Regarding drama
I don’t know if anyone will even see this but as you probably know I’ve left the Creators.TF team.
My duties there had been getting in the way of my actual work and health so I had been planning to leave for a while.
The tipping point was with the chat filter, if you’ve ever used a school computer you’ll know that filters simply don’t work. Not only that, I just simply don’t believe in censorship in any shape or form and I can’t condone the use of such a tool in a community that I’m helping run.
We’ve learned that humans are creative. Endlessly creative.
— Tom Scott on web filters
The original chat filter that a developer wanted to introduce would
permabana player from communication (text and voice chat) across the network if they typed words they deemed to be “offensive”. The original list of words can be found below: (this was expanded but I can’t find the screenshot)
Of course, what’s deemed “offensive” is completely different in different places. The last time I checked, we had users from 150 different countries connect to the servers. What’s considered “offensive” in your country or even region might not be in another. The people who were pushing for these measures either couldn’t or wouldn’t see how others would be affected, which is blatantly obvious the moment you look into it.
My suggestion was that we encourage our player base to self-moderate, using the built in communication tools that have been in TF2 since launch. This would allow each player to individually decide what they did and didn’t want to see in the chat and hear over voice. This idea was shot down by the particular 3 people that seemed to
love being offended, as not banning the particular offenders from playing the game entirely is bad… for some reason.
A tweet came in accusing the project and myself of being “transphobic” for daring to suggest someone mute another player who was aggravating them. I honestly don’t understand how these kind of people live in the same world as me.
I’ve been on
furlough the past month so I’ve had a lot more free time to spend working on the servers. My sleep schedule has basically been upside down, I’ve only recently fixed that (he says typing at 03:20am).
I’ll be going back to work in a week and I was planning to leave the Creators.TF team as I wanted to fully devote myself to my work and get my sleep in order.
Even though it was only a few members on the team who made me feel uncomfortable, one of these people in particular was basically taking charge where he had no place to do so. I’m not mentioning names here but I’m sure you know who I’m talking about.
I wanted to get out basically. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed seeing the thousands of happy players being able to play with new content in a cheater free environment. However, I was spending too much of my time on the project and it was interfering with my actual job, plus it didn’t sit right with me that people would be punished for something as inconsequential as typing in the chat. If you can’t handle people saying mean words at you, you probably shouldn’t be online.
I’ve heard from people that they’ve entered full damage control mode, and somebody in particular basically publically slandering me on Twitch in an attempt to gain cheap internet points. I’m not going to respond further. I’ve deleted my Discord account, and I pretty much don’t use any social media. I’ll be hanging around /vg/, I guess I’ll see you there.
Thanks to everyone who came along for the ride, I’m sorry this had to happen but it was necessary. Never give in to peer pressure. Stand up for what you believe in.
P.S. The guy that was getting “voted off the team” in the clip that I saw floating around wasn’t me. I’m a British guy, and I don’t sound anything like that. I was in the call though.