Written by Citizen Alpha Sunday, 24 January 2010 03:03

Article Index
The Rise and Fall of CCNGTA
The Glory Days
The Gangs of CCNGTA
Circling the Drain
Why so serious LSPD?
The Gift of Embitterment
The WTFMan Debacle
The Return of CCNGTA
Derailed Mindset of the Long Time Player
The Splinter Servers
The End
Epilogue
All Pages

 

This is what you would call in English 101 a first person narrative. A writing where the story comes from the mind and perspective of the main character. That being said, you need to understand and accept that the information being given to you is a point of view perceived from the narrator themselves. You’re influence over it, your opinion of it, and whatever else you may have to say regarding it is irrelevant. What’s done is done, what’s said, thought, and consumed cannot be undone. I’ve written a story like this before, I even thought it would be my last of such nature. Here I am again though, typing out another story of “what really happened” from my point of view.

This story will not be linear and it will be as candid as I can make it. I’m not looking for sympathy, praise, forgiveness, respect, or anything else for that matter. I expect nothing to come of this. I’m doing this because I feel that CCNGTA has affected a lot of people and everyone should know the story from the best vantage point possible. This would be my position as head administrator, server owner, or whatever else you want to refer to it as. I want to write this so maybe people can try to understand what its like, perhaps even learn something off of this, or at its very least come to their own conclusions as to why things happened they way they happened.

A lot of my opinions on things I kept to myself or within the upper echelons of the administrators for the purpose of keeping drama down. Other times issues were publicly ignored and privately worked on to diminish the effect of the issue, give the people causing the issue little reaction which causes them to abandon their efforts out of boredom. This has happened more frequently then you might imagine. Trust me, sometimes all I wanted to do was yell from the top of a building, “We’re fixing it, we’re working on it, we care!” but that would have compounded our problems.

I plan to talk truthfully about staff members, players, and myself alike. This will undoubtedly upset some individuals will more then likely not sway any already sour dispositions of me. My story may come off a bit negative because a lot of what went unsaid from me was the negative portions of CCNGTA. Don’t get me wrong, CCNGTA was an absolute blast, I’m so glad I did what I did. It’d be foolish to say I didn’t have any regrets about the course all this took, however CCNGTA was by and far the best SAMP server out there. I know I said this wouldn’t be linear, but I should really start at the beginning…

 

This is going to pick up the day I decided to create the GTA server. If you’re looking for more background on CCN itself, you can view it on our history page. I have a bit of a history in game server staffing, I was a staff member for many months on the Ultima Online shard In Por Ylem under the direction of Azaroth and then many months after that on UO:Redemption under Cetus. My skin has been amply thickened as I cut my teeth on those servers. A lot of the gameplay concepts that I enjoyed from UO and staffing techniques employed by both game servers I brought to CCNGTA. UO was a difficult environment and took the “sandbox” stance on creating goals for players. Outside of technical direction, tools were tossed into the sandbox for the players to use and give meaning to. It was a free market where value was given to items based off of popularity and guided by the lightest influence of the staff and coding team.

I knew right off the bat that CCNGTA was going to be a difficult vision to realize, especially with my aspirations for the atmosphere I wished to create. In the beginning the server was sparsely populated. Just a small clique of friends experimenting and wandering around. Immediately coding dominated my time and progress was being made at the rate of a major patch daily. I was enthusiastic and inspired by the work I was doing and the feedback I was receiving was overtly positive. Still, I continued to solicit the staff members of wtfman.com but was unable to receive any assistance outside of a server to use from Ryan of RunUO. I was on my own in terms of help from WTFman.com outside of a medium to address the users of the site. I turned to CCN, then known as Fromunda.net, in an attempt to get some help. Prior to any GTA work, the other administrator of Fromunda, Tarzan and I had partnered up on virtually every undertaking. From game tournaments to site development we worked together on everything and I expected him to be on board with this project as well, however it required damn near groveling to get him on board. I do believe at the time he was worried I would jump ship to abandon nearly a years worth of work on CCN/Fromunda to join the WTFman team. In hindsight I suppose him forcing the act of requesting for help must have validated him in some manner.
This initial act should have been an indicator to me of the future problems to come however after knowing Tarzan for so long I knew that mildly eccentric and strange behavior was just his cup of tea and mostly harmless. Some weeks went by after beta launch and we had our coding problems but people were pretty understanding. Ample progress was being made and a lot of problems with the original godfather script were being worked out. I had enough time on my hands to jump into the game and interact with players in more of a D&D style "game master" fashion. I wanted to see the player dynamics and hierarchies form so I spectated over the shoulders of players and gave them mild direction to help influence events in a manner that was natural and unscripted.

You have no idea what an absolute blast this was to do. Granted the mechanics weren’t really there, there wasn’t any real gang system to speak of and there were issues with the game mode that relied entirely on faith that the player would comply as opposed to scripting out the illegal ability. The players made it work. At this point everything was pretty much utopian until eventually my hand was forced into bringing down the first ban. I remember it pretty vividly, it was a player that had pushed the envelope frequently in terms of tolerance. The final straw was his act as a cop; he was killing people in jail after skyrocketing their wanted levels so he could receive a bonus when he killed them. He was quite clearly exploiting the system, profiting greatly and flat out ruining the game for multiple players. The ban didn’t go as I had thought would. During my previous staffing positions I had mostly been an authority figure sorting out disputes or jailing people who were breaking rules. I never had actually brought the hammer down on anyone, and now that I had actually done it, it was not what I had expected. There was no fanfare or swelling sense of pride. I didn’t smile, gloat, or laugh. I wasn’t relieved to be rid of him or excited I banned someone. The first thing that popped into my head was, “Why the hell would he have been so stupid to do that? Why couldn’t he just play?” He was the first of hundreds I banned and the mentality behind it has always remained the same. I never felt rid a problem, I always felt like I lost a player.

I laid down a definitive set of ground rules after this and posted them on the forums. I wrote them with the intention of keeping things civil, respectful, fair, and balanced. All the things on a game server you would imagine would be implied however they need to be stated so people cannot say you're banning on you're opinion. While laying down these rules does absolve me somewhat of the responsibility, it simultaneously bounds me to adhere to them despite my own personal opinions. This has, time and time again, proven the hardest to explain to the people I like the most as I showed them the door.