Goonhub
02-28-2021, 09:05 PM
Updated thoughts.
First bit: I am here to represent my experiences I have had with the poster. This is true of every application I post on. They are my experiences. I don't appreciate third parties coming in and trying to speak to those experiences; just as I am not here to say to anyone that their Good experiences were Actually Not Good because people THINK they saw X and Y and what was really going on was A and B and they misunderstood T; I likewise fully expect others to not do that to me.
That said: I could've laid some things out more cleanly. I want people with nuanced empathy and a commitment to cooperative problem-solving to be mentors. Like that's kind of the guidelines? Know thine role and help others know their role. That's it. That's the whole point of why I post as much as I do, what I do, and where I do it. These are the people that have helped my rounds and experience in the community, the mentor mice that have seen me slide out an airlock at a lubed escape and that I was going to die alone so they flew out the airlock to be with me; the mice that squeak and dance in front of Security when a shift SUCKS and sucks bad and we get to try to feed them our Robust Donuts; the mentors who know me and know I'm not new but don't give me any grief when I show up late in a round on Clarion and don't know where the heck mining is; the players that take the time to elaborate on how to use a printer (again) and remind me that I'm not stupid, it’s a mechanically deep game, and that once I get how to do it, I'll remember forever. I want someone who understands that leaving someone in a teleporter for an hour goes beyond just "I'm trapped" IC concerns that are relational to an AI Law and into "I'm not being allowed to participate in the game" OOC concerns that relate to who has capacity to cooperatively problem-solve and keep people in the round and feeling okay about the round. Same idea with the mediborg stuff (3 months ago). I am not far enough away from that to be comfortable and assured that this is no longer habitual. But maybe that's old and decrepit, so who cares too much?
Getting ignored in the teleporter was also about 2.5 months ago. Missing the mark on these things a few times is fine. I am not comfortable and assured that there is a more developed nuance between when something is becoming OOC unfun for people and when it's primarily an IC/IR concern. And this is a concern that, while this particular experience is dated maybe, came to life for me again three days ago.
I have played more in the past week and have tried to survey a broader field of experiences because I thought I am missing something here; when people are having lots of good experiences and I can only think of one good experience, it's undoubtedly confusing to the point where I think maybe I've been playing a mean and evil character or catching people on bad days.
So, the second part of this, after much more thinking and much more playing:
I will jump right to it. I'm moving my feedback to a full -1.
There was a round, 3 months ago, where I was on my Known and Named Officer; the AI bantered publicly with Stars in general comms in a way that I can best describe as...intrusive. Because it was banter that is best understood by people with a working metafriendship. And not that you can't have metafriendships or play on them in-rounds and in interactions and quip with people you know, but I don't fully understand having to subject everyone in-round to this by using general comms for a length of time and in a way that shuts down others who try to involve themselves in it. So this is nitpick-y, yes? Why does this matter?
The AI said "Someone's being stinky in tech storage", and I thought this meant the AI was reporting someone being criminal in tech storage, and when I go there to see what's up, it's Stars. I said "I got a tip someone was in here doing something they shouldn't be," and I am told "Oh, don't worry, that's just how me and the AI are, we go way back." Please recognize "that's just how me and the AI are" is dependent upon understanding of a metafriendship between those characters that is only known to the people in that relationship. I get to be no part of it, and coupled with "don't worry," it's a sign for me that I'm not invited into this interaction. This was a waste of my time; not because someone reported something meaningless over general comms, not because I spent the 5 minutes to go there; This is an opportunity cost thing: why did I seek out whatever was going on there when it dead-ended to a point of non-interaction? Why did I spend my time investing in that when no one else wanted me to actually invest in that? It could've been "Oh, this AI is silly, yeah? Maybe ask for their laws?" (at least this gives me a piece to speak), or "Yes! I've worked with them before, but they're usually not this snippy!" (this opens it up for me to understand something broader about the background of these characters, and to be "in the know"). There are different ways to open up the conversation and invite New Faces or Not Known Faces into it with the art of "Yes And...". "We're just like this" misses that mark and says "if you don't know, you don't know. Keep walking." Nobody likes to Not Be In On It. Especially not on an RP server where the whole point is To Be In On It at some level since people are meant to interact with you.
Okay, so why do I care about something from 3 months ago that's honestly so minor? First, I remember things like that and the way they make me feel, intended or not, and they shape how I understand people are going to treat me and how I need to expect to be treated. These are minor things apart, but think of getting ignored in a teleporter and told I'm not in on it and pushed out of my job all together as a collective thing and the end result is: none of these experiences make me feel particularly welcomed to the server by certain players when they're occurring all with the same player. I never want anyone else to feel that because they're not in on things. Because it honestly hurts my experience when it happens to me. And you know what? It also hurts when it happens to other people, and I've seen this as an outsider too, and will get to that somewhere near the end of this.
Second: pattern recognition. The point that THIS loops back to, the real heart of it is three days ago. Because the same AI and Stars are doing the SAME thing when I am in the SAME role, except this time the AI is saying how they’re gonna kill Stars and Stars is slinging it back and it's uncomfortable and weird OOC, again, personally because it’s violent, and less-personally because I am Not In On It But Being Subjected to Being The Weird Outsider Who Is Forced To See All This on General Comms. So I said, IC, to knock it off and go to PDA (nicer in tone, but if we're cutting to the core of Words Having Meanings here, this is what I was saying). And I got told over radio "that's just how we are" (see above). Fine, okay. This all operates at an "in your face" level of discomfort for the general conversation, and the follow-up when asked to stop shuts down other players new to the interaction from stepping in and engaging. If you don't understand this or want to reflect on it for the future, ask yourself why that conversation had to occur on gen comms. What was the very specific point of taking a personal interaction dependent on meta-knowledge only a handful of people hearing it on gen comms posses over having it on Departmental Frequency or an Intercom or paper with cameras or PDA or face-to-face, all of which you're familiar with as someone who plays/ed a lot of AI and someone who plays a character that has to speak through unconventional means? Think it through to all ends. But like, who cares because this gets too into it to be the actual legitimate problem I had with that interaction.
This is where that experience went from a "meh" to an "absolutely not" for me: I was in handcuffs in the courtroom after all this happened, and Stars walks in to clean up the room. We laugh for a moment or whatever and I try to get past the weird OOC problem I was having before by saying something related to it that was jovial, that kind of meant to bridge over. Like, to me, it was a "hey! I'm here, with Stars, one-on-one, I can have a good interaction and really see how Spark plays this character."
I move to the side so Stars can clean and start undoing my cuffs. I get 3/4 of the way there and get shoved, then told "oh it's so sad how [my team] all abandoned [me]." I say something, I don't even remember what. I think to myself "oh, I'm in the way," and move over another seat. I start undoing my cuffs. I get 3/4 of the way through and get shoved. Then I get told again "oh nobody came to help you, isn't that so sad." This was intentional. The shoving was intentional, undoing my cuff progress was intentional; Stars punctuated each shove with a comment about how none of my friends cared to help me. You knew what you were doing. Handcuff breaking text shows up in red, in bold, in the textbox to people who aren't the ones undoing the cuffs; mopping text is blue. For reference:
![[Image: n2UCsxa.png]](https://i.imgur.com/n2UCsxa.png)
There's not really any two-ways about this. You’ve played AI and are a seasoned player overall and know to pay attention to the chat window. You've played Security before and know how fast-paced and stressful it is without nonantags messing with you. You have a mentor application up. People are watching what you do more carefully. You know better than this shit.
You absolutely HAVE to understand that at this point, it looks like I am being punished for telling the AI and Stars to quiet down about something I think is OOC uncomfortable from earlier, for trying to involve myself in a conversation. Whether this was what you consciously intended or not, THAT is what it looks like. THAT is how people involved will read those situations, and they take that with them. I can't remember if I crashed out or whatever at the end since I didn't get the credits but after this interaction I specifically wanted to see if you were an antag. I checked the GoonHub round listing the day after since it still bothered me, and Stars was not an antag, not a sleeper, not a mindslave. So I was shoved around and made fun of and inhibited from playing the game for an additional 4 minutes after an incredibly tense situation because ??? It was funny to get back at me? Or it was funny on its own? It wasted my time after an interaction that had a bad misunderstanding and left me needing to rush to see what the next move was. It was insensitive in a moment when making small talk and picking up or even just sitting with me quietly would've done. I don't even know what to make of this fully. It's poignantly one of those minor "and...?" things and yet it's also by the same token really unbelievable. It wasn't very funny at all to me.
Which is...more confusing and no further elucidated because today someone also was IC adamant about something they were trying to hint they were OOC uncomfortable with. And Stars, the same character/player, understood, respected and supported what that person was requesting to happen IC.
And then also because the day after Handcuff Round, I spectated a round where Stars was the Same Character in the Same Job wearing the Same Outfit, and the way that he interacted with New and Not Named faces was never to make fun of them, never to shove them. It was helping a botanist learn to take a fire extinguisher back (no bumping, no pranks, no shoving of them, very conscientious with your game controls...), it was accepting a balloon from the very excitable clown, it was engaging in a pat-fight with a person that you have a meta-friendship with (which is a way of celebrating and reveling in that friendship. This stuff is fine, good even, since it doesn't depend on directly isolating or excluding people who Aren't In On It. It was cute). So then, why was my experience so dismally different even in markedly similar situations?
Well, sure, maybe my character on that day was being a bitch or something, right? Everyone has to have off-rounds, even though I just came back from a Very Big Break and felt genuinely good coming out of my first few rounds and haven't had a single problem in interacting with any other consistent players since I got back. Jump to the day after, when I'm on a fresh character and I stop by mechanics for a moment to see something someone was making and they take the liberty of letting me in the room to poke at the cabinet. And this is also a person Stars has a meta-friendship with. Stars walks in, talks to the person, and I am uncomfortably ignored by one half of the room. Like not brought into the fold at all. Maybe I got waved at.
Are you seeing parts of a problem here? Something patternistic? I am. Preferential treatment in interactions with Known and Named characters you have established meta-friendships with versus Not Known and Not Named characters. And to a different extent on that first one, poor grasp of pushing it too far to the point IC/OOC is blurred. And as a mentor, you will be dealing with a lot of Not Known and Not Named characters because that's precisely who new players that need help are. You will also be dealing with information that is sensitive to the meta-needs of the game where you need to keep IC/OOC separate for "winning" in a "who's an antag?" sense. You'll also probably get mhelps saying "hey, I need ideas how to get involved, can you help me think of a gimmick?", "I'm having trouble figuring out how to learn from my coworkers, they don’t seem willing to teach me", "I'd like to try and be a part of this job/task but have no idea where I fit with it/where to start". These second types will come from any and all players, new or not. Putting an artificially high barrier to entry of The Group Of People Who Do Get To Be Interacted With on the RP Servers is bad and runs counter to being able to resolve mentoring capacities that deal with the second of those types of requests. And I've signaled I've been uninvolved and left out both IC in most of these moments and OOC generally on Discord and this has not been resolved, even as of my posting of my first comment. The point that it was/wasn't expected that I was the randomname officer being shoved around or whatever doesn't matter, the fact that these things are happening to anyone at all in that situation is what does.
I leaned so heavy on OOC stuff my last comment, so here's my more recent IC experiences. But those wouldn't be complete without touching on some OOC stuff:
When discussing antagonists getting beat back by Security when trying to do Fun Things in Discord, you brought up Handcuff Round as an example that occurred just the other day and tried to represent it as Killjoy Security Strikes Again, when I 1.) volunteered to be held hostage for this person and played up the joke of it all being fake the first time since I knew they were an actual antag and bored, and 2.) was a part of the second situation that resulted in that person dying and did EXACTLY what I was told OOC to do to try and make up after (1.) didn't go over so well. I fully expected to do a “Stop and Talk” on the second one and not get shot at upon entering. I don't really know what happened there with round impressions, but I did the best I could to give as much as I could to everyone I talked with.
You then apologized and said you had incomplete information, which is true and fair maybe, but let's not try to speak on things we aren't involved in in the future because putting that down as RP Sec's At It Again Being Unfun Pieces Of Antag-Hating-Shit Like They Always Are is a garbage sentiment and really diminished all the good work and LOOC/OOC coordination four people DID do to try and make things fun; the entire fact there were two hostage situations because the second was to atone for the first; and that we willingly let a traitor we knew was kitted out attack us Because It Was The Most Fun Thing That We Could Do With What We Little Energy (and What Few People) We Had Left. That comment was HUGELY dismissive and discouraging.
From today, again along the same lines. There was a problem IC and IR with some breakdown between people communicating clearly with each other in a way that led to validhunting. And so validhunters were beat up and it sucked and was not a good round overall. But I talked to people involved, and tried to patch things up IR. At least two of the people involved acted on bad information but not in bad faith. I talked to both of them. I got one to willingly go to Sec and give his statement and he was let off with a "hey, it's not a problem, mistakes are made”. Cool. So then the second had later acted on the same bad information and got disarmed and shaken down and stripped and was roaming the halls injured and without clothes. So I talked to them. And they said, specifically after I told them what had led to the problem, that "Oh, so I was just the butt of the joke, I guess". They felt genuinely terrible for what they did and where they misunderstood and weren't Brought Into the Fold On Things cause Not Being In On It sucks. I sorted out the row between this person and the people that beat and stripped them but didn't get to the actual person they initially attacked in that whole snafu. So we're on the shuttle home and the person who was attacked throws the people that attacked them out of the shuttle. Someone gets heated about it in OOC, and like, yeah, maybe not the best place, but understandable considering that half the people involved thought we had taken the time IR to patch things up as much as possible in 10 minutes and move on and have everyone leave the round with a little dignity left.
And then you said in OOC during the admin pause on the round end "sometimes you just die. The person attacked was an antag so they can just kill people."
Was the person who was talking in OOC probably not in the right place to deliver their comments? Sure. Does this also dually serve to diminish the other person who got thrown of the shuttle, after getting all their stuff back, after admitting they made a stupid and bad mistake, after wanting to apologize to the people they got into the fight with, after feeling like shit for being left out of what the Real Back Workings of the Round Were? Absolutely. So, let's not overextend ourselves into things we didn't really grasp in defense of people because this was a huge moment of Missing the Nuance of the Situation and seeing that player get thrown out of the shuttle when I still had a piece of their gear I was going to deliver to them, when I thought it was sorted, was like getting my teeth kicked in. I can't imagine what it felt like for that actual player. And then having an uninvolved third party go in and say "it's fine and justified" was like? Why try at all to make amends ever? Really, though, the nuance and What's What with that was a situation that I wish, mostly, everyone everywhere doing everything just Shut Up about and let the admins online look into. But the comments made there were out of place. Sometimes the real honest truthful best answer for the things we don't really know about is to claim the epistemically modest and say "I don't know", versus trying to speak to the things we don't know. And I don't want a mentor with perceived authority (and, granted, some minimal finite real authority) to make comments like that that make people who already feel like crap about their experience feel like Worse Crap and totally dismiss what was actually going on and the huge strides that were made to grow and be better in that round after an in-character single-person decision-based chain-reaction Fuck Up so catastrophic, it would make Helen and Paris weep.
The real heart of why my feedback changed to -1, the real place I think these things all come together in full...is because there was something between the chickens and the mediborg that was bugging me. And so I finally remembered the something was Pathology, which was approached in very much the same way you approached Ranching, which was exclusionary and preferential to certain metagroups of established friends and Knowledge Bases In The Field in the same way, which left others Not In On It (ahhh...) in the dust, which left me to resolve that I was Going To Learn Patho on A Local Server, Alone, and Pester the Dev of It In Discord Whenever I Had A Question versus feeling welcomed into a collaborative space where I could try to take a crack at it while it was live and bump heads with people and learn by doing from others. I got ONE round where I was allowed as some vaguely Tangential Acceptable Job Role (Staff Assistant, that great grey bastion of do-anything-at-all-ness) into the Patho lab and it was I believe the last day that Patho was enabled. And I got about 10 minutes of live pathoing before the person mentoring me had to IRL run off. Missed the week-long-docking of that boat there.
And I get it! It was a popular job because it was New And Fun. Just like Ranching. But when the same people are in there every round, when they keep others "not in the job/lane" out of the area because of "staying in the lane" (and maybe moreso "I'm more interested in just working with/teaching this certain group of people"); when they can't see that there's a genuine division between letting people explore new and exciting content or trying to give them what knowledge they can of it in a public seminar or radio show announcements and interviews or letting visitors in to see the people in lockdown, versus trying to beat someone over the head with a rule that is meant more for bad-faith Do-It-Alling to the exclusion of others; when the same 3 or 5 or 8 people are in those spots rolling those jobs and make other people in medical or science Run The Shop and do all the radstorm cloning and liver replacements round-after-round so they can have all the fun (I was a doctor or something adjacent for at least two of these rounds, since I was on a pretty significant break from Sec + have one ticket from this time on my jailbird doc); there's a problem. The problem isn't "people didn't roll it"; plenty of people could roll doctor or botanist, or maybe despite setting those as favorite jobs to try and test The New Thing, people still just...don't roll the job. RNG is fickle. The problem is that people with a genuine interest in The New Thing were turned away from participating in The New Thing even though they brought their good faith intentions because there was no interest in inviting other people into The New Thing. That's the core of the problem. There will always be New Things in this game because of the rate it's developed at. There will always be a need to be knowledgeable about New Things. There will always be a need to show a little graciousness to people who are enthusiastic and perhaps IC tangential to The New Thing, but generally well-meaning and excited. I play Security because some nerd on Nightshade (an RP server) took a chance on a dumbass mime on Manta once and said "get a segway and a new ID, you're in". I play Engineer because a mentor playing CE on Cog1 told me as a listless CWorker with no projects to stop what I was doing and listen, because I was about to do my first hellburn with them. I only felt like I could try Patho on that day since a Scientist working on it saw my poor Staffie Ass locked in the OR after trying to sneak in when the doors were open.
To go back to the chickens as a hypothetical of what I think would work for scenarios like that, if a Roboticist walked up to you, and if robot chickens were out, there's maybe an angle there for "rare cyborg chickens" that you could've worked with them on. Make a prayer to an admin for Ranch 2 because NT made a hiring mistake and made this poor person some smarmy doctor, but you know you've found your Kindred Chicken Tender Spirit. Or it could've been a simple IC-fix of "hey, so NT didn't tell anyone about this new job department on contracting; they only just got research grants to do this, but let's take you to the HoP and get you a job change to 'Ranching Protege'. " The last of these is the easiest solution of them all. I had probably one of my coolest Nightshade rounds because I, an unassuming chef who was going to Cook Everything Ever, ended up sidetracked in my great mission because of getting the untrained Sous-chef I didn't know I needed; and he became my "Soup-Chef" in a mad quest to make the ultimate soup and had a heartfelt goodbye when he finally left the kitchen to become Something More (soup pot in hand). The unexpected is kind of the gist of it all; this is the appreciable "chaos" of the game. And sometimes the people asking to learn and asking to be a part of things from the opposite side of the board are the ones that appreciate being included the most. Patho and Ranching were both only a little over a month ago. I really, truly, believe it takes more time than that to move on from Habit, from something that's arisen as a problem more than once, in similar situations, under similar contexts, with similar outcomes. I have never had such a disillusioning feeling of being left out and isolated except for maybe with 5 people who I only encountered in Security, which is a role that is dynamic and hard to get right and not relevant here.
It's that last bit, the Ranching but really that it happened again with Pathology, that sticks out to me. So then, why is this all so long and winded? You're not out here screaming anything Patently Mean and Evil at People, you're not a bad person at all. But there's implications and effects that these actions and words have that are running as a contrary undercurrent to I think the character you want to portray and the actual legit persona you want to portray. I can be sore and sad about a teleporter or handcuffs or people I helped getting thrown out of the shuttle, and that's what it is. I'm not sore or sad about Ranching or Pathology, though. I'm disappointed because I think there is where it's clearest that there's more work to do in involving others and trying to better understand other players, even if they're new faces to you, before I can affirm you'd be a good choice for mentor, the sort of front-line introduction people get to the game and community that have huge influences on whether people feel welcome and included or not.
Yes, I’m embarrassed how long this is and apologize to the decision-makers in advance; no, this was not easy to think through; no this was not easy to move from private feedback; yes, I stand by a full -1.
First bit: I am here to represent my experiences I have had with the poster. This is true of every application I post on. They are my experiences. I don't appreciate third parties coming in and trying to speak to those experiences; just as I am not here to say to anyone that their Good experiences were Actually Not Good because people THINK they saw X and Y and what was really going on was A and B and they misunderstood T; I likewise fully expect others to not do that to me.
That said: I could've laid some things out more cleanly. I want people with nuanced empathy and a commitment to cooperative problem-solving to be mentors. Like that's kind of the guidelines? Know thine role and help others know their role. That's it. That's the whole point of why I post as much as I do, what I do, and where I do it. These are the people that have helped my rounds and experience in the community, the mentor mice that have seen me slide out an airlock at a lubed escape and that I was going to die alone so they flew out the airlock to be with me; the mice that squeak and dance in front of Security when a shift SUCKS and sucks bad and we get to try to feed them our Robust Donuts; the mentors who know me and know I'm not new but don't give me any grief when I show up late in a round on Clarion and don't know where the heck mining is; the players that take the time to elaborate on how to use a printer (again) and remind me that I'm not stupid, it’s a mechanically deep game, and that once I get how to do it, I'll remember forever. I want someone who understands that leaving someone in a teleporter for an hour goes beyond just "I'm trapped" IC concerns that are relational to an AI Law and into "I'm not being allowed to participate in the game" OOC concerns that relate to who has capacity to cooperatively problem-solve and keep people in the round and feeling okay about the round. Same idea with the mediborg stuff (3 months ago). I am not far enough away from that to be comfortable and assured that this is no longer habitual. But maybe that's old and decrepit, so who cares too much?
Getting ignored in the teleporter was also about 2.5 months ago. Missing the mark on these things a few times is fine. I am not comfortable and assured that there is a more developed nuance between when something is becoming OOC unfun for people and when it's primarily an IC/IR concern. And this is a concern that, while this particular experience is dated maybe, came to life for me again three days ago.
I have played more in the past week and have tried to survey a broader field of experiences because I thought I am missing something here; when people are having lots of good experiences and I can only think of one good experience, it's undoubtedly confusing to the point where I think maybe I've been playing a mean and evil character or catching people on bad days.
So, the second part of this, after much more thinking and much more playing:
I will jump right to it. I'm moving my feedback to a full -1.
There was a round, 3 months ago, where I was on my Known and Named Officer; the AI bantered publicly with Stars in general comms in a way that I can best describe as...intrusive. Because it was banter that is best understood by people with a working metafriendship. And not that you can't have metafriendships or play on them in-rounds and in interactions and quip with people you know, but I don't fully understand having to subject everyone in-round to this by using general comms for a length of time and in a way that shuts down others who try to involve themselves in it. So this is nitpick-y, yes? Why does this matter?
The AI said "Someone's being stinky in tech storage", and I thought this meant the AI was reporting someone being criminal in tech storage, and when I go there to see what's up, it's Stars. I said "I got a tip someone was in here doing something they shouldn't be," and I am told "Oh, don't worry, that's just how me and the AI are, we go way back." Please recognize "that's just how me and the AI are" is dependent upon understanding of a metafriendship between those characters that is only known to the people in that relationship. I get to be no part of it, and coupled with "don't worry," it's a sign for me that I'm not invited into this interaction. This was a waste of my time; not because someone reported something meaningless over general comms, not because I spent the 5 minutes to go there; This is an opportunity cost thing: why did I seek out whatever was going on there when it dead-ended to a point of non-interaction? Why did I spend my time investing in that when no one else wanted me to actually invest in that? It could've been "Oh, this AI is silly, yeah? Maybe ask for their laws?" (at least this gives me a piece to speak), or "Yes! I've worked with them before, but they're usually not this snippy!" (this opens it up for me to understand something broader about the background of these characters, and to be "in the know"). There are different ways to open up the conversation and invite New Faces or Not Known Faces into it with the art of "Yes And...". "We're just like this" misses that mark and says "if you don't know, you don't know. Keep walking." Nobody likes to Not Be In On It. Especially not on an RP server where the whole point is To Be In On It at some level since people are meant to interact with you.
Okay, so why do I care about something from 3 months ago that's honestly so minor? First, I remember things like that and the way they make me feel, intended or not, and they shape how I understand people are going to treat me and how I need to expect to be treated. These are minor things apart, but think of getting ignored in a teleporter and told I'm not in on it and pushed out of my job all together as a collective thing and the end result is: none of these experiences make me feel particularly welcomed to the server by certain players when they're occurring all with the same player. I never want anyone else to feel that because they're not in on things. Because it honestly hurts my experience when it happens to me. And you know what? It also hurts when it happens to other people, and I've seen this as an outsider too, and will get to that somewhere near the end of this.
Second: pattern recognition. The point that THIS loops back to, the real heart of it is three days ago. Because the same AI and Stars are doing the SAME thing when I am in the SAME role, except this time the AI is saying how they’re gonna kill Stars and Stars is slinging it back and it's uncomfortable and weird OOC, again, personally because it’s violent, and less-personally because I am Not In On It But Being Subjected to Being The Weird Outsider Who Is Forced To See All This on General Comms. So I said, IC, to knock it off and go to PDA (nicer in tone, but if we're cutting to the core of Words Having Meanings here, this is what I was saying). And I got told over radio "that's just how we are" (see above). Fine, okay. This all operates at an "in your face" level of discomfort for the general conversation, and the follow-up when asked to stop shuts down other players new to the interaction from stepping in and engaging. If you don't understand this or want to reflect on it for the future, ask yourself why that conversation had to occur on gen comms. What was the very specific point of taking a personal interaction dependent on meta-knowledge only a handful of people hearing it on gen comms posses over having it on Departmental Frequency or an Intercom or paper with cameras or PDA or face-to-face, all of which you're familiar with as someone who plays/ed a lot of AI and someone who plays a character that has to speak through unconventional means? Think it through to all ends. But like, who cares because this gets too into it to be the actual legitimate problem I had with that interaction.
This is where that experience went from a "meh" to an "absolutely not" for me: I was in handcuffs in the courtroom after all this happened, and Stars walks in to clean up the room. We laugh for a moment or whatever and I try to get past the weird OOC problem I was having before by saying something related to it that was jovial, that kind of meant to bridge over. Like, to me, it was a "hey! I'm here, with Stars, one-on-one, I can have a good interaction and really see how Spark plays this character."
I move to the side so Stars can clean and start undoing my cuffs. I get 3/4 of the way there and get shoved, then told "oh it's so sad how [my team] all abandoned [me]." I say something, I don't even remember what. I think to myself "oh, I'm in the way," and move over another seat. I start undoing my cuffs. I get 3/4 of the way through and get shoved. Then I get told again "oh nobody came to help you, isn't that so sad." This was intentional. The shoving was intentional, undoing my cuff progress was intentional; Stars punctuated each shove with a comment about how none of my friends cared to help me. You knew what you were doing. Handcuff breaking text shows up in red, in bold, in the textbox to people who aren't the ones undoing the cuffs; mopping text is blue. For reference:
There's not really any two-ways about this. You’ve played AI and are a seasoned player overall and know to pay attention to the chat window. You've played Security before and know how fast-paced and stressful it is without nonantags messing with you. You have a mentor application up. People are watching what you do more carefully. You know better than this shit.
You absolutely HAVE to understand that at this point, it looks like I am being punished for telling the AI and Stars to quiet down about something I think is OOC uncomfortable from earlier, for trying to involve myself in a conversation. Whether this was what you consciously intended or not, THAT is what it looks like. THAT is how people involved will read those situations, and they take that with them. I can't remember if I crashed out or whatever at the end since I didn't get the credits but after this interaction I specifically wanted to see if you were an antag. I checked the GoonHub round listing the day after since it still bothered me, and Stars was not an antag, not a sleeper, not a mindslave. So I was shoved around and made fun of and inhibited from playing the game for an additional 4 minutes after an incredibly tense situation because ??? It was funny to get back at me? Or it was funny on its own? It wasted my time after an interaction that had a bad misunderstanding and left me needing to rush to see what the next move was. It was insensitive in a moment when making small talk and picking up or even just sitting with me quietly would've done. I don't even know what to make of this fully. It's poignantly one of those minor "and...?" things and yet it's also by the same token really unbelievable. It wasn't very funny at all to me.
Which is...more confusing and no further elucidated because today someone also was IC adamant about something they were trying to hint they were OOC uncomfortable with. And Stars, the same character/player, understood, respected and supported what that person was requesting to happen IC.
And then also because the day after Handcuff Round, I spectated a round where Stars was the Same Character in the Same Job wearing the Same Outfit, and the way that he interacted with New and Not Named faces was never to make fun of them, never to shove them. It was helping a botanist learn to take a fire extinguisher back (no bumping, no pranks, no shoving of them, very conscientious with your game controls...), it was accepting a balloon from the very excitable clown, it was engaging in a pat-fight with a person that you have a meta-friendship with (which is a way of celebrating and reveling in that friendship. This stuff is fine, good even, since it doesn't depend on directly isolating or excluding people who Aren't In On It. It was cute). So then, why was my experience so dismally different even in markedly similar situations?
Well, sure, maybe my character on that day was being a bitch or something, right? Everyone has to have off-rounds, even though I just came back from a Very Big Break and felt genuinely good coming out of my first few rounds and haven't had a single problem in interacting with any other consistent players since I got back. Jump to the day after, when I'm on a fresh character and I stop by mechanics for a moment to see something someone was making and they take the liberty of letting me in the room to poke at the cabinet. And this is also a person Stars has a meta-friendship with. Stars walks in, talks to the person, and I am uncomfortably ignored by one half of the room. Like not brought into the fold at all. Maybe I got waved at.
Are you seeing parts of a problem here? Something patternistic? I am. Preferential treatment in interactions with Known and Named characters you have established meta-friendships with versus Not Known and Not Named characters. And to a different extent on that first one, poor grasp of pushing it too far to the point IC/OOC is blurred. And as a mentor, you will be dealing with a lot of Not Known and Not Named characters because that's precisely who new players that need help are. You will also be dealing with information that is sensitive to the meta-needs of the game where you need to keep IC/OOC separate for "winning" in a "who's an antag?" sense. You'll also probably get mhelps saying "hey, I need ideas how to get involved, can you help me think of a gimmick?", "I'm having trouble figuring out how to learn from my coworkers, they don’t seem willing to teach me", "I'd like to try and be a part of this job/task but have no idea where I fit with it/where to start". These second types will come from any and all players, new or not. Putting an artificially high barrier to entry of The Group Of People Who Do Get To Be Interacted With on the RP Servers is bad and runs counter to being able to resolve mentoring capacities that deal with the second of those types of requests. And I've signaled I've been uninvolved and left out both IC in most of these moments and OOC generally on Discord and this has not been resolved, even as of my posting of my first comment. The point that it was/wasn't expected that I was the randomname officer being shoved around or whatever doesn't matter, the fact that these things are happening to anyone at all in that situation is what does.
I leaned so heavy on OOC stuff my last comment, so here's my more recent IC experiences. But those wouldn't be complete without touching on some OOC stuff:
When discussing antagonists getting beat back by Security when trying to do Fun Things in Discord, you brought up Handcuff Round as an example that occurred just the other day and tried to represent it as Killjoy Security Strikes Again, when I 1.) volunteered to be held hostage for this person and played up the joke of it all being fake the first time since I knew they were an actual antag and bored, and 2.) was a part of the second situation that resulted in that person dying and did EXACTLY what I was told OOC to do to try and make up after (1.) didn't go over so well. I fully expected to do a “Stop and Talk” on the second one and not get shot at upon entering. I don't really know what happened there with round impressions, but I did the best I could to give as much as I could to everyone I talked with.
You then apologized and said you had incomplete information, which is true and fair maybe, but let's not try to speak on things we aren't involved in in the future because putting that down as RP Sec's At It Again Being Unfun Pieces Of Antag-Hating-Shit Like They Always Are is a garbage sentiment and really diminished all the good work and LOOC/OOC coordination four people DID do to try and make things fun; the entire fact there were two hostage situations because the second was to atone for the first; and that we willingly let a traitor we knew was kitted out attack us Because It Was The Most Fun Thing That We Could Do With What We Little Energy (and What Few People) We Had Left. That comment was HUGELY dismissive and discouraging.
From today, again along the same lines. There was a problem IC and IR with some breakdown between people communicating clearly with each other in a way that led to validhunting. And so validhunters were beat up and it sucked and was not a good round overall. But I talked to people involved, and tried to patch things up IR. At least two of the people involved acted on bad information but not in bad faith. I talked to both of them. I got one to willingly go to Sec and give his statement and he was let off with a "hey, it's not a problem, mistakes are made”. Cool. So then the second had later acted on the same bad information and got disarmed and shaken down and stripped and was roaming the halls injured and without clothes. So I talked to them. And they said, specifically after I told them what had led to the problem, that "Oh, so I was just the butt of the joke, I guess". They felt genuinely terrible for what they did and where they misunderstood and weren't Brought Into the Fold On Things cause Not Being In On It sucks. I sorted out the row between this person and the people that beat and stripped them but didn't get to the actual person they initially attacked in that whole snafu. So we're on the shuttle home and the person who was attacked throws the people that attacked them out of the shuttle. Someone gets heated about it in OOC, and like, yeah, maybe not the best place, but understandable considering that half the people involved thought we had taken the time IR to patch things up as much as possible in 10 minutes and move on and have everyone leave the round with a little dignity left.
And then you said in OOC during the admin pause on the round end "sometimes you just die. The person attacked was an antag so they can just kill people."
Was the person who was talking in OOC probably not in the right place to deliver their comments? Sure. Does this also dually serve to diminish the other person who got thrown of the shuttle, after getting all their stuff back, after admitting they made a stupid and bad mistake, after wanting to apologize to the people they got into the fight with, after feeling like shit for being left out of what the Real Back Workings of the Round Were? Absolutely. So, let's not overextend ourselves into things we didn't really grasp in defense of people because this was a huge moment of Missing the Nuance of the Situation and seeing that player get thrown out of the shuttle when I still had a piece of their gear I was going to deliver to them, when I thought it was sorted, was like getting my teeth kicked in. I can't imagine what it felt like for that actual player. And then having an uninvolved third party go in and say "it's fine and justified" was like? Why try at all to make amends ever? Really, though, the nuance and What's What with that was a situation that I wish, mostly, everyone everywhere doing everything just Shut Up about and let the admins online look into. But the comments made there were out of place. Sometimes the real honest truthful best answer for the things we don't really know about is to claim the epistemically modest and say "I don't know", versus trying to speak to the things we don't know. And I don't want a mentor with perceived authority (and, granted, some minimal finite real authority) to make comments like that that make people who already feel like crap about their experience feel like Worse Crap and totally dismiss what was actually going on and the huge strides that were made to grow and be better in that round after an in-character single-person decision-based chain-reaction Fuck Up so catastrophic, it would make Helen and Paris weep.
The real heart of why my feedback changed to -1, the real place I think these things all come together in full...is because there was something between the chickens and the mediborg that was bugging me. And so I finally remembered the something was Pathology, which was approached in very much the same way you approached Ranching, which was exclusionary and preferential to certain metagroups of established friends and Knowledge Bases In The Field in the same way, which left others Not In On It (ahhh...) in the dust, which left me to resolve that I was Going To Learn Patho on A Local Server, Alone, and Pester the Dev of It In Discord Whenever I Had A Question versus feeling welcomed into a collaborative space where I could try to take a crack at it while it was live and bump heads with people and learn by doing from others. I got ONE round where I was allowed as some vaguely Tangential Acceptable Job Role (Staff Assistant, that great grey bastion of do-anything-at-all-ness) into the Patho lab and it was I believe the last day that Patho was enabled. And I got about 10 minutes of live pathoing before the person mentoring me had to IRL run off. Missed the week-long-docking of that boat there.
And I get it! It was a popular job because it was New And Fun. Just like Ranching. But when the same people are in there every round, when they keep others "not in the job/lane" out of the area because of "staying in the lane" (and maybe moreso "I'm more interested in just working with/teaching this certain group of people"); when they can't see that there's a genuine division between letting people explore new and exciting content or trying to give them what knowledge they can of it in a public seminar or radio show announcements and interviews or letting visitors in to see the people in lockdown, versus trying to beat someone over the head with a rule that is meant more for bad-faith Do-It-Alling to the exclusion of others; when the same 3 or 5 or 8 people are in those spots rolling those jobs and make other people in medical or science Run The Shop and do all the radstorm cloning and liver replacements round-after-round so they can have all the fun (I was a doctor or something adjacent for at least two of these rounds, since I was on a pretty significant break from Sec + have one ticket from this time on my jailbird doc); there's a problem. The problem isn't "people didn't roll it"; plenty of people could roll doctor or botanist, or maybe despite setting those as favorite jobs to try and test The New Thing, people still just...don't roll the job. RNG is fickle. The problem is that people with a genuine interest in The New Thing were turned away from participating in The New Thing even though they brought their good faith intentions because there was no interest in inviting other people into The New Thing. That's the core of the problem. There will always be New Things in this game because of the rate it's developed at. There will always be a need to be knowledgeable about New Things. There will always be a need to show a little graciousness to people who are enthusiastic and perhaps IC tangential to The New Thing, but generally well-meaning and excited. I play Security because some nerd on Nightshade (an RP server) took a chance on a dumbass mime on Manta once and said "get a segway and a new ID, you're in". I play Engineer because a mentor playing CE on Cog1 told me as a listless CWorker with no projects to stop what I was doing and listen, because I was about to do my first hellburn with them. I only felt like I could try Patho on that day since a Scientist working on it saw my poor Staffie Ass locked in the OR after trying to sneak in when the doors were open.
To go back to the chickens as a hypothetical of what I think would work for scenarios like that, if a Roboticist walked up to you, and if robot chickens were out, there's maybe an angle there for "rare cyborg chickens" that you could've worked with them on. Make a prayer to an admin for Ranch 2 because NT made a hiring mistake and made this poor person some smarmy doctor, but you know you've found your Kindred Chicken Tender Spirit. Or it could've been a simple IC-fix of "hey, so NT didn't tell anyone about this new job department on contracting; they only just got research grants to do this, but let's take you to the HoP and get you a job change to 'Ranching Protege'. " The last of these is the easiest solution of them all. I had probably one of my coolest Nightshade rounds because I, an unassuming chef who was going to Cook Everything Ever, ended up sidetracked in my great mission because of getting the untrained Sous-chef I didn't know I needed; and he became my "Soup-Chef" in a mad quest to make the ultimate soup and had a heartfelt goodbye when he finally left the kitchen to become Something More (soup pot in hand). The unexpected is kind of the gist of it all; this is the appreciable "chaos" of the game. And sometimes the people asking to learn and asking to be a part of things from the opposite side of the board are the ones that appreciate being included the most. Patho and Ranching were both only a little over a month ago. I really, truly, believe it takes more time than that to move on from Habit, from something that's arisen as a problem more than once, in similar situations, under similar contexts, with similar outcomes. I have never had such a disillusioning feeling of being left out and isolated except for maybe with 5 people who I only encountered in Security, which is a role that is dynamic and hard to get right and not relevant here.
It's that last bit, the Ranching but really that it happened again with Pathology, that sticks out to me. So then, why is this all so long and winded? You're not out here screaming anything Patently Mean and Evil at People, you're not a bad person at all. But there's implications and effects that these actions and words have that are running as a contrary undercurrent to I think the character you want to portray and the actual legit persona you want to portray. I can be sore and sad about a teleporter or handcuffs or people I helped getting thrown out of the shuttle, and that's what it is. I'm not sore or sad about Ranching or Pathology, though. I'm disappointed because I think there is where it's clearest that there's more work to do in involving others and trying to better understand other players, even if they're new faces to you, before I can affirm you'd be a good choice for mentor, the sort of front-line introduction people get to the game and community that have huge influences on whether people feel welcome and included or not.
Yes, I’m embarrassed how long this is and apologize to the decision-makers in advance; no, this was not easy to think through; no this was not easy to move from private feedback; yes, I stand by a full -1.