Kaed

BYOND key: Kaedwuff Discord name/id: Menthe#4151, but I'm not in the discord server Borg / AI names: I believe I often used Wolf as a borg name, but I didn't have a habitual AI name and usually just picked names based on whim. Have you read the Aurora wiki page about the AI?: Yes. The new law 1 is very funny to me, because I remember when people used to ask the AI to open doors for them all the time to get into areas they didn't have a ID access to. I guess you got tired of that, and I'm glad, because I got real tired of spending half my round being a doorman. Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?: Playing an AI is fun for me. Borg are less so, but I sometimes have a mood to be one. There's a sort of relaxing nature to not having to roleplay something bound by a fairly strict behavior set, so I don't have to think too hard about 'what would my character do here', and I can just refer to my laws. Plus, I get to watch everyone while still participating in the round. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? I have not received any administrative action in years. The only bans I received in the past were forum behavior related, not in server (though I have received a few warnings on separate things in server). Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yes

I think that it did get a bit more violent than it needed to be, but I think the game's overactive bleeding mechanic was more to blame for the mess than anything else. Vaurca in particular bleed way more than they should, and the footprints we left made it look way bigger than it actually was. I remember lunging forward to claw him a few times after being called a bitch, before he started doing vaurca zoomies around me, pushing and attacking me. I'm not very robust so I mostly stood there and did my best to click on him when he was shoving me around, because usually his sprite had to hold in place for that. 🤷‍♂️ Many clawings were done on both sides, tho. Based on that there was more of his blood than mine, I think(?) I was winning(????) before it petered out and you arrived. Neither of us was seriously injured as far as I could tell, enormous pool of blood and footprints aside.

You make a few points here, but your understanding of the situation is flawed because you arrived after it started. Essentially what happened (very paraphrased) was this: Unathi: Wow, you're ugly, what are you, some kind of beast? (definitely an insult) Ta: No. Respect me. Unathi: Why, what did you do to deserve it Ta: Filth. Unathi: Go away Ta: No, you. <-- This is the point that is my main contention here, them digging their multiple heels(?) in and deciding they would rather stand on a point of pride than leave this obnoxious unathi. This would not have even led to more than a minor verbal altercation if she had done so. I did not corner her, this was a passing interaction in a public hallway. I had not noticed personal pride being a high level social characteristic for vaurca in general, but maybe I missed something. It IS definitely one for unathi, though, and I find it hard to believe that the Ta's player and the character themselves did not know this and thus I think they pushed the matter deliberately, because that's like, literally the main thing anyone knows about unathi is 'unga bunga honor.' It was at this point that my unathi started feeing threatened by their game of verbal chicken directly and started to become hostile rather than simply rude. This is what lead to your being called. If Ta are, as you say, not expected to be combatants, why are they holding their ground against some random visitor and thus feeing the need to call for back up? This unathi was also not an employee, they were a visitor, and you should not have held them to the ideas that they are part of the Nanotrasen workplace. I admit I seem to have mixed up which vaurca said the guwan thing (honestly most of the vaurca names kind of blend together for me and I don't really have an interest in playing one for their naming conventions are low on my list of shit I care about), but my point is still this: Should someone selected for an ambassador role be picking pointless fights with random rude people? The whole premise of their need to be protected from my dangerous unathi only happened because they continued to needle him out of a clear desire to 'win' the verbal altercation.

BYOND Key: Kaedwuff Game ID: cfl-bgus (this is the round following the one I am speaking of primarily) Player Byond Key/Character name: That one Zo'ra Ta consulate, I can't keep track of all these vaurca names, but there's only one of them, it shouldn't be hard to figure out. Staff involved: N/A Reason for complaint: This character is supposed to be playing some kind of ambassador based on their job position, but the way they play the character is completely unbelievable for the role they are in. As a Ta acting as a liaison of the Zo'ra hive, they should have the ability to navigate difficult social situations in a manner that is professional an non-inflammatory. To quote the wiki, This extension of their [the Ta caste] duties comes about from their keen social intelligence, making them ideal candidates for negotiating with aliens on economic and political matters. They easily grasp the nuances of social context, contracts, and systems that other castes have difficulty navigating. Vaurca are stated to be heavily prejudiced against in human space, but this character does not seem to act like this is a common issue that they have ever run into. Far from attempting to smooth out cultural misunderstandings, they immediately demand that they be given respect the moment someone does not show full acceptance of their presence on the station. When this does not work, they devolve into puerile insult matches with the offending party, using terms like 'filth' that no ambassador actually attempting to establish relations with another culture would ever do. Furthermore, they seem to have a tendency to call for other vaurca from station departments to come assist them in their insult fights, further escalating whatever situation was already developing, pulling them away from their job duties (I witnessed a vaurca doctor apparently dropping what they were doing during a chaotic round to rush over and use very humanlike slang insults that they probably should not have been saying if they wanted to maintain immersion) in a way that they should not be doing if they are trying to respect the nanotrasen workplace, and calling vaurca security guards to arrest the person who is offending them. They also use culturally tailored insults (such as inferring that an unathi is secretly a guwan) in a way that suggests they are fully aware of how provocative they are being and do not care. I do not think this player understand what their role is supposed to be on the station or that their species is not supposed to be a widely respected class of equals and they should be working to fix this. Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? No, I did not consider this an admin issue until thinking for some time after the round. Approximate Date/Time: 12/28/2021, but there was a previous incident too I witness on another round.

Clarification: I was not present for this Alberyk incident you mentioned and while I dimly remember hearing about it, my reason for the nerf was not 'a knee jerk reaction' to the event but rather the result of looking at the damage values available for the weaponry added to the game and determined they were vastly unbalanced. Acting like this sole incident was the result of player skill being punished by nerfs is vastly reductive of the situation as it was at the time, which was that a plasteel or diamond spear was competitively surpassing most ranged weaponry in power, regardless of how good or bad Alberyk or his opponent was as in this hypothetical famous battle. Your points that spears and related weapons deserve to be more powerful on account of how highly visible or breakable they are is not relevant to the actual problems with 'medieval weaponry' being in the game. It does not matter how unwieldy or destructible they are, because they can easily be replaced in seconds with materials you are capable of carrying in your backpack or acquiring in cargo with extreme ease. The fact of the matter is that these weapons were haphazardly implemented into the game using existing mechanics of materials crafting that make their manufacture absolutely, laughably trivial. Until something is done to curtail this, such as creating an more involved process for crafting them (maybe involving metal casting or something), they will have to remain a cheap emergency use only weapon so that cargo cannot arm the entire station with competitively powerful damaging weapons within less than 10 minutes. By contrast, most of the other weapons in the game have checks and balances on their use - firing pins, for instance, stop the use of science mass weapons production, or having to go through the cargo ordering system which keeps track of orders and is limited at least tangentially by available funds. Even the original craftable weapons such as the powered crossbow and stun rod require an array of components that are not trivial to gather, take a long time to construct, and are of limited utility or uses. Personally, I'd like them removed from the game entirely, but people hate content being cut, no matter how nonsensical it is to be wielding spears and halberds on a freaking space station, so we will have to look at this strictly from a balance sense.

This argument is becoming circular as I re-explain my reasons for misunderstanding the complaint rules and you insist that it does not matter what lead me to do so, only that I did, so I am going to end it here. But I will express the hope that people can look beyond a record of being rude and understand that people can make mistakes. My behavior on the forums previously was not a mistake so much as me choosing to put my own desire to be rude with people above the health of the forum community. It was a regrettable decision, and I am doing my best to improve. I do not feel that this action, even if it was a violation of the rules, should be treated with the same gravity as my previous conduct eventually gained me. It does not match the malicious intent represented by my previous conduct, and was a sincere attempt to critique the way the community is managed. It is clear that I should have put the post in a different location now, but it was not at the time I did it. If I, and other problematic members of the community, cannot improve if with each new misstep because every mistake, regardless of context, is judged as if it represents a continuation of our most severe misconduct in the past, then there will be little opportunity for us to actually grow to become a good part of it. You must ask yourself if your priority is to issue me another ban as swiftly as possible, or if your system is intended to make me correct my actions. Certainly, the path that lead to my previous permanent ban has brought about an attempt to correct my behavior, but this action of expelling me the moment I put another toe out of a line I did not realize was there does not seem to represent an attempt to correct my behavior, but rather to make me go away.

You are cherry picking your own stated rules to establish your point and focusing only on the part about not posting if not involved, while also assuming that I have some kind of foreknowledge of the chaos that used to be the complaint forums. Here's all of it that's related to this The post was both on topic and directly related to the complaint, which was about the ruling to remove a whitelist and about how your ruling does not match up with the standards that were visible at the time. The claim of two staff members was that the rules were including this new no-tolerance whitelist strip and I was refuting it by being a witness to a different standard. The fact that you made this announcement and changed the rules this morning, after you had banned me for pointing out the problem, does not mean that you retroactively gave notice. Certainly, I can understand your standpoint on this now that you have explained it to me, and since you are a staff member your ruling matters more than mine on interpreting the rules, but it's not strictly fair to treat a mistake in rules interpretation as the same thing as deliberately choosing the disregard the rules. I would like someone who is not Alberyk to weigh in on this, because the complaint is a direct result of his choices as a staff member, and it is not presenting an unbiased standpoint for him to handle his own complaint.

BYOND Key: Kaed/Kaedwuff Staff BYOND Key: Alberyk/MattAtlas Game ID: N/A Reason for complaint: Evidence/logs/etc: When I was given a permaban in January it was due to repeated failures to control my temper on the forums, and as a result, when I appealed my ban, I was told that repeating this behavior would result in consequences. What was not made clear to me at the time, I assume because that was not the intent behind the stipulation, was that any violation of forum rules, regardless of how minor or unrelated, would result in an immediate re-establishing of that permanent ban. Yesterday night, I made a post on this thread, which at the time I thought was qualified as being a witness to the issue, owing to the fact that it was directly related to my experience with the staff team. The post has been deleted, but the summary of the contents was that the ruling the staff made does not match up with the rules that have on the forums. This morning I was greeting with two things - an infraction from Alberyk bundled with another permanent ban, along with my command whitelist being summarily rejected due to the same incident. I attempted to bring this subject up with Alberyk this morning on discord, and the conversation was as follows: This was a matter of subjective information on the concept of 'being a witness that can refute claims', and I have been told the staff standpoint on the matter, but I'm willing to go with that. The problem with Alberyk's ruling is that they feel my attempt to bear testimony in this forum thread is tantamount to a resurgence of my previous behavior of being rude on the forums, of which I will indicate here: These are my list of offenses that have occurred in the last year and a half. Every single one of them was related to a specific issue, my tendency to lose my temper and be rude. Insisting that I deserve to be permabanned for this is akin to permabanning someone on the server for repeated powergaming, then after they appeal they misunderstand a corporate regulation, and you permaban them them again after explaining what the staff expects, stating 'a rule break is a rule break, and you have a history.' Neither of these incidents are related or even close to the same severity, and rulings for punitive measures should not be so binary. Additionally, I would like to lodge a complaint about the behavior of MattAtlas and Alberyk in regards to how my whitelist application was handled. I posted that application 10 days ago, on the 11th of June, and in that period since I have asked Alberyk twice to have someone review it, and both times the promise to get a response resulted in absolutely nothing, not even a notification that someone was evaluating it. By contrast, MattAtlas showed up to deny the application less than 5 hours after Alberyk issued an infraction against me. This prolonged lack of communication followed by immediate retributive action has left me confused as to whether the staff team places a higher priority on punitive action and bureaucratic process than making the playerbase's experience function in an enjoyable way. The fact that you have added a new addendum to the rules very recently that any ban will result in losing your whitelist seems to support this. It was, in fact, the sluggishness by which this command app proceeded that lead me to feel it was important I share my experience and feelings on this apparently new ruling that any ban of any length will result in a whitelist strip. I should also mention that the content of my post that was deleted was pointing out that it is frustrating that staff members will make rulings behind the scenes and not inform the players until after they try to appeal and present rules as they were provided on the forum. Sure enough, before I made that post, this is how the 'Removal of Command Whitelist' section read, as written by MattAtlas, per the complaint by Hesphos. And this is what it it now reads: This is an act of bad faith that seems to be directly in response to my commentary that the staff is changing the rules without notifying us, and one might even be able to make an argument given the timing that deleting my post and issuing a permaban followed by editing the rules as a result could be an attempt to silence valid player critique under the veneer of rigidly adhering to the rules about staff complaints. It could also be an excess of draconian policies and the staff expecting the players to know beforehand their private rules. It was my opinion at the time I made the post (perhaps incorrectly) that making a staff complaint about a staff complaint about a staff complaint (Hephestos's complaint is a followup to another) would be an unnecessary escalation of bureaucratic process, but the staff team has taken the hardline approach of expelling me from the forums for essentially not filing my complaint paperwork properly while claiming that I deserve it because I am a repeat offender on a completely different matter. Additional remarks: It should also be worth noting that when I attempted to request the ability to make this complaint earlier today, I wasted a half hour of my time due to Alberyk (and apparently Arrow) incorrectly managing my posting permissions that caused my original complaint to be unpostable, and I had to be asked to get direct links and permissions to even SEE relevant threads so I could get screenshots. It seems to be fixed now, owing to the fact that I can post this, but if you plan to allow people to make appeals after forum, you need to train your staff on how to manage forum permissions, because whoever was doing it this morning did not seem to understand what they were doing, and it made the experience extremely frustrating.

It has been 10 days since I submitted this form. Twice I have prodded Alberyk about the lack of staff response, and twice he has said he will have someone look into it, first by mentioning it, then promising to assign someone to it. As yet, the only person who has responded was Azande, who gave their support for my conduct as a roleplayer despite our OOC differences. I'm not certain how I am supposed to interpret this. There are people who posted command applications after I made this one and are already on their trial. Have I done something incorrect in the form that needs to be fixed? I have nothing to go on here other than promises that a staff member will look this over followed by additional days of silence.

I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a way that doesn't lead to frustrating behavior.

With the recent PR that removed 'kitty ears' from the game, here https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/9158 the subject of a borg player that was tangentially related due to their custom skin came up. Since discussion of that seemed out of place in the scope of the PR thread, I moved it here in an attempt to bring up the subject. I hope this is the appropriate place. Per XanderDox: I wish to note that both the Admins and Devs have been complicit in cat-girl cringe, specifically allowing a staff member to have a set of custom cyborg sprites that are all a Cat Girl, including a Catgirl Surgeon and Bartender. The Catgirl custom borg sprites should be removed too if you are removing cat ears from all players, --- And I posted this comment before deleting it to move it here: Veronica also doesn't really fit into the normal mechanical aesthetic for a borgs, either. It is basically a little roomba with a holo projector on top, but interacts with the world around her as if the hologram was a solid object. If it performs surgery, how is it reaching the top of the operating table? Why is it able to block pathing for people who could realistically just walk over it? How is it serving drinks as a bartender when it is shorter than the counter? We have solid light the technology in the holodeck, but that requires a special room, and the borg sprite clearly has the wavery style that non-solid holopads use. It was a bad gimmick for a custom sprite in the first place, and requires way too much suspension of disbelief if you put more thought into it than 'haha catgirl nursie', and we should be taking the time to rethink it if we are doing a purge of 'catgirl cringe'

I feel like this would create a dynamic of kamikaze tactics where security beats any non-group antag by one of them charging into them while the others pile on the knocked over antag after. It would make unathi security officers horrendous to go against, because their lunge speed is so fast you would have almost no time to react to their charge. Cultists or mercs/raiders could use the same cheese tactics to capture important targets.

Even if I agreed with that, by definition it doesn't mean they deserve extra attention and languages that the others don't get. If the lore team is of the opinion that there humans are on the same ground as everyone else, I can get behind that even if I don't feel the same way. But the topic of this thread is specifically that humans deserve more for no particular reason other than that they are the 'main' race, and that bay has a bunch. It's even referred to as 'language bloat' in the title.

I think that's a flaw with the setting that could be fixed.

Because I don't care about them. Obviously your mileage is different. I've been advocating for a different, non-human dominant setting for ages. As far as I'm concerned, they're roleplaying training wheels to do something more interesting later. They're common because they require the least forethought, it doesn't make them worthy of being more special.