Orean
New Member
Hello everyone,
As you may be aware, Shane has recently left this project. For those of you who don't know, Shane is the developer of the current PWO client.
In recent months, Shane had returned after a long absense. He immediately picked up from where he left off, quickly updating the game in ways that other staff previously could not. This was a good thing for everyone, and the game was able to progress much faster. However, there were issues involving communication with the rest of the staff.
When Shane returned, he came back to a fairly different staff system. The staff currently is a much more democratic affair, with all members communicating together regularly—not just working independently with minimal communication with other staff groups, which was previously the case. We have many ways to contact each other and for the most part talk on a daily basis, especially through live-chat group communication (something that wasn't the norm in the past), and one of our goals in improving communication was to allow the team as a whole the chance to voice their concerns about upcoming releases.
For Shane's part, he stated that he preferred to work independently from other staff, and this worked well for him, as we can see from the results of his updates. He also communicated with staff, but—apart from his forums posts—it was usually on a one-on-one basis. Therefore, while Shane spoke to many of us individually, there was no successful attempt from either side to incorporate Shane into the new staff system, and information would become easily scattered. This is where the small problems began to arise, and we as a staff group failed to correct this once it was apparent that we needed to take the initiative.
In spite of this, progress was going smoothly. Staff continued to work on their own updates which had been in progress before Shane returned. Shane himself continued to work, with some releases available for staff input and some without. In the meantime, he would also ask staff for suggestions about his new client build.
However, soon after this, a totally unrelated incident occurred involving staff policy; we responded to the issue by deciding to make it impossible for staff to battle players normally. Almost immediately after, Shane found the new code and unbeknownst to us, it turned out that it hindered him. We had made the change without even realizing it would even effect him, and as a result we failed to inform him. In hindsight, we should have done so regardless of if we expected it to affect him or not.
As a note, staff has had very little contact with Shane directly after this point, so saying too much here about Shane's reasons would only be conjecture. However, we do know that Shane believed all staff were against him, though we do not know where these allegations originated from. This led Shane to believe that the Staff to Player PvP restriction was a direct attempt by staff to hinder him from making updates; in response, he promoted a former staff member to Admin in order to better the current staff situation.
As this Admin was a very controversial choice both for current staff and players, Shane’s decision was immediately reversed and his new Admin demoted soon after. Shane then closed PWO until further notice.
What resulted was a public breakdown of relations. Xanatus brought PWO back online and discussed the situation with staff, trying to understand where everything had derailed. Once staff was able to piece together what had happened, we were able to find where our fault was in all of this - that we should have been more encouraging toward Shane in joining group discussion and that we should have established a reliable, low-maintenance team-based communication route early on. During a meeting with Xanatus, we informed him that we would welcome Shane back and fully include him in our team’s business, as we should have done from the start. Sadly this declaration may have come too late, and it is unfortunate for all of PWO that we had to discover our mistakes in this way.
We hope those reading understand that any actions we have taken that may have hurt others were not intentional and most of the time we were not even aware of them. We also hope that over time there may be forgiveness between everyone involved, and ask that everyone be given time to heal and learn from what has transpired.
Regardless of what the future brings, those of us who remain will be continuing to supply a wider variety of content updates thanks entirely to Shane, who gave us the means to do so. We hope for these to have a positive, lasting effect for the game.
On a final note, we wish Shane success with his future and other projects, and we apologise to him both for the misunderstandings and how greatly the situation has escalated. He is a highly skilled and intuitive programmer and developer—easily among the best we have ever had to work with—and will go quite far, very easily.
We know this was a long read. Thank you for your time and understanding; we hope to see you around in-game.
As you may be aware, Shane has recently left this project. For those of you who don't know, Shane is the developer of the current PWO client.
In recent months, Shane had returned after a long absense. He immediately picked up from where he left off, quickly updating the game in ways that other staff previously could not. This was a good thing for everyone, and the game was able to progress much faster. However, there were issues involving communication with the rest of the staff.
When Shane returned, he came back to a fairly different staff system. The staff currently is a much more democratic affair, with all members communicating together regularly—not just working independently with minimal communication with other staff groups, which was previously the case. We have many ways to contact each other and for the most part talk on a daily basis, especially through live-chat group communication (something that wasn't the norm in the past), and one of our goals in improving communication was to allow the team as a whole the chance to voice their concerns about upcoming releases.
For Shane's part, he stated that he preferred to work independently from other staff, and this worked well for him, as we can see from the results of his updates. He also communicated with staff, but—apart from his forums posts—it was usually on a one-on-one basis. Therefore, while Shane spoke to many of us individually, there was no successful attempt from either side to incorporate Shane into the new staff system, and information would become easily scattered. This is where the small problems began to arise, and we as a staff group failed to correct this once it was apparent that we needed to take the initiative.
In spite of this, progress was going smoothly. Staff continued to work on their own updates which had been in progress before Shane returned. Shane himself continued to work, with some releases available for staff input and some without. In the meantime, he would also ask staff for suggestions about his new client build.
However, soon after this, a totally unrelated incident occurred involving staff policy; we responded to the issue by deciding to make it impossible for staff to battle players normally. Almost immediately after, Shane found the new code and unbeknownst to us, it turned out that it hindered him. We had made the change without even realizing it would even effect him, and as a result we failed to inform him. In hindsight, we should have done so regardless of if we expected it to affect him or not.
As a note, staff has had very little contact with Shane directly after this point, so saying too much here about Shane's reasons would only be conjecture. However, we do know that Shane believed all staff were against him, though we do not know where these allegations originated from. This led Shane to believe that the Staff to Player PvP restriction was a direct attempt by staff to hinder him from making updates; in response, he promoted a former staff member to Admin in order to better the current staff situation.
As this Admin was a very controversial choice both for current staff and players, Shane’s decision was immediately reversed and his new Admin demoted soon after. Shane then closed PWO until further notice.
What resulted was a public breakdown of relations. Xanatus brought PWO back online and discussed the situation with staff, trying to understand where everything had derailed. Once staff was able to piece together what had happened, we were able to find where our fault was in all of this - that we should have been more encouraging toward Shane in joining group discussion and that we should have established a reliable, low-maintenance team-based communication route early on. During a meeting with Xanatus, we informed him that we would welcome Shane back and fully include him in our team’s business, as we should have done from the start. Sadly this declaration may have come too late, and it is unfortunate for all of PWO that we had to discover our mistakes in this way.
We hope those reading understand that any actions we have taken that may have hurt others were not intentional and most of the time we were not even aware of them. We also hope that over time there may be forgiveness between everyone involved, and ask that everyone be given time to heal and learn from what has transpired.
Regardless of what the future brings, those of us who remain will be continuing to supply a wider variety of content updates thanks entirely to Shane, who gave us the means to do so. We hope for these to have a positive, lasting effect for the game.
On a final note, we wish Shane success with his future and other projects, and we apologise to him both for the misunderstandings and how greatly the situation has escalated. He is a highly skilled and intuitive programmer and developer—easily among the best we have ever had to work with—and will go quite far, very easily.
We know this was a long read. Thank you for your time and understanding; we hope to see you around in-game.
