What's happening in here?

**psychoangel691** · 08-21-2015, 04:40 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by HeZe

See, now I'm told that TC_Halogen was never an admin. Well, as far as I know, he was the one who was handling things and making things run. I don't care what the actual rank was, there always needs to be some sort of coordinator.

As long as there isn't anyone to coordinate the site, nothing good is going to happen. Synth is not going to commit in this dilemma, nor does Tass, so who will?

He was just game management, he dealt with batches and such. The other things like dev, events, etc are handled by different groups.

Edit: oh yeah he did do events management for a little when I passed it off to him.

**AragakiAyase** · 08-21-2015, 05:27 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by Zageron

I've been trying to write a good response to this for a while, but I can't write anything that wouldn't make at least one person angry. Instead, I'll ask a question.

What would you do, given the ability to control the full direction of FFR?

I would remove all current staff titles except from the head of each group and open applications for each group.

**psychoangel691** · 08-21-2015, 05:31 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by AragakiAyase

I would remove all current staff titles except from the head of each group and open applications for each group.

That would be really unfair to the people who have been active on staff.

Personally I just think there needs to be someone that is kinda like checking in with all the groups once in a while and getting an update on what's going on to make sure that things are getting done. The weekly what's happening posts were cool for a bit but then there were times I couldn't get anyone to let me know what was going on so I stopped doing them.

I think there just needs to be a lot more transparency about what's going on and if there's areas or people who aren't working out then maybe new people need to replace some people in those areas.

There's always been a huge lack of communication between the various areas of staff and from staff down to the users, which keeps sparking these threads.

**AragakiAyase** · 08-21-2015, 05:36 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by psychoangel691

That would be really unfair to the people who have been active on staff.

Let me elaborate a bit on why I think it's a good idea. If this process happens, you let everyone know that it's not as a punishment or anything like that but as a way to gauge current interest levels. Now when people apply, you have a few possible ways that staff may react (off the top of my head):

1. Staff who is demoted is passionate about their position, reapplies, gets reaccepted. No change there.

2. Staff who is demoted is inactive/doesn't care much. They either don't reapply at all (because inactive/too much apathy) or they reapply half-heartedly. Maybe they get accepted, maybe rejected, who knows.

And this also opens the door to other people who have a very strong interest in helping out with FFR management who may have applied in the past and been rejected, or have had a strong interest but haven't had a chance because staff applications are rarely open.

**psychoangel691** · 08-21-2015, 05:39 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by AragakiAyase

Let me elaborate a bit on why I think it's a good idea. If this process happens, you let everyone know that it's not as a punishment or anything like that but as a way to gauge current interest levels. Now when people apply, you have a few possible ways that staff may react (off the top of my head):

1. Staff who is demoted is passionate about their position, reapplies, gets reaccepted. No change there.

2. Staff who is demoted is inactive/doesn't care much. They either don't reapply at all (because inactive/too much apathy) or they reapply half-heartedly. Maybe they get accepted, maybe rejected, who knows.

And this also opens the door to other people who have a very strong interest in helping out with FFR management who may have applied in the past and been rejected, or have had a strong interest but haven't had a chance because staff applications are rarely open.

Okay but I don't want to put my event staff through having to re-apply, they don't deserve that. I've removed people as they've become inactive and added in new people as needed.

Each manager for each group should be doing that and holding applications as needed, not just remove everyone who's been working with the site for however long.

**AragakiAyase** · 08-21-2015, 05:42 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by psychoangel691

Okay but I don't want to put my event staff through having to re-apply, they don't deserve that. I've removed people as they've become inactive and added in new people as needed.

Each manager for each group should be doing that and holding applications as needed, not just remove everyone who's been working with the site for however long.

Ok, then have the most active members keep their titles as well, at the discretion of each group manager. Remove everyone else.

I don't know how things have been going because I only recently came to the site but from what I gather there are a lot of inactive people and lack of transparency. Both need to be fixed but I think the inactive people problem has a more direct solution.

**psychoangel691** · 08-21-2015, 05:44 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

I and many others have been down the road of pushing for inactives to be removed, and actually a lot finally had been. I don't know about the groups currently because I've just been staying within the events management lately, but I mean the new judges were just brought on so I doubt there's much inactivity there. I know my events team and what goes on there. Idk the dev and mod side of things, that would be for Zag to answer

**justin_ator** · 08-21-2015, 05:49 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by Zageron

I've been trying to write a good response to this for a while, but I can't write anything that wouldn't make at least one person angry. Instead, I'll ask a question.

What would you do, given the ability to control the full direction of FFR?

Adam, you're a dope dude but I'm not a fan of this post and here's why - if you're not going to flame someone then step on some toes. The site administration has faults. Parts of the userbase are definitely salty as well, and that is a pretty big fault in itself. But the reality is that communication will not roll out smoothly from the question you posed. A civil conversation (no matter how many toes are stepped on) can be far more productive. Is there change being worked on? Pass some updates through the change log at least! Are there not because "x" is lazy? Call them out on it - if they're serious about being a helpful part of FFR staff, they'll understand where you're coming from as long as it isn't rude. Do you take offense to AJ's accusations about staff being a shit-show? That's fair too! Express that. Staff commentary does not need to necessarily be representative of the entirety of the staff's thoughts on the matter, nor are we expecting any huge executive decisions to be made on a whim in this thread. The ball may be rolling but nobody sees that currently. If it's not, I don't feel that it's a bad thing for that to be recognized, especially by staff. It just needs to be addressed as necessary.

I'll humor you with your question though. I don't think I would want to be in charge of the site or its direction as a whole anyway, but if I were I think a big part of it would be having some accountability by staff to either have goals that they are pursuing, or projects to be working on. Have occasional meetings where people brainstorm things, and if nothing comes up that's fine. But stick with it, because if nothing comes up for changes or additions, or ways to keep the community involved you have a whole different problem. I actually have a very similar situation with this being an issue in the service fraternity I'm a part of at my campus. We're a small group of people to begin with - without highly encouraging people to be a part of things and head projects, we see very little happen. Our executive committee for the past few semesters was not very transparent and things weren't taking place often. We had VERY low member commitment to activities that were going on. Once we swapped out that committee and had people that were willing to hold each other accountable to the goals they had set and the activities we were trying to participate it, that made a world of difference. Do we still struggle to stay active on campus? Yes. Do we still struggle to get involvement? Yes. But it's improving drastically because we're working to make it what we want it to be.

I don't know if that made as much sense to you all as it does in my head, but enjoy the read.

**Funnygurl555** · 08-21-2015, 05:51 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by One Winged Angel

The difficulty spectrum is going to be expanding from 1-120. I've been working on exactly how the current difficulties will be restructured but the goal is to have significantly more files in the old '13' difficulty level (FSO, currently 93+ in game...for reference: RATO will probably be sitting around 110-113 on this new scale). I believe a sort of mental restructuring where FFR is taken from a game solely focusing on AAAs and expanding the spectrum to include more files of a much higher level will increase activity across all divisions (we all know that even D1 players will mash through DP/RATO from time to time just due to the sheer absurdity in difficulty, and they still find it fun).

yyyyeeeeeesssssssss

**TC_Halogen** · 08-21-2015, 05:52 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by Zageron

I've been trying to write a good response to this for a while, but I can't write anything that wouldn't make at least one person angry. Instead, I'll ask a question.

What would you do, given the ability to control the full direction of FFR?

first off, don't ask that question and give people these ridiculous ideas about what to do when that's not the issue right now. Resolve the same issue that has been brought up every single time these threads have come up by concerned users: offer some transparency. Stop hiding behind your proverbial closed doors and actually talk to the community.

this question looks like a "oh how about you put yourselves in our shoes for a moment and think about things" -- no. Come up with a solution as an administrative team on your own and then confer with users and see where things go. Don't get users involved in this shit until YOU have a plan.

EDIT: and if you're unable to come up with a plan, find someone else who can.

**xAlphaWolf** · 08-21-2015, 05:59 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by TC_Halogen

first off, don't ask that question and give people these ridiculous ideas about what to do when that's not the issue right now. Resolve the same issue that has been brought up every single time these threads have come up by concerned users: offer some transparency. Stop hiding behind your proverbial closed doors and actually talk to the community.

this question looks like a "oh how about you put yourselves in our shoes for a moment and think about things" -- no. Come up with a solution as an administrative team on your own and then confer with users and see where things go. Don't get users involved in this shit until YOU have a plan.

I agree!

**MinaciousGrace** · 08-21-2015, 06:06 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

i just realized the fact that AJ has moved to the osu community indirectly indicates that he thinks the osumania dev team is more competent than ffr's

damnnnnnnnnnnnn

**DossarLX ODI** · 08-21-2015, 06:13 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

I can't speak on behalf of the dev team but I can provide insight to restructuring that's taking place with how the batch is being handled. Recently some of you may have seen the post about adopting a Sprint-Style structure similar to what would be used on JIRA, and I'll explain how that fits in to the judging process after listing out the many inefficiencies of the traditional approach to the batch system. This post is informational and presents the situation the way it is, no sugar-coating or sensationalism -- the community should have a fair treatment to understand what's going on.

Traditional approach: Judges didn't get assigned tasks. They voluntarily said they would judge a set, but too often what happens is that weeks after stating this they don't give a response and then the original deadline would come up.

Better approach: To analyze the current practical judge team, find the most active judges and ask them for their availability. Assign tasks to the Judge Team. Organize what's in To Do, In Progress, and Done. Judges also need to log their hours worked on their set. This way the Judgment Team can see if the Judge is taking longer than expected on a set, that judge can do 50% and another judge can do 50% to split up the work of the task accordingly instead of having the task hang for a long time with no communication.

Essentially I can make a similar connection to the dev team. From what I've seen, they have no progress monitoring process and don't assign tasks clearly. With this new idea of 2-week sprints with a spreadsheet showing what's To Do, In Progress, and Done, the dev team can see who was assigned a certain development task, how long the person has spent on it and if that person needs help, and redefine tasks if a situation changes.

Silvuh has done a great job keeping track of which files have been submitted to which batch. However, right now there is a huge backlog that's just sitting in the batch email and to make OWA's idea come into life would be unrealistic. Right now I'm working on finding potential hard files to be in a special batch that should be open in the next week to contribute to this mentality shift of harder files and a bigger difficulty spectrum.

Here's currently what is on To Do, In Progress, and Done in the spoiler.

Take a minute to think about the above tasks. It's clear who is assigned what (and which tasks are unassigned). If dev also took this approach, similar to JIRA, they would know how much time has been spent on a certain task (I didn't include that here but the spreadsheet does list logged time) and be able to monitor progress appropriately.

**gameboy42690** · 08-21-2015, 06:16 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by _Zenith_

Batch I cannot say anything about because it's one thing I definitely do not know so someone can answer that accordingly, but the additions of judges should help with the process even if it's just a slight shift in help.

At first we actually made good progress on the batch when the new judges (myself, Gradiant, DarkZtar and Lurker) were added to the team. But around late July to early August things just fell apart. I don't think there's been any actual progress in two weeks.

**TC_Halogen** · 08-21-2015, 06:16 PM

Re: What's happening in here?

Originally posted by Zageron

We have tried Halogen. I ask, because I honestly want another take on a solution. I poured all of my energy into a recovery effort last year and again earlier this year. Nothing has worked, even with many months of constant effort. You want transparency? Everyone on staff should be aware already, as if my frustrations weren't made clear many months ago. Very few care enough to help sail this ship. Those that do care can't actually sail.

I'm going to call complete and utter bullshit on this, because this has been a problem even when I was on staff too.

Or are you going to sit here and say that you talked to people like me when things were going bad? No, I went out on my own and said that problems were happening and fixed them accordingly with my corresponding teams, who I was very thankful for their cooperation.

If you're so pissed about the progress of the site, then you or someone else as a(n) administrator community manager need to do something about it.

What's happening in here?

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