After writing my post yesterday, I received an unsolicited, out-of-the-blue message from one of the Moderators on Discord, demanding I "chill out about all of this" and that the proposals "are just changes that the majority of the playerbase supports".
This is a direct violation of rule 1.5.2. and it would be hugely appreciated if you could avoid doing so in future, discord messages are meant to be private. Moderation are not lawyers unfortunately we cannot afford to check every message we send on an instant messenger, we apologise if some of our messages came across in the wrong way.
Polites and FPC are claiming they have received private feedback convincing them there is a consensus for what they propose to do. Now, that is very interesting, and it's obviously a very big claim to make, so I hope they can back it up some more. I would not expect them to breach player confidentiality by naming names or quoting correspondence, but some facts/figures would be helpful. For example, can Moderation tell us how many players they believe both reasonably understand what the proposal is (so far as anyone can reasonably understand it at the moment...) and have expressed their informed support of it?
We sent a survey to each active player in game explaining in detail the proposed reforms and linking to a surveymoneky survey asking what people thought of the proposal, and if they supported it. As it stands I think we have had 113 responses; 67 in favour and 46 against. None of the Moderators voted on the survey
We appreciate there are a fair few people in the community against the proposal and we have been trying to find time to work on a way to keep people more happy with it, however unfortunately a lot of our time has been taken up with responding to this thread and dealing with other ongoing issues. I appreciate we should have been more visible however I have been away for about a week and I hope you can appreciate that this made it difficult for us to be proactive.
We understand it may seem like we are biased and I will be honest we probably are slightly biased however if the consensus in the community was against the reforms I can assure you we would back down. I appreciate my "we are trying to push it through" message was terrible and I am sorry that it has affected the consultation in such a way. The consultation will go on until at least April 3rd, until we can find something that as many people as possible are happy with.
I am not sure I could personally trust them to have solicited the private feedback in an objective and balanced manner.
I can ensure you we did not try to influence players when sending this out, the message simply explained what was going on and asked for people's opinion.