Complaint Two incidents: Goon3 7/1/24, 7/6/24

[gondor2222]

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Your issues with cyborgs were things like, as you admit, trying to bomb your law rack or mess with payroll, on default laws. You openly admitted that you were "trying to find the line."

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Your cyborg ban had absolutely nothing to do with "equal rights." No admin ever told you anything remotely like "equal rights is a stupid meme and I should feel bad and never do it again."

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You were not being "punished" by a "bug or glitch." The code that handles cyborg-banned accounts touching borg artifacts is the same that handles NPC monkeys touching artifacts: log the death, spawn an npc mini bot, and qdel the user. It functioned exactly as written. The process is entirely different from a regular borging, which tears off and replaces limbs one at a time and ends with gibbing. There are multiple kinds of artifacts that can instantly kill you in artifact science.

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You were banned nearly a half hour after your initial mhelp. You spent that entire time arguing and complaining, and just as before, you've drastically misrepresented our conversation in your complaint.

It should be clear from the first screenshot from my own words that I was trying to find things that were silly pranks that were NOT general annoyances or worse - I was looking to discover novel mechanics for pranking people in harmless ways (like a clown might). If the intent of finding the line were to cross it to actually cause harm I would have simply intentionally griefed people with known mechanics. Silly pranks were to be memorized for general humor in RP, annoyances were to be avoided in general, and grief was to be triaged and reported to the admins. I would like to clarify that many of the instances which appear to be intentional grief were experiments with unknown systems which unintentionally caused grief, with the intent being to report any such problems to the admins so the underlying mechanics could be fixed to avoid actual exploitation.

It's kind of hard to follow rules exactly as a new player when we're told that the rules on the rules page are "just guidelines" and that individual cases need to be interpreted by the admins. Repeatedly doing things that are completely within the rules in order to receive more concrete feedback on what the rules should mean and being warned when rules are broken is the only realistic way to learn that kind of stuff, since we don't have more concrete rules. "Trying to find out what constitutes rulebreaking" shouldn't be an offense in itself, and I can't very well use ahelp for permission for every possible step into gray area: it would just completely swamp the admins with questions they've already been asked a thousand times because I often have NO IDEA what actions are potentially dangerous.

As a new player, I also made the mistake of assuming that many easily accessible possible griefing strategies would have in-game solutions that are just as accessible for balance reasons. For the DWAINE terminal for example, I hid my deletion of system files from other players because I assumed that there would be enough protections in place to stop a crisis from arising, and that if a crisis were to arise, it would be easily fixable without the cooperation of the one who deleted the files, and in the worst case I would admit responsibility and help clean up, and we would all learn how to avoid hostile DWAINE actions in the future. When it became clear to me that this was not the case, I stopped deleting files and collaborated with the science department across several shifts (including switching to goon1 for extra help) to figure out how to fix these issues with the master tapes. The second screenshot in your post shows my ahelp where I warned that i had very good reason to believe that such cyberattacks were WAY unbalanced and needed to be addressed, since this could ruin a round for several departments if a single antag, emag or not-computer-savvy person were to make the wrong decision. The intent here was CLEARLY to inform the admins that I had experimentally determined that this mechanic was potentialily grief, so that it could be fixed. I have already used this information multiple times since then to help repair DWAINE terminals that have accidentally or intentionally had their files corrupted, since I can easily identify the problem and organize a team to fix the issue.

The remote payroll suspension and resumption were similar, though I was confronted by admins before any in-rp investigations were able to discover what was happening. As before, I was careful to make sure the payroll changes were more "haunted and annoying" rather than truly threatening to the team, hiding my actions with the expectation that command or AI would immediately notice that it was me who was doing it, at which point we could teach command the signs of payroll hacking and disseminate this information to the playerbase. As before, this system was very unbalanced, and once antag activity on the station became clear I dramatically reduced the payroll interference to a level of "mild annoyance". Also as before, I planned on informing the admins that this mechanic was prone to grief so that it could be fixed, but since I was questioned by an admin before I could reach out at the end of the shift, I stopped entirely because I figured this questioning by the admins was a good enough sign that the admins were aware of the issue. The intent was to cause drama and some laughs through mild inconvenience, and explore mechanics to allow anti-griefing measures to be deployed.

The cyborg behaviors were more or less in the same line, though here the motivation was twofold. There were a bunch of end-shift experiments with the law rack to stress test it. Initial ones were simple, like thermiting the floors and cutting the wires. There was eventually unintentionall collateral damage when an RD stepped in to remove the bomb, and I panicked and attempted to set the bomb on fire. After this incident I received some good feedback from ahelp that I should try goon1 if I was interested in less-rp-friendly explosives testing, but after goon1 told me the RP rules are more or less the same other than looc, I started testing on replica law racks in the space diner. These were intended to gather data that could be useful in true antagonist situations as well as defense measures against them, and occurred at the end of shift similar to science's frequent toxin explosions to minimize harm to crew. There was also a similar motivation to discover if a single emagged borg could emag the rest of the borgs (for the same grief or antag discovery / recovery data), and I'm happy to report that the law rack was the one case where easy griefing appeared to be impossible.

My remark about being punished for advocating for civil rights was in response to the "please don't appeal it just to get back up to the same PLEASE FREE ME". This comment makes me feel like I'm being told I should get lost rather than committing an offense like roleplaying a borg that wants freedom from being ordered around like a literal slave. If a human player behaved in this way when imprisoned they would be treated by sec with in-RP measures and perhaps a trial, while the same behavior from a borg apparently results in public humiliation and public execution by the gods because an admin has decided that "political activism while being a borg" is a severe crime warranting banishment from existence along with collateral damage to anyone foolish enough to associate themselves with that player in later rounds.

The second incident with the borger revolved ENTIRELY around trying to figure out what happened. I kept asking what exactly had happened because I wasn't getting clear answers. When i initially asked why exactly my inventory had been deleted, i just got a response that was more or less "that's what happens when you're banned from borg", which was... less than helpful. It sounded like me and the rest of artsci were being suddenly smited by the admin intervention because of my unrelated actions in a previous round. I'm a relatively new player - I don't know all of the possible artifact effects, edge cases, interactions with ooc statuses, and the like. I never saw a clarification that it wasn't a bug or a glitch, just that it was because i had been banned from borg and I should just deal with it. So of course I was going to keep insisting on getting an answer from ahelp because my question had not been answered and I wasn't even sure if I was being actively punished by an admin for a prior offense. When I insisted on knowing what if anything I was being punished for, this was interpreted as belligerence and I was banned, which to me feels really extreme.

In all of these cases I've been trying to figure out how the rules work so that I can *actually follow them*. Or as you represented my actions, "I AM GOING TO DO EVERYTHING BUT ACTUALLY BREAKING MY LAWS". And when I complain that I need feedback to know if my actions are in the wrong, I'm *banned* for asking. All of these behaviors are actively punishing me for trying to work within the rules in an rp-friendly way that allows me to better understand the rules and play the game. If the admins punish people for asking whether something was a rulebreak or for trying to discuss the rules in detail, this will inevitably force players to either play extremely boring "safe" gameplay, force them into griefing in secret (since asking if something is allowed will be punished), or quitting entirely.

I really am trying to just get clarification so I can contribute to interesting and enjoyable gameplay, and I feel like punishing this kind of explorative behavior is punishing both creativity and my ability to realistically RP. I want to shut down griefing and discrimination against borgs to create a more welcoming and fun environment for other players, but I'm warned, punished and then banned from such roles or from the server altogether when I try to experiment with how best to do so. Requiring people to understand the rules in order to play but also requiring them to learn the rules through experience is just frustrating because it means the only way to understand the rules is to be punished for breaking them.