How best to help us help you!

[George]

A message from Management

Hi everyone, I'm making this post shortly after the 6.5 update to bring up some things that the development team and the staff team have had complications with post-release. These issues are common with every update, but larger updates are the most difficult and the most time sensitive.

Firstly, I kindly ask you all to remember that most of the development team and all of the staff team are volunteers, and they all have the common objective of making the community and the server a more fun and better place for you! Reading this post and taking in what I have to say makes that job easier for them, and we should all work together as a community for the common goal of having more fun and making a better server for us all to enjoy, we have very limited options with what to play on Arma 3 these days and it's best if we all try to make ANZUS a more enjoyable server.

ANZUS Arma 3 has been around for 5+ years now, a lot of good memories have been made and there are alot of dedicated community members who make this community what it is, community members allow this community to continue and hopefully carry on for more years to come.

Precise Initial Messages
When messaging developers to report bugs, too often are people vague in their initial message, they will often start with something along the lines of 'Modshop is Fucked'- Leading to a plethora of follow up messages. Developers are often working against the clock either with release schedules or auto-restart timers, and this extra time of follow up messages can be make or break in getting something fixed in a timely manner. As a global community, we also all live in different timezones, by the time the developer sees your initial mesage, you might be asleep and it can take up to 12 hours for the developer to be even aware of what the bug entails, let alone start fixing it.

It's the same with staff matters or other requests, people will say 'My whitelist is fucked', but won't include their Steam 64, what they need whitelisting for, or proof of their position.

All we ask is that you include as much information as possible in your initial message, so that as little follow up questions are needed, it helps get issues fixed in a timely manner and helps timezones from preventing fixes being attempted.

Don't Ask to Ask
An extremely common term in the tech industry, and I'm sure other industries too, is "Don't ask to ask", A pretty blunt website I can provide with a good explaination of this is 'https://dontasktoask.com/'

It's anti-social and rude, sure, as is https://nohello.net/en/ but it's effective and extremely helpful in situations like large updates.

Bothering Developers in Game
This varies from developers to developer, some developers thrive off of the interactions they get regarding development in game, and some developers have just spent 18 hours working on an update and never want to hear the word 'Broken' again in their life. Developers who are trying to play on the server, relax, and enjoy a new update, just like everyone else, have trouble because people will call them in game, ask for them at main PD or DOC or just get bothered in general. It ties into don't ask to ask, because you'll often see developers get asked "Hey can I ask you a question", and the developer says "Yes", expecting it to be related to their gameplay or roleplay position, only to be asked a extensive development question. You have to remember that all of the developers started off as players too.

Please don't bother developers in game, If its urgent, you can DM them on Discord and they will look at it when they get the chance, alot of developers will listen to you in game, but they are too polite to tell you to please leave them alone so they can relax. Alot of members of the community already accept this and are very respectful and sometimes protective of the developers being harrased, we salute you. If you see a developer clearly being harrased in game but too polite to tell the other person to fuck off, please feel free to back them up

You'll also notice that developers can be forgetful, naturally, and bringing up an bug/issue in game will lead you to thinking the matter has been reported, and not filing a bug report, causing this bug to go unfixed.

Talking Trash
It's not too common, but it happens, you might be in death chat and think no developers or staff can hear you, and let out a simple "Fuck this server I'm going to play olympus", It's not a huge deal, but can be wildly demotivating for developers and staff, who again are volunteers just trying to make the community and server more fun, which is not an easy job, please keep your comments constructive and again if you hear people talking shit excessively, especially whilst developers are present, please stick up for the developers, they're often just kids trying to do their best to make the server better

Some of this might seem common sense, and some of it might seem cold, anti-social and borderline autistic, but everything is situational. As a member of the community, it's important to actively and positively participate in that community, so that everybody can benefit equally.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great rest of your day.