The staff+ have been working on multiple servers such as Office, Surf and Minecraft and TTT wasnt a priority at the time. We wanted to fix JB. and get the rest up and running before starting some new projects. In future this should be coming, just be patient for new servers as we are working as hard as we can with the sparetime we got to do it.

We dont give private channels. People pay for it. But if you wanna hang out with certain people that u like more than other fine. There will always be people having the same in common and others not so much. Thats why the groups are made. Or if you are from a different community and transferring over. Its normal to still talk with the same.

Most, and more, successful servers (regarding population / growth) IIRC has generally been a garry's mod server which may / should be our focus, you would think.

Well, again, to be fair we should probably move away from any members creating cliques (referring to Bri's / Dino's clique that went on for awhile, even Zachariah's group / Cooper & Rads (NSG) so-called group on TS3).

Really only pushes other members away if they aren't in this so-called "clique / group" (BriBee's channel was more "welcoming" if you wanna say than any other, but still should be avoided)

That being said, staying in a locked channel (Cooper / Rad) away from any EGN member edit: noticing it's now unlocked but since it was given it had a big LoCk oN iT

I just saw your edit as I clicked quote but in our defense (like you noticed) we haven't been locking our channel as of recent unless someone is coming in and being annoying or if someone in our own "group" is trolling us. If I'm being honest until recent (the Minecraft server and even JB a little peeked some of the other's interests) Rad and myself were the only people who actually cared about the community in our "group" and the rest were just there because it's where we decided to hang out (which I think is pretty obvious). We could have just sat in a Discord completely out of the TS if we really wanted to so I think we deserve a little more credit than what we are being given, especially if you take into consideration we used AJ's channel for most of the year we've been here (which I can't recall once being locked). We've been in the TS every single day since we first joined so I think it's fair to say we kept it from becoming a complete ghost town at times and made good use of it, even if we kept to ourselves.

Also, I don't really think "welcoming" is necessarily a good term for Bribee's clique, if you didn't fit in with them or if she didn't like you they would isolate you. She even tried "getting rid of us" at one point just because she didn't like our group, even though we had left them alone for a while. You really had to fit the mold to get in with them and even then there still was a lot of inside drama and such within that group that probably pushed a lot of people away, from the outside it really just looked like high school. Not to say Bribee or NaCl didn't contribute anything to the community.

Again, wanted to make it clear I'm not trying to be toxic or anything along those lines just giving my point of view.

To be fair, TTT probably should have been a priority over any source server along with Minecraft. For many reasons, first being the fact that we SHOULD eventually be moving away from source preferably towards Garry's Mod and / or CS:GO. This doesn't mean removing / moving away from our jailbreak server, but we shouldn't continue to prioritize / put up source servers only pushing members more to play so, and secondly, well based off previous (source) servers that have been put up there has NEVER been a steady population neither any growth from any of the servers put up which we should probably take into account by now that continuing to throw servers into a dying game, said lightly, shouldn't be prioritized.

Most, and more, successful servers (regarding population / growth) IIRC has generally been a garry's mod server which may / should be our focus, you would think.

Naturally, yes, most members (and more often Staff+) will use "don't worry, people leave all the time, we will be fine" as what, I would presume, is a way to just justify themselves or the clan (and their reasoning for leaving which generally revolves around an issue with the clan), practically a way to remove their responsibility as a Staff, or similar to what I've read in the chat box saying, "they left after a misunderstanding, it's practically their fault that they left in the first place / for believing X" or "they're not dedicated / we don't need someone like that in the community". Like i hate it. It actually bothers me to the core when someone will say that, all it does is excuse Staff+ job in actually even attempting to keeping the community together. But as it happens & as everyone already knows there will be a large portion of the active community who are generally a part of the same clique, that leave because of a same / similar reason regarding a member of the clan, or a problem with the community. They will all leave and yes, we do fine, we still run as a clan. But there's no reason to let a large portion of the clan leave without any care to try to get them to stay in the community.

Like take the last particular group that had left, not one Staff had taken the time to either convince them to stay after the large 'meeting' that was held in discord neither even a "hey maybe you'd want to stay as a member?"

That is,
Bribee
Starscream
Shya
NaCl
Kathythepurplellama

Whoever else you can remember, but it was practically the large portion of those who hung in Bribee's channel who were the most active portion of the clan for the last few months.

They're practically the one's who kept / brought members into teamspeak which no surprise it's dead now.


Now moving towards the "remove retired / toxicity", again, it's under debate to say otherwise because yes most of those who become retired now a.) have no attachments to the clan, and b.) will often take a more aggressive approach to any conversation and / or thread because of the fact that they have no attachments to the clan. Can easily compare someone's response from when they were in the clan, to after they have left. And I can pull examples if I wanted to, but I don't think many will disagree on the point that most retired do become "toxic", to say, towards the community as they have little to no care what will happen to them. Rather than addressing the full issue they avoid it while still addressing a small issue that correlates just to indicate that they’re displeased yet have little care to offer a practical solution but a "HEY THIS IS HERE BY THE WAY". Pretty subjective since people have different levels of tolerance towards a response from someone but it's easy to say their response changes once they've been in the clan to when they leave.

Second being, like Link mentioned earlier, retired is practically identical to member, except as a member you have more access / permissions to the forums and can as well be an admin / a part of a team. There is little differences when someone becomes a member to when someone becomes retired except if they don't want any attachment to EGN which is why they shouldn't if that's the case (chat access, additional forum access).

Either become a member, or registered user.

WTF Needy where is my honorable mention :)

Groups will always be a thing, that in of itself is not the reason for the decline of EgN. If anything, you can argue that groups/cliques/etc are what keeps consistently in both the servers, ts3, monthly meetings etc since they allow for people to have a place to socialize.

If groups were what are killing EgN then it would have been dead a while ago. Instead, I'd focus my attention to crucial variables and not independent ones that have not been proven to cause harm/good in the community in the long run. Just identify the obvious leak first and get it done. Don't think zebras when you should be thinking horses.

I also don't think it's wise to demonize groups that flock from other communities for merely congregating, that type of sentiment could be one of the reasons a group has decided to leave in the first place and try to build something that they feel is much more fair and enjoyable to them.

I will say this though: "People leave all the time" is one of the most careless things I have ever heard. No company CEO would say that, they would investigate why someone feels the need to leave and reassess whether their policies need to be changed or not. Be fair.

Hope you guys pull through.