Player Complaint - Naelynn

[Goret]

BYOND Key: TheGoret
Game ID: N/A
Player Byond Key/Character name: Naelynn
Staff involved: N/A
Reason for complaint:
I've been wanting to make this complaint for some time. I tried to let time pass to see if they would improve, but there seems to be no intention for the player to improve their behavior. Three quarters of the time, I see powergaming, and actions that do not contribute to the direction of the round as an antagonist. An antagonist must show a story. The most recent example I saw was during a vampire round. They were a merchant (as usual, most of the powergaming and bad actions from them that I see is as a merchant), and was a Vox. For an hour, no one heard from them. We heard of them only after we spotted the detective, who was also a vampire, and they immediately switched on lethal when they saw the head of security. So the second hour ended in a manhunt, and I NEVER heard this antagonist speak. The detective was much more present than him, he always spoke in the common channel. Earlier, the Vox hid the weapons from the armory somewhere we wouldn't find them. This was clearly an action to destroy any chances for security to kill them. 
There are many examples. And not just from me. I am sure there are many others who could share their point of view on the situation, including Naelynn.
Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation? N/A.
Approximate Date/Time: N/A.

[Naelynn]

Hey! I'd like to clear something up about the round you are mentioning!

... I got vamped 50 minutes in.
I had very little idea how vamp abilities work, because it is very hard to try them on a test server.

And finally.. I interacted with a bunch of people. Did those interactions end up in vampire bite? ... yeah? ... but I was a vampire after all.

[Snoopy11]

Hello, I've also been involved in rounds where Naelenn has been the antagonist, and I unfortunately have to agree.  There never appears to be a direction the antagonistic actions are leaning towards, nor are there typically any communication.

What tends to happen about ~50-60 minutes into the round, is that we notice high tech shit is being stolen.  The AI is being subverted.  Someone is walking out on the asteroid armed to the teeth. By this point Naelynn has armed themselves to the teeth with every little thing they can; while not a bad thing, of course, the problem lays in the fact that they have no purpose other than arming themselves.

I'm sorry Naelynn, but I don't believe your behavior as an antagonist has really improved  since your antagonist unban, you seem to be doing the same things all over again.  This time more armed, as you're the merchant a fair chunk of the time.

[Naelynn]

@Goret @Snoopy11

Before we proceed with this, please do me a favour:

Please define what an Antagonist is, how are they supposed to do things, and what's their purpose for existing according to you.

I will start with my own definition:

Antagonist is someone with ulterior motives on the station, regardless if those are friendly or unfriendly. They should use any means available to them to achieve their goal, regardless of what it is, as long as it does not constitute griefing. Their purpose is to drive roleplay and/or atmosphere of the round in one way or another.

[Goret]

My definition of antagonist is simply the one that the rules gives us.

[Naelynn]

@Goret

Wonderful! So our definitions are pretty much identical!
Now that I know what I can work with, let's get to it

 

15 hours ago, Goret said:

I tried to let time pass to see if they would improve, but there seems to be no intention for the player to improve their behavior.

I've literally never got feedback from you. I try to do my best to improve things, but the easiest way to make someone do something differently is to.. ask them to do so. 

As an example, I would like to summon @Marlon Phoenix - I recently fucked up a thing where I missunderstood the Unathi, and specifically Aut'Akh lore to mean that Aut'Akh more or less do not feel pain, and as such acted upon that assumption. Marlon, being the wonderful person he is, Pm'd me on discord and pointed out my mistake. The mistake was not repeated. 

Another example of this would be @kyres1 - Literally last round as of writing this there was a missunderstanding over how IPC's are created and owned, should they be made on the station itself. Kyres contacted me on discord and explained to me that I was wrong. 

Yet another example that I can think of right now is @Jupiter Storm - I have been trying to do a lot more work with the Ai, since it is such a wonderfully useful way of involving crew in your storyline - With feedback from Jupiter [And the IPC discord server] I've created a bunch pretty well written Ai laws that I can use in the future to make good stories.

Next example I can think of is @Aboshedab - When I was planning out my skrell application, I pm'd him and asked him to review my character concepts and then spent a bunch more time making sure their planning is more up to standards.

Another example I can think of is @DRagO whom recently handled one of the ahelps against me where I went out of line and killed a person who didn't attack me. The situation was quite complicated and is irrelevant, but we reached an understanding and I'm going to strive to only attack in retaliation.

Yet ANOTHER example is this entire thread handled by @Garnascus: 

Tl;dr: I no longer create or play 'antagonist' characters - a.k.a: characters that exist exclusively to be antagonists. Nor do I cryo out of rounds if I'm unhappy with things. Furthermore, there was an implication that I only play antagonists in that thread, as evidence against that I would like to offer the fact that during the week of antagonist ban I stayed active and played on the station.

ANOTHER example would be the round that got me antag banned, handled by @Pratepresidenten: The reason for the antag ban was going too far with ooc knowledge, specifically walling in ERT/TCFL shuttle. I based this on the fact that one of the round-start tips literally mentions that one of the vulnereabilities of ERT is that people know where you land. This behaviour wasn't repeated since. Hell, in discord PM's I asked him to bwoink me more, because pointing out my mistakes is the best way for me to learn.

Tl;dr: Please present evidence where I am unwilling to learn, if given the opportunity to.

 

15 hours ago, Goret said:

Three quarters of the time, I see powergaming, and actions that do not contribute to the direction of the round as an antagonist. An antagonist must show a story.

I would like to address this point using three different points:

1) 
Within server rules [ https://aurorastation.org/rules.html ], and as mentioned by @Garnascus in:

 Antagonists do not require gimmicks. Cookie cutter 'I am a raider, and I steal things' or 'I am a merc, and I was hired to assassinate X on this station' are just as acceptable as a proper well thought out gimmick.  Are well thought out gimmicks preferable? Yes. But they are NOT mandatory.  I have contacted @Skull132 and @Pratepresidenten during writing of this to ask their feedback on if this statement is correct, here are their respective inputs: [ Skull: http://prntscr.com/p9e2co ] [ Prate: http://prntscr.com/p9e32i ]

With that said, you are saying that that gameplay style does not drive a story.... Is security on a manhunt for someone throught the entirety of station, having to monitor the cameras, involving Ai AND multiple non-security personnel who report seeing the antagonist to security... Is that NOT a narrative? Is that not something to talk about in the bar? 

2)
I have been working on this particular aspect since the original feedback thread with Casey Mercer which basically embodied this style of pushing story/gameplay. Since then, I have had a ninja gimmick where I caused a more-or-less revolution to occur by relawing the ai to claim that there is a raider ship coming [played by @Jupiter Storm ], and repeatedly used voice changer to stir up the crew into wishing to protect themselves. Furthermore using announcements from the bridge and/or uplink to drive the story even further, and yet more finally dressing up in captain armor and running around at the end of round as an evil pirate at the end of round. 

Next example would be the ai laws that we've worked out with Jupiter, one of which was already used in a round where the ai was lawed to believe it is a parent to everyone on station. The ninja was mostly unknown in the round, only adding in a little bit of spice there and then, until an ai-slaying team formed, consisting of @Cnaym  @Jupiter Storm and two more players I'm not familiar with. Since the shuttle wasn't called yet, I needed to defend the ai and lawed it to be extremely unhappy with the security officer in the group. The ai interpreted that to 'Vent the hallway the character is in', which in this case involved primary hallway. Thinking quick, I teleported him to telecomms using ninja-stealth + hand teleporter, but because I didn't think it through well enough it revealed me and caused the round to derail from 'Slay the insane ai' to 'Slay the invisible man by the name of Death'. When shuttle was called, I attempted to give the story a crescendo by offering one person from the group to take them to the Ai core and letting them finish the job, which didn't work out as planned because of the aforementioned mechanical fuck up. The lawset in itself was almost instantly craked by @Rosetango who figured out that the Ai is literally lawed to be nice and treat you kindly if you simply are nice to it and the people on board and do your job. Rose spent the entire round on common comms trying to explain this to the crew. None of this would have happened if I didn't strive to up my story game.

3) If I am in the wrong for seeking to power up my antagonist characters and manage to gain the upper hand in situations where often I am playing as 1-4 people vs 6-9 people in security, then please explain why many other antagonist players are not in the wrong. And if they are in the wrong, why do I not see player complaints against them.

 

15 hours ago, Goret said:

They were a merchant (as usual, most of the powergaming and bad actions from them that I see is as a merchant), and was a Vox.

This has a very simple explanation.

The character in question is Sabael Kyledes [Human Miner]. For whatever reason, this character spawned as a merchant on exodus. I genuinely do not really know why - here are the job settings for the character: http://prntscr.com/p9e7ew 

The character /DOES NOT HAVE MERCHANT ENABLED/ - And literally cannot even have merchant enabled because only Independent faction characters can be merchants. As such, to not completely destroy the character's lore, I was forced to go Vox, regardless if I wanted to or not - as I did not wish to cryo on round start.

Because Merchant code is inherently balanced around LRP, I have been personally slowly reworking it over in this thread right here:  

Before you say that my goal is to make antagonist merchants more op, I would like to ask you to consider the fact that Unathi Breacher from the merchant costs precisely 6 tc via operation funding. Operation Funding in the traitor uplink is fantastic for driving rp on station, but completely wrecks merchant traitor power economy, and this is an issue I am well aware of - as adressed in my 'To Be Done' section of the post. I wish to make these very powerful items UNABLE TO BE PURCHASED USING MONEY by transferring them to unique traders exclusively. 

Reality of the situation is that Merchant is balanced for 40 minutes rounds, and no one else but me is currently working to change that, as far as I know. If you have any feedback for the merchant changes, please write them in the thread. Sadly, until the rework's finished OR merchant being automatically excluded from being 'on station' antagonist [probably by being turned int "Antagonist" role like ERT are], this will continue being the case.

Furthermore @Marlon Phoenix had a discussion with me on a round where an Unathi Breacher was used by a merchant and we agreed that items on it's level should be used extremely sparingly. - This has been implemented when later I had an unathi breacher purchased, but decided to leave it on merchant's base in favour of making a more interesting interactions.

Thank you for reading this - I am not adressing the specific example round because while it is relevant to the post itself, this novella is already long enough. If it will be required, I am willing to provide further clarifications on my actions in the round.

[Garnascus]

If i wake up to a dogpile of random and unverifiable accusations against the player in question i will hand out forum bans. Back your shit up with logs or round IDs or do not post. 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I did talk to Naeylnn about how they were playing aut'akh. There was some red flags in how they interpreted autakh pain rp in an incident they were very responsive and adjusted their playstyle. As far as i know beyond that i have not gotten substantial complaints that got me to talk to them again, even with asking for them to be kept an eye on for a little bit.

I dont see a unathi whitelist issue but i can't speak for anything else.

Edited September 22, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[Goret]

Alright, I've read through this novel. Firstly, thank you for responding so quickly. I lacked time to answer yesterday, and I have been busy until now. 

The fact that you're trying to reinforce your point by putting in evidence solid arguments is respectful, but I have some problems with all of this.
The first quarter of your post is about lore related stuff. I never pointed out the fact that we should remove your whitelists, or that you had a bad RP. You are a good roleplayer from what I saw, and I think not alot of people are going to think otherwise. On a OOC point of view, nor do I think that you are a bad person. Really, my only problem is the way how you play antagonist, and the possibilities of powergaming.

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

Another example I can think of is @DRagO whom recently handled one of the ahelps against me where I went out of line and killed a person who didn't attack me. The situation was quite complicated and is irrelevant, but we reached an understanding and I'm going to strive to only attack in retaliation.

I remember this thing being brought up from people who were playing and ghosting during that round. Apparently you beheaded twelve people with force gloves and a glaive. I wasn't on at that moment, nor I trust the sources that could be biased by it. Drago handled it and I'm not going to go against their judgments since it was a complicated situation. 

Moving to the next part, you brought up the complaint that made Mogelix, and that Garn handled. 

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

Tl;dr: I no longer create or play 'antagonist' characters - a.k.a: characters that exist exclusively to be antagonists. Nor do I cryo out of rounds if I'm unhappy with things. Furthermore, there was an implication that I only play antagonists in that thread, as evidence against that I would like to offer the fact that during the week of antagonist ban I stayed active and played on the station.

Never I mentioned that you made characters for the sake of antaging, and going to cryo when you were not. I am only revolving around WHEN you play antagonist. I know that you are playing normal characters sometimes, and I have no problem with that. I don't think its relevant, so I'm going to pass.

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

ANOTHER example would be the round that got me antag banned, handled by @Pratepresidenten: The reason for the antag ban was going too far with ooc knowledge, specifically walling in ERT/TCFL shuttle. I based this on the fact that one of the round-start tips literally mentions that one of the vulnereabilities of ERT is that people know where you land. This behaviour wasn't repeated since. Hell, in discord PM's I asked him to bwoink me more, because pointing out my mistakes is the best way for me to learn.

You should rectify this for the sake of not making anyone handling this confused, Prate wasn't the one that antagbanned you, but @Tailson. 
You were banned one week from antagonist. This action has been given by an admin that seem to have escalated it after multiple times breaking the rules in a short time as an antagonist. While you are saying that you learnt from that, of course you did, because you know it would be more than an antagonist ban if you did it again. This is logic, if you break a rule, you're not going to do it again(normally). 

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

 Antagonists do not require gimmicks. Cookie cutter 'I am a raider, and I steal things' or 'I am a merc, and I was hired to assassinate X on this station' are just as acceptable as a proper well thought out gimmick.  Are well thought out gimmicks preferable? Yes. But they are NOT mandatory.  I have contacted @Skull132 and @Pratepresidenten during writing of this to ask their feedback on if this statement is correct, here are their respective inputs: [ Skull: http://prntscr.com/p9e2co ] [ Prate: http://prntscr.com/p9e32i ]

I feel like you are taking out of context what I said. 

On 21/09/2019 at 23:36, Goret said:

Three quarters of the time, I see powergaming, and actions that do not contribute to the direction of the round as an antagonist. An antagonist must show a story.

I NEVER said that a gimmick was necessary. I said that an antagonist must show a story. They can do it using a gimmick for sure, but they don't need one. But making interactions for everyone is necessary, as stated in the rules here: 

and as Prate told you here: 

You are master of the round as an antagonist, and everyone is counting on you to make it fun. But most of the time, this fun revolve in frustration. 

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

With that said, you are saying that that gameplay style does not drive a story.... Is security on a manhunt for someone throught the entirety of station, having to monitor the cameras, involving Ai AND multiple non-security personnel who report seeing the antagonist to security... Is that NOT a narrative? Is that not something to talk about in the bar? 

I fail to see how a narrative revolving around security chasing you through the whole station, people screaming "NINJA MAINT" and the AI stalking you is a good narrative. "Hey, did you see that guy in a dark suit teleporting around? -Yeah. -Isn't that scary? -Yeaaaah."
Is this what 2 hours of a round are supposed to revolve around? A simple talk in the bar? I don't think its supposed  to be like this. When your only interaction with the crew is literally "they saw me and reported me", I don't think we could qualifies it interaction. 

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

I have been working on this particular aspect since the original feedback thread with Casey Mercer which basically embodied this style of pushing story/gameplay. Since then, I have had a ninja gimmick where I caused a more-or-less revolution to occur by relawing the ai to claim that there is a raider ship coming [played by @Jupiter Storm ], and repeatedly used voice changer to stir up the crew into wishing to protect themselves. Furthermore using announcements from the bridge and/or uplink to drive the story even further, and yet more finally dressing up in captain armor and running around at the end of round as an evil pirate at the end of round. 

I have absolutely no problems with that part, as it is fair and valid. I wasn't in this round, so I can't say much about it. If people enjoyed it, its great. But that doesn't excuse the other problems. I'll ignore the part that goes next with it, since it is fair too. 

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

3) If I am in the wrong for seeking to power up my antagonist characters and manage to gain the upper hand in situations where often I am playing as 1-4 people vs 6-9 people in security, then please explain why many other antagonist players are not in the wrong. And if they are in the wrong, why do I not see player complaints against them.

Please, using the argument "he does this and I do the same but why isn't he punished too" isn't appropriated. I made this complaint because I had issues on my mind, and that your behavior is repeating itself. You think someone is doing things wrong? Someone need to make a complaint. Nobody is doing one? Do it yourself.

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

This has a very simple explanation.

The character in question is Sabael Kyledes [Human Miner]. For whatever reason, this character spawned as a merchant on exodus. I genuinely do not really know why - here are the job settings for the character: http://prntscr.com/p9e7ew 

The character /DOES NOT HAVE MERCHANT ENABLED/ - And literally cannot even have merchant enabled because only Independent faction characters can be merchants. As such, to not completely destroy the character's lore, I was forced to go Vox, regardless if I wanted to or not - as I did not wish to cryo on round start.

You are never forced to do anything. You could have just ahelped to get you fixed. Anyways, I wasn't even pointing out the fact that you were a Vox was a problem.

On 22/09/2019 at 15:05, Naelynn said:

Before you say that my goal is to make antagonist merchants more op, I would like to ask you to consider the fact that Unathi Breacher from the merchant costs precisely 6 tc via operation funding. Operation Funding in the traitor uplink is fantastic for driving rp on station, but completely wrecks merchant traitor power economy, and this is an issue I am well aware of - as adressed in my 'To Be Done' section of the post. I wish to make these very powerful items UNABLE TO BE PURCHASED USING MONEY by transferring them to unique traders exclusively. 

I have no issues with you contributing to the server. But despite the fact that you know that it is too op and that you want to correct it, you still use it sometimes. The rouns was when I was on my first/second day as a trial, and I think it was revolution. You had a breacher, as an Aut'akh and you were dragging a medkit around. I think the round ID was b3e-auUo. It was on the 14th of September, so it was a week after you brought your project up. 

Also for Garn's sake, the round ID where they were just flying around as a vampire was b3l-cttM.

[ReadThisNamePlz]

Hello, @Datamatt and I will be taking this complaint.

For my sanity, and Matt's. Please keep your posts short and concise. I do not want to read a 1000+ word essay each time I look at a post on this.

[MattAtlas]

8 minutes ago, ReadThisNamePlz said:

Hello, @Datamatt and I will be taking this complaint.

For my sanity, and Matt's. Please keep your posts short and concise. I do not want to read a 1000+ word essay each time I look at a post on this.

How to do this, you ask? Don't go quote by quote. It's a pain in the ass to read and makes shit way too long. Just make a summary of your thoughts regarding the whole post instead.

[Naelynn]

Right. Will keep things concise... or at least try to!

The first part of my post existed merely to show evidence that I look to improve my play style with any and all feedback I receive. This matters because if something is wrong with how I interact with players in a round, throwing me a pm/bwoink is sufficient to fix this [Within human reason, of course].

For second point.. Yes, antagonists serve to create a narrative of some form. I think I got too stuck in the details to get at what I wished to convey, so please excuse my failure to communicate there. That being: I have been working on this since the days of Mercer. I have planned out gimmicks for the antags I've been playing for a while prepared and planned out, and look to rp them out. Most notably for Ninja/Wizard. I still have very little planned for other antags.

The 'someone else does this, so why not them?' argument... It's not strong, but it's still relevant. Rules should be applied to everyone equally. 

Finally last point: Because tricordrazine can heal all major damage types, should we remove it? How about Ions? Ipc's? Unathi? Ninjas? [They're stronger than other antags]. Just because something is strong, should we never ever use it? If things were this clear, I believe the thing would have already been removed.

[Naelynn]

Call me dramatic or whatever.

I need a break from ss13

However this will end, it will end.
I'm not going to reply here anymore, muting any emails from forums and uninstalled the game and all relevant discord servers. 

I may be back in 6 months, but between some stuff irl that's giving me a lot of stress, and the fact that I'm appearently the target of hatred in dead chat almost every single round I do something even remotely non-perfect... Yeah no, I'm just tired.

Edit to explain when I'm not in full blown panic attack:
I feel targetted, disliked and unwanted.
Outside of few friends, I don't see evidence to the contrary.
I just got second out of three ban warnings for trying to drive a story in improper way.
I'm leaving because of these reasons.

[MattAtlas]

We have found no evidence of wrongdoing in the -cttM round ID. It is a standard vampire round gone wrong - yes, the gimmick may have been disagreeable, but there is nothing against the rules.

Naelynn was not in the other round ID provided.

This complaint will be closed in 24 hours unless further evidence is presented.

[ReadThisNamePlz]

Hello, as per the message @Datamatt sent, I will be closing this complaint. Thank you all for your time.