posted June 02, 2000 11:48 AM               

I want to start off by saying that all of the recent public bashing will be dealt with in a private forum, and very harshly. I cannot tolerate people breaking a direct order from myself to, "Praise in Public and Punish in Private." I encourage people to raise concerns and suggestions in a public forum. However, once you add someone's name to your message it turns into public bashing. I WILL NOT tolerate any form of public bashing. Members of the Vast Empire get 1 warning in the form of a reprimand. After that people will start to get demoted and possibly banned from the Vast Empire. Also, when someone (especially a higher ranking officer) tells you to take something private. It is considered a direct order and you should immediately take your concern via e-mail. If anyone has any questions about my ex-policy and now direct order please feel free to let me know via e-mail.

Moving on, let me just say something briefly about the High Council. We are the owners of the Vast Empire. GM Kadann, Moff Threeof4, and myself put hard earned cash into this club. Everytime I hear people bashing us I bring up this concern to them. The next thing I hear is silence. Basically what I say is,"Then offer me a solution so we can correct this problem together." When I hear complaints with no solutions your e-mail will indeed find my deleted e-mail folder. I wont even reply to them. I have no problem with people explaining to everyone in a public forum where the Vast Empire is not so great at. It's when people start putting names in those messages that I really dissaprove of. It makes those people look stupid and I am not going to have what I consider a dear friend hurt in any way shape or form (even if they do ignore you bashing them and dont let it bother them). So make your suggestions a little more reasonable and include a recommended course of correction (in a polite manner).

Now lets move on to some good stuff and some suggestions by myself. You all know that the Vast Empire's High Command(s) and High Council run everything concerning VE-wide campaigns. The problem I am having with these campaigns is a lack of mission writters. The one really good member I have that can make missions also belongs to another successful organization. I have some very talented story writters along with some very good graphics artists. What I need are people to put these thoughts into a mission. I think I have starcraft covered but what about JK, XvT, XWA, FC, etc etc? So if anyone knows how to make missions and wants to be on my Adjutant staff please let me know. I would love to improve VE campaigns with single playable missions. I simply do not have the time to develop them myself. Until that time we gotta depend on our allies that make missions, multi-player missions, stories, graphics, tactical missions, etc etc. Now in addition to these campaigns the specific divisions hold competitions from time to time. Keeping all of this intact I ALWAYS leave some time for the squadrons, squads, cabbels, etc etc to come up with their own form of fun. I remember very clearly when I was a squadron commander. I picked a mission a month for everyone under my command to play. Whether that mission came from a different squadron or club didn't matter to me. Only that I was playing a mission and talking about how I was the greatest starfighter pilot ever when I got the highest score (not true, but it made my fellow pilots try harder and they often beat me and did their own form of bragging). My squadron had a lot of fun picking out their squadron patch, making a website, picking our own missions to play and challenging other squadrons to play against. I remember when I was a platoon leader in the Hammers Fist. A very good friend of mine was in another Platoon. We love picking on each other and challenging each other as to who is the best platoon in the Hammers Fist. I very rarely see that type of comraderie and it would make me very extactic if I saw something like that happen again, especially here in the Vast Empire. I am trying VERY hard to keep this club's management in the hands of the squad(ron) leaders. They are the most important leaders here in the VE. You guys gotta start playing against each other and having some fun. Every now and then we will have a competition or a campaign that you can all take part in. However, depend on one thing and that is yourself.

Campaign number 2 will be comming out soon. So you all have some time to start making some challenges.