Dealing with cliques and popular players/characters

[Kaed]

I have noticed a tendency on the server for certain groups of people to form metacliques where their characters will always support and look out for each other, at the expense of literally everyone outside of their friend circle.  While this is a fairly realistic representation of how people act in real life in a casual setting, it can be extremely frustrating to have to deal with it in a setting that is supposed to be professional and corporate.  The biggest offenders are in the medical department, as far as I know.  I barely play in medical, and I mostly just hear things on the grapevine, so I can't particularly give many firsthand accounts, admittedly

But I have seen a particular things in person, sometimes in character, other times as a ghost, such as a CMO threatening to hang themselves in the bathroom for attention, a different one literally running off to hide in maintenance like a child when faced with a minor security charge that apparently they'd been ducking all round, trying to wait out the end of the round, CMOs leaving the medbay in code red to run out and go negotiate with terrorists, ignoring security telling them to back off.  CMOs who rush into conflicts to hypospray-inject combatants with drugs to stop the conflict going on so they can be the hero.

These are all actions that are the prerogative of their players to do.  You can play your character however you like.  But what is frustrating to me is that these actions never seem to result in any sort of punitive action that might cause the character to need to change.  I have literally seen captains who I assume must have been part of their metaclique bail some of them out of their own actions, and ahelped when I see it, and nothing happens.  Some people just seem to be above consequences on this server because other people like their character and they don't think corporate policies or professionalism should apply to them. Or maybe they just somehow are psychologically incapable of seeing how frustrating their behavior is to other people and just think everything they do is right and okay. I don't know. I'm not these players.

How are we supposed to deal with issues like this.  Appealing to the admins/mods for help isn't working.  Appealing to security in-round doesn't do anything, because there are too many people floating around in the server base who surround these people in a protective hugbox of consequence immunity.  You may have noticed I haven't named any names here, but the people who I am pointing out probably know who they are.  Good for you, nameless people.  This isn't a complaint thread, this is a frustrated rant looking for answers on how to deal with the way the playerbase has become of late.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Kaed

[AmoryBlaine]

I'm not in the cliques, but, I use my ability to interact with other characters, get on their good side, and they act favorably in the future. Given I main a Security Officer, this is extremely useful. This is why being a social butterfly is important.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

It's part of the natural cycle of online communities. If it gets too bad it can throttle the life out of a community, because their behavior runs off new players who are put off by it all. The best thing we can do as regular players is to space the clique characters whenever possible, and doing favors for other, random characters so they feel involved.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[MarauderW]

This is what I do, and why I like to play Vaurca. They literally have a lore reason to be so socially active and question everything that happens around them.

And I try to include and interact to everyone when I play, no matter the race really. But I am one of the people who will never have a clique, so... I say this with utmost certainty.

[Alberyk]

Not sure how you can say that ahelping does not help, when I do recall people being warned/spoken to/having their whitelists stripped over this kind of behavior. Just because you don't see the punishment, it does not mean it does not help.

[Resilynn]

I wonder who you’re talking about.

Ahelp when you see issues. This is a game full of social interaction and motivations and story that can develop, even in round, on one side of the station and you’ll never see it if you’re not around. 

For example, I’m 99% sure the cmo getting excused for something by a metafriend captain thing you’ve mentioned is when butterobbers captain didn’t charge my cmo for neglect of duty for saying he wouldn’t do his job while in pain crit. Because people say dumb shit while they’re in pain and actions speak louder than words. 

Butterrobber and I are not friends. Our first discord interaction ever was after that round. You’re just assuming we are meta friends instead of assuming we had a conversation in round. 

Which, honestly, is the same thing with the medical metaclique.  Medical is a revolving door of players and characters.  And we are, in my experience, pretty absurdly friendly OOC and welcome new characters, teach, and include them.  I see LOOC invites go out for the medical discord and the private discords pretty much daily, and everyone in MY rounds is given assignments regardless of their time on the server.

So, ahelp. You’re not around for most of the ic and ooc interactions in a round for any given character but your own, so you have no way to know what’s going on.  Bitching in a vague essay post doesn’t accomplish anything. If you ahelp, admins can investigate and determine whether there is sufficient IC motivation or not. 

And I’ll echo Alb when he says just because YOU don’t see punishment doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 

[Kaed]

2 hours ago, Alberyk said:

Not sure how you can say that ahelping does not help, when I do recall people being warned/spoken to/having their whitelists stripped over this kind of behavior. Just because you don't see the punishment, it does not mean it does not help.

This might be a problem with transparency somewhere, then.  Because we hear nothing back, and the behavior we ahelped keeps happening.  What are we supposed to think here? Someone is being ignored, most likely, and since the admins are the ones with the authority and power, it's generally easier to believe they were arbitrarily lenient towards the person you ahelped than that they gave them a talking to and were ignored themselves. 

You ask of us to have blind faith in the staff team's benevolence and process, but you allow people on staff who behave with extreme bias towards players they like and bwoink people the moment aggression starts against one of their friends, or try to make up situations not covered in the actual rules that you violated because it's how 'they think things should be'. 

You ask me personally to have faith in the staff team effectiveness when the single time I volunteered to be a trial mod I had to endure streams of msay memeing and spam, and any attempt to request people act professional was largely met with 'take a chill pill, dude', before being rejected from the mod team because 'I didn't get along well with people on the team'.  Well, that made sense at the time, because we clearly seemed to have different ideals on acceptable staff conduct.

It's been over a year since then, but I have no reason to believe this isn't still the case, and while it's all good and fun to have fun playing your spessman game and you are all unpaid volunteers, the fact that I have personally seen that in game staffchat is a stream of memes and shitposts during my long-passed tenure along with some interactions I've had with mods where I literally had to argue with them over issues outside of the scope of the rules that they were trying to force on me does not give me a strong feeling of confidence about their objectivity and professionalism.

I'll grant you that maybe you personally can act without inherent bias, I don't know, I've rarely dealt with you in ahelps, alb.  But when it's a crapshoot what will even happen based on which mod or admin you get to answer your ahelp, and your experience follows little in the way of any particular visible procedure or process is not encouraging.  Some mods/admins will communicate with you clearly that something happened, others will just close the ahelp ticket without a word.  The staff team isn't all bad or anything, it's just not consistent.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Kaed

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

3 hours ago, Munks said:

Rather than joking about 

I'm not joking.

[geeves]

1 minute ago, Senpai Jackboot said:

I'm not joking.

can confirm this one too, just take the problematic player directly to the loredev using screenshots and it gets handled

[Resilynn]

22 minutes ago, geeves said:

im pretty sure resi got bwoinked, warned and IR'd for their actions, being on their "last chance" for chloraling people

nice miss tho, im glad Staff Man Bad sentiment is stronk here

Yep, altered my entire playstyle and became Best CMO of 2018 after it. Haven’t been warned since. 

Also I think we are confusing ic shittery and ooc shittery here. Perfect characters are boring. 

[ben10083]

47 minutes ago, Munks said:

When we ahelp people like you, you have a fit and lie about it like you're doing now and nothing gets done. You were using your viral infection as leverage to get people outside of your chain of command to obey you, stating you wouldn't cure the viral outbreak until someone you wanted arrested was. Additionally, I cannot imagine a captain player you've never met or spoken to using the exact words "I'll pretend to be fair" while slipping your charges under the rug and offering to pay your Security fine with "unmonitored" station accounts. I can't blame anyone for having zero faith in ahelps getting anything done as long as you're not only still whitelisted but manage to worm your way into CCIA. You play a corrupt druggie who charges into hostage situations alone so he can meet the hostagetaker (at least once resulting in the death of the hostage), finds no issue locking down the entire medbay over someone littering in the lobby, spends shifts hiding in his office tweaking and going through withdrawal and refusing to see patients because he got hit by a scrubber surge. and is probably the most irresponsible and complained-about head of staff we have. You're the biggest failure of the whitelist process and perfect representative of the clique problem on Aurora. Why bother with ahelping if someone can play like you do and face no consequences whatsoever?

Yes, it is true that Fernando has done many things which has resulted in someone filling an ir (In which investigation showed that he did not violate any regulations and policies). But does this affect his capability to have a head of staff whitelist? Not in the slightest. You see, this is one of the problems we have, of heads of staff thinking that they must play a goodie-two-shoes with a heart of gold and infinite compassion, when in reality heads can also self-antaging (Keep in mind I mean self-antaging as permitted in the rules.). True, Fernando is kind of sketchy, but there are many bosses and higher ups that are similar, and I would argue that it is more realistic that not every single head is a loyalist to the company and treats the company as a god. 

A good character is not one that is everyone's friend, a good character is one with weaknesses, strengths, and with different relationships to other characters. He is not a failure of the whitelist process, he is a success who's character should be seen as a example of a effective head of staff.

In regards to your claim that "he wormed his way into CCIA", like all applicants, his request to join CCIA was discussed amongst CCIA and it was determined that he would be a good addition to the team, and so far I have not seen any indication of abuse of staff authority or other severe errors.

In regards to your last sentence of the futility of ahelping, it was futile since he was not breaking any rules, and his unique playstyle and character made people question if it was OOCly allowed (it is)

[Skull132]

Hoookay.

Hi. I will be frank, I don't have time to properly read this thread at present, but from what I am reading this is turning into a what's basically an unmoderated player complaint. So here is what I'm going to do:

• Lock the thread.
• Flag a moderator or an admin to sort this shit out (issue warnings where necessary, purge the thread where needed, and reopen this if there is any meaningful discussion to be salvaged here).

And here's a reminder. If you have specific complaints about the conduct of a player or a member of staff, we have specific sections of the forums to deal with this shit. Use it. Otherwise, your complaints will be removed and not listened to.

[Lady Fowl]

Going to echo skull here, The thread has been cleaned up of off-topic posts or posts directly calling people out. @Kaed makes a legitimate point that in some aspects there is issues with cliques, and I think as a community, despite if we all like each other or not, we have in common that we want a welcome enjoyable environment. With that said, I believe discussion should contuine. If there is Anymore posts that are off-topic, seriousness or calling people out directly then you will be warned. If you have a direct issue with a player, it should be ahelped or make a complaint.

[Kira]

I like to just play random characters, but I am not sure how you’re supposed to combat this besides getting a lot more strict ooc’ly?