The Collapse of AWTeen

Note: The following post was written by Matthew, not Brant. Following the post by Dr. SquaiLboonT on the AWTeen forums that the world would be handed over to Flagg and the Peacekeepers, discussion quickly moved to the reason behind this. While Boont and Digigurl would not provide any (real) information as to the reason behind this decision, many of the users of AWTeen, and people who were not users, talked about the reasons. There were disagreements. Some people thought that Boont and Digi were completely in the right for doing this. Gnu summed it up in his post with the following statement.

Cause really, if there's half the world abusing the volunteers on the team, people bickering in the background about changing the way they run things and one really persistent little muck-racker, then there's not much point to providing these services anymore, no?

I have to wonder about this. Was half of the world really abusing the volunteers? Of course not. Sure, there were people who did not respect the Caretakers, or put them down in front of everyone in the world. But, the volunteers were not being abused. I was a Just Ask Me, that's a volunteer position. Was I ever "abused"? No, I wasn't. Nor were the majority of other people who gave up their time to help the world. Neither, of course, were "half the world" abusing Digi and Boont. There were certain people who abused them, but it never got out of hand, as far as I could tell. Had the Caretakers cared to use their privileges to moderate the world like they were supposed to, this would not have happened. Digigurl constantly abused her powers, banning certain people for simply annoying her, but not banning others for doing the exact same to other people. Whenever Boont was on, he just spent his time sending annoying console messages from some telephone. This let the users of AWTeen run wild, doing whatever they wanted. This led to a small collapse in the community. Older citizens simply left. They could no longer deal with the chaos of the world. The same happened to new tourists in AWTeen. They got insulted by so many people, and nothing did anything about it. Of course, they left the world. Who would want to stay somewhere where they just get put down? By allowing this action to continue, the CTs were leading the world to its death. They were also not following the duties they had to AWI, as AWTeen is an AWI world. They were pretty much forcing away most of the new users, who could have became citizens. A big part of this problem was the aging of the Caretakers. I don't mean in physical age, but in how they acted. No longer did they want to deal with the twelve year olds in AWTeen who whined about everything. They had better things to do with their lives (or so they claimed). Of course, they weren't willing to resign from their positions, which they should have done. From what I can tell, none of them wanted to give up their power in the world. They got so annoyed with the world that they simply decided to shut it down. That was a very, very bad move, especially because they were supposed to be the mature ones of the world, as the Caretakers. If they truly deserved the position of Caretaker, they would never have done this. The reason that they were still the caretakers, however, was simply because of the way that the position got passed down from CT to CT. You didn't get the position because you were the best person for the job; you got it because you were the best friend with all the Caretakers. I can say this with certainty out of a similar personal experience. At the meeting on the Friday that the CTs left AWTeen, there was supposed to be a meeting. This meeting was supposed to be to discuss a position I had suggested for the world, the Community Liaison position. I had suggested this position because of the obvious lack of communication between the Caretakers and the users of AWTeen, which I discussed earlier. I was set to receive this position. When Boont and Digi announced the removal of Hermes from the world, however, I was very public on my disagreement with their decision to do this. Pretty much as soon as I first said that I disagreed with their actions, both of the CTs decided to shun me. They would not talk to me on MSN or AW. What had changed that had made me bad for the position of the Community Liaison? Absolutely nothing. The only difference was that I no longer agreed with them on one simple thing. This is just proof of how the only way to help change the world was to suck up to and be friends with the CTs and other high staff, who, of course, were their friends. All that came out of this was the age of people in the government getting older and older. It is time for a new generation of people to come in and manage AWTeen. People like Jaguar Hahn, who are actually friends with people in AWTeen. People who know what the users of AWTeen want, and what kids their age like to do. The current generation was good while they lasted, but it is time for them to move on and pass their contributions to the next group of teens, like the first CTs of AWTeen have done. Young users of AWTeen have every ability to do well running AWTeen. They just need the chance.