Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-36984938-20190127155044/@comment-30980630-20190227220040

What angered me most? Bad staff members. I used to play on DoME, which has a good functional community, and runs well. Some friends of mine and I played there for a long while, and became pretty influential.

Now, the problems began when the staff members got short with people. They made decisions too quickly and honestly really screwed over their own players a lot. They lied about stuff, made up rules, abused power, and were generally the kind of people who would be banned if they were not staff.

So my friends and I decided we would make our own server. We did so, we were the conceptors, the admins, the owners, and the creators. I wrote the rules myself, borrowing heavily from DoME, because, let's face it, there was nothing wrong with the server, just the staff members (no, I won't name any names). Thus SoA was born, and it's still thriving against all predictions.

I woke up one morning and went to log on to DoME, and found I was banned. No reason given. I'd been banned from the Discord, I'd been blocked by all the staff members save only one, and I had no way to get my precious, precious progress back. I of course appealed, and was informed that I was banned because I had advertised the server. Had I? No. I had direct-messaged my friends, and asked if they wanted to play on my server. The staff of DoME had stepped into private messages with friends, and deemed themselves in control of those things.

They also said I "copied their rules," citing three specific examples where, okay, I did base mine heavily on theirs. But every server is bound to have some overlap in rules - are the owners of The Elder Days (great server btw, check them out) going to be banned from DoME just because they also have rules against building at lore waypoints?

Point is, the staff members were stuck up, entitled pricks who wanted to control everything. Honestly I think they got mad at us from SoA because they realized that we had something they didn't: harmony between staff and players.

Either way, I am banned still from DoME and I don't care. I've been doing quite well for myself on SoA, and I'm glad I made the switch. To those who are looking for a good RP server, DoME is good but also a bit... crazy, as you can tell. Elder Days is great for Second Age, and of course I recommend SoA for third age, but I'm a bit biased.