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Written by Citizen Alpha Sunday, 24 January 2010 03:03
My staff position as a writer for wtfman.com allowed me to broadcast to this audience and aside from the server from Ryan, there really wasn’t much else in terms of assistance received from wtfman.com. Just a name and a box. It wasn’t for the lack of trying on my part. I solicited everyone on staff there to come and staff on the GTA server but it wasn’t in the chips I guess. Instead I turned to CitizensCoup.net / Fromunda.net to populate the staff ranks. CCN also provided a better medium for conveying information. WTFman.com wasn’t on any kind of CMS such as e107, Joomla, WordPress, updates are done via notepad edits, and I had no ability to create forums or mass PM information so we were limited in terms of communication.
Don’t get me wrong, we owe them for a great start.
I like wtfman.com, and still do to this day. We continued to fly under the WTFGTA name and code in Easter egg tributes to the site and its staff. Most of which were completely unnoticed by the wtfman.com staff because they never played there. I continued to operate on both forums and both of them exploded in activity. The non-GTA residents of wtfman.com grew very intolerant of the WTFGTA players whenever they ventured out of the GTA forums, forcing a lot of players to turn to CCN for their online community fix. Ryan was increasingly difficult to get a hold of as time wore on and troubleshooting the server was very time consuming and difficult. I understood, he’s a busy guy, and despite the money we sent him perhaps he had a lot more important things to worry about. I can empathize.
About this point in time the server died. Ryan told us an entire raid array was lost on our box and the files on there are gone. The way the original game mode script was set up it was not really meant to handle the volume of players we were lucky enough to get. Backups of the files took literally all night and bogged the server so bad it was borderline unplayable. Scalable data management was clearly a foreign concept to the original developer so we wanted to migrate to a SQL database which would handle this better. Make the most of this situation.
MrBarragan and I continued to work on the code as much as possible but seeming that the SQL addition was critical to our development we needed to know how to code our new additions. Days turned to weeks. Weeks to months. Ryan was near impossible to get a hold of, however we would receive sporadic communication that would lead us to believe we are on the cusp of getting a box back so we can fire the server back up again.
Meanwhile, we had everyone’s favorite, recently ex-staffer Xanavi slowly getting banned from each one of our services. After his royal screw up with the police he was never entrusted with anything aside from day to day admin work. He had even resigned to go back as a player and I foolishly let him back on staff when he said he wanted back on. Finally he received a demotion to a junior level staff position after jumping the gun and making duce an admin without permission. Luckily, duce worked out for the best, however prior to making someone an admin I sit them down and remove any ambiguity about the position and back up their user file so they have the option to revert back to being a player right where they left off. Staff has limitless money, guns, and power and that cannot transfer back into the player realm. If duce had decided after I detailed the job to him that he didn’t want it, he’d be screwed. Back to square one. Time wasted, player lost, do not pass go.
Xanavi was let go privately as always in an effort to prevent embarrassment and hopefully transfer them back into the player community productively. Unfortunately this leaves it up to the ex-staffer to explain the lack of admin rights and sometimes people mistake them for still being on the team. So when Xanavi went onto wtfman.com’s forums, called them useless, its easy to get the impression that he represents the staff’s opinion and by proximity my own. He did what? Too late, damage was done and a response was posted to his comment by Nighthawk, the owner of wtfman.com, and a thread was started on the staff forums giving me an ultimatum to drop CCN. Ryan also posted quite an enraged reply to the thread stating that the server was ready for weeks and he was holding off because he felt I wasn’t associating enough with wtfman.com, effectively stalling the development considerably. I barely had much opportunity to respond and that evening all of my rights on wtfman.com were pulled and the drama began.
Ironically I was getting cut off because of my lack of association with wtfman.com, which was as quick as pulling FTP/Mod rights in a few minutes, and three days of recoding various advertisements, tributes, place names, etc on my end. Not much transpired between Nighthawk and I, for the most part I said thanks and attempted to bow out without much backlash. Ryan didn’t really have much of that and I got a trashy front page post and belittling thread replies in my honor. Most were quickly pulled down because it was pretty clear they were emotionally charged. I don’t believe I lost any players over the split and wtfman.com’s activity hit the floor as it went back to its previous state.
I still visit wtfman.com from time to time and I’ve spoken with Nighthawk a few times after the fact. We’ve aired some grievances between the two of us and for the most part I’m going to just have to chalk this up as one of those things that I wish could have gone the other way. Nothing particularly harsh was exchanged between him and I. I do wish wtfman.com would not continue down the path it is in turning into a haven for people who don’t like CCN and me. That’s not for me to decide and I won’t turn those forums into some faux battleground out of respect for it. A new server was bought the next day and production on 3.0 continued largely in part to the efforts of MrBarragan.
CCNGTA relaunched under WTFGTA/CCNGTA to begin a slow transition over to using exclusively CCNGTA. We had a lot of players come in directly form the SAMP lobby with no knowledge of the websites and I wasn’t about to lose those players. Many people spent a lot of effort propping up the WTFGTA name and I wasn’t about to demolish that work because the people it paid homage to no longer supported it. As for Xanavi a mix of things happened after the fact. While I do see him as the catalyst for these events he wasn’t the cause of them. He was banned from CCN and circumvented under a new account to start a thread about his laundry list of screw ups. I informed him many times what and how he’s screwed up, and what I think of him. The thread spun circles as he failed to grasp that he was a royal screw up until finally we just locked it and every other thread, tossing him out the door. The threads remained public to show people that we gave it the old college try, he just wasn’t getting it.
Comments
Our little microcosm was amazingly unique. I doubt it'll ever be reciprocated.
Memories for sure.
Hah, maybe its a blessing you didn't.
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