Shane clarifies on community managers' twin exit and other team changes

Earlier today, Shane stepped in the E2 Discord to comment on the recently announced exits of the two Earth2 community managers - K-Dizz and Liz. Both CMs have been serving their notice period for some weeks now prior to the public announcement

SHANE: "Hey everyone. I hope you’re all well. Just because we have reduced the number of team members directly connected with the public does not mean ‘our entire senior team has quit because they know something the community doesn’t know’. Moving forward, we didn’t want to put any additional pressure on team members / new team members. We learned our lesson from that in the past where that direct, public interaction lead to all kinds of problems including low productivity, loss of focus, sense of entitlement that was thrown around internally at other team members and the list goes on.

Can you imagine being in a situation where it’s difficult to fire someone because the community will react without knowing the full picture, yet for confidentiality reasons you cannot disclose the actual reasons that person is no longer on the project? We want to avoid that and keep the people working on the project, FOR the project, focused on the tasks at hand and not with the leverage they can pull due to the external public following they have built up. If we part ways with someone there are reasons for doing so.

Liz and Kieran are two people who started off as early E2 Players who became (very helpful) MODs and slowly moved into CM roles because E2 acknowledged their ongoing effort and wanted to pay them for what they were doing. I remember reaching out to them and telling them “you guys do so much for the community we’d just like to be paying you so there is some form of reward in it for you as well”. This is how they became Community Managers for Earth2, and though they have done an amazing job, it is not their choice of profession, they have other fields of expertise and are within their right to want to move onto other things. They also became very close to Thomas and I am sure for them things do not feel the same (as we know Thomas wanted to move onto other things).

This is not something that suddenly happened, Kieran and Liz let us know some time ago. We have been searching for a replacement but we want to ensure that replacement does an outstanding job for E2 and it is taking some time, so this is not something that Kieran and Liz just sprung on us suddenly and they had no idea about the contents of the draft paper we released last week when they first informed us on the above details many weeks ago.

We are in deep discussions with a multinational company who are looking to create and deliver a 'Social Media Playbook' prior to commencing any actual Community Management for Earth 2. This will ensure alignment and clarification on the 'rules of engagement' and importantly provide the 'blue print' or 'guard rails' needed so that anyone in the role is able to execute according to our strategy. So we may move forward with that company or others that we have ongoing discussions with, there has been no final decision just yet and Kieran and Liz have been kind enough to ensure they stay around a little longer to help the transition.

I understand people don’t like change and their first reaction is to create negative scenarios as to why personnel are changing, but this is a normal part of life, we are still a very young project – we started with an initial team and it is normal for that team to evolve in order for us to get the right balance and achieve the goals set out before us.

We are making really good progress internally after recent changes and additions to the team, in fact better progress than last year so the changes we’ve been experiencing are having a positive effect. There is higher morale and a better sense of getting things done. I had planned to release the first video of the new dev vlog series early this week but it just didn’t feel right with all that is happening in Ukraine and the fact we have a number of developers based in that area of the world, so we will delay that release a little. We have members of our team who are actively involved with what is taking place and it’s very disheartening"

E2 News would like to thank K-Dizz and Liz for their immense help to the Earth2 community. We know they will be hard to replace. The good part is that they will be staying back as Earth2 Discord Mods