COMMITTEE STRUCTURE RESET

Dear players and fans,

Today, I took the decision to remove 8 people (actually 7) from our committee, after too many serious mistakes from a small group of sabotaging people who were once trusted as we recruited them. This doesn't change anything for you, players, but I thought that you might need some explanations about it. I am committed to rebuilding a complete new team as soon as conditions allow. Everything else will work as before, this doesn't change anything regarding Duel Commander apart from that governance reset.

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Over the past few years, an uneasy climate has enveloped teamwork and collaboration within our organization. A climate rooted in a closed circle of more or less well-intentioned outsiders who have managed to reach into the current team and influence part of it for the worse. This has led to a dead end regarding the possibility of working as a team in healthy and favorable conditions.

Over the past (soon to be) 11 years, I have built, with more than thirty people, just about everything you know about Duel Commander: setting up each of our old forums, I built each of our Facebook posts, articles, pages, our website, our announcement texts, I wrote our comprehensive rules, I spent months digging our history so that it wouldn't get lost, and writing about it, I wrote all our content: our beginner's guide, our forms, FAQ, I built our Discord spaces in thousands of clicks, I spent alone more than 1500€ across the services used just for the last 5 years, from Discord to domain names, I provided infrastructures, tools, partnerships, reconciled dissonant teams, managed crises, and I built with responsible people a game that has multiplied its popularity by more than 20 within a decade, which is today present on official platforms of the publisher, contributed to increasing our audiences tenfold, pairing up with some official MTG formats' audience, provided hundreds of insightful dataviz, supervised profitable partnerships, assisted multiple tournament organizers, judges, and so on. In short: if you've played Duel Commander for the past 11 years and enjoyed its development, growth and success, there's a good chance I've had something to do with it.

Unfortunately, while our team has always managed to renew itself, move forward, and overcome all forms of problems over the years, it now finds itself facing a growing wave of concerns and serious internal misconduct that have accumulated over more than three years, seriously threatening our fragile structure: refusals to use the secure tools in place, repeated denigration of current and former members covered up by managers, internal data leaks, refusal to negotiate, refusal to maintain contact, withholding of information, perverse accusations, denigration of team members, false accusations, conflicts of interest, public antagonism, childish behavior, misuse of tools, passive-aggressive threats, lobbying not accepting majorities’ decisions, uncoordinated initiatives, external compromises, recruiting of people more involved in third-party, unrelated places, undermining of official ones, failure to promote internal initiatives, public disclosure of internals, sending false information in public, failure to respect procedures, teamwork timings, formalism, publishing contradictory information, attempting to hijack domain names, discourage some tournament organizers from taking initiatives, allocate too little time for the committee to operate and even asking to be a part of it without being a part of decisions, and the list goes on. Not all of them are concerned by all this, some might not be concerned at all, but this is a global decision, and the whole toxic group needs to go, as we had reached a point where even sharing a link, forwarding an application or even offering to open discussions in peace again was rejected and transformed into accusations. I assume you'll read some people victimizing them, and I assume you will understand who is responsible for all this mess. Regardless of how this ends, I will ask you not to trust these people ever again as a team, but keep trusting them as individuals. They might attempt to keep hijacking the structure, and even if it all fails, I cannot tolerate these years of work, money and time to fall under the wrong hands of spoiled people who would steal all that we had built, in plain sight. And if that coup d'état works (no doubt it will be backed by those couple hundreds of unaware, toxic people who helped create it), so be it, they will have to do the whole job over again, so that they realize at least how intense and complex it was, and how spoiled they were to be welcomed to a house they would destroy from the inside. And should they try to fool you all into thinking they were legitimate heirs to all those years of work: they were never so. I alone have as much experience alone as them all seven summed up altogether. They probably never read our comprehensive rules, anyway.

All of this has led to a slow and creeping undermining of all the work accumulated over recent years, leading any collaboration to a dead end. I tried as best I could to allow this situation to continue for as long as possible, giving a chance for a "renewal" group, asserting its freshness, legitimacy, and confidence, yet leading to the abandonment and discouragement of several people, and mitigated results, often in denial of reality and unpleasant reports. As of this day, despite appearances, this undermining job is reaching its peak, using silence and isolation of people, one by one, so that this all looks like an isolated act in anger, revenge or gratuitous reaction that would not be based on facts, gradually creating enemies, born from a handshake between the inside and the outside. All this being backed by numerous quotes, direct messages, screenshots, forwarded notices of antagonistic behaviours and public denigration. All that happened here is truly unforgivable.

After they pushed the limits of what was acceptable and appropriate every day to the point of no return, I chose to put an end to this long-standing coup d'état. Cause yes, there are no elections, all we do is nominate ourselves in hope for stability and teamwork, and it's now been so for 18 years and over 45 people. This is why, today, I have made the decision, having never wanted to use this option, especially with people I respected and individually cared about (which makes me even angrier than anything else), the people that WE, together, as a trusting team, recruited, the people I interviewed myself, sometimes, even recruiting some questionable ones in hope to improve our internal cohesion, the decision to reset the affected part of our structure, by firing the seven remaining concerned people, with complete reluctance and in absolute disgust of this action, having never before considered such an operation.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the substance of the choices made recently: personally, I approve of our latest announcements, as I have unwaveringly supported the last 60 (remember that the last September changes are experimental, however). I will hasten to rebuild a full, more international team to avoid this community failure again as much as possible, once calm has returned, and to better represent the global diversity of our now worldwide game. Until then, nothing changes in our habits; the next announcement is still scheduled for November 24th; everything you know will continue to exist as before; and the "temporary functional lead" I am representing will draw its guidance from the remaining team in the meantime, while a new team arrives, so that I can leave this strategic decision-making role as quickly as possible to return to team supervision I can trust and made up of competent people.

This remains the heaviest and worst decision I have had to make in over a decade, and I strongly ask and encourage all those who would feel the urge to harass me online, like our former and current members, not to do so, the rest of the team in place having nothing to do with this decision, and remembering that there is a strong chance that the perpetrators of such actions would very likely be part of the source of the problem, and that in all the countries concerned, this is an action liable to prosecution and enshrined in the laws as such. It goes without saying that as such, the means of contacting me will be temporarily limited. I will not, as you can all guess, answer further questions nor lead public talks for a long time, so trying to get in touch with me will mostly be unsuccessful, rejected or blocked, on all social networks and anywhere else. I hope you can understand how hard this will be for all of us.

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Your unwavering and persevering supporting member for 11 years,

William / DocFX.