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title: Server Culture

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# Server Culture
With everything "rebooting" I believe it's important to talk a bit about server culture and the issues we've encountered in the past.
I think most active members have, at times, experienced the server as an unsafe or unwelcoming space to be in. There's a multitude of reasons for that. Some, like a community of our sizes always also including toxic people, are unaviodable or only rectifiable after the fact (through mod action).
But for the most part, the issues people have had with each other did no come from a place of toxicity for toxicity's sake. Most conflicts I witnessed, both as a player and as a mod, were a result of miscommunication or differing expectations.

So were do these issues come from?

## Differing Expectations
Probably the main reason for more serious issues. The expectations of what this server is about vary wildly among the members of this server.
For the most part that is a good thing, but it can also lead to conflict.
The most obvious point of conflict is between
> A: People who enjoy the faction turn as a board game and are heavily invested in the competitive nature it provides

and
> B: People who like using the faction turn primarily as subtle inspiration for lore-building and roleplaying.

*(of course these groups are not mutually exclusive, but that seeems to be the main axis of conflict)*

For people from group B aggressive actions against their faction are contrary to their fun. Whether that's destroying the faction outright or threatening the faction and making demands. It limits their enjoyment of the game when they have less freedom.
For people from group A doing *exactly that* is an important part of what's fun for them.

That's unfortunately not a conflict that can be resolved entirely. Neither group is in the "right" on what the faction turn is about. I hope some of it will be changed by making the factiorn turn more collaborative and less punishing (which seesm to be the direction current game design discussion is heading), but it's an issue we have to keep an eye on *and* something to keep in mind when you are interacting with people who feel differently about the game than you do.

## Miscommunication
This happens a lot. Most of it is just due to text based online conversations often lacking obvious tone or intent. Another reason miscommunication happens is due to this space being quite diverse and people not realizing that. Especially with lots of people whose first language is not English. From personal experience I can say that the language barrier can make it much harder to frame your statements with the intended tone or interpret other peoples' statements in the right way.

This is an issue that *can* be solved. By making your communication more obvious and direct. Tell people what you mean, when you say it. And mabye sometimes think twice about whether your "obvious joke" will be seen as a joke by everyone. *Especially* when joking about other people or factions.

## Lore creation & Roleplaying
Lore creation and roleplaying are both quite creative activites. As such they can also be quite emotionally charged. Whenever you create something you also reveal something about yourself. And that's personal.
So by the nature of the server and most people creating lore or roleplaying in some way, interactions are a lot more personal and emotional than in other spaces.
That's okay. It's important to recognize that it's valid to genuinely feel sad, angry, excited, etc. about stuff that happens in the faction turn, roleplay or lore building. And there needs to be some room to express these feelings and talk about them.

## Faction Identity
Seeing people identify with their faction was, in some ways, pretty cool. I think few people expected it to be that big of a divide in the community, but certain decisions on the admin side (no shared ic spaces come to mind) definitely contributed to it. Overall, with a bit less activity on the server overall that lessened a bit, though I still see some people mainly or exclusively writing in their faction channels.
It often led to in- and out-groups, people feeling excluded (especially during the STO-Empire conflict) and an overall feeling of distrust between players of different factions.
Factions that were in conflict in the faction turn also often had players of those factions getting into interpersonal conflicts in diplomacy or even other areas of play.
I hope that with more shared spaces for roleplaying and continuing to support lore-collab & diplomacy channels on main, we can somewhat alleviate the conflicts resulting from this. But it's still something we, as a community, need to work on and remember when interacting with each other.

With a reboot we'll also have a chance to rid ourselves of a lot of baggages that were created in the last two years. There are a lot of grudges left from even the beginning of the server. And this is, sort of, a call to action for y'all:
Try to approach the new game as you approached this server when you joined. Sure, there are friends you made and people you know you don't vibe with - and that's fine -, but when engaging with people in the future try to leave issues you've had with them or their old faction about the *previous* faction turn behind.


##
Alright, that as a whole lot of vague thoughts and ideas about server culture, nothing concrete ~ but I do hope talking about the issues our community has experienced in the past can help us do better in the future. While this post does seem quite negative, I think our community is already in a pretty good place (like, damn, I've seen faaaar worse).
But it's a space where emotions can run high and where people interact with each other on a deeply personal level. So conflict *will* happen, but we can always try to deal with it in ways where people get hurt as little as possible.

So ~ let's start into the new game(s) with a fresh perspective *and* the lessons we learned in the last 2 years.

Have fun and thanks for reading this waaaay to long post.
~ Jill aka 1111