as productive.
And finally, when it comes to pricing, some lines of merchandise are so new, nobody yet knows what the price ought to be. If I say to the customers, "Hey, we haven't figured out the right price to charge on that yet, so you use your own judgement. Decide on a fair price and just leave the money on the counter while I'm back here tending inventory"... If some of the customers make a bad faith choice, clearly leaving too little money on the counter, and clearly KNOWING they are leaving too little, but only taking advantage of the whole group because they will never, ever, ever pay a bloody red cent more than they can get away with not paying... if you all stand around and let it happen, that's taking away from the profitability of the whole group, and putting all of you in danger of losing the business. This is bad for two reasons. 1) It forces the owners into a position where they can no longer trust the customers to behave like decent, responsible people, but instead have to go through and figure out a fair price for every last item in the store, dramatically increasing the overhead costs to manage the business, making it much much MUCH more likely the whole thing will collapse. 2) The resentment that builds in the other customers who did pay a fair price, and now see they could have gotten away with paying less. This tends to encourage more cheapskating, which is even worse for the business than the added overhead, because it can spiral out of control, feeding on itself until there's nothing left.
In an ideal world, some altruistic soul or group of souls would volunteer to do all the work, expecting nothing in return, putting up with all the hassles, paying out of pocket for all expenses, including those incurred by the crooks, and you could all just play along happy without any need to take responsibility for any of it. Just show up, be a consumer, play, and be happy.
In the real world, it costs to run a group. I can bear much of the costs, but I WILL NOT cut corners. The whole thing has to live up to my standards or I won't continue it. And not one of you here has the right to tell me I should settle for being unhappy with the results but still continue to do the work anyway, because I owe you something. The only thing I owe you is honesty.
Smegged likens my departure from RBE to the closing of my Diablo II page. It's a false analogy. With Diablo II, I took issue with the game company and their policy, and so as to withdraw all my support from them, I closed my website. Some who liked my site persuaded me that there was a better way: that I could protest what I wanted to protest without "punishing all my fans" in the process.
This is different. My grievance here is not with the game maker, it is with the community. There are problems. These problems are not unsolvable, but my way of solving them relies on trust. I need to be able to trust that I'll get enough support when I've got to have it to keep going, and I need all of you to have enough trust in my judgement not to require me to spell out, debate, and haggle over every single decision that has to be made. Each side needs to give enough to the process to make it work. I know you need to understand a decision, what goes into it, what the pros and cons are, to be able to support it. I've offered explanation for every decision that has been questioned. I've been willing to debate any topic at any time. I've listened to criticisms and suggestions, acted on many and been willing to explain why in the cases where I've rejected them. Ideally, there would be unending amounts of time I could devote to removing all ambiguity, addressing every concern, explaining the reasoning behind every policy decision with the patience of Job, refraining from exageration or personal remarks, and rehashing solutions until perfect ones are achieved with all concerns addressed, but of course I can't meet this standard. How much are you folks expecting from me anyway?
I hate to see the whole thing crash, so sometimes I dip into reserves that, frankly, I should not be spending on this. When I choose to do that, so as not to let the standards slip below my tolerance level, we hit this situation. I run in the red for a while, hoping to turn the thing around but coming under more and more pressure to stop spending my energies here, because they're being wasted. Walking away becomes my preferred choice. It's better than watching my work ruined, and it's better than giving too much to this just to keep it afloat. Walking away means abandoning a serious investment, but sometimes you have to know when to cut your losses.
I'm not angry at any one of you for not helping more. You weren't obliged to. I -am- angry at some of you for imposing costs that could have been avoided. Trust is fragile. Sometimes it can be repaired to a functional state (though never restored to 100%) with a lot of work. Sometimes not.
Those of you asking for another chance, for me to come back and trust the group again, are, at the moment, asking for too much. I am not willing to risk it. Maybe down the line, maybe not. If MOO3 is worthy enough, I might try some SG's with it, with some of you (where I'll have a higher enthusiasm factor going, thus have more to put into it) and if those go well, that might be a way to rebuild what has been broken here. In the mean time, I plan to stay away entirely -- not read the games, not comment, and certainly not play. Good luck with the DSG's.
- Sirian
I'm not sure what you want to see in terms of public support, but that's the best I can do. Looks like it's been enough for us to mostly reconcile, and enough for you to trust me with the captaincy of RBE4. I apologize for the damage our arguments may have done to the community (and it may have served as an example for Arathorn's arguing against you), but it was an argument I felt needed to be made at the time.
and proved you couldn't be trusted with that kind of responsibility. 
You blockhead.
)
I knew by then how much burden the rules lawyering put on you, so I tried to set it up as simply as I could - just "here's the loophole, say no" - and you still said it gave you a headache.
