Admin Interference & Guilds
 

I think a line finally needs to be drawn in relation to administrators participating in "player" aspects of the game. I understand that admins are players too, but in a game like Graal (where, to my knowledge, you aren't materially rewarded for volunteering to be an admin) it's way too easy to take advantage of the position.

I think this is most prevalent within tower guilds. If you tower at all, you have probably heard of ridiculous drama involving admins and their guilds. I've been towering for less than a week and can already see the problem.

I feel like a decision needs to be made and administrators should be held to some sort of requirement to not interfere in parts of the game that they have a conflict of interest in. It seems really unfair and just shady to me that certain guilds have immediate, unquestioned access to the powers of administrators. It hardly sits well with anyone in the community and it's obviously going to contribute to bias.

TL;DR: Something needs to be done to ensure that administrators have a harder time favoring certain players and giving them "express access" to their powers and attention, and the most obvious way to do that is by not allowing administrators to participate in active and competitive tower guilds (where this appears to happen the most).

So basically cut off the staff from participating in the main aspect of the game? No.

You're not understanding. The first course of action should have been to strictly warn staff to not abuse their powers and show strong favoritism and bias towards guilds that they participate in. If that was ever done, then apparently it hasn't worked.

Since it hasn't worked, yes. This is what I am proposing. What would you otherwise suggest?

I'd suggest that you look to another server, all they hire is immature, unqualified children half the time who dont even know manners and respect. Stefan wont change that, since its been part of his way of making money.

Sorry, I just feel like proposing a sensible solution to a glaring issue is a little more productive than "give up," so yeah.

Me ( who is trying to become admin and turned in application ) find this true showing favoritism to some when ur an admin is like the presidents best friend gets the royal treatment which obviously not fair I get what your saying

People don't make iServers to let people have fun. They make them because they have a lot of potential for making money. Which is why there's been so many hat updates. They aren't going to care about this problem unless there are like 100 complaints about it.

True

Favoritism happens everywhere. Whether it's because of power, loyalty or money.

Allowing immature and irresponsible administrators, who seem to do nothing more than tower, consistently ban players outside of their guild doesn't strike me as profitable. Something's gotta be done one way or another, I've heard of it happening too often and I've already experienced it in my brief time outside of the spars.

Yes that's true I find this honestly unfair

It's not as if every admin does it. Rufus has handled US for a while and I've never, ever heard of him do anything close to this. He actually witnessed me get warped out of the arena due to a glitch in one GST (when I was sparring for US) and didn't want to bother mentioning it or interfering simply because it'd look like something like favoritism or bias. There are obviously others who I wouldn't suspect of this.

There are just some guilds who make it a point to recruit admins and it seems like it's for this reason, and for the sake of Graal and towering being competitive and enjoyable at all, it should stop. Envy and Aster can't be allowed to continue to throw their admin weight around for Vintage, and that's just an example. There are more.

Indeed my friend indeed

If I do become admin like I plan to do imma gonna be the best

TL;DR Adiams get no freinds

Staff aren't allowed to use their powers in forts. Nor are they allowed to have a "presence" there by standing on the wall or whatever or showing off around others. If so, then they probably shouldn't of been hired in the first place. Non-staff accounts are fair game, however. I mean aside from being a staff, they are players, you know? That would suck if you started working here then Xor one day tells you you aren't allowed to guild spar or tower because they're worried that you may influence others in wanting to join. Which is like saying if you work for Classic you aren't allowed to have fun.

I'm not saying you're wrong about there being some staff who abuse their powers. Thing is, they were never really allowed to. And if they were they probably would've been fired already.

How many staff members are we talking here?

From what I've seen personally 3-4. There really needs to be a tutorial on how to stealth, when Admins come into towers, they pretty much make their presence known.

We don't have that many staff who are invested in 'tower' guilds.

Nvm, theres probably only about 2-4 actually in tower guilds, but from what I've seen there's about 3-4 Admins that usually respond to tower issues. Im not sure how they respond to reports, but they should make sure they're not go ring to get damaged right when they warp to.

Wow I think I actually agree with Thallen for once lol. I don't know if this is what you're thinking but basically Admin guilds have 2 advantages. First one being EXTREMELY easy recruits and admin guilds fail to acknowledge this when it's obvious, second is if an enemy guild is glitching, lagging, hacking, or anything else like that they can simply ban them as they please, while other guilds have to send a bunch of reports and most of the time by the time an admin gets off there butt to help, the enemy stopped. Not to mention, I've seen admins use there admin account to scout towers lol. My point: Look at all admin guilds, take the admin out of the guild, and the guild would of failed miserably.

Another point I realized I just forgot: You signed up for your staff position, it was your choice, therefore you should be doing your job a bit more and stop taking advantage of your admin rank for your tower guild.

As of right now: Aster, Envy, Neo, Furryamigo, Queen of <3s, Reemas, and several others are in a few of the more competitive tower guilds. I'm sure there are more, but those are just some names. Not saying that they've all done or even been accused of doing stuff they shouldn't.

Check Abel's profile right now, his status complaining about being banned for "lagging." His guild pic even shows Aster PMing him about it before apparently banning him. I'm sure this was when Abel was attacking her guild at a fort, coincidentally. Let's assume that he was lagging himself or whatever, that seems to happen at every fort. Vintage's advantage is immediate access to that admin. I could report the same dude for lagging 20 times and not see a thing happen.

And then there's this girl:
http://puu.sh/2lUlC

She literally goes completely invisible to scout out forts and apparently (saying apparently because I didn't see this part) kills people and attack flags. I confronted her about it and told her I'd be talking to other admins about it and she starts guilt-tripping and changing up her story from "WUT R U TALKING ABOUT?" to claiming she was lagging. When stuff like this is happening at forts, it sucks.

I can't even block a doorway vs. guilds like Vintage because I am literally fearful that I will be banned. It's almost like a strategy to recruit admins now.

So vintage took castle from SON, they knew they couldnt keep for long, so they needed a way to stop it. I found this unfair, because they spawn back in the same space in that area... we then took back, having to heal inside and regroup. I then had the idea to do the exact same thing she did, and i got warped and a warning €.€ see the problem?

Okay.

Pidgin history screenshot of me talking to a guildmate, just to show you that we literally have to strategize against admins:
http://puu.sh/2lUY4

And here's the Gyazo link:
http://gyazo.com/e04e29c7d4a267085ee99b30201fb025.png



Similar story: Aran, Ramone, Exalt*, and myself were defending Swamp fort from Vintage. We were all on a subtag slashing at the entrance and literally killing everyone before they even got into the water. On screen, Aster starts threatening to send us a warning for "boosting." ?!?!?! Boosting because you're running into our swords as we strategically defend a fort? This all occurred right before Envy turned into The Invisible Woman and helped her guild steal the fort from us.

After they took it, we go in to attack and they are doing the exaaact same thing that Aster had just threatened to warn us for.

Stopped reading here, no **** they would ban if someone is hacking/glitching..

You're posting this as if your guild didn't get 5 of us banned on day one and proud of it, but alright brother!

What a joke.

Ok raging kid, the hacking/glitching stuff I mean an admin guild can ban you instantly, as a normal guild has to report and sometimes once the admin arrives they stop and get away with it. That's what I meant lol, made it fairly obvious. Once again, that was a time reports worked because you guys were stupid enough to continue lag/chat blocking even after the admins arrived and even warned some of you, not my fault. The blockers were in the hallway spamming emotes and talking in front of the trap room door, you were all banned for an actual reason. You fail, talk to me when you calm down a bit, and actually make some sense k?

@Thallen Not many people even know Neo is an admin lol and he only helps sometimes, most of the time when he's on he's with his guild Scarlet. He is not like a perm/leader in a tower guild so he's not really taking advantage of his admin rank like others.

I think what he means is that the admins are allowed to block and do not get in trouble, and when players see their GREAT ROLE MODELS they mimick them when the admin guild loses the tower. But because they have powers, and some immature or just unfair, they warp bann or warn you.
But yes i agree about how admins have a right of passage to immediatly drop the bann hammer, or to warp you, when we have to wait, or its overlooked.

How about not hacking/glitching?

The problem is that this discussion has nothing to do with glitching or hacking. Idk where goten got that from. The problem is that admins abusing, or being hypocrytes. They block, they lose, it gets over looked, we block, we get banned to benefit them .

Since you are actually smart and apparently staff:
Can you explain to me why that is illegal? People were literally banned for taunting another guild by doing the AFK emoticon while blocking and saying stuff like "EZ," I don't get it. This guy seems to be under the impression that it is illegal in some way, and whichever admin handed out the bans seems to think so as well.

Are these people under the impression that hitting Ctrl+A somehow extends the length that you're able to block in a doorway?

If you're referring to lag/chat blocking it's the same thing, usually after reporting it's too late to catch them in the act.

@Arann Also 2 of my members were also banned on that day for blocking back. I realize this and I don't complain about it because they broke a rule and got banned.

They were also talking on purpose in front of door which was extending there time. I think someone got Male on video clearly doing it and it was taking hits forever to recognize on him. I also know that Hikaru wasn't doing the emotes, he was just straight up chat blocking.

I hate to break it to you, but typing or doing emoticon does not effect how long you blink. Not in any way.

Do you know what "chat blocking" is? Chat blocking was when you could infinitely hold down the Tab key on your keyboard to effectively tab in and out of the chat field on PC Graal, which would drop your framerate horribly (thus extending the time you're able to block).

That has been disabled forever. Chatting and doing emoticons does absolutely nothing, half of the people who got banned don't even know what this "chat blocking" is. They have literally never even towered.

But again, some admin who was pressured enough by countless (stupid) reports from a guild of interest ended up banning these players. So, this is another example of what I mean.

Aster didn't threaten I was the one that said in overhead that it's like boosting fyi. As far as the bans go, I'm pretty sure that the only time I know of your members being banned was the night Rebel was attacking you. As far as I know Aster not Envy have nothing to do with any bans anyone has received for anyone whom had been banned for towering involving Vintage. In fact I'm fairly sure. If people are banned they're doing something they shouldn't, all of this can be looked into if the staff is wrongdoing, I'd recommend [email protected] if you disagree.

Nice try to deflect, but would you care to comment on Envy's continuous abuse to get your guild towers? Are Abel, Eldon, and I just making this up? Why do Aster and Envy continue to do this stuff?

How come a member of your guild spammed everyone in my guild with PMs when we were defending a tower? He even said "GOGOGOGO" on screen, confirming that he was finished spamming us and you guys all charged in (including Aster and Envy).
http://gyazo.com/7542c9c79f51d4350c9b4d2c5805cd70.png

Every single member of my guild reported this guy, and I even PMed Envy about it, but nothing was done. If I had done something stupid like that, I would be banned within 5 minutes. Why? Well, because your guild has admins who love to play at towers.

This is the leader of Vintage, if anyone is curious.

We tested chat blocking for the hell of it. Everything from searching in your menu, guild chat, and overhead makes you 2 times as hard to kill. We tried it several times and each time both started with full health and one stood standing with 1.5, if done consistently it's not fair game play.

You can do Graal science projects all day and you're not going to be able to convince me that typing "EZ" and hitting Ctrl+A extends your blink, sorry. I have a brain, I know the mechanics of Graal, and I know what FPS is. If doing emoticons drops your FPS then you're using a soda can as a video card or something, I don't even know what to tell you. Opening menus does drop my FPS, and I'm assuming that's how people have "lagblocked" against us before.

Quit replying to mostly-irrelevant parts of the thread and acknowledge the parts where Envy is abusing to get your guild fort hours.

Read all 4 pages even though I knew this was all about Vintage. If I may add, I do recall that they have warped some guild members just so they're low and easy to take.

Of course, that's almost old news. They do it so often that it's almost a part of the game itself, I don't even complain about it anymore. I actually accept it as a part of Graal. I'm sure fp4 or Dusty can comment here confirming that there is no boinky script in tower levels that would cause a player to just randomly get warped away at critical points when sieging a tower.

Spamming a guild before an attack is not illegal, though a low move on our part I wasnt aware of, it's legal. As well as the Abel, Ast wasn't even online on staff when this occurred, he was unkillable attacking the flag, staff saw, he was warned, he continued, he was banned. I don't know what else you're referring to with the other people.

I don't care if it's illegal or not, that isn't the point. It just goes to show that there are administrators who are heavily-invested in tower guilds. Enough so that they would strategize and cooperate to do something as low and stupid as that.

Spamming an entire guild with PMs so that they can't communicate in guild messages may not be illegal, my favor-banning members of competing guilds, and constantly going invisible to stalk forts, and warping players out of forts sure doesn't seem like the most productive stuff for an admin to do on an every-other-day basis.

TBH, your guild should probably be reset and Envy should definitely be fired. Just my opinion, though. This isn't an argument or a flame war either, this is actually a productive conversation that is helping prove my point. I'm glad you decided to post here.

We were warped ALL the time. It's everyone that was being warped. If staff was doing it, it shows a message, it was already established that didn't happen. No staff warped anyone, everyone towering was being warped. It was annoying as hell when you'd have 5 go down same time and 3 warped. It was not an isolated occurrence.

The spamming the guild thing is a "newbie" thing to do. It's like the member who takes a tag so they can steal the flag, if we were aware, it would've stopped. They should've been attacking, not spamming lol.

The warping you're experiencing sounds like the kind that occurs when the server lags and you change levels back and forth too many times, and you are warped onto a wall.

Either way, I've contributed enough to the thread for now and hopefully you'll show this thread to the awful admins in your guild and they'll get it together. Maybe they should take a break from towering 16 hours a day and actually administrate the game, anyway.

there's an admin called libbie (don't know if she is an admin anymore) who was in 99 problems, who threatened to ban me because I was saint and in her flag room. Honestly, it needs to be sorted out, i think admins shouldn't be allowed to tower, end of story.

Guild forts are where most problems occur, but if a staff member is handling a problem incorrectly, he or she needs to be corrected, and possibly dropped from the staff team if it continues. I haven't spent more than a few minutes at a time at a guild fort in the past two years, but I would think staff members that handle fort-related issues would wise up by now... I don't think GP's need to leave all competitive guilds, but should act like staff while on staff account. That means no favoritism. While on a non-staff account, I think one shouldn't have to worry about unfair advantages. That is where I think the line should be drawn between player activity and staff activity.

Perhaps there are just too many GP's to accurately keep track of their individual performance??

No way someone under 15 is going to fix this problem *cough* envy *cough*

How can someone get banned for spam when there's a block button lol. Thallen, it's CLEARLY obvious just having your keyboard up on your iDevice makes hits much longer to recognize on someone. And typing on PC is the same concept. I can get someone to record this if you want lol this one is a fact, this isn't opinion based lol if you block while chatting you'll take longer to die.

Well I'm just development, and not really trained to be a GP or anything like that. GPs have certain rules and punishments for various situations. I'm not familiar with that stuff at all so I can't say. Unless I see someone blatantly hacking I just report them.

No, I'm referring to "hacking/glitching." It doesn't matter if the person is staff and can respond to it immediately or not. If someone hacks or glitches then they have absolutely no right to whine that a staff happened to be able to react faster because they're "participating." In the end, the staff wouldn't be at an advantage if people didn't hack/glitch in the first place, because the situation wouldn't arise.

The only warping that occurs at a guild fort is when the flag ownership changes and everyone but the new owners are warped out. There are no other warping functions in play.

I think this may be a FPS issue, as Thallen said before with the early PC example. Although, I'm not an expert on the signal flow between client, server, client...

-libbie is no longer admin
-chat blocking doesincrease blink.
-vintage is a cheap guild due to their admin
-she is a GIANT hypocrite
-IMO remove her from staff. She has done too many thing to deserve a warning.
-IMO vintage should be reset. They wouldnt be anything without their abusive admin.
-she has warped(not the tower warp to graal city but the unstuck warp)
-she bans you for doing things she did in the first place.
-as thallen says uses vanish for unfair reasons.
-yes these female admins are envy and aster

I see your point. Maybe you should bring a camera to the next fort you have.

PROCESSOR SPEED DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO LATENCY