SaiKar
From Charas Project
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SaiKar (AKA Harvey/Jason Steffke) is the oldest (as of registration date) active member of Charas. He became a Request mod, then All of All mod, and finally Administrator of the forums. HE acted in Alex's stead, though he didn't actually own anything on the site. He resigned.
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Charas History
Early Days
Harvey joined Charas under the login SaiKar upon suggestion of his friend to share his battlecharacter sets that he had created for his own game. Receptions to the sprites was very positive and Sai started to get requests, which he answered for a time before burning out. Sai joined the VG Reapers, the largest spriting group on Charas at the time. The image of someone trying to help the community was enhanced with Sai tried to solve the RRWP vs Gary arguments that were raging at the time. When Alex decided to appoint new moderators, Sai was appointed Moderator of All of All and Requests forum on Feb 29, 2004. Some of his policies set in the Requests forum are still in use today.
Growing Power
Sai resigned from All of All moderator on July 23rd, 2004. The actual reason wasn’t public knowledge until now, but it was in reality him being tired of cleaning up after Darkfox; the latter was starting a great number of personal feuds at the time that were spilling into the forum.
When the first global moderators were chosen, Sai was on the list but declined Alex due to growing real life concerns. Yet he saw the general state of Charas deteriorating under Darkfox and Kijuki’s global modship; the former has already been discussed and the latter was much more well-minded but rarely around when he was needed. Reain and Trevlac, new All of All mods, were also doing little. In his panic, Sai sent a private message to Alex asking for a global moderator position himself. Instead, Alex made him an Administrator; someone with access to the control panel to appoint moderators, create new forums, and ban members!
Quarrels with the Staff
Darkfox immediately objected to SaiKar’s insane jump of power, making many accusations of impending power abuse. Several other moderators murmured in discontent, but with Alex supporting Sai nothing really could be done.
Sai took over his duties rather quickly. When Reain resigned as All of All moderator, Sai organized a public election to replace him. He also fired Trevlac for continued lack of presence and expanded the election to two winners. Red Giant and Carmen became part of the staff as All of All mods.
For many months afterward Sai was playing Final Fantasy XI, an online game that takes up the full screen. As such Sai wasn’t on the site very much and missed several rather important events, such as the coming of Lord Raffles. The staff (GhostClown and Carmen in particular) grew discontented with his lack of being around and began to criticize his policies, claiming he was “out of touch.” Which, to be fair, had some truth to it. The staff often complained at his actions, saying that Alex wanted him to run everything by the private forum first, and yet other staff members went ahead with their policies and complained of “ganging up” when they were called on it later. Some called for a new administrator but there weren’t any willing candidates that could be trusted. The staff became polarized and no meaningful decisions were made as a group, and the progress of the site stagnated.
The New Charas
However Carmen and GhostClown’s policies were not terribly well liked and they made a number of enemies, in particular Osmose and Midnight. They had a heavy-handed moderation style to them, and eventually people got rather annoyed at things being locked or deleted for no real particular good reason. Robotam approached Sai’Kar and asked for his permission to start an investigation. Sai granted it, seeing a public hearing as a good way to get rid of his rebellious staff.
Public opinion strongly sided against the two and Sai made his decision to remove some of Carmen’s powers in the infamous Charas Judgment on March 17th. Co-conspirators Osmose and Midnight were appointed moderators on March 22nd. Many new policies on why threads would be locked and the future were introduced. GhostClown and Carmen retired shortly afterward.
This point essentially marks the time when Sai took a much more active role in the development on Charas, now that he had a staff that wouldn’t fight him on every point.
The Troll Invasion
TrollKingdom began sending trolls to stir up trouble on April 9th, mere days after the little revolution. Essentially, the entire reason there was a Troll Invasion was because Sai got sick of having to cross-check IPs and writing styles and always be on active alert to ban troublemakers. In order to counter the trolls tactics, a new forum Sanctuary Fortress was established to discuss the situation and try to keep the general population from making the situation worse. Behind the scenes, almost four solid days of MSN chats between staff members tracked down the source, located another forum that had been attacked, and tracked down of Alex to implement an IP ban feature.
On April 13th the trolls were still coming despite everything done, and, weary of constantly being ready to ban someone, Sai authorized a Charas flood on TrollKingdom, the only such action in Charas’s history, of which many are thankful for.
Bizarrely, the attack stopped the invasion, but Charas itself was fragmented by the actions. The situation was made worse when Sai took a few days off. People accused him of acting irresponsibly, of abandoning the forum. Sai decided to resign as administrator, but was talked out of it at basically the last moment by Midnight. Eventually everyone calmed down anyway.
Aftermath to Present
Other stuff happened, but nothing of it really defining of Sai, and so I’ll leave what happens next for a history article. Sai is still the administrator and still deals with stuff on occasion, and there haven’t been any sightings of lynch mobs in record time!
Resignation
On March 5, 2007, SaiKar posted his resignation thread, offering no reason for this turn of events. He recommended Razor and Osmose for promotion; both were eventually promoted.
Personality Stuff
Administrative Style
Sai was a proponent of the “new Charas” style of administration; rules designed so that the members don’t need the moderators and function on their own. This rarely works in practice as there is often someone out to stir up trouble or oblivious to the fact that they’re being annoyed. But it’s a goal!
SaiKar is something of a narcissist and enjoys typing up large triumphant speeches whenever possible to introduce a new forum feature or some judgment on a current issue. If anyone actually reads these speeches is unknown.
Sai administered the site mostly from afar, letting individual moderators handle as many problems as they can and work them out without management hanging over their heads. However when the situation gets out of control Sai had no problem diving into the action, often in the form of another big speech. Generally people listen when Sai gets involved; those that don’t tend to get threatened, or worse.
Art and Programming
Sai is a spriter and dabbles in making all sorts of resources for RPGMaker, though his best and most commonly known one is battlecharacter sets. He has made at least 15 sets based off of either Mack and Blue characters or generated characters from scratch and about the same number of RTP characters with added attack animations and status effect poses. He submitted a few resources to the battlecharacter generator.
Sai is also an artist, but a bad one. He never practices to get any better and occasionally complains about this. Perhaps ironically, at least a dozen people are better at drawing Sai'Kar than he is.
He has been working sporadically on several RPGs over the years. Control of Destiny 2 is a traditional questing RPG and is what the vast majority of his spriting work was created for. Outpost was an experiment in sim to manage a city that was partially successful. Control of Destiny Tactics is a more recent project to create a Final Fantasy Tactics-type engine that is still in the development phase (and by the looks of it will be there for a very long time to come).
Friends
Midnight and Osmose are Sai’s two closest friends on the site and are largely responsible for him not going nuts at some point and retiring for good. Over the years they have acted as advisors to Sai in making administrative decisions and the three clocked about 34 trillion hours in MSN chats since becoming friends. Realizing that they were essentially the “power behind the throne”, he finally gave in to their constant nagging to make them real moderators during the Charas Judgment. They were both given weak positions so that nobody would complain about appointing friends as mods too much, and then both upgraded of All of All mods, the positions they currently hold.
SaiKar is generally good friends with most of the rest of the moderation staff, particularly Warxe PhoenixBlade, Razor, and FFL2and3rocks. There isn’t really anyone on the site that Sai strongly dislikes anymore.
To the best of his knowledge, Sai is the only part of the moderation staff that Alex trusts explicitly.
The Sai’Kar Character
SaiKar’s login is based on Sai’Kar, a female character in the RPG Control of Destiny 2 that he has been working on for the past forever. Sai is probably one of the most recognizable faces on Charas, and several forum members have included Sai in their own arts of work.
Gender Confusion
Because of his female avatar, many many people thought he was a girl, and it's a common mistake even recently. It is rumored (and almost certainly true) that the "gender" field of the Charas profile was added because so many people thought Sai was a girl in real life.
Historical Trivia
- First post: http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=1657&forumid=2&catid=2
- In the original battlecharacter request topic, Sai only fulfilled three of four actual requests before quitting. But the reputation as a spriter stuck for years and was only really replaced by a reputation as part of the staff.
- Sai actually “hacked” into threads in the private forum and also read private messages by using URL abuse. Sai told Alex both of these things after a time, who patched up the bugs.
