Morning everyone, it's 6am here on the east coast as I'm about to head to bed. If anyone's been over to the Team Fox Star blog, you'll notice it's now the Fouse Radio blog along with a final straw post. What happened? Well it's a long story but to sum it up I went over to the RFL site to go register Team Fox Star thinking that things had improved and to my disappointment, they got worse. I was greeted with a notice that teams now must have a minimum of 5 members. This is very off-putting as Sage and I have ran Team Fox Star by ourselves since we started Team Fox Star in 2013. We usually run into people who feel that by joining a team they can get something monetary out of RFL and when they don't, leave us in the dust.
The second thing that I was greeted with was that all teams have to be named something PG and be ran in a PG environment. That may not be as severe as the 5 team member minimum but there are some groups that will miss out on RFL because of how they conduct themselves. RFL hasn't even started yet and I can already tell there's going to be issues. If Dwen was still the chair this wouldn't be an issue but this person they put in charge for 2015, this Random Darrow... really doesn't have as open a mind as her predecessor did which lead to butting heads over event content(even though they were clearly marked adult and done on adult marked sims) and caused several large contributing teams leave RFL. By the end of RFL 2015, more then 15 teams left over a wide range of issues.
I have to give Random credit though for stepping up to the plate and not backing down when teams barked over comparing how Dwen ran RFL, or issues with vendors, or the other long list of issues that continued to grow. That's about all I'm giving her credit for. Random came from running a First Life team where the dynamics are different. There are things that you can do on a First Life team that you can't do or just doesn't apply when it comes to Second Life and it didn't seem like the message was getting through. Yes you can apply your knowledge of running a First Life team to running a Second Life team but running a virtual extension of the American Cancer Society you need to have more business orientated experience. Do I think Dwen made a mistake by naming Random his sucessor? No. He saw what she had done with her First Life teams and thought she could handle it.
For 2016 the wife and I have decided to join Oldesoul and his team. That guy and his team work their tails off for everything that they do and am proud to have us and Fouse Radio at their disposal. I look forward to seeing how a real relay team operates where everyone looks after each other and relays because they feel it's right or because they've had or have a loved one with cancer instead of for monetary purposes.
Go Relay,
Matt
Sunday, February 21, 2016
