> Fatzke
During one the weekly organiser meetings, Edenal and Planks sat down with Fatzke and told him they have a lot of free time on the ESA headquarters, so they’d like to use it to contribute more in other facets of ESA, namely scheduling - we added one or two of their requests per event, like Untitled Goose Game and the Glorious Segment in Winter 2024. They had a few ideas to make the process more productive and streamlined, including having an AI do the schedule for Stream 2. This infuriated Fatzke, who told them that me and Ben would always be better at scheduling than the two of them. Edenal and Planks took this personally, and on the next meeting, they utilized corporate lingo to tell him, among other things, that ESA has too many cooks in the kitchen and they want to cut as many people as they possibly can. Fatzke’s reply to this boils down to “I guess you don’t need me either, then”.
Later, during Winter 2024, Edenal had a meeting with the members of the scheduling team present on site. To them, he said that the solution to the effective disbandment of the team was to have new volunteers every year, vote on the games to be added to the schedule. 5 or more volunteers, guided by the organizers.
So, the answer to there being too many cooks in the kitchen, is bringing more cooks to the kitchen? That’s not why this entire process was a problem, and if you’re smart about this, you’ll also understand why the heart of the problem was getting rid of Fatzke himself.
A few weeks after Winter 2024, we got summoned to another meeting with Edenal and Metako (the latter did nothing but write the minute). In this meeting, Ben and I were basically told the scheduling team was no more - they did think about continuing with the two of us, but they KNEW there are things they want to bring to the table that we wouldn’t agree with, so in order to avoid an unpleasant experience for everyone involved, they just decided to cut the two of us as well. We spent the rest of the meeting arguing about how Winter was handled, and even if Edenal multiple times asked “why are we talking about fundraising, we should be talking about scheduling”. My reply was “you just told us we are cut from the process and there is nothing we can do about it, so there is nothing else to discuss.”
Two things mentioned:
- Team Leaders were nothing but a nuisance to them (not verbatim). Every time they’d try to implement a change team leaders were either too slow or ignored their requests. They also claimed Team Leaders were not taking responsibility for everything wrong that was happening in the event - the organizers were always the ones to blame. So, as they didn’t want to start blaming Team Leaders for their shortcomings, they decided to cut them off instead. The only Team Leaders left at this point (renamed to head volunteer) is Tech, Infodesk and Moderation. Leaders lost include: Marketing, Prizemaster, Security, Games and Scheduling, Fundraising.
>They want to make thematic ESA events. Whatever that means. I told them they were severely underestimating how restrictive submissions can be. Edenal’s reply was “we’ll contact the people we need in order to make the even we want to happen.” You know, completely disregarding the runners that actually submitted.
They did ask us to keep volunteering for the event so they could put us in charge of “putting out fires”. In case you don't know, Metako had an FF VII run scheduled for Summer 2022, but couldn't make it. This blew a 7 hour hole in the stream 1 schedule. Metako and Fatzke reached out to me, only a runner for that event, and asked me to coordinate a solution with the members of the Final Fantasy community that were on site. Our solution was to put FF VIII on Stream 1, and FF V and XIII on Stream 2 replacing FF VIII, and I'm pretty sure this was part of the reason why I was accepted into the scheduling team before Summer 2023. Well, I’m not willing to do that sort of thing for people what have been nothing but unappreciative of what I’ve been doing so far, even if it wasn’t for long.