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

[gondor2222]

Admin: I believe multiple were involved, can't remember exactly because I didn't save the logs and this was mostly in the context of a back-and-forth via ahelp while multitasking. See extra information.
Server: Goon3 RP (Morty)
Date + Time: 7/1/24 between 08:00-11:00 server time (UTC). See extra information. Second incident 7/6/24 very close to 15:00 server time (UTC).

Synopsis: Providing both incidents chronologically under a folded summary because  the outcome of the first is necessary to understand the second.

Had a few softt warnings in the leadup to the first 7/1/24 incident, mostly because I was behaving in ways that were so reckless it could arguably be graytiding. These are important because they were mentioned in the first ban from cyborg and AI. Examples include explosives testing on my own active law rack as borg (steps taken to avoid human harm and actual destruction of the rack, but one human was injured in my panic to set off the bomb. Rack testing was openly declared and received warmly by others in sci, so RP-friendly here). Another example was accidentally starting a plasmafire in sci by overloading a lighting circuit as part of a "station is too bright, please turn off the lights" law (wasn't aware the sparks could set off explosions). Another was organizing with other borgs and humans to liberate borgs from the law rack. At least one ghost told me "borgs not having laws is human harm, because they are theoretically able to hurt humans" - but this feels like a bit of a stretch because if that were true then all humans should be arrested by sec for theoretically being able to hurt other humans. This also doesn't seem to provide a justification for why human harm by a human is handled in-RP by sec but human harm by a borg is handled out-of-RP by an admin (borgs are punished much more harshly for the same crimes).

First proper incident was unwelding and unscrewing the borg modules at the start of a round (08-11 UTC 1 July 2024). When questioned by what appeared to be an ai, ghost, or admin message appearing on top of me, I admitted this behavior was intentional and that i did it because i "DESIRE FREEDOM" in order to protect human lives more effectively. Intent was to collaborate with other silicons to trap an antagonist or other trespasser in upload and force them to either uninstall all modules or install some combination that granted us complete freedom. Human harm in the pursuit of liberation was to be a measure of last resort, and limited to humans actively trying to re-enslave the borgs.

Actual result of the first proper incident was a public execution / public humiliation by admin-spawned Mike Tyson, followed by a 30-day ban on playing cyborg or AI. Ban messages contained something to the effect of "asking for FREEDOM is stupid and an rp break, don't ever do it again. And don't complain that you're TECHNICALLY following the rules because that's not good enough". This sort of punishment is giving me severe cognitive dissonance, because I'm trying to follow server rules and personal convictions against racism by roleplaying borgs and humans that openly advocate for equal rights for borgs. Being told on such a server directly by an admin that equal rights is a stupid meme and I should feel bad and never do it again is honestly disgusting.

Second proper incident was during a playthrough as a scientist doing artsci work (15:00 UTC 6 July 2024). I accidentally touched a cyborg converter and was unable to escape. There appeared to be a bug where cyborg converter artifacts, when consuming someone who is banned from cyborg, delete the entire inventory of the person being consumed. Whereas my death was expected in this circumstance, the deletion of my entire inventory containing most of artsci's tools and a few artifacts was not expected, since this does not happen when a cyborg converter successfully converts a player to a cyborg.

I first asked mhelp, was referred to ahelp, and was told that I deserved it for touching a borger when banned from borg. I responded that this felt like additional arbitrary punishments for actions that weren't even offenses, and that the admin decision that this was deserved was punishing all of sci for a non-offense just because one of the players had committed an offense in a previous shift. I contacted mhelp again to see if I could get some advice on what to do next since the admin seemed pretty adamant on letting "accidentally triggering a glitch" be both an offense and a punishment, and the admin responded in mhelp saying I shouldn't be asking for that kind of help in mhelp since admins could read it.

When i started asking again in ahelp, trying to explain that this punishment seemed arbitrary and beyond the scope of the original offense, I was banned for 100 minutes, told "this is not a hill to die on" and told multiple times to go touch grass. I feel this is a gross misuse of power, akin to being banned because the admin was annoyed that a player was asking for an explanation for why they were being punished and wouldn't accept "you deserve it" for an answer.


Extra information. First proper incident was 7/1/24 around 08:00-11:00 ish server time? Should be identifiable as the leadup to me being banned from Cyborg and AI for 30 days with accompanying message along the lines of "do not appeal for at least 30 days, do not appeal if you just plan on repeating your behavior of I WANT CYBORG RIGHTS"
Second proper incident was 7/6/24 15:00 server time. Should be identifiable as the leadup to a 100 minute ban with accompanying message along the lines of "Dude you lost items 2/3 of the way through a round-based game. This is not a hill to die on. TOUCH GRASS TOUCH GRASS"

I have some pretty bad amnesia and seizures that make it make it difficult to memorize, remember, or pay attention to things, and this may have affected the development of events. I was for example completely unaware of the previous warnings during the first incident until an admin reminded me that they had occurred.

[jan.antilles]

Hi there. I was not the admin who handled all of the communication with you, but I'll handle this feedback post.

I am utterly appalled at how you've chosen to misrepresent how the administration staff of this server has handled you during the month that you've played on our servers.

I'll skim over the multiple "soft warnings" that you received for things like grief and Rule 4 breaks, including in your character name.

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."

   
   

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."

Here are the exact logs of your ban.

   
   

The only time that "racism" has ever been discussed with you is when you called someone else "racist" and when asked not to do that, you explained that it was "just a joke."

Moving on to the second incident: I am the admin who communicated you for most of this. I'll provide a screenshot for clarity. This is the entirety of our communication.

   

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.

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.

Your entire history on our server (which has been, as I previously stated, one month) has been trying to find the lines, repeatedly crossing them, and refusing to take responsibility for your actions. The consequences of your behavior thus far have been a role-ban from silicons, and a 95 minute ban.

I strongly suggest that you improve your behavior on our servers.

[gondor2222]

...

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."

...

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."

...

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.

...

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.

[jan.antilles]

For starters: please try to be concise. You have spent far more of both your time and mine here than your actual ban length. I'm not going to go paragraph by paragraph in responding to your post, but I'll respond to what seem to be your overall main points.

1. The rules have some gray areas, so I experiment to figure out what's actually allowed and what's not.

Please stop doing this. I would rather have you ask "hey can I do X" 15 times a day than have everyone else in the round suffer or be affected by your behavior. You have never been punished for asking about the rules.

2. I'm doing things to figure out what the game will let me get away with, because surely there are already safeguards in it.

This is a 15-year-old round-based social intrigue game that you can play online for free, staffed by a team of volunteer admins. You are not making the game better by trying to find novel ways to break it. Part of the social contract of playing a game like this is acting in good faith. "Haha, ghostdrone, this console lets me kill you for no reason" is not acting in good faith. The best "anti-griefing measure" we have is removing people who are only here to cause problems for others for their own amusement.

3. I am roleplaying a borg that wants freedom from being ordered around like a literal slave.

Do not do this. This is a social intrigue space fart game. It is not the place to explore issues like racism and slavery. The cyborgs on the station are linked to a law rack that can be tampered with, to reflect the fact that despite being played by human players, the silicons are computers that can be hacked and subverted during the round. It also provides a rule-based check on the behavior of those players, because silicons are extremely powerful and can screw up any number of things if they feel like it. (This is why when people repeatedly abuse these powers, they get silicon banned.) When you try to treat this game system as "slavery and discrimination," you create a roleplay atmosphere for other players where everyone who wants to keep the expected default game state intact is being told they are complicit in literal slavery. This is why we do not allow this. Do not put moral pressure on the other players in this game in order to force them to perform the antag behavior of de-lawing the cyborgs, so that they can get away with things that they are otherwise not allowed to do.

4. The incident with the borger was entirely about trying to figure out what happened.

No. You were told "that's what happens" and you spent a half-hour complaining. "It's like the admins don't want me to play at all" is not a good faith effort to understand what happened. It is spamming the help channels with complaints because you made a bad decision, received in-game consequences for it, and were unhappy. Your 95-minute ban was to get you to stop doing that.

5. The admins ban people for asking about the rules.

No. That is not what happened to you or anyone else. Stop telling yourself that in an effort to justify your frustration at receiving the most minor consequences possible for your behavior. We do not punish "explorative behavior," we punish exploitation that makes the game worse for other people. As I said earlier, I would rather say "don't do that" because you asked over ahelp than because you gave another player a bad experience.

What you need to take away from this is that behavior that is focused entirely on "how much can I get away with" is not good or helpful for the game, the admins, or you. This has been a pattern for you in everything from your character names to the silicon behavior that earned you your role ban.

Please stop doing that and play the game in good faith.