Let me begin by saying that formulating a post like this is not a decision I take lightly. As anybody who has done the job can tell you, being a Moderator is tiring, thankless and frustrating at times and I appreciate that we have people in this community who are willing to commit the time and energy to fill the role. With that said, it is a position of responsibility which comes with certain duties and any member of Moderation must meet certain minimum standards. In my opinion, the current Moderation team is failing to meet those standards.
Since I returned to actively playing the game just over a month ago, I have perceived a pattern of behaviour within Moderation which is characterised by poor response to criticism, dismissal of legitimate concerns by players, lack of communication between Moderators as well as with the wider player base, failure to follow proper processes and a general culture of complacency. At various stages, I have raised these concerns with the Moderation team but it seems that there has been no effort to change this behaviour and that is why I feel it is necessary to raise them in a very public manner.
It would be impossible to properly address these matters without acknowledging that a lot of this behaviour has related to one player in particular and that is Aquinas. At times it has felt as though Moderation has consciously decided to ignore requests made by Aquinas, such as in this instance of a cultural violation report which took five days to receive a response despite all three Moderators responding to other players requests during that period. Eventually I took that particular issue to Moderation and neither cm9777 nor Mr.God acknowledged that there had been a delay and in fact both chose to deflect the blame back to Aquinas as him being "impatient" or "demanding". From my perspective, that seems to confirm that this was not a case of Moderators accidentally overlooking a request but that it suggests there was a conscious decision not to respond.
The problem is not limited to requests by Aquinas, though. In the case of Zardugal's renaming, I first brought the issue to Moderation's attention on 2nd December (around ten days ago) and yet there has still been no response at all from any of the three Moderators. It should be noted that neither of these incidents (or the handful of similar ones which have occurred) have been cases of players "criticising" Moderation but rather of players making enquiries and requests in the dedicated threads on the forum. Even so, the response from Moderation (when there has been one) has been dismissive or deflective.
The lack of communication from Moderators can be epitomised in the Security Council saga. The numerous threads and questions about this are spread out across the forum but the clearest example can be seen in cm9777's update on the matter, in which Auditorii (the World Congress coordinator) is not even clear on what is happening. Moderation has dragged its heels over what could've been a simple and quick process. It is now a month since the new rankings were implemented (i.e. a quarter of the way through their period of effect) and there is still a lack of clarity. It would seem that Security Council votes have now been reset, though the default option has not been set to abstain and there has been no official announcement about this.
Two recent incidents highlight the lack of communication between Moderators and the failure to follow standard procedures. Both, unfortunately, involve Mr.God. The first was the rule changes instituted, it appears unilaterally, on 5th December by Mr.God and the subsequent response to player queries of this process. In a highly unorthodox move, these rule changes were approved without a public consultation, without consulting the Global Role-Play Committee and I suspect without consulting all Moderators or Wouter. When this was brought up, there was a complete resistance to holding a public consultation and instead, the Global Role-Play Committee was asked to help improve the "wording" of the changes- after they had been implemented! In this case, it seems there was a total lack of coordinated approach from Moderation and a total rejection of the standard procedure for making changes to the rules.
The second instance relates to Cildania's cultural protocols. In this case, it seems that Mr.God has once again taken decisions against the proper outlined procedure and without consulting his co-Moderators (Luis1p confirmed that he was not aware of Mr.God's actions). In the linked thread, Moderation's tendency to dismiss and deflect is clear and Mr.God even refers to the "tone" of the player raising concerns rather than simply admitting he had made a mistake.
I believe this also highlights the complacency that has crept into Moderation and which can be seen most clearly in the continued ineffectiveness of the Global Role-Play Committee. My experience of the Committee has been pretty atrocious in all honesty and much of that comes from Moderation's willingness to allow players to do nothing in their roles. For a significant period of time, the Chair was a player who had not posted any role-play for months and we currently have several players who are simply doing nothing, not even responding to my repeated attempts to engage with them in discussion. Frankly, some of these players do not deserve their positions.
All of this paints the picture of a very poor state of affairs for the game and it is extremely personally disappointing to me to see a game I have dedicated dozens of hours to falling into decline. If this situation is to be turned around then it needs some serious changes to be implemented to the approach of the current Moderation team. The first step to achieving that is for Moderation to accept that these are valid concerns, not just bitterness from individual players, and to set out what they are going to do to improve, which I will leave for them to determine. Apologies once again for such an impolite and public essay but it is my opinion that there is very little else that I can do to vocalise these concerns. I look forward to a response.