This is the report no leader in the club wants to write but inevitably must. All things must end and real life must always come first. Suffice to say I have some things in my professional and personal lives that I must attend to and that has placed me in a position where I can no longer give this community what it deserves. Decisions like these are never easy but I feel confident that a fresh energy and perspective in the Fist chair is what is needed at this crucial crossroads, not someone muddling through while they are distracted by IRL.

Serving as Fist has been an honor and the gaming community will always be close to my heart. I will always be around, gaming with yall, submitting the screenshots because I don't trust anyone else to do it :P I had hoped to stay a bit longer and see the implementation of seasons through. It's now up to the next Fist to decide how to integrate gaming into the seasonal model the council is implementing next year whether they stick with my battle pass proposal or implement something else.

In my time as Fist, I have endeavored to make gaming, and advancement within the gaming society in particular, more accessible and foster a stronger sense of community. Much work remains for my successor, and the work of removing barriers to gaming and fostering the gaming community is never-ending.

The Future

Bubba will post the application timeline and requirements for the next Fist. Here are my thoughts on what the immediate challenges are:

• Our platforms and cluster values need a comprehensive overhaul. One of my regrets is being very reactive and haphazard with cluster values and that has lead to some glaring inconsistencies. One of the second-order effects of Casual Queue was it created a new floor of sorts for our traditional time/cluster ratios. Casual Queue is amazing, don't get me wrong but it changed the landscape for cluster balancing. The old guideline used to be roughly 5 minutes a cluster and the next Fist will have to reconcile the need for consistency in cluster values with the "tic tac toe" effect of casual queue for lack of a better term.
• One of the promises of going to seasons is the opportunity to provide an "endgame" of sorts for the gamers who have long since maxed out the GMRG. The GMRG accessories/leaderboard once served this purpose but it needs reform or replacement to engage more than just the top 10 in a given quarter.
• The gaming community currently feels fractured in the sense that everyone is off in small pockets playing a ton of different games. That's not inherently a bad thing but one of the challenges for the next Fist will be bringing people back together.

I'm available via discord DM or email to anyone who wants to ask questions or even look over an application. My advice is to think of where the gaming community is now and craft a vision for where you think it should go. The specific ideas/proposals in your app should point toward your vision for where the gaming community needs to go.

Closing

Thanks to Evant and Bubba for taking a chance on me. Thanks to Drac for the support and counsel over the past few years. Thanks to all my colleagues on the council, past and present, who were great friends and teammates to help support one another. Thanks to all the great Fist staffers who kept things moving and listened to all my crazy ideas. Thanks to all who gave feedback over the past few years, I sincerely hope you know that I heard you. And the biggest thanks of all to the gamers of the club, who make this community what it is.

Rajhin Cindertail aka Turel

Fist of the Brotherhood