Originally posted by Jiddy78
Originally posted by Painmaker
This incident merely highlights the glaring weakness that is GLB's mechanism for transitioning team ownership.
It's a shame that after two weeks of inactivity, without consulting rank-and-file team members, admins would simply intervene to transfer team ownership. No time to start a thread in the team forum to get a sense of what the players want? As far as I know and without exception, the Exiles and Border Jumpers enjoyed playing together and wanted to stay together under the existing conditions of playing time and team atmosphere.
Unfortunately, two weeks is a very short time to communicate with admins who send one cryptic PM every 48 hours or so to a single GM and don't communicate at all with the rest of the team. The reduces "communication" to about 5 exchanges between a single GM and an admin staff who rarely read the PMs accurately the first two times you send them so you waste your time correcting them. An admin who shall remain nameless would probably save himself a lot of time if he just doubled the time spent spent thinking, "my customers aren't automatically idiots, so if I find myself thinking that they are then I might have misread the PM." Compounding the problem, only someone who had been named a GM is eligible to "trump" the list to buy the team, and no one who already owns a team is allowed to buy another - severely limiting the pool of eligible buyers to hold the team together.
The GMs are left watching a trainwreck as team ownership will inevitably change hands to a random GLB player. Their loyalties are to their teammates, so it should be expected that they will work within the rules to help out their teammates at the expense of a random stranger. If some form of behavior isn't desired, then that mandate should be made clear to the community, with options ranging from rules changes to something as simple as a centralized and dynamic "standards of fair play" endorsed by the admin staff. We don't have that yet, so I continue to expect GMs to behave as the USAORG GMs have and do what they can to protect their teammates.
This topic deserves mature discussion and not the childish insults, personal attacks, requests for banning, and the like which have taken up half this thread. Real problems need real solutions.
Finishing off the year then being released seems feasible in midseason issues like this...for the OTHER players that are playing in divisions with the gutted teams. Seasons take on a life of their own in this game...'tis a shame to have them butchered because people hit the panic button. This problem was foreseen by USAORG GM's it appears, so why not restructure contracts to end on day 40 and perhaps give the new guy a chance to make a name for himself, possibly earn the respect of the players over a month?
That sounds reasonable, though right now it isn't an established standard for behavior. Why should the GMs show more loyalty to a stranger than their friends, when there is no established standard for doing so? Teams are "gutted" all the time right now, why should the USAORG GMs show less loyalty to their players than any other GM?
Do I think it would be better for the game for Bort to come out and say, "if you know ownership will be changing there should be a two-week moratorium on trades and releases before ownership changes, and all player contracts will be reset to Day 40 of the current season in the event ownership changes hands"? Absolutely. I think some code functionality could even be added to automate this function, such as an admin-selectable 'ownership changing' flag which puts these requirements into force and could only be lifted by extending the ownership period (paying flex points). But someone official (e.g. Bort) needs to put this out as an expected standard of behavior, otherwise no one can reasonably be expected to do it.
