FBY Clan Drama

I am asked every night about FBY. Usually somebody asks me why FBY went away or why I got rid of it or why I didn't deal with our problems in a more positive way. Many players are still annoyed and simply do not understand the degree of internal crises that led to its demise.

I would prefer that the questions "go away" but they don't.

I will make a few comments.

I am still stunned and occasionally saddened by the degree of loss some people express to me privately.

I do want people to realize that in many ways everyone got what they wanted - I removed a great deal of personal drama from my life, I have the freedom now to be more autocratic, and other admins now have the opportunity to run their own organizations.

I always found the technical aspect of running servers, and tearing ET to pieces, more interesting than the repetitive drama of administering a clan. There are multiple layers of clan organization, and the external layers are the "happy face" that people love and identify with. As you go up the food chain the problems and dramas become more complex and unresolvable. The easy problems are solved at lower levels.

For me the challenges I identify with and find a sense of purpose in are improving the servers. Making them as powerful as possible, as secure as possible, and with the best weapons I can design. Arguing over who rushed what map or cheated or that sort of thing is just a nuisance best delegated to other people. This was my intent in creating FBY (or allowing it to self-create as it did). 

For me FBY served a purpose of providing a user interface for players to interact and a way to train admins to detect cheaters and help control players. Layers of easily-replaced admins allowed the clan to be autonomous and I could leave ET for months while I focused on real-life problems.

When these problems are never resolved over many years, or get worse, it becomes apparent that the solutions are mostly technical, through server settings, rather than social (rules and admins and training etc etc).

So simultaneous with this long awareness that most of these issues would be better solved by technical solutions, there was all this other drama which was intolerable. Much of this has been rehashed over and over and is best forgotten. There are details that have never been discussed. I realized that the clan was creating far more problems for me personally than any benefit I was receiving from it, and my server would actually be more enjoyable without a clan.

My goal now is to run a highly effective and extremely popular server. Most of the settings from the old Funboy Beginner server have been ported over to silent mod. This provides a vastly more stable platform with the most advanced anticheat available.

I hope you enjoy it. I'm glad to see so many people on it every night.

obit