Hi everyone,
I thought about this for quite a while, but it's been a month and a half since everything happened, and I'm in a much better place now, so I feel now is a good time for me to come back one last time and say my goodbyes. Some people have noticed that I haven't been back on CN since October, and that's not something that's going to change, I uninstalled GMod the day everything happened and I don't plan to reinstall it again. I think, though, that it's worth the time to say my goodbyes and properly draw the curtain on my time at CN, rather than just leaving everything at a single sudden announcement, and batting away the questions I've received in my DMs.
I started playing CG DarkRP in 2017, when I was 17 years old and still in school. It's weird to think that since then, I've finished school, university, and had a job. Back then, we were just a DarkRP and a CityRP server, and we looked completely different to how we are now. DarkRP was the #1 server in the world while CityRP was pretty consistently in the top 100. I joined the staff team at the beginning of 2018 and I joined the senior staff team around Q2 2018. 'Senior staff team' was what we used to call Server Leadership before I renamed it around 2021 (weird to think it's been that long!).
Through the six years I spent at CN, we went through some pretty major changes. Firstly, the people at the top went through changes - we grew up. Some of us left and then returned months or years later, others left forever (I was the longest serving staff member as of October afaik, and even I had a short period during 2020/21 where I left). But everyone grew as a person, and in most cases, that was for the better. The community grew too, and lots of things changed - MRP and SCP-RP were launched, DarkRP and CityRP were shut down - and yes, pulling the trigger on that was a sad day, we all got attached to our servers - and we grew to numbers way beyond what we had when I joined in 2017.
One to two years ago, we rebranded to Civil Networks and the community changed along with it. We started taking things a lot more seriously and I do think that we did a pretty great job of managing the community as it grew. I'm proud of the work that I did in reworking the staff teams - most of the current staff structure, from the handbook, to ranks, to teams, to our policies, comes from work that I did, and while it's not all perfect, I think I did the best I could. As we grew larger, our responsibility to our players grew, and I think we did a good job there too. Leading a large community is incredibly hard and you can never do everything perfectly: after all, how many GMod, FiveM, etc. communities can you think of where bringing them up will not just get an immediate response of "they're shit and I hate their staff", when in reality, they're probably just fine?
It's so easy to criticise and paint the entire leadership team as being evil for mistakes made (I was on the receiving end of this many times!), but with a community this size, it was never possible to get to every problem as soon as it occurred. People like to focus in on outliers, most of which the leadership team were never made aware of, and act as if they were purposefully ignored and everyone is evil: it couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that running a community online is really, really tough. When you're fighting against anonymous children who have nothing to lose, there's only so much you can do. I've had to sit there and make police reports about terrible things, and I know others who have too. This all gets conveniently forgotten when someone has an agenda to push, and they'll do anything they can to make people believe that others are evil. Take everything you read with a pinch of salt: it's so easy to leave out context to make someone seem like 'the big bad', and honestly, whenever I've had someone come to me with an accusation, after a short conversation with them, 99% of the time they become understanding and didn't know the truth. In the other 1% of cases, they'd already made their mind up about you being evil (probably because you banned them once for saying something racist ingame).
It's no different now that I'm gone: please think about the other person before you start calling the staff team terrible. I feel like in most cases, people make their minds up way too early. I can't tell you how many times myself, or another staff member, would get caught completely off-guard with the most crazy accusations against us, usually in retaliation to a ban, blacklist, or us refusing to punish another player. And unfortunately, once people make up their minds about you, it's hard to change them: they're just going to repeat that you're shit in the hopes that others will unconditionally buy it.
In the end, my undoing was just my depression. These aren't meant to be excuses - ultimately, it doesn't really matter except to me - but my dad had a major heart attack in the middle of 2023, and then I moved to Hong Kong shortly after (a big mistake!) and started work on CN full-time. In a position like mine, you really do have to be available 24/7 - if something bad happens, you need to get on it immediately, and I frequently was doing just that at any moment of the day. That gets you very little appreciation, which is understandable, it is just a video game to most people after all. But combined with the fact that I wasn't speaking to anyone in Hong Kong (until I returned to the UK last month, I hadn't had a proper in-person conversation in almost 5 months), my depression got the better of me and I wasn't working at my optimal efficiency.
Ultimately it was my own problem to sort out, not anybody else's. I don't think it was terrible, mind you, but in an environment like this, you have to be pushing 24/7, and I just wasn't putting out enough work to keep my position: I was stressing myself out constantly popping out to-and-fro to firefight, waking up at 3am to fix server-breaking bugs that popped up overnight, and occasionally I would get bursts of motivation and grind out a crazy amount of development work in a few days/weeks, but overall, I'm sure to a lot of people, they couldn't really see what I was doing to justify staying as Community Leader. And I'm absolutely fine with that. I never did this to try to get acknowledgement, I did it because I enjoyed it! To those who I demoted, banned, or blacklisted, I hope you understand that I don't hold anything against you: we're all just playing a video game, at the end of the day. I didn't always make the right choices, and there are things I would change given another chance, but to repeat myself, I think I did the best I could.
I feel so much better now that I'm back home in the UK, though!
I do feel a bit sad that my time at CN ended the way it did, but I don't regret a minute of it, and I don't hold any grudges against anyone over my demotion. I do think CN is an amazing community and I have the utmost respect for everyone who plays here. Sorry that there won't be any more fireside chats - hopefully you all remember the time we spent together!
At the very least, I hope I made your time here a little happier.
Goodbye everyone.
Kind regards,
Cloak (Alex)
I thought about this for quite a while, but it's been a month and a half since everything happened, and I'm in a much better place now, so I feel now is a good time for me to come back one last time and say my goodbyes. Some people have noticed that I haven't been back on CN since October, and that's not something that's going to change, I uninstalled GMod the day everything happened and I don't plan to reinstall it again. I think, though, that it's worth the time to say my goodbyes and properly draw the curtain on my time at CN, rather than just leaving everything at a single sudden announcement, and batting away the questions I've received in my DMs.
I started playing CG DarkRP in 2017, when I was 17 years old and still in school. It's weird to think that since then, I've finished school, university, and had a job. Back then, we were just a DarkRP and a CityRP server, and we looked completely different to how we are now. DarkRP was the #1 server in the world while CityRP was pretty consistently in the top 100. I joined the staff team at the beginning of 2018 and I joined the senior staff team around Q2 2018. 'Senior staff team' was what we used to call Server Leadership before I renamed it around 2021 (weird to think it's been that long!).
Through the six years I spent at CN, we went through some pretty major changes. Firstly, the people at the top went through changes - we grew up. Some of us left and then returned months or years later, others left forever (I was the longest serving staff member as of October afaik, and even I had a short period during 2020/21 where I left). But everyone grew as a person, and in most cases, that was for the better. The community grew too, and lots of things changed - MRP and SCP-RP were launched, DarkRP and CityRP were shut down - and yes, pulling the trigger on that was a sad day, we all got attached to our servers - and we grew to numbers way beyond what we had when I joined in 2017.
One to two years ago, we rebranded to Civil Networks and the community changed along with it. We started taking things a lot more seriously and I do think that we did a pretty great job of managing the community as it grew. I'm proud of the work that I did in reworking the staff teams - most of the current staff structure, from the handbook, to ranks, to teams, to our policies, comes from work that I did, and while it's not all perfect, I think I did the best I could. As we grew larger, our responsibility to our players grew, and I think we did a good job there too. Leading a large community is incredibly hard and you can never do everything perfectly: after all, how many GMod, FiveM, etc. communities can you think of where bringing them up will not just get an immediate response of "they're shit and I hate their staff", when in reality, they're probably just fine?
It's so easy to criticise and paint the entire leadership team as being evil for mistakes made (I was on the receiving end of this many times!), but with a community this size, it was never possible to get to every problem as soon as it occurred. People like to focus in on outliers, most of which the leadership team were never made aware of, and act as if they were purposefully ignored and everyone is evil: it couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that running a community online is really, really tough. When you're fighting against anonymous children who have nothing to lose, there's only so much you can do. I've had to sit there and make police reports about terrible things, and I know others who have too. This all gets conveniently forgotten when someone has an agenda to push, and they'll do anything they can to make people believe that others are evil. Take everything you read with a pinch of salt: it's so easy to leave out context to make someone seem like 'the big bad', and honestly, whenever I've had someone come to me with an accusation, after a short conversation with them, 99% of the time they become understanding and didn't know the truth. In the other 1% of cases, they'd already made their mind up about you being evil (probably because you banned them once for saying something racist ingame).
It's no different now that I'm gone: please think about the other person before you start calling the staff team terrible. I feel like in most cases, people make their minds up way too early. I can't tell you how many times myself, or another staff member, would get caught completely off-guard with the most crazy accusations against us, usually in retaliation to a ban, blacklist, or us refusing to punish another player. And unfortunately, once people make up their minds about you, it's hard to change them: they're just going to repeat that you're shit in the hopes that others will unconditionally buy it.
In the end, my undoing was just my depression. These aren't meant to be excuses - ultimately, it doesn't really matter except to me - but my dad had a major heart attack in the middle of 2023, and then I moved to Hong Kong shortly after (a big mistake!) and started work on CN full-time. In a position like mine, you really do have to be available 24/7 - if something bad happens, you need to get on it immediately, and I frequently was doing just that at any moment of the day. That gets you very little appreciation, which is understandable, it is just a video game to most people after all. But combined with the fact that I wasn't speaking to anyone in Hong Kong (until I returned to the UK last month, I hadn't had a proper in-person conversation in almost 5 months), my depression got the better of me and I wasn't working at my optimal efficiency.
Ultimately it was my own problem to sort out, not anybody else's. I don't think it was terrible, mind you, but in an environment like this, you have to be pushing 24/7, and I just wasn't putting out enough work to keep my position: I was stressing myself out constantly popping out to-and-fro to firefight, waking up at 3am to fix server-breaking bugs that popped up overnight, and occasionally I would get bursts of motivation and grind out a crazy amount of development work in a few days/weeks, but overall, I'm sure to a lot of people, they couldn't really see what I was doing to justify staying as Community Leader. And I'm absolutely fine with that. I never did this to try to get acknowledgement, I did it because I enjoyed it! To those who I demoted, banned, or blacklisted, I hope you understand that I don't hold anything against you: we're all just playing a video game, at the end of the day. I didn't always make the right choices, and there are things I would change given another chance, but to repeat myself, I think I did the best I could.
I feel so much better now that I'm back home in the UK, though!
I do feel a bit sad that my time at CN ended the way it did, but I don't regret a minute of it, and I don't hold any grudges against anyone over my demotion. I do think CN is an amazing community and I have the utmost respect for everyone who plays here. Sorry that there won't be any more fireside chats - hopefully you all remember the time we spent together!
At the very least, I hope I made your time here a little happier.
Goodbye everyone.
Kind regards,
Cloak (Alex)
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