Discussion Regarding the Current Staff

Since HiGuy and Derp have stepped down as moderators of our little community theres been a lot of discussion regarding the current staff team, mostly revolving around re-promoting Kalle to moderator. This thread is meant to be a place where the community can voice their opinions and or concerns about this subject, As well as let us moderators voice our opinions publicly.

The story as I understand it so far (please if I've misunderstood or left something out let me know so I can correct this).
HiGuy, Derpking, and Matan promoted Kalle on June 12th, 2015. Since then he (Kalle) has had a less than happy relationship with the old staff, disagreeing on nearly every decision they've made as a team. In early January 2021 decided to demote Kalle "Due to considerable differences of opinion about how the community should be run". The Old Staff had been increasingly upset about the state of the community as time went on. They had wanted to resign for a long time, and in late January 2021 finally resigned as moderators, promoting Me, and Go'way in their place. Since then I've had extensive discussion with Kalle, the community, and the other staff members about what to do with all this but we failed to come to any definitive decisions.

Thus, in the interest of getting results in a timely manner and with the community's input I have created this thread. Please post information I may've missed, this is meant to be a big overview not a comprehensive recap, or your opinions about this situation around Kalle and re-promoting him to moderator. Please keep this discussion centered around Kalle and how/why he was demoted and why/why not he should be re-promoted to moderator. There will be another thread for discussing everything else the community should do that I will create soon, please save those discussions for that thread.

Please keep everything civil. I look forward to our discussion.

Edit: Fixed typos. Removed misinformation from the summary

Since a lot of this demotion has come down to disagreeance with old staff and the community is moving onwards, if it's all agreeable with new staff and Kalle I see no reason to not promote them back up.

That main message was meant to be a brief overview of the topic as a whole I tried to leave my own opinion of the situation out of it. That said here is my opinion on this whole thing.

Kalle should be promoted to moderator again. HiGuy and Derp may've said that they demoted him for "considerable differences of opinion about how the community should be run" but I think they simply didn't like him and demoted him because of that.

A detail I left out of the main post because I'm uncertain of its validity
- Kalle donated to the staff, but I'm uncertain if Kalle did that in order to get staff or if its just coincidence. And I'm uncertain if the Old Staff promoted him because of it, or if again, it was a coincidence. Or maybe I've misunderstood this entirely I'm not sure. I thought it was worth mentioning.

Wow... I didn't know all this has happened...but I'm glad there are new moderators here now.

Before I come back later and discuss the actual topic at hand, can I just take the opportunity to kill this long-standing myth that I somehow bought a moderator position?

I donated $100 on the 14th of March in 2015 completely unconditionally; we had no form of agreement, neither official nor informal. This was also several months before I became a moderator (around June 14th the same year). I was promoted because I was active and over 18, not for monetary reasons.

Sorry for misrepresenting what had happened Kalle about ur donation that was not my intent. I just thought it was worth mentioning though now I know the full story I see that it was not. I'll remove it.

It's been a mess for the last couple months, so here are my thoughts.

I've been following along with this whole drama, and heard from both sides what has been going on. Based on what I've heard, the old staff's reason for demoting Kalle was almost entirely political, and politics should have no place in those types of decisions, or indeed in any dealings with this community, because we're just here to play a game. After HiGuy banned Yoshicraft224, and Kalle was against it, HiGuy used that to justify removing Kalle from the moderator position, which he and Derpking had wanted to do for years because of political differences. Kalle had never broken any rules or made any controversial decisions in his five and a half years as a moderator (as far as I'm aware), and he was usually on Webchat and would moderate there while no one else would (even though he was AFK most of the time). He has always been a good moderator and listened to the community. He even used to be a spammer in 2015 before becoming a moderator, but once he was given the rank he took his job seriously and has improved the community by doing so.

(EDIT: I just read Kalle's post and looked back through the website. Aayrl made a news post announcing Kalle's trial promotion to moderator on 12 June 2015, with the promotion becoming official on 20 June 2015. So no, Kalle absolutely did not become a moderator from making a donation. I remember Kalle received his colored name around the time he made the donation—I even remember asking "Kalle, why are you purple?" in the chat at the time—but like he said, the promotion was several months after that happened.)

One more thing is that Kalle has been a member since 2013, much longer than any other moderator currently on the team. This is especially valuable because of the amount of knowledge he has about the game, the community, and the website over so many years. His previous experience as a moderator will also be incredibly useful, as he is confident in using the backend of the website. Political views aside—as they should be—I fully believe that Kalle should continue to serve as a moderator or administrator for this community. He has helped move the community forward and he can continue to do that now, especially when we need it the most.

I think it’s best to tell you all how this situation arose. I myself truly became active in the community in 2014, though I had lurked on the forums for almost a decade prior to that. Back then the community was less split. Drama had always existed, but we still seemed to have a unified community at the time. I became a moderator in June 2015 after my year of high activity and even before then I had talked a lot to the staff on Skype. Even at this time, with the more lenient style moderation, I was still standing out somewhat among the other moderators by being the most lenient in what I deemed acceptable to post.

And I do think that the style of moderation at this time is why some of us fondly look back at this period of the community. However, a lot did happen that foreshadowed where we were headed. In 2016, we got the “Webchat without mods” discord server, run by noby (who was recently unbanned). This event partly split the community since some didn’t like the complete lack of moderation in the server, so people split off to different servers. In August 2017 we made an official server. It was meant to be a combination of noby’s Webchat without mods and my “The saltmine” since these were the two biggest servers that we used. That’s why in the early days of the server we had some odd channels that might not make sense now.

Now, all of this is already essentially public info. So here I will start to explain some things that went on behind the scenes. hPerks became a moderator at this time due to his help in setting up the new official community server, and already at this point he wanted me demoted. There were several group chats made with both staff and regular members in which hPerks talked about how he wanted me gone. He compiled chatlogs from DMs and noby’s server, consisting mostly of political discussions and hPerks’ annoyance with them, and tried to use it as arguments against my position as moderator. These logs were spread around to the new moderators to try to pit them against me. hPerks hated me on a personal level even before he became moderator and he has been completely incapable of separating that hatred from his role as moderator. And he has also been actively pushing for me to be removed even after his departure from the community as well as pushing for Go’Way to become a new staff member. Derpking has also hated me on a personal level for a long time, which was obvious in the way he talked to me. This made it hard to discuss things in staff chat and I was often simply dismissed or ignored when I tried to bring something up. Instead, staff talk often happened in DMs and in hPerks’ server The O-zone where I couldn’t see what was being said.

Before I continue I will tell you that I did try to reach out to all relevant (previous) staff members and only HiGuy responded. I couldn’t message Matan or Derpking, and hPerks said that he didn’t want to talk.

Now I will say that HiGuy definitely could have done a much better job as community leader, and simply direct other staff members to the staff chat when they had something they wanted to say. However, this was not out of malice, but rather a case of him having to deal with more responsibility than he could handle. I didn’t know it at the time but having to moderate did cause him great amounts of stress.

I will also say that early on in my moderator “career” we did try to have monthly staff meetings, and were successful for a while. A staff meeting, to put it simply, consisted of discussing what had happened during the past month, voting on issues, and talking about what to do going forward. When I was demoted, we hadn’t had a staff meeting in years.

And this also touches on another topic, the fact that most of the staff already wanted to leave. Matan had wanted to leave since at least 2016. So not only were there internal conflicts within the staff team, but several of them didn’t really want anything to do with the community in general.

I myself knew I was on thin ice for years and therefore didn’t try to push too hard when I disagreed with decisions (which was most of the time). But when it came to Yoshi’s ban I definitely did give some pushback, and I even gave pointers for how to deal with the situation better. I intended to make a big post in the staff channel for how to deal with bans in the future to make the community less upset when it happens, but I was demoted before I could do that. To give some context here, when Yoshi was banned, HiGuy, Derpking, and Matan were all in support of banning him, DKman and I were not. All three of the staff who were in support of the ban outright said that they’d ignore the community when people were starting to get upset. I pointed out that the situation could have been handled much better, to which Derpking said that the community would have reacted in the same way regardless of how we as staff had acted, which is completely untrue.

The tension among staff members became even worse. Matan had a long conversation with Azful in which he explained that he was upset that he never got invited to breakout servers. As I was informed that he felt this way I sent him an invitation, which he instantly rejected due to Nockess being present in the server. And due to poor communication, a lot of misinformation got spread here. To the other staff members, this looked like I was pulling the community to a different server that I had made. In reality I had not made the server, and the only person I invited was Matan. So this very tense period got even worse by this, and it sort of was the straw that broke the camel’s back – especially considering how much Matan disliked Yoshi and seeing me defend him.

And since I have now touched upon the topic of breakout servers, I just want to quickly say that the fact that several breakout servers exist shows some level of unhappiness with the way the community is run. And I absolutely do think that it’s the job of the moderators to talk to the community about what the people want. A moderator should essentially be a servant of the community, not be seen as a type of nobility with special privileges. Talking to people publicly about how to go forward rather than making decisions completely in a private chat (which has happened several times) should be the standard.

Now this is also largely public knowledge, but I was not in any way made aware of my demotion until after it had happened. I found out by seeing that I no longer had access to the staff chat, only to shortly thereafter get a DM from HiGuy in which he explained that I was demoted for disagreeing too much. While this might be true, we must also understand that a big part (all?) of the personal hatred towards me is because of political views. And it has always been worrying to me how it seemed like other moderators were unable to separate political disagreements from moderating the community.

I will also say that the community needs a clear leader. The current state of the mods shows this. Two of the three moderators are very passive and don’t really take an initiative in anything. The staff should be leaders and be on top of issues as they arise rather than shy away from them. And having a single leader with other co-mods would also remove a lot of the bystander effect, i.e. mods waiting for other mods to act while they don’t want to do anything themselves.

All in all, I will say that I am glad we don’t have to deal with the corrupt nature of the old team, nor the malice of hPerks and Derpking. I don’t think HiGuy or Matan ever wished harm like the two former did, but they were not cut out for the position.

I knew most of this already, but I'll respond to a couple things that surprised me.

Kalle29 wrote: And he has also been actively pushing for me to be removed even after his departure from the community as well as pushing for Go’Way to become a new staff member.

I'm dismayed to hear this. In my opinion, if someone leaves a community, trying to push their opinions on other people and influence how the community is run is not a good thing to do. It feels like trying to get their way and manipulate things without having to face any of the consequences of their actions. And to what end? If they're choosing not to be a part of the community anymore, it shouldn't matter to them what happens anyway. Or in the other possibility, where they are still involved with the community, just not "officially", it's still a mean thing to do because of the whole "lack of transparency" issue that has been a common thread for this whole situation. Obviously I don't know the whole story here, because I'm just hearing about this for the first time, but that's how it seems on the surface. Anyone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

And the fact that it was multiple people who were behaving this way when you objectively did nothing wrong only speaks more clearly to how corrupt everything was. I hope we can get a fresh start here with a healthier moderation team.

Kalle29 wrote: I will also say that early on in my moderator “career” we did try to have monthly staff meetings, and were successful for a while.

I remember hearing about these! They seemed like a really good way to converse as staff. Would you want to bring them back?

Kalle29 wrote: I myself knew I was on thin ice for years and therefore didn’t try to push too hard when I disagreed with decisions (which was most of the time).

I know it's probably not worth it, but let me know if you want to elaborate on what you disagreed with the staff about. It would give more insight into the vague "disagreements" reason that HiGuy gave for demoting you.

Kalle29 wrote: And since I have now touched upon the topic of breakout servers, I just want to quickly say that the fact that several breakout servers exist shows some level of unhappiness with the way the community is run.

This whole paragraph is, in my opinion, something that needed to be taken seriously long ago, and very nicely worded. I couldn't agree with this more, and transparency would massively improve the health of this community and its members.

Kalle29 wrote: I will also say that the community needs a clear leader.

I think so too. It feels like the community is in a state of flux right now, and while that is partly due to there being so many servers, I think it's also due to there not being any administrators, and as a result the community feels fragile and unstructured. We need someone who knows what they are doing, who has experience, and who can be a voice of reason for the whole community with our best interests at heart.

thanks for opening this discussion up here. ive been pretty vocal about this matter on discord for quite a while, so ill try to reiterate and sum up some points ive made over the past couple months.

to start, i believe the opening post could represent the situation a bit better if some details are included here:

Since then he (Kalle) has had a less than happy relationship with the old staff, disagreeing on nearly every decision they've made as a team. In early January 2021 decided to demote Kalle "Due to considerable differences of opinion about how the community should be run".

i think it is definitely worth mentioning here that while kalle disagreed with other staff, his opinions typically aligned with those of the community. hence when he was wrongfully demoted with no discussion or warning or vote, there was great backlash. the community felt very strongly about his removal.

ill sum up some of the points ive been bringing up on discord so everything is in once place and easy to read

• kalle had been doing a good job as a moderator up until his demotion, and never had a reason to be demoted to begin with. the previous staff was only willing to hear opinions mirroring their own, to the point of taking pq server staff chat to private areas and servers that kalle did not have access to so there wasnt even a chance to disagree. saying some previous staff had a big vendetta against him is not even speculation at this point - even matan admitted in a call with me that it was primarily due to differences in political opinion. (something that i think we can all agree has nothing to do with moderation or marble blast to begin with.) to sum up this bit, he did his job well and there was no reason for him to be removed to begin with. this has no reason even being an uphill battle - the only real request here is to revert a poor decision, to right a wrong.


• there should be someone in staff who has ample experience in the community and as a moderator. the current staff, while still having great things to offer, lacks history and ties with the current community that go way back, as well as have very little experience moderating. having someone there to guide or lead who has these things is not only valuable, but necessary - as a community, it is important to have staff that you can trust. kalle has established this trust, and having some stability and familiarity during these unsure times would be very beneficial to the rebuilding of the community. the past experienced staff left suddenly and unexpectedly without giving much training to the newer staff. this applies to even surface level stuff like the backend, or debatably more importantly, handling situations as they arise, which ill touch on in my next point.


• having kalle lead the team would lighten the load of current staff significantly. a big concern of many is to not want to overwhelm the current staff since they have just had a lot thrust upon them. let us not forget the mountain of pressure higuy felt when all the responsibility fell in his lap and his alone. a situation like that one can be avoided in the future by spreading out responsibilities among a team. something we are hearing more and more often from current mods is a lack of time or energy to handle situations in the community at the time it's requested. having someone to lead staff, specifically someone experienced and resilient such as kalle, would help avoid a situation where all the pressure is being put on a tiny sum of people who are very muchso human and need breaks from time to time.

right now, the community and game as a whole is in a transitional period, and still feels split to an extent. i feel that putting kalle back where he fit best is the final piece to rejoining everyone and will allow us to move forward into a better atmosphere and continue to thrive.

_{also thanks for reading my long post i tried to format it to be easy to read ajshfhasjfdaj}

i also have permission to post mazik's thoughts on the matter

Since I refuse to use the forums on my phone:

At this point in time we definitely need some sort of leader to get us through this unfamiliar period. As of right now the current mods are for the most part unequipped to deal with the problems running this community faces. Without a clear leader of the community we'll just continue to be disorganized and not much progress can happen. Worst case scenario the game and community dies quicker than we expect.

Just like NF said, Kalle has had years of experience being a community member and staff member. Right before higuy and derp left the community, the staff member I had the most faith in was kalle, mainly due to how he interacts with me and the rest of the community. He's always willing to hear any of us out, and be willing to connect with anyone in the community no matter the differences, which was something I unfortunately never got to have too much of with higuy and derp (mostly derp though).

Given his background and how much more in touch I felt with him, I think it would be the best choice to re mod kalle to give our community a sense of direction

Everyone's added so much more detail than I thought there would be. I've obviously left a lot out of my initial post but I didn't think I was capable of giving an accurate, and comprehensive overview of the situation like Kalle did. So I opted to make a brief summary. This issue obviously goes much further than it just being about Kalle. There needs to be some big structural changes to how things are run around here and I don't really know what to do about it, but I think Kalle does. At least he would know better than I what to do, so I would welcome him back to the staff team to help us figure it out, with the community's help of course.

Doomblah wrote: I would welcome him back to the staff team to help us figure it out, with the community's help of course.

This sounds good! What can we as regular community members do to help with this?

Just voicing your opinions on how things can/should be different. We'll figure that out after we make a decision on Kalle.

So the voicing opinions thing will be in the other topic about general community improvements? And I hope the decision about Kalle can be made quickly and publicly if possible.

I don't really have much to say other than I'm fine with reinstating Kalle.

Would you want to bring them back?

Absolutely, they are a great tool to improve the community. One of the things I disagreed most with the old team on is that I always wanted to listen more to the community than they did. To me it's quite an obvious thing to do since it makes the community happy and it puts less pressure on the staff team to come up with improvements on their own.

I know it's probably not worth it, but let me know if you want to elaborate on what you disagreed with the staff about. It would give more insight into the vague "disagreements" reason that HiGuy gave for demoting you.

As stated above we disagreed a lot on how much we should listen to the community. We also disagreed on transparency and banning. The other staff members (Matan, HiGuy, Derp) would semi-frequently joke about banning people and almost made it into a game when it came top the banning of Yoshi. It was extremely unprofessional and they were laughing about it in staff chat. There was also a problem with the staff simply not listening to people when they were told that their methods didn't work. Yoshi himself didn't think it was too clear that he was about to get banned but the other mods simply didn't listen and just said that they had "Dm'd him before". I offered to talk to him myself to make the situation clear but they didn't want that, i.e. they were looking for a ban.

And since Go'way hasn't responded I will assume he doesn't have any differing opinion. He's free to correct me if this is wrong, but the thread has been up for a while so I think it's time to move forward and right this wrong as soon as possible.

thank you Mr. Skeltal

There was also a problem with the staff simply not listening to people when they were told that their methods didn't work.

yeah... staff literally told eachother (in staff chat!) "ugh azful is typing" "don't respond to her" etc. which is a large reason of why i am currently so uneasy about all of this. this was about when i stopped having most conversation in the main server.

We also disagreed on transparency...

when lack of transparency was questioned, it was met with "people will complain no matter what so why bother" and "we just dont always feel like it." this made me a bit

Yoshi himself didn't think it was too clear that he was about to get banned but the other mods simply didn't listen and just said that they had "Dm'd him before".

i have seen the dms. there was no attempt to resolve any issues, and yoshi was asking legitimate questions about why the things he was saying werent being received well, and examples of when he had broken ToS, which was met with "not about to explain and argue this" and "its a waste of my time"

i.e. they were looking for a ban.

matan told me in plain english that they had been looking for a ban for years. the dm he got (after he was already banned, btw) began with "i know this seems abrupt", meaning they knew it was uncalled for. overall that whole situation was just handled poorly.


anyways, just thought id give my insight there since i reached out directly to people involved for answers when this happened, considering the staff at the time didnt want to publicly divulge any information regarding the ban. ...also the bit about "dont respond to azful" maybe stuck with me a little

Kalle29 wrote: To me it's quite an obvious thing to do since it makes the community happy and it puts less pressure on the staff team to come up with improvements on their own.

Yes, absolutely! To me too it just seems like common sense. I know you'll take that into consideration once you are reinstated, and it is very reassuring to think of that.

Also I knew most of the stuff you said in the middle paragraph, as well as what azful contributed, but thank you both for putting it in a place where everyone can see it.

Kalle29 wrote: And since Go'way hasn't responded I will assume he doesn't have any differing opinion. He's free to correct me if this is wrong, but the thread has been up for a while so I think it's time to move forward and right this wrong as soon as possible.

I absolutely agree. I'll be really happy to see this fixed so that (i) we can benefit from your leadership again and (ii) we can move on to the next topic of how to improve the community in general, because I think Doomblah said there was going to be a separate forum topic about that. The quicker the better!

This is a bit late, but I am finally getting around to write this post after collecting my thoughts.

I first want to apologize to anyone who thought I was being unfairly generous to the previous staff team, and I also want to apologize for being stubborn about the server's old ways. In fact, I was unfairly generous.

I used to have a somewhat favorable view of the previous staff team, but after reading all this new information (which was quite upsetting!), my opinion has completely flipped. If I knew about the wrongdoings, such as trying to find an excuse to permanently ban Yoshicraft224, my opinion would have been quite unfavorable. Remember the idea of transparency...?

Regarding transparency, Marbleblast.com's previous staff members had a unique problem. They didn't just lack transparency; they were maliciously opaque. Anyone remember when some of the channels were being repurposed, and many opt-in channels were nuked? There was exactly zero community input, and when the changes happened, previous staff members refused to answer any questions until they were asked dozens of times. The response was mediocre at best, employing faulty reasoning while also demonstrating how out of touch most the team was with the community's desires. Regarding Yoshicraft224's ban, every staff member conveniently went radio silent as soon as it happened.

After reading about the DMs, staff chat, etc., it is clear that most of the previous team did not care one bit about the well-being of the community. Not to mention, they literally couldn't tolerate differing opinions. Historically, when I have seen that someone gets demoted from a staff team for "disagreements", the vagueness is meant to conceal more sinister motives and actions. However, in this case, the statement was to be taken at face value. Kalle was demoted just because he disagreed too much, which is not an okay reason.

Seeing that the staff team is a lot fresher now and more community-oriented, it's safe to say that we are able to move on from the past. Kalle29's reinstatement as moderator greatly helps. I'll probably write something in the post about restructuring the community.