Taking a break, please read this

E

elmo

Good evening,

These past few weeks I've been tired out, not sleeping right, stressed out and feeling down. I have quite a lot of stuff going on in my life right now outside of PoliceMP and the stuff ongoing within the community isn't helping my situation at all. I have been toying with a lot of ideas today on where to turn, both with the community and with myself within the community. The thoughts of resignation have crossed my mind, so have the thoughts of having a complete restructure. In fact, there's probably not much that hasn't gone through my head in the past 24 hours. I need to get myself back on the tracks now, I have a mini break up in Lewis' Duck Land planned for the week after next, I don't want to be feeling rotten whilst spending time with friends having some time away.

I have ultimately decided that I am going to take a longer than usual break. Normally I take 2-3 days off just as a quick refresher but I need a little longer this time. I don't think a few days will cut it, so I am taking 2 weeks away starting from today. I will return to normal duties on the 23rd May but until then Lewis (Duck) will be taking charge of everything. I will be working on some stuff in the background and I will still maintain some activity on Discord and on the server, but I will not be here with any intention of dealing with any community-related activities. As usual during my leave, Lewis has ultimate power on decision making for both community and Police related affairs and he will be the one in charge from today.

Chain of Command should still be followed and I ask kindly that you don't go straight to Gold Command for every problem you have. We have a bunch of Command members sitting, waiting and happy to help you with the problems you have and frankly Gold Command have enough on their plate to deal with without the need for any additional unnecessary work.

Cal has very kindly created a document outlining who you should contact within Chain of Command, this is a very helpful resource that will aid in helping you guys know who to contact. You can click here to view it.

We all need to work together as a community for the next few weeks, a lot of command teams and developers are feeling drained now and need the support of the community. Be nice, play nice and ultimately have fun.

The area below is a little less important, but I'd like to speak about some of my experiences of the past few weeks to share why it isn't always an easy-going task being in charge and why a little patience and appreciation can go a long way:


We took on PoliceMP to try and transform it into a community back around April 2020. We've worked tirelessly with command teams past and present to create resources, procedures and assets that you guys enjoy today. The community you are playing on now is a far cry away from what it used to be back when it first started. Me and Lewis along with a few golden oldies who've also been here a long time will know that what we've created here was always done to try and give people something to play on, one of my main intentions whilst creating all of the community side of things was to give people a cheering up during the lockdown, at that time I only expected there to be one lockdown and I sure as hell didn't expect it to go on as long as it has done. Because we worked so hard on creating every little part that you guys play on (minus the actual server assets and development, I can't take credit for that at all), we feel a personal connection and a personal love for the server that you guys may not feel, or at least not as strongly. If something goes wrong, it feels personal to us and I think this is the same for a lot of Gold Command and other command teams here.

I wake up trying to innovate, trying to think of new things that we are able to bring out for you guys to enjoy. I focus a lot on ensuring staff morale is high, we created a People Services structure to ensure that everyone who plays is able to have the same amount of fun we are. As the community has grown, the pressure has also grown. Every new player is a new person to manage, to make sure they are having a great time, to ensure they are doing as they should to make sure everyone else is having a great time too. It is a constant uphill battle, one complaint can sometimes take us weeks to deal with. No matter how many teams or structures we put in, people not feeling happy within the community always drips through to us and it is something we always take on, something we take pride in making sure is happening.

It honestly hurts when someone comes to me and says they are not happy. It hurts, even more, when it gets to the point where they are so unhappy it is impacting their mood, making them angry or upset. It is a game, a game server set up for people to play and enjoy. It isn't a full-time job, it isn't something that should be driving your mood down towards the ground. Hell, it upsets me when people feel like this and it is something I never thought I would see or ever wanted to see. We've made constant changes over the past week to try and remedy so much, but yet it still doesn't feel like enough, we still have not quite hit that mark. The problem is, I've spent so long trying to worry about every player that has joined that I've now driven myself into exactly the position I want others to not be in. My question to myself is, is this right? Should I be feeling the way I do?

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This is some data from our administration system we use on PoliceMP. To give you an idea of how much we have to manage from up-top. We have teams who deal with a lot of things and god aren't I grateful for that, but the amount of stuff that still requires approval and still needs our input. We're working day by day on reducing it, but it is still really high. You guys have a combined playtime of 1358 days, that's insane. Calm down!

Our last week has been dealing with constant problems, constant upset along with trying to find a new server to run our community for another year. Admittedly, I've even considered not renewing our services for another year. The way that our senior staff are feeling right now, it has felt not even worth it at times but at the end of the day that's removing the services that you guys enjoy playing on and that would be the wrong turn to take in my opinion.

I am sick to death of cancelling seeing friends and going places after a year of lockdowns, and 5 months of lockdown just gone in Wales. I want to be able to go and socialise with friends outside the community, but problems here make that near impossible. Again tonight I have cancelled plans to do 2 emergency meetings, I have honestly had enough of it and I do not like being driven this close to leaving this community because of it. This is stupid, you could definitely argue that it was my choice to cancel plans, but when I don't do something immediately then either myself or my colleagues in Gold Command get it in the neck for not being immediate. We have things to do outside of the server, we aren't robotic.

On the subject of not being robotic, people need to understand that we are all human. Computer systems don't manage PoliceMP, real human people do. There is a lot of room for error, sometimes we will make mistakes and this becomes even more likely when we're sleep-deprived and stressed out. Anyone reading this will surely agree that a few hours of sleep a night isn't going to make anyone the most productive workhorse in Britain.

I will be taking this leave and I will be urging my Gold Command members to do so when they feel they need to as well. Not only that, I want everyone in Silver and Bronze command as well as developers to be able to do the same if they want to.

Gold Command will be focusing a lot of attention on the lack of communication in the coming week along with other issues that have been brought up in the past few weeks.


Thank you for reading this to those who have managed to get to the end,




Elmo
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Thankyou for everything you do, running a server/community on this scale especially we all respect what you have done. Enjoy your rest and have some you time brother. ?
 
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