I'm gonna start out by saying this is not meant to stir hate, or trouble in any way.
Since we're doing community feedback, and the UNMC was brought up the way it was, i thought i'd give my perspective.
My perspective, by the way, has been formed by information that was available to me at the time, combined with my own memory of events i saw happen.
I understand i more than likely don't have the entire picture, and given the time span, my memory will probably be a bit off, but here it is nonetheless.
I was a UNMC sergeant. I was on the inside when it started to decline. While there were issues within the ranks, at the time, and i guess still, it felt like it was issues that wasn't out of the ordinary, and that could've been resolved, but was exacerbated by what felt like management mistreatment of the UNMC as a whole.
Let's start with the threads to remove. My recollection is, we had equipment available to us, and people who knew how to use it, i'm shit in a gunfight so i'm not among those people, but as a result of that, often times we'd come out on top in gunfights. Aside from the times where gangs, and police especially, would intentionally wait til the midnight restart where most UNMC had gone off for the night before launching an attack, i don't recall us losing a lot of gunfights. I feel that's where most of those threads stemmed from. People would lose a fight, and cry fowl.
While on the topic of late night attacks. Police were doing that a lot at one point. For a while it was sure as amen in church, come midnight restart, they'd launch an attack and claim big victory.
We'd raise concerns about it, and most everybody, staff and management included, would shush it down. It was fine, police could do that. Okay, cool. We'd do exactly the same thing to them in retaliation, cause seasoned russian military unit, we weren't just gonna sit and take getting attacked, police would kick up a big fuss about it and people, staff and management included, would take their side. We'd try to point out "hey, this was done to us and was deemed to be okay", and we'd basically get kicked to the curb.
There were just a lot of things said and done that made us feel like staff had it in for us.
@Vladic Ka especially, outright said on streams he wanted us gone. I recall at least a couple of times on stream he would call abuse of power, power gaming, or just plain bad RP, often times for doing nothing more than police were doing, and still are doing, without them getting any flak for it.
I remember one episode,
@eval_betty was streaming RPUK. And he decided, like many before him had done, to go challenge the UNMC rule of the checkpoint not being a place to be hanging out. He wanted to poke the bear, as was his thing.
So he went to the checkpoint, and started doing essentially what equates to the stereo typical bully holding a finger close to someones face going "i'm not touching you, i'm not touching you", hurling abusive remarks in the process.
So the soldier there, i forget who it was, followed procedure. Gave betty multiple verbal warnings to back off, and leave the checkpoint. He was met with more abuse and "i'm not touching you". The soldier eventually had enough and made it clear that if betty didn't start heading down the road, he'd be taken into custody, and dealt with. Betty went to a nearby bush and sat there, which wasn't all that uncommon for people to do.
So the soldier went and took him into custody, as had been done with many before betty who refused to heed warnings, and ended up executing him. Betty disapproved, devolved into trash talking the soldier, resulting in a barrage of TS abusive being hurled at the soldier by bettys following, and no one doing anything about it. Vladic just sat there like "well i agree with betty".
I believe that was Vladics main complaint. That we went too often and too quickly to the execution. The thing is, we put a lot of effort into avoiding it. Some were stripped naked, knee capped and let go, some were taken to a remote location and left there. Some were used as forced labor, and others were tortured and later let go. The exodus charter were only really used for people who had gone out of their way to poke us. And Vladic didn't seem to see that.
Another situation, Vladic came into our channels, clearly intoxicated, telling a story of "police didn't play ball with my scenario, so i want the UNMC and the gangs of altis to do an HM and kick their butts, with the UNMC organizing it", giving no thought to whether or not it made sense for us to do such a thing within RP. He was initially declined, to which he responded by talking down to us, so we tried brainstorming ideas on the fly. The general response from vladic to this was essentially "nope, wrong, bad. Not good enough."
We eventually get an OP going, and whooped the butts of the police. Job was done so we pulled out. That wasn't good enough either. He wanted us to stand around shooting our guns in the air with the rest of the rebels, again giving no thought to whether or not it made RP sense.
What broke the camels back, was when we were pushing hard for territory expansion, and everything we tried just getting shot down. For weeks, if not months, we put real effort into coming up with new job ideas, and ideas for runs. Ideas for new checkpoints were thought of, developed and presented. All got rejected.
Scenarios to take more ground were put together and played out. The scenario to take Paros was played out, and ended in our favor. Barely so, but we took Paros. It got ignored. Nothing happened.
I don't recall who the dev were at the time, but i remember someone mentioning we weren't gonna get any work done on our side, cause the dev just couldn't be bothered. That's when people gave up.
That's when it turned into a "shitshow". Sure, people got in that shouldn't have, and some command decisions were made that were not as great as they could've been, but it didn't truly go down hill til after a year+ of everything we did being deemed as wrong in some way, and nearly every attempt to course correct basically getting shot down.
If memory serves, which it very well may not, we even tried for a full command change, which was also halted. I remember
@blaze1981 saying the only reason he stuck around for the last 6 or so months of it, was because management had told him that if he left, the UNMC would get shut down, and so he stuck around, in spite of wanting to leave, because he didn't want to ruin it for everyone else.
To end this, i feel i should mention again, i am not putting this out there to cause trouble. I harbor no real grudge against anyone, and i am not intending for this to be an attack. Just in the spirit of community feedback, and because the UNMC was brought up the way it was, i thought i'd put my perspective of it out there.