All,
This is a suggestion thread to remove @Jermaphobe from staff. I have tagged him knowing he'll see this anyway but also so he can try and reply, justify or explain himself. I know this thread will have to be heard by @Bottiger and the end result for removal is highly unlikely but the issues that are presented in this thread cannot simply be ignored.
There are no formal guidelines, forums or forms for staff complaints. I feel there should be, legitimate cases of admin abuse or admin misconduct, or even admin error, should be raised so we can better ourselves. TF2 is a dying breed and if Skial wants to be the best (let's face it, we're definitely in the top rankings!) we need proper channels to deal with staff issues. So for now, a suggestion thread will have to suffice.
I'll be as detailed and thorough as I can in this suggestion/report because obviously I have a personal desired result which I feel would only be a benefit to the team and the community. Others may have a different desired outcome which is fine.
I'll split this into a few sections. The sections being how I and others perceive J's behaviour, his attitude, how he deals with things, how he speaks to people and his overall performance. I don't imagine this will be a large section.
The second section will be the evidence of misconduct and errors I and others have noticed so far which have lead me to make this thread.
I became an admin here in Feb 2019, a year ago this month. Jerma became an admin shortly after in April 2019, I had never worked with him as a mapper or contributor but I have seen and watched him as a staff member, an admin, for his entire "career" here in Skial. I've had ups and downs with J, more downs than anything. I am a very easy going guy, I try to get on with most people, but I am also very critical and try to not only point out issues, but solutions. I have found time and time again while observing Jerma handle reports, appeals, discord public channels and even speaking on the servers, to be extremely hostile to the community and even to other staff.
As an example of this, let's do a quick search for his name.
https://stats.skial.com/#summary/chat/All/Jerma
Which brings up immediately the following which catches my eye;
We have these posts here where Jerma was quite abrasive or rude for no apparent reason;
I have done some recon work around Skial and gathered a few bits of feedback. I have spoken to 5 active staff at random and asked for their thoughts, every single one of them agreed with my position and my feelings. I am obviously not going to name these staff as I am not going to start a conspiracy - this thread is mine and off my own back but they are free to feedback if they want, though I doubt they will.
I have spoken to over 10 players, most of which have had no direct dealings with Jerma, all of which agreed with me except 1 who valued his activity over his issues for some reason, despite recognising he had major issues. Again, I could survey the entire community but I don't want to start a witch hunt or conspiracy, I am just here to relay facts.
I am a TF2 admin. I have expressed an interest in fixing up the skial forums for the community to make them all appealing and productive but have never asked for any ranks. In my time here, Jerma has managed to secure TF2 Admin, Rust Admin, forum mod, has been asking for forum admin for months and has begged for discord admin which he finally got last night, citing there were no discord admins online, despite Biggie and Toxik being online and responding. I questioned this for the reasons I stated and got met with ignorance and this;
The "salty" emoji. He changed that after I asked why he was promoted to discord admin. This is a prime example of his attitude towards his staff colleagues.
A thread was made at some time in 2019 suggesting Jerma step down or resign. I believe it had something to do with @Kaleido and bloop. Obviously this did not happen but that thread seems to have disappeared? No staff have the ability to delete threads. No staff except forum mods, which Jerma is for some reason, did Jerma delete his own complaint thread?
I'll move on to the misconduct now as I have ranted on enough I think about his demeanour.
I am not saying everyone should adopt my stance and my methods when it comes to administrating the community but I personally maintain a standard where I only ban when I am 100% certain they are breaking the rules. Not 99%, 100% always. If this means a hacker gets off for a few more hours while staff review a demo of mine, so be it. I'd rather not have an innocent player removed from Skial because of a "hunch", they could be potential future donors or even future staff, which I'd drive away by wrongfully punishing them, not to mention I'd have to apologise after... ugh.
That being said, there are cases cropping up more regular than I'd like which show an absolutely careless and reckless attitude to handing out punishments to our players, some of them being regulars. I am not going to rip apart Jermas ban or silence list because I don't have the time and I am not that sad but the ones I have handy speak enough for themselves.
https://www.skial.com/threads/appeal-viper.85012/
In this thread a player was banned and a demo was produced. A player even said this in the appeal which speaks volumes about Jermas attitude:
"Jerma's next line will be: You were caught cheating, you will not be unbaned" - this comment was removed for violating the unban thread policy. The thread from start to finish lasted an astonishing 7 days. It took 3 days for Jerma to reply despite being on the forums daily and being tagged on day 1. I had to personally review the evidence my self which Jerma had reviewed and recorded and I saw no hacks at all, not even remotely, not 1%. The player was then unbanned on the 7th day. For 7 days, a player was unable to play on a community he had accumulated nearly 1000 hours on, for a ban that should never have been applied, and an appeal that should have been handled 6 days prior to the date it was finalised.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&advType=ip&advSearch=199.8.13.248
I am unsure what the deal with this is, I just stumbled across it by accident in honesty, but again, it shows a player being permanently banned on the 30/09/2019 - I can't see a removal date unfortunately so I dread to think how long it was in place for, but the unban reason is "lack of evidence", yet another dusty f-up of hasty banning without reason.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&advSearch=[U:1:905061841]&advType=steamid
This thread probably upset me the most out of them all for reasons below. This player appealed his permanent ban for hacking, Jerma responded on the same day (thank god..) explaining he'll remain banned while other staff review the demo. It seems that other staff did review the demo and it was discovered the player was indeed innocent as his ban was lifted. But, the part that upsets me is, rather than admit he was wrong and apologise for the inconvenience to a loyal player, the thread was simply just marked as "resolved". This is a regular pattern with Jerma, he refuses to acknowledge when he is wrong, never truly apologises and gets very defensive about any time he is challenged.
https://www.skial.com/threads/appeal-♦•general•hawka•♦.85672/
This thread being the most recent. I have played probably over hundreds of hours on DR with Hawka and he plays some god awful music, not to my taste. I initiate votemutes on him all the time, when they fail (as they do 99% of the time), I use !ignore.
"Whether music over voice chat is spam will be left to a server vote. However music is NOT allowed on trade servers." - I follow this to the letter.
!ignore exists for everyone on all skial servers, you do not have to listen to anyone you don't want and you can ignore them and unignore them on a whim. The fact that Hawka was not votemuted tells me 2 things; 1, people liked it enough to not try it to begin with (as they usually do like it, honestly), and 2, Jerma didn't follow the server rules, ignored the players on there who may have been listening (as they usually do) and silenced him for a week for music.
I confronted Jerma on the appeal thread and got no response.
I questioned Jerma in our private staff discord channel #Admin and got no response until I piled a bit of pressure on for a reply. It took hours, despite him being active and handling other reports and talking to other people, Jerma ignored my request for information to why he silenced a donor, a regular and someone ultimately who did nothing wrong. The reply I got was... odd. To prevent leaks from our staff chat I will not be putting publically the chatlogs but all staff can see them on demand. The bottom line was jerma told me he did it by accident. When I questioned further, Jerma said he was playing music loudly (not against the rules) and that Jerma joined the server where a vote to mute another player was already ongoing and passed, which Hawka began playing music again after. I again quizzed further and asked why he didn't put it to a server vote as per the rules, the reply I got was "lmfao, I don't keep track of my punishments".
To put it bluntly. Jerma silenced Hawka for a week for playing music which is not against the servers rules, forced Hawka to appeal and forced him to apologise and agree to server rules he never broke before un-silencing him.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&searchText=Billymays&Submit=
I don't know much about this situation but the unban reason, from permanent ban, speaks volumes about Jermas ability to admin, once again being too hasty, too harsh and too incompetent to actually detect hacks. Jerma issued an over the top punishment without thinking or being 100% certain, keeping a regular off the servers, once other staff verified the proof was insufficient, Jerma issued the unban with reason: "The others "think" he isn't cheating" - despite being told by a few staff, failure to admit fault.
As I said, I am not going to rip his bans and silences apart further, but I dread to think how many more there are.
It is at this point that I am quite... disgusted? to work with such a person who cannot take criticism, who handles cases so harshly and speaks to the community as a whole (players and staff alike) like shit, except for bottiger who he begs for more power from. Jermas only goal seems to be getting more power. I reitterate that to date, he has garnered the ranks of TF2 admin, Rust admin, forum mod (which no other TF2 admin has), asking for forum admin and begged until he got discord admin.
I know that this thread will likely not be responded to by staff as they would rather remain impartial, but I am sick of this being ignored and swept under the carpet. I have messaged Bottiger a few times with my concerns to be brushed off. I feel this my last resort to put my case forward and maybe get some external support for this.
Thank you for reading my life story :).
DISCLAIMER:
It's long.
There is no TL;DR.
I probably missed stuff. No, I definitely missed stuff.
This is a suggestion thread to remove @Jermaphobe from staff. I have tagged him knowing he'll see this anyway but also so he can try and reply, justify or explain himself. I know this thread will have to be heard by @Bottiger and the end result for removal is highly unlikely but the issues that are presented in this thread cannot simply be ignored.
There are no formal guidelines, forums or forms for staff complaints. I feel there should be, legitimate cases of admin abuse or admin misconduct, or even admin error, should be raised so we can better ourselves. TF2 is a dying breed and if Skial wants to be the best (let's face it, we're definitely in the top rankings!) we need proper channels to deal with staff issues. So for now, a suggestion thread will have to suffice.
I'll be as detailed and thorough as I can in this suggestion/report because obviously I have a personal desired result which I feel would only be a benefit to the team and the community. Others may have a different desired outcome which is fine.
I'll split this into a few sections. The sections being how I and others perceive J's behaviour, his attitude, how he deals with things, how he speaks to people and his overall performance. I don't imagine this will be a large section.
The second section will be the evidence of misconduct and errors I and others have noticed so far which have lead me to make this thread.
I became an admin here in Feb 2019, a year ago this month. Jerma became an admin shortly after in April 2019, I had never worked with him as a mapper or contributor but I have seen and watched him as a staff member, an admin, for his entire "career" here in Skial. I've had ups and downs with J, more downs than anything. I am a very easy going guy, I try to get on with most people, but I am also very critical and try to not only point out issues, but solutions. I have found time and time again while observing Jerma handle reports, appeals, discord public channels and even speaking on the servers, to be extremely hostile to the community and even to other staff.
As an example of this, let's do a quick search for his name.
https://stats.skial.com/#summary/chat/All/Jerma
Which brings up immediately the following which catches my eye;
I could go on, there are literally pages of this. I am an admin and I punish for some small things people don't like sometimes but yet I am still liked amongst the players. I have banned @Sir Trooper and yet he still likes me and talks to me regularly, it's the same with others. I don't know how he manages to do it but Jerma seems to manage to upset everyone he comes into contact with through his superiority-god-complex or just his rudeness or attitude.
We have these posts here where Jerma was quite abrasive or rude for no apparent reason;
I don't want to continue dragging these up as I feel this thread is going to go on forever.
I have done some recon work around Skial and gathered a few bits of feedback. I have spoken to 5 active staff at random and asked for their thoughts, every single one of them agreed with my position and my feelings. I am obviously not going to name these staff as I am not going to start a conspiracy - this thread is mine and off my own back but they are free to feedback if they want, though I doubt they will.
I have spoken to over 10 players, most of which have had no direct dealings with Jerma, all of which agreed with me except 1 who valued his activity over his issues for some reason, despite recognising he had major issues. Again, I could survey the entire community but I don't want to start a witch hunt or conspiracy, I am just here to relay facts.
I am a TF2 admin. I have expressed an interest in fixing up the skial forums for the community to make them all appealing and productive but have never asked for any ranks. In my time here, Jerma has managed to secure TF2 Admin, Rust Admin, forum mod, has been asking for forum admin for months and has begged for discord admin which he finally got last night, citing there were no discord admins online, despite Biggie and Toxik being online and responding. I questioned this for the reasons I stated and got met with ignorance and this;
The "salty" emoji. He changed that after I asked why he was promoted to discord admin. This is a prime example of his attitude towards his staff colleagues.
A thread was made at some time in 2019 suggesting Jerma step down or resign. I believe it had something to do with @Kaleido and bloop. Obviously this did not happen but that thread seems to have disappeared? No staff have the ability to delete threads. No staff except forum mods, which Jerma is for some reason, did Jerma delete his own complaint thread?
To quote a wise, wise man...
I'll move on to the misconduct now as I have ranted on enough I think about his demeanour.
I am not saying everyone should adopt my stance and my methods when it comes to administrating the community but I personally maintain a standard where I only ban when I am 100% certain they are breaking the rules. Not 99%, 100% always. If this means a hacker gets off for a few more hours while staff review a demo of mine, so be it. I'd rather not have an innocent player removed from Skial because of a "hunch", they could be potential future donors or even future staff, which I'd drive away by wrongfully punishing them, not to mention I'd have to apologise after... ugh.
That being said, there are cases cropping up more regular than I'd like which show an absolutely careless and reckless attitude to handing out punishments to our players, some of them being regulars. I am not going to rip apart Jermas ban or silence list because I don't have the time and I am not that sad but the ones I have handy speak enough for themselves.
https://www.skial.com/threads/appeal-viper.85012/
In this thread a player was banned and a demo was produced. A player even said this in the appeal which speaks volumes about Jermas attitude:
"Jerma's next line will be: You were caught cheating, you will not be unbaned" - this comment was removed for violating the unban thread policy. The thread from start to finish lasted an astonishing 7 days. It took 3 days for Jerma to reply despite being on the forums daily and being tagged on day 1. I had to personally review the evidence my self which Jerma had reviewed and recorded and I saw no hacks at all, not even remotely, not 1%. The player was then unbanned on the 7th day. For 7 days, a player was unable to play on a community he had accumulated nearly 1000 hours on, for a ban that should never have been applied, and an appeal that should have been handled 6 days prior to the date it was finalised.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&advType=ip&advSearch=199.8.13.248
I am unsure what the deal with this is, I just stumbled across it by accident in honesty, but again, it shows a player being permanently banned on the 30/09/2019 - I can't see a removal date unfortunately so I dread to think how long it was in place for, but the unban reason is "lack of evidence", yet another dusty f-up of hasty banning without reason.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&advSearch=[U:1:905061841]&advType=steamid
This thread probably upset me the most out of them all for reasons below. This player appealed his permanent ban for hacking, Jerma responded on the same day (thank god..) explaining he'll remain banned while other staff review the demo. It seems that other staff did review the demo and it was discovered the player was indeed innocent as his ban was lifted. But, the part that upsets me is, rather than admit he was wrong and apologise for the inconvenience to a loyal player, the thread was simply just marked as "resolved". This is a regular pattern with Jerma, he refuses to acknowledge when he is wrong, never truly apologises and gets very defensive about any time he is challenged.
https://www.skial.com/threads/appeal-♦•general•hawka•♦.85672/
This thread being the most recent. I have played probably over hundreds of hours on DR with Hawka and he plays some god awful music, not to my taste. I initiate votemutes on him all the time, when they fail (as they do 99% of the time), I use !ignore.
"Whether music over voice chat is spam will be left to a server vote. However music is NOT allowed on trade servers." - I follow this to the letter.
!ignore exists for everyone on all skial servers, you do not have to listen to anyone you don't want and you can ignore them and unignore them on a whim. The fact that Hawka was not votemuted tells me 2 things; 1, people liked it enough to not try it to begin with (as they usually do like it, honestly), and 2, Jerma didn't follow the server rules, ignored the players on there who may have been listening (as they usually do) and silenced him for a week for music.
I confronted Jerma on the appeal thread and got no response.
I questioned Jerma in our private staff discord channel #Admin and got no response until I piled a bit of pressure on for a reply. It took hours, despite him being active and handling other reports and talking to other people, Jerma ignored my request for information to why he silenced a donor, a regular and someone ultimately who did nothing wrong. The reply I got was... odd. To prevent leaks from our staff chat I will not be putting publically the chatlogs but all staff can see them on demand. The bottom line was jerma told me he did it by accident. When I questioned further, Jerma said he was playing music loudly (not against the rules) and that Jerma joined the server where a vote to mute another player was already ongoing and passed, which Hawka began playing music again after. I again quizzed further and asked why he didn't put it to a server vote as per the rules, the reply I got was "lmfao, I don't keep track of my punishments".
To put it bluntly. Jerma silenced Hawka for a week for playing music which is not against the servers rules, forced Hawka to appeal and forced him to apologise and agree to server rules he never broke before un-silencing him.
https://www.skial.com/sourcebans/index.php?p=banlist&searchText=Billymays&Submit=
I don't know much about this situation but the unban reason, from permanent ban, speaks volumes about Jermas ability to admin, once again being too hasty, too harsh and too incompetent to actually detect hacks. Jerma issued an over the top punishment without thinking or being 100% certain, keeping a regular off the servers, once other staff verified the proof was insufficient, Jerma issued the unban with reason: "The others "think" he isn't cheating" - despite being told by a few staff, failure to admit fault.
As I said, I am not going to rip his bans and silences apart further, but I dread to think how many more there are.
It is at this point that I am quite... disgusted? to work with such a person who cannot take criticism, who handles cases so harshly and speaks to the community as a whole (players and staff alike) like shit, except for bottiger who he begs for more power from. Jermas only goal seems to be getting more power. I reitterate that to date, he has garnered the ranks of TF2 admin, Rust admin, forum mod (which no other TF2 admin has), asking for forum admin and begged until he got discord admin.
I know that this thread will likely not be responded to by staff as they would rather remain impartial, but I am sick of this being ignored and swept under the carpet. I have messaged Bottiger a few times with my concerns to be brushed off. I feel this my last resort to put my case forward and maybe get some external support for this.
Thank you for reading my life story :).
DISCLAIMER:
It's long.
There is no TL;DR.
I probably missed stuff. No, I definitely missed stuff.
