Complaint Flourish - 4/20
#1
Admin: Flourish

Server: Main - Heisenbee
Date + time: 4/20~5-8PM EST (though generally ongoing)
Synopsis:

As a preface, this is less about the specific incident that happened yesterday and more about the general flavor of interactions I've historically had with Flourish, though I'll cite what happened yesterday mostly.

Yesterday was my first time actually playing space station for any length in almost a year due to repetitive stress injuries and the really tense and overwhelming social environment of goonstation last year and the year before. I was a tiny bit manic and a little out of it and I got a tiny bit overexcited to the point of riding the line of a few server rules. In summary, a non-traitor (or at least someone who did a very good job of acting non-traitor O.O) found a katana and beepsky ran after them so i smashed him so they weren't immediately stunlocked out of slashy fun toy after finding it. An NTSO ran into me later with the baton in my bag (for the record it wasn't ever used, i just still had it from earlier), buuut they opened fire and lethaled me into crit for having it. Eventually they healed me after I handed it over but they seemed to have been treating a lot of people that way so I ran them down into security and started bashing the doors trying to challenge them to a duel because I felt like roleplaying a lighthearted non-lethal revenge plot and a few other people followed along and it was all in good fun.
The following round, I decided to join in as a security officer because of complaints about harsh security and my goal was to be entertaining. The NTSO from the last round joined and I teased them a bit after they joined about being aggressive in the previous round (for the record I never interfered with anything they did and the only time I ever clicked their sprite was to pat them on the head.) So after getting up to very clown-sec-like antics of hiding in bushes and rping with people in dark maintenance corridors, I slipped into the AI upload and jokingly freeformed them to end their sentences with "nanodesu" because of a callback to how i was teased in a similar way earlier in the round who at the time I'm pretty sure was the AI. The law only ended up lasting a couple minutes.

So what happened after that was me being pinged by Flourish saying my "behavior was unacceptable", I "should know better", that I was acting in a way unfit for a mentor. After that it was just "Why did you do X" and "Why did you do Y". At this point I was having a panic attack from suddenly being talked to like that and having a bunch of questions thrown at me, so it took me a little while to calm down and think of a response, but in the time it took me to explain myself Flourish had posted the same chat-spanning paragraph of admin ping two more times before i finished typing, which of course made the anxiety i was feeling already even worse. But after reading a more frantically typed version of what i mentioned above, Flourish called me griefy and shot down what I said by effectively saying I was being unfun and taking enjoyment at the expense of others and metagrudging. I don't have screenshots because I was too panicked to take any, but I'm sure ahelps are logged somewhere.

I'm going to make something extremely blatantly clear. I have extreme debilitating trauma surrounding ANY thought of deriving enjoyment at the expense of others. I have never once attacked someone without reason in this game as a non-antag and if things do escalate to combat around me I do my best, meticulously, never to cause any sort of round-ruining or lasting damage to anything or anyone around me. In other words, I am very literally deathly afraid of causing harm to people, manipulating people, bullying people, or generally senselessly causing anguish to another person without being reasonably provoked. If I have ever done any sort of griefing or grossly tasteless thing in space station it was either by accident, not taken the way I intended it to or otherwise miscommunicated, or a niche gimmick accidentally taken a little to far and then apologized for afterward. To not be given time to think, be talked down to like a child, have my status as a mentor used against me by saying I'm not holding up the image of a mentor by doing the things I did, called an unfun griefer, made out to be completely unthinking of the people around me, and completely misinterpreted triggered a trauma attack so intense that I couldn't trust myself for almost 48 hours. The way Flourish spoke to me was a way designed to make people feel guilt. I would have been perfectly fine to say "oops I'm sorry for going too far, I'll make sure I don't do it again" if Flourish had said "Hey I saw you did these things and they were too much. Please don't do things like that again." But instead Flourish demanded that I explain every little point in the same way you reprimand a child to make them feel guilty for misbehaving. Flourish told me I wasn't acting like a mentor which is literally just a textbook guilt trip. And the entire time I was panicking thinking "Am I really the exact kind of person I hate?" "Do I really deserve to be a mentor or even to play this game if I just make people uncomfortable and ruin their fun?" "Did I actually do something really wrong and grief someone without it seeming that way to me and completely fail to understand the people around me?" Even after I responded, because the response was just more of the same, it was too much and I cried myself to sleep and broke down the next day too. And it took until now to recenter myself and realize that I literally just poked at a NTSO for being a shitter and made an AI say nanodesu. But for some reason Flourish framed this entire thing as some sort of moral failing on my part for what effectively boils down to no-grey-area rules lawyering. And while I don't think it's intentional at all, I can't help but feel a tiny bit gaslit by the disproportionately exasperated way I was reacted to (that just so happened to hit my worst trauma trigger by chance). And on top of all of this Flourish told me that I should have just ahelped the player instead of trying to get back at them myself. I understand the sentiment, but what I did was very tame, lighthearted, and rp-centric and sure as hell shouldn't put me in the "fighting back makes you just as bad as the bully  (¬‿¬)" hole. And besides, interacting with Flourish is almost 100% of the reason that I don't have enough trust to use the ahelp command more in the first place. Pff the last time I had a conversation like this involving Flourish from the other side, the person who was lethaling and permabrigging as a nonantag was just doing a little "natural escalation"

Ever since 2019 I've had only awful interactions with Flourish to the point I constantly felt singled out and targeted by them and I'm almost certain I've spoken about this publicly before. I've never had this kind of experience with another administrator and, in fact, if an admin is pinging me at all, it's usually Flourish. Of course I can't link any messages to support this because I deleted my old discord account...But there's historically been a lot of bitterness between Flourish and I both in-game and on the discord and this is by no means the first time I've cried myself to sleep because of something they've said to me.

I have no idea if I'll ever touch this game again because of how emotionally harmful it's been to me due to a big pile of reasons, but this really is a bit of a last straw for me. I care about goonstation a lot and I've put a lot of work into content for it and even more time playing the game and feeling like I have to leave for my own health for a third time hurts a lot, but I keep feeling unwelcome every time I come back and don't want to be hurt like this again. Though if I ever feel masochistic enough to join another round at some point, I will no longer respond to messages from Flourish and I ask that if Flourish has an issue with me, to contact another administrator and to never speak to me again. I'm only typing this complaint for peace of mind and for other people to understand, so I will not be elaborating further, responding to comments, or ever checking the forums for any reason.
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Messages In This Thread
Flourish - 4/20 - by AwkwardDryad - 04-21-2022, 08:38 PM
RE: Flourish - 4/20 - by UrsulaMejor - 04-21-2022, 11:42 PM
RE: Flourish - 4/20 - by PNut - 04-23-2022, 11:13 AM
RE: Flourish - 4/20 - by Flourish - 04-24-2022, 12:42 PM

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