Official Everybody Edits Forums

LukeM

Member

From: England

Joined: 2016-06-03

Posts: 3,009

Website

I'm just not enjoying this anymore

So, the rumours going around probably deserve and explanation.

Yes, I have decided to leave the Everybody Edits staff team, sorry for this short novel of a post, but this has been building up for a while so I thought it best to tell the whole story. Most of this is already public knowledge, I just thought it would be good to get some of it off my chest and tie it all together. I have tried to be unbiased but this is just my point of view, so it probably tips things in my favour a bit, I guess make of it what you will.

(Note: I no longer have access to the staff discord so I can’t fact check my quotes or the orders of events, but I’ve tried to be fairly accurate from what I remember)

It's no secret that me and Chris haven't been getting along very well for a while now, this generally started back in the Alpha when we were discussing where the game would be heading. Chris wanted certain limitations and restrictions and I disagreed, which led to a long debate about these sorts of things. Of course, it’s alright for people to disagree, but he tended to pick out and criticise my wording or bring up a load of analogies that didn't really make sense instead of giving clear reasons against the general ideas I was proposing, and I tended to spend a while trying to explain what I meant by that exact wording, and trying to explain why I didn't really think the analogies he was making made sense. This has ended up causing several needlessly long and fairly irrelevant discussions while I've been part of the staff team, and a toxic relationship between us.

He decided to solve this problem by hiding information from me and the rest of the staff so we couldn't discuss it. At first this was just chunks of the EEU roadmap, for example often the first I’d hear of a lot of plans would be when he posted them publicly on the forums, which was annoying and it made us feel like less of a team working on a shared interest and more of his (almost) free labour. This might have been fine if it were a job, but Everybody Edits is a hobby project for us, so if we’re giving our time almost for free I’d want us to feel more like peers.

Then came the incident with me, Phina, and Gosha. Tensions were high and things were behind schedule, so a lot of pressure was being put on us. We had been working on an update for EE, and we were at the point where we were ready to upload. The button was pressed and… everything crashed. The game was reverted to the previous version and we looked to the error logs to see what the problem was, Gosha saw a load of ‘nonsense’ error messages so he cleared the error history (still not really sure why he did this). What he described sounded similar to some other error messages I had seen in the past caused by some PlayerIO weirdness, but we couldn’t know for sure whether this was the case as we no longer had the error logs to prove it. We spent a while testing things on our development servers and looking for problems but we found nothing, so in the end we explained that we had no option but to start up the servers again, and it’d either be a PlayerIO thing and it’d just work, or we’d get the error messages we needed and we could revert again. Of course this was unacceptable, how could we suggest such a thing? Intentionally uploading code that previously didn’t work? We tried to explain that we had no other option but in the end he said that if we uploaded it and it broke again then we were both fired. We again tried to explain that we didn’t really have a choice but at this point Gosha and Xeno were getting angry, and saying things to each other that probably shouldn’t have been said. That was when Gosha was fired.

At this point I was fed up, I was saying that we were the ones that knew what we were doing here, and that he should be trusting that we were correct, this was when I was fired. Some time during this Phina tried to complain about how Chris was acting (can’t remember exactly what order this happened in), as she had done several times in the past, this again got out of control and she was fired too. Later on when Josh came back he recompiled and uploaded the code and everything worked fine, and later on he had convinced Chris to hire me back. We ended up discussing a lot of the problems we had with each other, in which he agreed to share more information, and we tried to make some changes that would prevent these sorts of arguments and debates in the future.

This is when the hacking started. People weren’t happy with what had happened, and Chris had renamed Gosha’s account, making him think it had been deleted, so Atilla somehow found a backdoor that allowed him to delete Chris’s account. He gave us a textual version of the account data to restore it, but this was only supposed to be for debugging purposes, so it wasn’t in an easy to use format (it was loosely based on JSON, but very invalid so you couldn’t use a premade JSON parser, and had no type information), so this was quite a bit of a pain to restore. Atilla claimed that this was a bug that specifically allowed the deletion of accounts, but we removed some development tools to be safe, and it died down for a bit.

This was around when I was moved to working on EEU instead of EE, which started off fairly well, we still weren’t being told a lot so I was still pestering Chris to share some of his plans, and morale was still low from the three of us being fired and the hacking incident, but other than that nothing was too bad. EEU was now significantly behind schedule though, so I tried to convince Chris to push the aim for the public release (now less than a month away) back to the summer holiday, as we wanted to get things done right, and if we rushed things and ended up with a lot of the problems EE had all over again, a lot of this would have been all for nothing. In the end Josh was a bit more optimistic than me about when this could be finished, and Chris changed the deadline to ‘Early 2019’.

The physics engine was one of the first things I worked on and was a very interesting project, and being mostly designed by me, not knowing what else was going on wasn’t really a problem. It went fairly slowly as I was now at university, so I had a limited amount of time that I could spend on EE, but once term ended I managed to wrap things up and after a relatively small amount of bugfixing the project seemed to be successful. Things were behind schedule but what we had was a good foundation on which to build a better game.

During this time EE started being attacked again, this time with bots spamming some non-family-friendly links. This was another hit to morale but we eventually managed to get this sorted out, but straight after they managed to somehow get access to the database and do things like giving other players admin and delete account data, at this point we audited everything we had access to, removed several keys used for development access to the database, and all created new accounts with new credentials and fewer permissions just in case that was the problem, and the attacks seemed to stop. At this point I worked on creating a proper tool to restore PlayerIO exports (which are slightly less invalid JSON) and managed to get the affected accounts restored. Shortly after this the first data breach happened. This was a mix of some data which to my knowledge had always been publicly accessible but probably shouldn’t have been (although some previous members of staff said they didn’t remember it being public, so that may have been changed by someone at some point in the previous year or so), and a PlayerIO export of all users emails and facebook names. At some point were made aware that someone knew of a PlayerIO exploit which allowed anyone to download these exports without permission, you just had to guess the time at which they were made (which was fairly doable), and I had found an exploit which allowed a development server token from any staff member (even if passwords had been changed, and I believe even if they were no longer a staff member) to get full database access. At this point we made all data that did not absolutely need to be public private, removed some data like IP addresses from the database, and notified PlayerIO of these issues. They quickly fixed the export issue, and manually invalidated all previous development server access tokens, and the problems seemed to die down.

Now morale was pretty low, we were all down from the hacking and the data breach, and Chris’s plans were still being kept from us (which at this point I was complaining about fairly frequently), but EEU was nearing a live Alpha release, so we tried to power through and I started working on the server hosting. This was also an interesting project and something I hadn’t done before, so there was quite a bit of learning involved, which I always find enjoyable. After I believe a few weeks and just before I went back to university I had a server architecture planned out and the hosting was set up, so the EEU Alpha was live! (Although now quite late)

At some point there was another incident where people’s gems were spent and friends were deleted, I quickly restored friends using my previous tool, but PlayerIO exports don’t include purchase information so I was unable to restore gems using the same process as before and Chris ended up scanning through a lot of the sales manually to try to spot ones that looked fraudulent and reverse them. This just seemed like someone managed to sign in to other accounts rather than get database access, so it wasn’t as hard to fix, it looked like someone had somehow managed to get the private key for the old linked account system, so we generated a new one and all seemed to be fixed.

At this point Chris showed us a document containing some of his plans for EEU, the idea was that this was a Google doc where we all had suggestion rights which would allow us to give feedback and generally work on ideas as more of a team. I wasn’t there at the time as I believe I was back at university at this point, but from what he says he got annoyed when some of the other staff had a bit of fun doing Google doc things (you probably know the sorts of things I mean) so he scrapped the document.

This was now exam term at university so didn’t get much done during this time, I changed some small parts of the physics engine to make it easier for Josh and the rest of the staff to tweak the constants, and did a bit of research into the rest of the hosting setup, but other than that I had little spare time.

By the time I finished my exams we were now significantly behind even the new deadline, so Chris was putting more pressure on us to get things done quickly, although I still didn’t have much time as I was taking part in a full time summer internship. I started working on the databases (a fast searchable SQL database for storing player data, and a larger but not searchable file database for storing worlds), this is when I realised that we had a problem. Josh has loosely based the previous room system on PlayerIO’s and what he was familiar with in Flash and Haxe, which meant that things were designed synchronously (meaning that we couldn’t easily wait for something like a database operation to occur without locking up the whole world until it loaded or ignoring threading issues and introducing a lot of nasty bugs that couldn’t easily be fixed). Just to be clear I don’t think he’s at fault for this, it’s just that he had had been using languages that didn’t support modern asynchronous code (which made these sorts of things much easier), so he had no way of knowing that what he was doing wasn’t the current accepted way of doing it. I continued to implement the databases using asynchronous code but as the main server didn’t support this this meant if we wanted to avoid those nasty bugs we could only load data when rooms were first created, and we couldn’t wait for data to be saved.

Unfortunately the hacking now started up once more, someone had access to the EE backend again and were putting non-family-friendly images in worlds. I believe that minimaps were removed straight away and some other in-game measures may have been taken, and I think this was this time that I asked for some pretty extreme measures to be taken for the backend as what we did previously obviously wasn’t enough. All non-critical access to the backend to be removed, so this included me, Josh, and Cercul, leaving only Chris able to make any database changes and update the game. I then began updating my previous tool to work with worlds, and created a program that would scan through worlds and spot some of the tell tail patterns left by this hacker then restore them to their previous backup. This was the summer that reached almost 40 degrees C, and I was still in London for my internship in a small student accommodation place with a window that opened maybe 10cm and no air conditioning, so working in these conditions was pretty hard, but I just about got the worlds restored. However I failed to notice that worlds had continued to be compromised after the first countermeasures we took, so although I had restored almost all of the worlds that were compromised originally, there were some new ones that I missed. Chris had some fairly colourful things to say about me after this, and unfortunately they had removed the easily detectable signs so after trying to do this automatically for a while, Josh ended up creating a tool that rendered a screen full of minimaps of worlds and looking through every single world that had changed since the attacks first started (kudos to him for this, it must have taken ages). However we weren’t done, someone managed to log people’s passwords for a few days from the EE site. After this we immediately shut down the game, and I convinced Chris that we couldn’t start it back up again until some even more extreme measures were taken. This led to me moving the whole site to static hosting that only I have access to (at this point it was very unlikely that it was my account that was compromised, as my access to the EE backend was removed pretty early on and the attacks had continued), and without anything to do with PlayerIO just in case this was another problem with them. Since then luckily there haven’t seemed to be any problems.

Now we were even further behind schedule, a good chunk of the time I had over the summer had already been used up, and morale was somehow even lower than before. Luckily we were at least fairly close to Closed Beta, the main thing blocking us was the authentication, which I was working on while Josh worked on generally polishing the game. This is something I really didn’t want to rush, especially after what had happened, so this ended up taking up most of the rest of my summer holiday, but Open Beta was finally released just as I left back for university.

So, now was time to get back the big project, the server rework. I really didn’t want us to need to rework things again, so this time I spent a long time researching our options and planning out how we’d want things to expand in the future so I could make sure the new server system could easily have other systems that we would need in the future added to it. While I was back at university things went fairly slowly for obvious reasons, and to be honest I wasn’t very motivated, from a mix of the hacking, the fairly unrealistic deadlines being set and passed and the pressure Chris was putting on us because of it, and how Chris had been treating us and certain members of the community. At this point I believe I said that I thought it could be finished over the break.

Then came the Christmas holidays. I believe that this was the point at which Chris started intentionally hiding as much information as possible from me because he believed that if I didn’t know about anything else that was planned he could force me into spending more time on the server rework. All this meant I just wasn’t really enjoying working on the game anymore. At the start I spent a bit of time working on the server rework, Chris asked if I could work on portals, so I said that it would delay the server rework but I didn’t think it would take too long, and we wanted to set up a Secret Santa, which I believe I said would take a couple days so Chris said that would be ok. I did admittedly get a bit side-tracked as our block state system was a bit of a pain to work with from a physics standpoint at the time, so I spent a week or two maybe designing and implementing something that made that easier and implementing portals on top of that, but the Secret Santa was finished in about as long as expected. As it was Christmas I also spent a lot of time with family and friends, so in the end the server rework was delayed by a few weeks maybe so I still had quite a bit of work left at the end of the holiday that I didn’t manage to get done in time.

Since then Chris has been putting more and more pressure on us to get things done, and has been trying more and more things to try to force me into getting things done faster, to the point that he once said that if I didn’t ignore university and get the server rework done there and then he would fire me, which I obviously said no to, as since I joined the staff I have been clear that university comes first, and that I might not have any time to work on EE during term time.

So here we are, the following holiday, Chris has said some more unacceptable things to and about me and members of the community, and he continues to try to do stupid things to force me into working on EE more even though I’ve made it clear that this just makes my time less enjoyable, for example for the April fools update he didn’t tell me anything about it until maybe a few of hours before we were supposed to update as he thought I would waste time working on EE? Josh (wasn’t told/forgot?) that he needed to be there, and I didn’t know when the update would be (there might have been a short window between when I knew when the update was planned to be released and when Josh left for the night, but not sure about this) or that he needed to be there so I couldn’t have reminded him, so I ended up having to spend several hours setting things up to compile EE myself (as Flash is losing support finding compatible versions of compilers and things is getting increasingly more difficult, so when I got a new computer fairly recently as EE wasn’t really supposed to have any more updates I never set things up). I asked to have one last staff meeting to try to change some of these things, but it seemed like not all that much was going to change, he did agree to make the team channels in our staff server public but reverted it within minutes, and after a vote to change it back he disabled message history to make the change effectively useless so he could technically respect the vote while not actually changing anything (admittedly it didn’t pass with a huge margin, possibly because a lack of information was more of a problem for me than the rest of the staff, not sure, but it still passed). He has made it clear that he’s not going to stop doing those things to try to force me to work more on EEU while there’s something he thinks needs doing quickly. (He said that when things like the server rework were finished he’d stop, but not before that, and there will undoubtedly be times like this again in the future.)

So now I just don’t believe I can enjoy working on the staff team anymore while Chris is in charge, so I’ve made the decision to leave. I’m not sure how much of this is me and how much is him, I am certainly slow at getting things done but I don’t believe I’m unacceptably slow, and I do tend to seem to stretch out debates quite a bit, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem when I’m talking to other members of staff and I’ve heard from other past/current staff members that they have also had these sorts of problems working with him. I guess there might just be a type of person that he just can’t work with, and I might be that type of person. I do believe that he wants the best for the game, and to be honest his plans for the game that we have seen have been mostly good, if for example this was a job so the expectations for enjoyment and information were lower and more time could be spent on the game, and he managed to deal with his anger problems I do believe that he could successfully manage a game. I do genuinely wish the rest of the staff team the best and hope that they can find enjoyment where I no longer can and I’d like to thank the community for generally being supportive of most of the staff team (most of the time). I am genuinely sad that I have to go, but if I can no longer enjoy doing what I do then I don’t want to be stuck doing something I don’t enjoy.

I wish you all the best and hope to stay in touch as a member of the EE community,
Luke

Norwee

Formerly NorwegianboyEE

From: Norway

Joined: 2015-03-16

Posts: 3,773

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Don’t keep up a job you find no enjoyment in. You made the right call.

---

★              ☆        ★        ☆         ★
   ☆    ★                     ★

TundrumMax

Formerly Memomemo

Joined: 2017-10-26

Posts: 447

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

a lot of the problems created (especially with timing) seems to be to do with University getting in the way

this is why you should never hire young adults around 20. not because of their attitude or skill, but because they're too damn busy with education to do what you want

---

I can speak by breathing in but it sounds like a dying horse

Signature by HG

Lictor666

Guest

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

this isn't a team it's a F sketch

time to stop playing eeu

...

will you join EEW staff ?

AllenCaspe9510

Member

From: Heart Locket

Joined: 2018-03-24

Posts: 901

Website

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

At least you get to be developer on the forums

---

I Animate Stuff

Gosha

Member

From: Russia

Joined: 2015-03-15

Posts: 6,211

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

a lot of the problems created (especially with timing) seems to be to do with University getting in the way

this is why you should never hire young adults around 20. not because of their attitude or skill, but because they're too damn busy with education to do what you want

You clearly missed the point of the thread.

____

About the situation when Luke and I were fired:
I was making an minor update. When it was done, i as always tested int on our development server. Everything seemed to be working so i had no expectations that it might break when i upload in on the main server.
<sidenote>
    PlayerIO error log is a mess. You can't usually get a very good, detailed description of the problem. Other than that, there were also some errors that are there but we can't really do anything about them.
    For example, "Player <player> send "m" messages too quickly". With time, PlayerIO ErrorLog gets clotted with useless error messages and it's not always easy to find the ones you actually need to see.
    It's safe to delete them since you don't get any real information from them, major errors are always fixed before it gets to that point. I've cleared the error log many times before.
</sidenote>

As i said, i believed it was safe to upload update to the main server. So i did. And EE crashed and wouldn't load.
I looked into PlayerIO ErrorLog and saw a vague useless playerio error (it was a long time ago i can't remember it word by word but it said something like this:) "PlayerIO Internal Error" and nothing more to hint what was actually going on.
I reported to the discord staff channel that ee is down, quoted the error message. And said that i am going to clear out the error log to get more precise errors.
I was interested if there is any messages i could've missed because of the mess. So i cleared out the error to have a clear picture.
However, i couldn't view the errors after that, what happened? Xenonetix blocked my access to errorlogs entirely and refused to give it back.
Luke and I of course reverted the update and tested everything again on the dev server. Everything was working fine, so we concluded that it was a playerio issue and it wasn't my wrong-doing.

Xenonetix already got mad (as he usually does) that i deleted the errorlog (that didn't contain any significant errors and he himself didn't use it at all, since it was useful for developers only and he had no idea of its real value).
Luke and I said to xenonetix that we need to upload the "broken" code again, because everything worked fine on dev server, and uploading the code is the only way to find out if it was my fault (ee would crash again) and we could fix the issue, or it was one-time playerio bug (and ee would work).

Xenonetix gave us an ultimatum: If we upload the code and ee breaks, we are fired, which is super unprofessional and stupid. We are the developers, owner should trust us in development. It's okay if ee will be down just for 30 seconds to debug the unknown issue. I got into heated argument with xenonetix and realized that it's impossible to work with this guy professionally. So i decided to quit, but before that, tell everything what i think about him. He of course fired me. Later i found out that my code was fine and pushing it a second time to the server didn't cause any trouble. So it was playerio issue after all.

As you can see, a simple internal playerio error escalated to xenonetix firing both of his developers. This is unprofessional and childish behavior.

__

lol read this thread and then remember xenonetix quote after i told him that ee is downhill and he isn't a good manager: "i don't see a reason why i should quit, if i can't motivate my developers with anything but money, i can't see how anybody else would. I need a community manager, who would talk to the community while i would be an owner". That's a guy who clearly can't see how wrong he is.

__

Good luck luke. Finally you quit too and feel free of this nightmare. Hoping you would get more fun and excitement in other projects.

TundrumMax

Formerly Memomemo

Joined: 2017-10-26

Posts: 447

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

TundrumMax wrote:

    a lot of the problems created (especially with timing) seems to be to do with University getting in the way

    this is why you should never hire young adults around 20. not because of their attitude or skill, but because they're too damn busy with education to do what you want

You clearly missed the point of the thread.

I was making a point of how because of LukeM's University exams, a lot of problems occured that disrupted development time, which caused Xeno to get more and more frustrated.

Besides, I was simply making a comment about that one thing, no need to be so rude.

---

I can speak by breathing in but it sounds like a dying horse

Signature by HG

Falk

Member

From: Index

Joined: 2015-04-28

Posts: 284

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Teens go to school, young people go to university, older people go to work.
There's no escape no matter what age you are. There's always something in real life that will undoubtly take priority over any hobby. And developing EE is a hobby for all of them because how on earth would that be a real job at EE's popularity and funds.

It doesn't really matter if it's Luke or anybody else. Work needs to be done well, not fast. Well and fast is a luxury, a luxury EE never had because it's a kid's flash game on the internet.

this is why you should never hire young adults around 20. not because of their attitude or skill, but because they're too damn busy with education to do what you want

Who else are you going to hire then? The only reason all staff is staff right now is because they were kids and grew up playing EE.
Good luck hiring some 40 year old master coder for this meaningless speck of dust in the gaming industry.

Zumza

Member

From: root

Joined: 2015-02-17

Posts: 4,656

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

You made the right choice Luke. I wish you best of luck to find something you enjoy doing!

---

Everybody edits, but some edit more than others

TaskManager

Formerly maxi123

From: i really should update this

Joined: 2015-03-01

Posts: 9,465

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

good job luke, its about time
come over to EEW we have face blocks and coloured usernames

to the point that he once said that if I didn’t ignore university and get the server rework done there and then he would fire me,

lol this is ridiculous
show me a sane person that would prioritise an unpaid and unenjoyable side project over university/school/other real affairs

---

signature by HG, profile picture by bluecloud, thank!!
previous signature by drstereos

Different55

Forum Admin

Joined: 2015-02-07

Posts: 16,575

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

good job luke, its about time
come over to EEW we have face blocks and coloured usernames

to the point that he once said that if I didn’t ignore university and get the server rework done there and then he would fire me,

lol this is ridiculous
show me a sane person that would prioritise an unpaid and unenjoyable side project over university/school/other real affairs

Even in my real-life-actual-job-that-I-get-actually-paid-a-living-wage-for, school takes priority. I've called in to work so many times because I needed the extra time for a school project or assignment. That might sometimes come at an inconvenient time and put my real-life-job-that-affects-real-life-people in a bad spot occasionally, but they're reasonable people and wouldn't dream of holding it against me, let alone firing me, because they also know school takes priority.

---

"Sometimes failing a leap of faith is better than inching forward"
- ShinsukeIto

Tomahawk

Forum Mod

From: UK

Joined: 2015-02-18

Posts: 2,847

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Moved to Game Business.

EDIT: People might not appreciate things like this being on record in this subforum but they’re important bits of history and shouldn’t be lost in the mess that is Game Discussion.

---

One bot to rule them all, one bot to find them. One bot to bring them all... and with this cliché blind them.

peace

Member

From: admin land

Joined: 2015-08-10

Posts: 9,226

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

holy **** lukem

---

thanks hg for making this much better and ty for my avatar aswell

Kikikan

Member

From: Hungary

Joined: 2015-08-10

Posts: 204

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

This was actually depressing to just read through. Hope you get better!

Xenonetix is just unsuitable for any kind of management. Sad to see the game we all loved at some point had the worst possible owners a project can have.

Minisaurus

Banned

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

I think you took a good choice, and a hard one, you have to focus on study for the U, programming EE was a hobby, and not a good hobby if it wasn´t fun to do, and if you were having bad time doing so.
I don´t tell you that you could had to wait until better times arrives for the staff, since that probably will be much later on

den3107

Member

From: Netherlands

Joined: 2015-04-24

Posts: 1,025

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Teens go to school, young people go to university, older people go to work.
There's no escape no matter what age you are. There's always something in real life that will undoubtly take priority over any hobby.

To be honest, university was by far the busiest time of my life. University aims for 40-hour "work weeks" (at least mine did, we always laughed when that question came by during semester reviews...), but even if you're try-harding just a little bit, you're easily at 50 (essentially giving you a 7-day work week).
High school I personally didn't care too much about, so I spent as little time as possible, but the knowledge is probably far too little to actually hire somebody (let alone the legal issues you'd have to double-check).
Now that I have a full-time job, I just work 8 hours a week, 5 days a week, and no more. When I'm at home, I'm at home and I can do whatever I want (aside from cooking and such). So I do, to an extend, agree that a university student might not be your best hire. Not if you're expecting you need to pressure them (since believe it or not, they're already under a ton of pressure).

Btw, for the record, I'm 22 now.

Edit:
Funny thing we have in my job (going to use some terms I'm not going to bother to explain). Obviously it talks about a multi-disciplinary team which you can't realise in a project such as EEU:
As developers (even as a lead developer), you don't get informed about deadlines, budgets or all those shenanigans, because you shouldn't. If we'd get behind schedule, the product owner can really only do 3 things:
• Talk to the client about postponing the deadline (yeah, not going to happen).
• Tell the team's organiser they're behind schedule (still no specifics on exact deadline given), who can then only either given gentle nudges, or re-arrange assignments to try and speed things up (e.g. an intern might lose ownership of an issue because they're excruciatingly slow).
• Drop user stories for this deadline and update your planning for future deadlines accordingly (e.g. shifting user stories one deadline up the chain).

peace

Member

From: admin land

Joined: 2015-08-10

Posts: 9,226

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

lukem im gonn amiss you for ever as staff you started as a good bot porgrammer then wa spromoted to staff but now..

---

thanks hg for making this much better and ty for my avatar aswell

Xenonetix

Past Owner

From: Moving on with my life

Joined: 2015-03-07

Posts: 899

Website

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

While the majority of what Luke says is true, there are definitely a few issues with what was said that I have to defend myself over.

Firstly, let's get this one out of the way quickly considering people are already latching on to it:

to the point that he once said that if I didn’t ignore university and get the server rework done there and then he would fire me,

This is untrue. I have been encouraging and supportive of Luke's university and learning just as I have been encouraging and supportive of Josh's other development projects for Light Wolf Studios. We all have lives to lead, and I'm fully aware that we have to work around them to get things done. At no point did I say he had to "ignore university". It would be crazy for anyone to suggest his university learning should not have come first.

That being said, every single "deadline" Luke believes I have attempted to enforce have been based entirely upon the information and projections for the future that the developers have informed me of. I have never thrown out any dates arbitrarily, but I do not think it's unreasonable that, considering Luke projected the Server Rework could be completed in around 2-4 weeks of full-time work from start to finish. He claimed first that it could realistically likely be done by the end of September, so I told the community we were hoping to have it done by October. Then he said he could likely get it finished over the Christmas holidays, so I told the community we were hoping to get it done by end of January. He was consistently bringing excuses and reasons why it wasn't getting done, and I was consistently seeing no progress and no results. Let's take Graphics for example - The Graphics Team are fantastic, and generally post their progress as they're going along. We see multiple versions of the items, give feedback, suggest changes, and there is clear progress being made every step of the way. That's great! With the Server Rework, we were seeing none of this. Luke claims I was holding back information from him, (which I'll address in a moment,) but the exact same could definitely have been said of him, considering he repeatedly didn't want to explain any of his progress, and we were seeing no results.

I'd also like to explain why the Server Rework was so important, although Luke went into a little detail on it himself. He blames morale on me, but one of the reasons morale is so low is because the Server Rework is a massive step towards completing other things, so progress on everything else for the game is constantly slowing down and grinding to a halt the longer it isn't complete. There's only so much we can realistically add without the Server Rework. At the moment, it's mainly blocks, smileys, and UI changes, and that's it. Almost anything that's related to 'updating a user's account' required this Server Rework to be completed. As such, things we currently are unable to do without it include:

• Energy System

• Shop System

• World Purchasing

• Jewel Purchasing

• Membership Programs

• Progress Save System

• Auto-Saving

• Moderation System

• Friends System

• Messaging System

• Game Settings

I often include the Smiley Customizer in the list because I don't think it's realistic to have the Smiley Customizer before we have the shop, but we could technically add the Smiley Customizer without the Server Rework.

As such, morale for everyone, including me, has been declining, getting worse and worse mentally, as long as the Server Rework was not completed. I suggested as many different ways I could think of to get the Server Rework completed faster so that we could get moving on implementing the more exciting stuff and boosting morale.

However, Luke was overruling me at almost every juncture. Even though I suggested we attempt to recruit new developers to work on it from September last year, Luke repeatedly stated that would be a mistake, and would not speed up the process. It's quite evident to me now that, if we had indeed recruited new people last year, chances are that some of them could potentally have been working on it during the times Luke was unavailable with his university work and life, and it could have been realistically completed by December at the latest, but Luke refused. In addition to that, he also refused to explain at any point what I could do to help speed up the process, but instead just kept saying lines such as "It'll just take however long it takes", giving me no shred of hope for the future. I wish I could have trusted him to deliver on something, but considering we've still seen little-to-no evidence that any work on the Server Rework has even been done, and the only thing we have is his word on it, it was very difficult to ever understand why this unique individual was seemingly purposely holding back everyone else's enjoyment of the project for his own reasons.

In addition, I was hearing from a few different programmers from the community how they could have gotten the Server Rework done by now, and questioning why progress was so slow on it, and I kept being put in a position where I could not give an answer, because Luke could not provide me with one. He had said it would have been done by now, and it wasn't, and then he just kept listing excuses and reasons why it had not been done. This would have been fine if Luke had ever finished such statements with "But now I'm getting back on track, I think it could be done by the end of this month if all goes well", and that would have been great! I wouldn't hold him to getting it done by the end of the month, but I would remain hopeful that it would get done in that time, and if he then says "A few issues came up during testing that means progress will be delayed a little more", also fantastic! This is generally how Josh has operated, and it's worked very well.

Sadly, instead of this, I would have to spend hours trying to get any such information from Luke, as if I was trying to wring water out of a stone. In terms of recent 'threats of firing', the threats were for if he didn't complete it by the end of October 2020 (and later December 2020, which he FINALLY agreed to simply because of the existing Flash deadline out of our control). I REALLY do not consider that unreasonable, considering this alleged 2-4 week project not being completed in the course of over a year (from September 2019 to October 2020) is ludicrous. In that same time, we could have hired and trained new developers, and had them do it, with relative ease, and Luke, after 7 months (from September to April) of absolute refusal to allow us to recruit new developers until the Server Rework was completed meant that he'd put himself entirely in control of the situation.

Yet, this situation he was in control of was "just a hobby to him". Now, don't get me wrong, it's 'just a hobby' for many of us, but it's also a passion project that we want to succeed, not for money or glory, but for the community. I have been a member of the community since 2010, and I took this project on as owner with the intent of making it live on beyond the time Flash dies in 2020, rather than it just dying out completely. We have had to overcome so many hurdles, as Luke has outlined in his post. I still have not been able to finish sorting out every account that was affected in the Gem Spending hacks of last year, because thousands of accounts were affected, with around 30-40 having all items removed from them as well. The way Player.IO works, as Luke intimated, meant there was no simple "undo" for these actions. What took the hackers a matter of seconds to achieve created a ripple effect throughout the remaining life of EE.

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of this also was that Luke was also put entirely in control of being able to update Everybody Edits itself, meaning Luke's presence was needed for every EE update. Again, he refused to allow either Josh or myself the ability to update, claiming that we probably wouldn't be updating EE that often any more, and I mistakenly agreed with him at the time, putting my trust in him that he could be present during the times we wanted to update EE, and that enough updates would happen to EEU that updates to EE would no longer really be required.

As such, he'd positioned himself, whether intentionally or not, in a position of complete control, over the progress of both EE and EEU, and I was trapped. Trapped in a position where I had to be completely dependent on this individual who would refuse to keep me in the loop with his own plans and schedule, refused to work to deadlines, and refused to show any progress of anything he was working on. He would constantly just bring up the past events, and reasons why things hadn't happened, when I just kept wanting to hear about the future, and what to expect from it.

This then led to a situation where I felt I couldn't share plans with him either. It was a ****-for-tat scenario - He wasn't keeping me informed, so I wasn't keeping him informed. He claims I was purposefully keeping things from "all staff", which is entirely untrue. I was purposely keeping things from him, and he knows it was personal, and it was specifically him I was keeping things from, and that's where he had an issue. As for other reasons which led to this, the fact that whenever I seemed to keep him in the loop about something, he would immediately jump to me saying "I would like this done by this time" as a deadline, and then he would go off and work on whatever that was. The most notable update that keeps coming up in regards to this is Portals, considering I said that I would like to get Portals into the game as soon as possible, considering we were expecting to be able to have them implemented from the start of Closed Beta.

Luke's timeline is skewed here, because he claims he started work on Portals from the Christmas holidays. If that's true, then he had been lying about ever working on them since September, considering we were talking about implementing them in September and October, but that's mainly an aside. I also wanted to add the Portals, and collect feedback about them from the community, so we could make relevant adjustments, but those adjustments were not time-pressured or time-specific, and Luke said he wanted to be present to collect feedback about Portals and make adjustments. I did not agree with this - Sure, he could play EEU for a bit with the portals, and see what people were saying, but he then proceeded to seemingly spend the remainder of the Christmas Holiday spare time he had working on the Portals, when we had done what we'd set out to achieve, which was adding them, and we'd collect feedback from the community over time. Luke had previously stated that he should be able to get the Server Rework to at least near completion during that Holiday period, and instead chose to work on Portals throughout the entire time of the holidays in his spare time, even though we'd added them near the start, if not prior to, the holidays beginning. They were added on 23rd December, leaving the remaining time to be spent on the Server Rework, being the highest priority item at the time (and still to this day) to get done.

But Luke didn't seem to work on the Server Rework at all during the holiday period. Term didn't start again until January 19th, and during that entire time, he was working on Portals, and a little bit on the game's physics. After all this, came the time where we calculated, with massive leeway, that the Server Rework was unlikely to be done before October at the rate it was going, based on Luke's life, term-times, and internship work during the Summer Holidays. I'd like to show a conversation from our Dev Team chat at this point (and Luke chose not respond to the questions being posed):

▼Dev Team Discussion

As such, Luke put himself in a position where, no matter what any of the rest of us said or thought, he was in complete control of the future of EE Universe, and he'd refuse to give us any indications of when he would finally complete the thing holding almost 'everything' in EEU back.

In the end, I gave up. Luke said in a recent staff meeting how I should "stop" trying to motivate him more, but I'd stopped trying to motivate him from around January or possibly February. The only question I'd really ask him was "How's the server rework going?" in a vague desperate hope that perhaps I'd magically one day get some answer that gave me a shred of hope that anything was happening or being done. I'd 'purposely been holding back' information from him simply because the evidence had shown that whenever I share information with him, he'd get distracted and leap on that instead. Even a recent conversation about adding Slopes into the game meant he clearly was starting to talk about how they should act and work, and I had to try to steer him back to suggesting we can get Slopes done after the Server Rework's done.

I truly believe the Server Rework being completed would have been a massive turning point in EEU's development. Updates were likely to snowball at that point, with far more cool and fun things to be added to the game in shorter spaces of time. I'd agreed completely reasonably to keep him more in the loop as soon as the Server Rework was done, as is the case with his final conversation in the staff chat:

▼Hidden text

As for purposely holding back information from the rest of staff, this has never been the case since becoming owner. My trust issues lay with Luke and Luke alone on staff. That trust was never repaired since the moment we rehired him. Whenever people asked for plans, I openly stated them to any members of staff that requested them, and even in the case of Luke up until the start of EEU Closed Beta. I spent weeks working on a Design Document with the plans for the future, but rather than having a civil conversation about it, some members of staff, perhaps buoyed by the excitement of seeing this document for the first time, ripped it to shreds, changing hundreds of lines in it without discussion. It was an anarchic staff meeting which Luke happened to be unable to make. Incidentally, ever since then, Luke's inability to attend (even though the staff meeting was during a weekend at a preagreed time, so term time shouldn't have really made a difference) has then made Luke interpret the fact he wasn't there as me holding back information from him, which certainly was not the case at the time.

I want to be able to discuss things openly with staff, and I think, for the most part, we have been doing so very successfully now for many months. We recently had some very good discussions overall about how the Switch & Door system should work and look, and they're shaping up to be excellent additions where we're able to finally add them. The only real proper arguments that have been occurring have been between Luke and myself. I apologise to any other members of staff who may feel I've been arguing with them too, but I really do not recall getting angry at anyone else on current staff (except Josh very briefly quite recently, but even that was in the middle of a longer argument with Luke).

---------------------------------------------

What does this mean for the future? Well, it means we still won't have a Shop or World Purchasing for any point in the foreseeable future. I'm trying to scout and find suitable programming candidates who may be willing to be Developers. If you're interested, please do message me on Discord so we can discuss it. The next update I'm still hoping can be the Switches & Doors, and I don't really see a reason why not. I'll personally be working on tweaking the overall physics of the game a little further, and then after those updates are implemented, I hope to work on fixing Portals and adding Slopes. I believe Josh is working on adjusting the User Interface, including things such as the Block Selector and the way certain elements of the game interact with each other, but I hope to be able to work with him on the Switches & Doors update after the Ludum Dare Jam finishes this weekend.

The Server Rework does still need completing. This does also depend partially on when Luke uploads all he's worked to date to our GitLab, if he does at all. If he doesn't, well, that would be an immense shame, as it would mean we're basically back to where we were in development terms last September, and would be a massive setback that means the chances of completion any time in the near future would be slim. I'll do what I can to make it happen as soon as possible still, but as soon as possible now feels like it could now be a few months away under the circumstances. It depends on too many factors right now, but I hope people will remain with us through this exciting new chapter in EEU's life! If not, I completely understand, and thank you very much for playing!

See you in-game,

~ Xenonetix ~

---

den3107

Member

From: Netherlands

Joined: 2015-04-24

Posts: 1,025

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

<snip>

~ Xenonetix ~

Mostly referring to the chat screenshots here:
I do enjoy how this does not at all reflect the stuff I often see on the forums, because let's be honest, it's pretty negative most of the time.

While I can agree that the way you respond in the conversation with Luke, might not be a method a lot of people find easy to communicate with, the essentials seem fine.

P.S. I'm just dropping my two cents, obviously I'm far from the most-informed community member, since I do believe I'm missing out on some when I skip those huge drama threads.

peace

Member

From: admin land

Joined: 2015-08-10

Posts: 9,226

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

damn xeno

---

thanks hg for making this much better and ty for my avatar aswell

Luka504

Member

From: Serbia,probs never heard of it

Joined: 2015-02-19

Posts: 2,934

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Damn you know Xeno **** up when even peace can't defend him anymore.

---

How long will it take me to get banned again?
Place your bets right here.

Zumza

Member

From: root

Joined: 2015-02-17

Posts: 4,656

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Xenonetix, while I appreciate your response, it's not what I would had expected.

I believe that Luke, and every staff member, should receive at least a thank you when they leave the staff.

After all, they did sacrifice a bit of their time for this game. Have they done good, have they done bad... their investment still remains and it should be appreciated.

Mistakes have been made on the both sides, that's natural.

But again, here we are with Gosha, Phina, and LukeM in the end, all gone, and all mudded by their former manager.

I believe that the only people who can vouch for your trustworthiness are the other staff members Xenonetix, not yourself. And I currently see no self-initiative from them to do that, which means a lot.
A sincere "we are a team" from them, would worth so much more than your dozen paragraphs in everyone's eyes right now, or at least, in my opinion.

---

Everybody edits, but some edit more than others

XxAtillaxX

Member

Joined: 2015-11-28

Posts: 4,202

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

does anyone remember when Chris Benjaminsen was about to take the game back but then NVD and Emalton decided to hand it to Xeno instead? does anyone know a way to alter timelines?

---

*u stinky*

SirJosh3917

Formerly ninjasupeatsninja

From: USA

Joined: 2015-04-05

Posts: 2,095

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

does anyone remember when Chris Benjaminsen was about to take the game back but then NVD and Emalton decided to hand it to Xeno instead? does anyone know a way to alter timelines?

i talked to him, and he did say that he was going to rebrand Worlds FRVR under the Everybody Edits name

---

Scarlet - EE & EEU Minimaps for the forums

Smiley Face Game | Join Discord

Finance me. I want your money.

Phinarose

Member

From: Dizzy Land

Joined: 2015-12-31

Posts: 102

Re: I'm just not enjoying this anymore

Xeno, the fact that you still blame everyone but yourself for everything that has happened doesn't fail to amaze me.  Am I surprised? Not one single bit. I have no idea how many times a staff member needs to quit or be fired for you to realize that you are a big part of the problem. Sure Luke wasn't working on EEU that much, even he has admitted that. However, how do you think it feels to be verbally attacked by someone constantly to no end? I have no idea how you would expect that person to put work into something when they know that have very little respect from you.  You can blame me, Gosha, Luke, etc. for your actions all you want, at the end of the day it doesn't change the way you treat people. I would say maybe this will get you to open your eyes, but that is very unrealistic. With that being said, have fun continuing digging yourself a deeper hole as you further damage your reputation as the owner of EEU.

---