Anphillia

The War

At the time of writing, 2005-06-11, Anphillia is at war. It's a war of 4 sides:

  1. The side of the hosts, that's me, Tino, and Sherian
  2. The side of the DMs who resigned, that's mainly old long term DMs of Anphillia.
  3. The side of all the other DMs who struggle to keep the server from falling apart.
  4. And the side of the player, who demand information about what for the hell is going on.
We hoped to keep things confidential a week. But this was not possible.

Instead everyhting was carried into full public. So instead of fixing technical problems I sat down to write this text.

What changed in the hosting agreement

  1. Decisions of the Hosts are final in all cases and have to be implemented/enforced by the DM team. A reasoning for them has not to be provided
  2. All DMs are required to abide by the hosting terms and Host decisions at all times. It is the duty of the DMs to enforce themselves in this regard
  3. Players are innocent until proven guilty. Any punishment - regardless in any form - passed by the DMs has to be proven by the DM(s) in question

1. Host decisions are final

Before we had following:
H-1) The service has to abide by German and if applicable European Union laws and regulations at all times
H-2) Rulings made by the host are to be implemented quickly and abided after that. There does not have to be a explanation for them. This applies mainly to law and regulations implementations. Failure to do so may result in an immediate shutdown of the service until the problem has been solved
H-7) The Host will only interfere in running the server if the community as a whole is endangerred or any terms of service are not met. If the host choses to interfere the decision is final - regardless of the cause of the interference

This only repeats things which were there before!

It only sounds more spectacular, but it isn't. In effect, I always was at charge. I can reach out and say: This is my service and you do that, else I have to pull the plug. I was allowed to say "I do not like you, get lost". And I always was able to do things, like completely rewrite the module and upload it without asking somebody else.

I never did. Not because the hosting agreement held me back. I never did because I did not want to do it.

However I needed this clarification, such that other people understand that they must obey in case I decide anything. As the consequence of not obeying is that I must shutdown the service. Sorry, that's a destructive behavior, but I am required to do so, according to the law.

This change was cucial, as before, I always was questioned and challenged about german law. I did not have the time to answer this all. It always looked, as if I do halfhearted things, instead this all were major problems, which I could not escape to fix. Problems I did not want to fix at all.

2. It is the duty of the DMs to enforce themselves in this regard

That's only a clarification. No change at all. Of course the DMs must abide the hosting regulation. We only clarified this, again, because it was our impression that they can do better.

3. Players are innocent until proven guilty.

This is a requirement by German law. This already was in effect before, from the previous hosting agreement. Nobody can be punished without evidence. And this was in place before, too.

The posting

Please see in the appendix for the posting we did to the DMs.

Was this posting clever? It looks like it was not.

Was this posting semantically correct? No, there were errors in it.

Was this posting covered by the current hosting terms? You bet!

Here is the main part which was implemented:
The hosts will name a Liason DM, who will be the only DM that the hosts communicate decisions through. It will be the responsibility of the Liason DM to see to proper decision making within acceptable time frames and gets a full backing by the hosts. The Liason DM can chose freely to not accept the position or resign at any time of course.

The Liason DM is like the press relations officer of the Hosts, so treat this position accordingly. It is safe to asume that at times the Liason DM will have to enforce unfavourable decisions because it is the responsibility of the Liason DM to do so.

We did not even name a new DM, we named an existing DM. So we gave this DM more power than she had before.

To be able to do her/his duty, the Liason DM will have the following powers inside the DM team:
  1. The Liason DM has the full support of the host and speaks in our name. Any disagreement will be settled between us and the Liason in private
  2. When in doubt, the Liason speaks for the Hosts. Any question sent about it to the Hosts by anyone other then the Liason will get a "we support the Liason" answer. If we won't, we will settle this with the Liason in private
  3. The Liason DM can set a deadline for votes. This deadline is binding. It should be sufficient for the task at hand
  4. The Liason DMs vote wins a tie on any poll
  5. The Liason DM can veto any decision of the DM team. A veto has to be justified to the hosts alone, optimally in advance to vetoing a decision. It may be shared with the remaining DMs if desired. Note that this does not mean that the Liason DM can force a new ruling
  6. The Liason DM is able to enforce host rulings in any way he/she sees fit. She/he has full host support in this regard
  7. Any grief about the Liason DM will have to be brought to host attention via a PM. Griefing, flaming or otherwise attacking the Liason DM for any duty related reason openly is not acceptable. Criticising and discussing with the Liason is completely acceptable. Any grief brought to the attention of the Hosts regarding the Liason DM will be confidential.
We gave up some power to the Liason DM like the power of vetoing decisions, setting deadlines, breaking ties. Well, this sounds new. But actually this isn't. We already were in charge. The only thing which hindered us to do so as the Liason DM was, that we were not interfering with DMs.

Still, we are not interfering with DMs. The Liason DM is a DM. Only one, with special power. The power to speak as host!

Actually the DMs who left did not understand what this means. As the Liason DM can act as host, the DMs get the power of the host. So if they convince the Liason DM of something, they get our backing. This is one more chance to do something, as we might not understand it and veto. However if the Liason DM already decided for them, we will not need to decide against them.

There is a common trick to get rid of responsibility: You shift it elsewhere. I am responsible for the server according to German law. Now I give away this responsibility to somebody I trust. In case something goes wrong I can point to the other person and tell, that I trusted everything would be handled correctly. This does not always help, but quite often it is the difference of "you have to pay for it" and "this time you are proven not guilty, but ensure it never happens again".

The second trick is, that by the law I am only required to do something, if I must know something is wrong. If I have somebody who does not inform me, I simply do not know, so I am not forced to do something. However if nobody like this person is there, the law says, that I must make sure that I would know in case, so even if I don't know, I am treated as if I knew, simply because nobody else was there.

We already told likewise to the DM team some weeks before. However I fear, they did not understand.

And how would I be able to tell everything? Write a post of 200 MB or so? Certainly impossible. Therefor we added follwowing paragraph:
Final words:

The content of this post is to be held secret outside DM team for one week at minimum. This includes tells to players or any other forms of communication. This time should be enough for every DM team to rethink the changes calmly and come to terms with this change, and maybe even test it out a bit.

It is a decision of the DM team to make any of the above changes publicly known after one week or not.

The idea behind this was twofold:

  1. I did not have the time this week to handle it, as I have a short weekend.
  2. We wanted people to discuss this internally and this way answer open questions.

First reaction

Nearly immediately 3 DMs resigned. I don't want to tell names. This is no personal problem, it's a general question about something which only can be called exodus. I don't want to blame anybody personally because what they did or how they behave. As blaming does lead to nowhere.

Up to today there is still no explaination to me why they resigned. They say because of the new hosting agreement. As we clearly can see, just nothing has changed, except for the new additional power transferred to the DM team through the Liason DM.

I understand, that the DMs think they lost some power. However that is not proven yet. It simply is unknown up to date what would happen and how the Liason DM would evolve.

Could it be, that the DMs did not trust the Liason DM? I doubt this, as on the new forum of the Anphillia Refuges, the Liason DM is present too.

Could it be that the DMs think, wee will take over their DM Team or even Anphillia? Why shall they think this? We did not assign any DM. We only empowered one of them. We did not change anything in ruling. We did not say we will do. We only gave away this right to do so. A right we already had before!

Could it be, that they decided not to trust us, because we stated some problems we saw along within the text (see Appendix)? This might be. However it is wimpy to resign only because of some critics. They could ask us and want clarification. Instead they resigned.

I really cannot explain why rationally thinking people shall harm the whole Community (and they did harm, that is no question) because of such a little thing. One of them used the terms The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back.

Well, this was a straw, and the load became to heavy?

Why that? I cannot imagine. Everyhting seemed fine to me before. If there is such a high load, where does it come from?

The only things they must know is, that Sherian wanted to resign as the lead developer. For over 2 months now! But this was not yet possible. So they wanted something from us. We never demanded something from them, except for the few cases (6 or such) which were handled according to the previois hosting agreement.

Second reaction

The DMs posted a farewell to the board. This made the community wonder what's happening.

This exactly was the case which shall not happen. The player community shall have no notice about the situation until one week was over. Was it really too much I and Sherian asked for after we dedicated months of work to the community to keep the service running and improve all the things for them?

The community demanded that we explain things. But I refused to do so, as there was the clear statement, not to reveal anything before one week.

Third reaction

Somebody disclosed the changes in the hosting regulations to the public. Only the changes.

This is a clearly misleading step. The public did not know anything about the previous hosting regulation. So they could not see that there is simply no difference at all!

Also they started to cry out about a new host. On my board. Sorry, that was too much.

I had to make clear that I will not tolerate such a discussion in the public area of the board. I stated clearly, that they can discuss in a closed board (I faild to post this in the first hurry, but this was implicitely told to the DM team with the note about the changed hosting agreement) and offsite.

I made clear, that I am required to close down the forum, in case I cannot stop this threat to the community. That's nothing else than a barkeeper must do if the people in his bar go berserk. This was no threat. But people thought it is. However I told the people, that there is a problem, such that the problem can be resolved before harm is done. And luckily, this worked. I could keep up the service. If I would ever have wanted to harm the community, I would have shut down the board without notice. Note that it was close to shutdown.

I decided to stop discussing because I went out of time. I was wrong, again.

Fourth reaction

Sherian tried her best to fix things, to calm down and stand steady. However the people out there who think they know but are have no access to the complete information are just too many.

And I think, there are a lot of people out there, who want to know, but don't want to make situation worse by contributing to a battle, which only will leave loosing sides.

I still don't know if the fate of Anphillia already is sealed. The community says, the DMs can rule. That's exactly what I think is true, too. So if the DMs decide to move on, they are free to do so. They always have been free to do so.

The only thing I wonder is, why some DMs decided to choose such a destructive way. The move could have been prepared in the background, silently, and suddenly revealed to the community. But instead, everything was hawked into the public.

Well, this made me rethink. I left beside important work (the server the Anphillia board is on is under heavy stress, I want to prepare a replacement machine, but don't find the time to activate it) and started to write this information pages.

Hopefully to calm things down. To give information to the majority of people, who are wise enough, to stay in the background, quietly wondering about the war from a safe distance.

If you ever wonder, why I do what I do how I do it: It's all for them.