Buyable Staff: Staff management reworked

For you slower fellas the below post was OBVIOUSLY an April fools joke xD. And if you haven't read this post already, enjoy reading..!


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Buyable staff ranks. It is exactly what the title says. Today folks, after months of planning, preparation, and revision, we are finally ready to announce, that effective immediately, Staff Ranks will now be up for sale on our store at https://store.grandtheftmc.net. With that said, we are no longer accepting helper applications on our site, and starting today, rank upgrades will only be offered to purchasers. Seriously? Yes. Seriously. GTM has decided to make the following ranks purchasable to (almost) any member of the community willing to pay for it:

• HELPER - $400 [$200 Rank Upgrade from SUPREME]
• MOD - $800 [$400 Rank Upgrade from HELPER]
• SRMOD - $1350 [$550 Rank Upgrade from MOD]
• ADMIN - $3200 [$1850 Rank Upgrade from SRMOD]

* Note: Manager rank is not purchasable. It will only be rewarded to hard-working admins. Manager is an important rank that can not simply be purchased.

The rest of this thread will cover the reasons to why we decided to make staff ranks purchasable, how will we make this work, limitations on who can purchase staff, explaining the process of purchasing a staff rank, and explaining merit-based staff rank discount codes.



There are many reasons to why we came to the decision to officially make staff ranks purchase. But the main reason revolves around server lag. As we have repeatedly told you guys, server lag has not been exactly a super easy fix. We are also using the best plan our host has to offer. So what's the problem? JUst gEt a BEtTeR hoST. Right. Only if it was that easy. Yes. We can go to a better host, but due to limitations on our current host provider, it is nearly impossible to transfer to a better host. We have over 8.76 terabytes of world data, plugin data, and biggest of all player data from HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of players. This data includes rank data, backpack contents, house contents, kits, ender chest, inventory, logs, black-market and countless other forms of data. Transferring such a tremendous amount of data to another host requires immense resources on our end more than just paying for a better host. In fact, here is a simple price rundown:

• $360 / Month for hosting all of our servers
• $105 one-time setup and delivery fee on this new host
• $720 termination contract-violation fee with our current host
• $225 upgrade fee with the current host to buy fast enough speeds to transfer the 8.76 TB of data in any reasonable time
• Estimated $2500+ dev and sysadmin charge to connect with this new host and re-setup GTM
• And even still, GTM can be down for as long as 48 hours

The total costs add up to just under $4000 to just switch a host! On top of that, we have already spent thousands more to attempt to optimize GTM plugins to help with lag that way.

Now with this coronavirus epidemic, a lot of people don't have a job anymore, and frankly, sales have been down and GTM is going broke. We aren't making any profit. And when a business is no longer economically viable, it shuts down. With that said, in order to save GTM, we have decided to expand the GTM store to increase our revenue, and selling staff ranks is the best, and most manageable solution. Seriously.



Obviously, we can not expect will any reasonable judgment that any "rich boy" [with respect] who purchases a staff rank will be capable of doing the jobs of staff members such as helping players, punishing rule-breakers, and etc.

With that said, I would like to thank especially @MrTacoMan for the work he has put in over the past 2 months with a new project named Larry the Help Bot. Larry the help bot is already capable of answering ~10% of ALL help questions and ~85% of all help questions from new players. Current trends expect the total help questions answered to rise to 15% and the total help questions and to 93% for help questions asked by new players by next month! In sum, Larry the Help Bot would almost completely be able to complete the function of /help and Helpers on its own by targeting to answer the new players. We expect the staff members who purchased the staff rank to be able to fill the remaining gaps in the Help bot.

Then, as for our anticheat, Gary the Anticheat, Grand Theft Minecart has recently hired a new developer who is to dedicatedly work on clearing up remaining performance optimizations and both false positives and false negatives. Already, almost ALL hacking bans by staff are primarily detected by Gary the anticheat! As of recent, Gary has even begun enforcing chat rules. In short the senior team believes that the job of catching cheaters can not only be done better but also with less false positives by an anticheat. Especially with our new dev, within a few months, we expect staff to only be responsible for glitch-abuse and bypass related punishments.

Finally, in order to filter out players who will most likely abuse the purchased staff rank for personal gains, the senior team has implemented certain restrictions on who can purchase a staff rank as outlined in the next section. Even still, the server will be practicing extreme logging practices and hourly backup under the very extreme (and unlikely) scenario where a player chooses to abuse their privileges for dangerous r



In order to purchase a staff rank, a player must meet the following criteria. These criteria were established to prevent malicious users from obtaining staff ranks. They are as follows:

In order to be eligible to purchase the rank of HELPER or MODERATOR one must meet the following criteria:

• Has a playtime of at least 24 hours
• Has no hacking-related punishments over the last 2 months
• Has a limited punishment history in general
• Receive a minimum of two-thirds approval from the senior team to purchase the rank

In order to be eligible to purchase the rank of SRMOD or ADMIN one must meet the following criteria:

• Meets all requirement in the previous category
• Has already held an eligible staff rank for 3 months or more
• Has a limited disciplinary history
• Receives a unanimous approval from the senior team to purchase the rank

If you believe you meet these requirements, you will be required to open a support ticket in the "Purchase Staff Rank" category as explained in the next section...



Once you believe you meet the criteria for the desired staff rank as listed above, you will begin by opening a support ticket at https://grandtheftmc.net/support-tickets/open under the PURCHASE STAFF RANK category as shown below.



Simply fill out the required information and a manager will reply to you whether or not your request is accepted. If accepted, we will unlock a secret staff rank package on the store for your username...


From there, once you make the purchase, we will promote you to your desired staff rank.

Please note, regular sales DO NOT apply to staff ranks! The only discounts offered on staff rank are merit-based staff rank discounts. These will be explained in the next section.



Currently, for staff members who actively fulfill their duties, and help keep GTM great we reward with promotions. We believe it is important to keep our staff members motivated to do good. With that said, we are offering "Merit-Based Discounts" for staff upgrades that will be as high as up to 80% for the most deserving staff members! With these discounts, present (and future) staff members will be able to upgrade their staff ranks for cheap!

We will begin to offer this merit-based with this month's staff of the month. Staff members will still be required to create a "Purchase Staff Rank" ticket if they wish to upgrade their ranks!



We understand these are big changes to the staffing system. With this said, we will be happy to answer any questions. Please direct any questions to @Presidentx (Presidentx#6731) or @SkylixMC (SkylixMC#3132). We ask the communities and staff members support and trust for helping maintain GTM's status as the top GTA server in the Minecraft community. Please understand we are going are best to make sure in the end, our players have the best experience possible by helping keep GTM afloat.