Disgruntled

Hi folks

I wanted to address a fleet email that has been circulating from a former member, Vyper. In the mail Vyper makes a lot of serious accusations and throws in a few insults for good measure. You can be the judge of the measure of a man who acts in this way. Normally I would ignore something like this but as he decided to go public with his complaints I feel I should address a few of the points he makes.

First I would like to thank Vyper for his contributions over the years, his EPG101 guide on the website is often visited and is a valuable resource and will remain.

It's a shame that his disagreement with me, to which I am still unsure of the cause, has spilt over into the public domain, but there you go. Sometimes people don't like the way an organisation is run and so they leave and try to disrupt or upset those left behind, it's the same in an MMO it seems.

I left the original Discord and created my own because there were several toxic individuals I no longer wanted to be associated with, this is a shame because Matt Doody put in a lot of time and effort to make a great Discord for all of us and I didn't want to go. However I'd also received a few complaints that most of the people in there were only playing Elite Dangerous and so the chat was irrelevant to STO, so with a heavy heart, I made the new Discord. Contrary to what Vyper states in this mail, I am very open to ideas and suggestions, but not all of them can be implemented easily or at all. When some ideas are rejected some people take them personally as is the case here.

Of course, if anyone is not happy with the way I run SRS then please do let me know what the problem is for you and I will try to resolve it if I can.

Also contrary to what Vyper says is that all the money I spend is not a tax write off. My own small business which generates an income for me of about £18K (I am not a rich person lol) a year donates about £300 to the fleet in exchange for the link on the website to the business page, this is called a backlink and helps drive a tiny amount of traffic to my business site. Of that £300, 20% is not taxed as it's billed as an expenditure, so I approximately gain around £60 by tax write-offs. The other £800 or so I spend is from my own money, although I won't be spending that much this year unless Cryptic drastically increases the amount of content they put into this game.

Perhaps it was a mistake trusting Vyper with a high enough position that he can post fleet mails, however, I guess you never really know people do you. But the fleet is built on trust as well as ships and I'm not going to be changing any fleet permissions due to the actions of one disgruntled ex-fleet member. Over the last 10 years, I have built SRS into something I am very proud of. We have some of the best players in the game in our ranks, we have lots of wonderfully themed fleets, we run more events than any other fleet to my knowledge, we have a great knowledge base on the website and other outlets and I think most people have a lot of fun. I've worked tirelessly for those 10 years trying to bring something to the STO community that is useful and fun and trying to help keep the game alive by building the MRP system after the foundry was closed down. I'm sure I've made mistakes, in fact I know I have, but I have done my best and will continue to do so. Live long and prosper Matt Johnson