Topic: Just some perspective
So, I noticed Lothar's message on the front page, followed by his quazi-anonymous whistleblowing in a separate thread. While he's absolutely right that Faldon has historically chosen lots of corrupt Gms and balked at the idea of any sort of oversight, and I'd be making the exact same argument as he is in that situation (you're seriously gonna give someone with that kind of a history even greater power to abuse?), there is a sort of ironic twist to things. The thing that strikes me about Lothar's post is that he claims he was without fault as a Gm. This is not the way I remember things:
The story starts back when I was a Gm. It was no secret that Lothar and I didn't see eye to eye. That was fine when I was a higher level Gm than him, but once he was promoted to the same level as Catbert and I, his head ballooned. If I recall correctly, one day he banned some players who had been badmouthing him. I unbanned the players, because there's no reason that Gms should have some super-special chat immunity. Gms are simply players who have been granted the ability to create new content and to handle players who break the terms of service. We're not gods, and thus we are governed by rules like everyone else. In my opinion not only was Lothar's way of handling these players against the rules, but it was cowardly and more than likely to result in more trouble from those players.
As you might imagine, Lothar wasn't real happy when he saw those players back online, and he and I argued about it. My argument is that we were governed by rules and that we couldn't just ban people we didn't like. His argument was that as GMs, we could do whatever we wanted, as long as it was a means to an end. He even tried using the "As Gms, we have to stick together, no matter what" claim, which was preposterous. I had won the trust of the players by being transparent and following a very clear set of guidelines about what was and was not allowed in Faldon.
In my mind, this was Gm corruption (this is not to mention the suspicions I had about other things he was doing for his friends, GeG started out as pretty much a huge laundering operation imo). He was using his power to punish players who weren't doing anything wrong, simply because he couldn't handle criticism.
He eventually went over my head, first to Crovax, then to Spectre, finally to Coma and Zer, in order to get me removed as a Gm due to inactivity because I hadn't finished my map yet. (Even though Gms like Cali, Illuminati, Wu, etc used to go MIA for huge periods of time without losing their accounts. Also, I WAS working on my map, and it was probably 95% done with less than a month of NPC and scripting work left to launch it). It was a dick move.
The irony, then, is that Lothar is quitting because of a potentially corrupt incoming Gm, when only a few years ago he got another Gm removed because they refused to be complicit to HIS corruption.
-Mumblee
