Staff Complaint - Alberyk

[DeadLantern]

BYOND Key: DeadLantern
Game ID: caG-aqGy
Staff Byond Key: Alberyk

Reason for complaint: Poor antag play after a history of poor antag play. DasFox was recently unbanned in January of this year from a permaban--they were permabanned because of metagaming an antag, but I believe their history goes farther than that. In short, this complaint is being levied against DasFox because they've exhibited signs of poor antag play across rounds, but this complaint will specifically focus on the play during the round of caG-agGy. During this round, DasFox and Jonky23 boarded the Aurora as Ninjas. Like most antags, they had a gimmick: their gimmick was to cause minor issues throughout the station. From flickering lights to throwing bottles, this was the essence of their gimmick. Mostly trivial stuff. From the standpoint of security, this gimmick was incredibly unfun to play with--We, as security, were forced to investigate this matter and treat it as a threat. At first, we were running to and fro at every report of a ghost, trying to find signs of a physical being causing these errors. This was not that fun. We could not roleplay with the antags nor with ourselves--we were essentially forced to be on medium alert running all around the station because the antags are doing minor things to the station. I get the sense that this was boring to the crew, as well. The antags were messing with very minor stuff, and so the crew did not respond greatly. The crew had 0 initiative to RP with the antags and the actions the Antags took provided no story for the crew to latch onto.

The second phase of the round began when we finally spotted the ninja out of their cloak. This was after we ahelped--presumably, the antags were warned and told to step it up in terms of game interaction. I'd also like to mention that I was shocked by a random door, but this might've been the AI's doing, I really don't know. Anyways, it was like the previous situation, but worse--security had even more of an incentive to run around the station chasing around these invisible guys, even though it's practically impossible to engage with them. Eventually, we stopped running. Again, the crew received very little attention, and security's gameplay was reflective of that. We were fighting against phantoms that did nothing but essentially forced us to be on guard. Afterwards, we get a bomb threat--at this point, we ignore it, because there is very little we can actually do. It's simply not fun to fight against two impossible-to-chase Ninjas doing covert things in an attempt to get the attention of the crew. It did not involve the crew, and security was forced to respond, so we basically stopped responding. After that, the round ended.

This round was 2 hours of misery for security. We could not roleplay with the antags. We could not roleplay with each other. We could not roleplay with anybody. We were forced to be on guard, but could do absolutely nothing. The normal crew, while being able to roleplay with their respective departments, got no action from the antag besides the occasional ghost spook. It was essentially an extended round for them.

I hope you can see how this type of antag play is unacceptable and unengaging to literally everybody that isn't an antag. At first, I was under the impression that these were the actions of new players, so I was a bit more lenient. Jonky23 was new, that's true, but DasFox is an old player--and a player that has quite the history, leading to a permaban. A player like this should no better. Perhaps if this was their first offense, I'd accept a warning, but I would like the administrative team to go further with this. This kind of antag behavior should be unacceptable to older players who know how the game flow works and what engages crew and what doesn't engage crew. It's fine if they come up with a gimmick that doesn't quite stick the landing--it's another to obsessively do the same thing over and over again, only to continue to fight this secret unfightable and un-roleplayable war even after they've been warned not to. That is also why this complaint is more focused on DasFox, and not Jonky23. I don't know who came up with this gimmick, but they should have tried something else or escalated once they realized no story was being generated.

Also, I have heard stories of DasFox behaving the same for other antag rounds. I have logs provided here of one such occurrence a couple of days ago:

Evidence/logs/etc:

[F] DEAD DasFox (Geist) laments, "I could've sedate-killed all of security very easily."

[10:19 PM]

[F] DEAD DasFox (Geist) blubbers, "If I were alive they might because I would've gone on a sprree after my friend died and I had the ability to inject people with fucking cyanide"

Here we see DasFox bragging about how they could've killed security easily and would've gone a killing spree because they had the mechanical ability to do so. I do not know the exact context of this quote--if this play is actually acceptable, forgive me, but shown here, it doesn't look so good. It looks like they only care about mechanically dominating the crew and messing with us.

I was the HoS of the Ninja round, if that matters. Numerous other players complained about the gimmick, not limited to security.

Additional Remarks: This staff complaint is transplant from the player complaint I originally issued. I only disagree with Alberyk for the actual punishment. I believe a ban or something is much more fitting than a warning when considering DasFox's time on the server and their prior history with staff.
 

[Alberyk]

What is the round id/date from those logs?

Also, to explain my decision: someone some rounds ago ahelped saying that they were doing it before, which they had no evidence, so I kept a remainder to talk to the player if they did that. So, I managed to see the player in question doing that, and I spoke to them. If their notes had stuff about previous rounds of being a bad ninja, I would likely have applied a harsher punishment.

[DeadLantern]

The date of the log was 02/11/2021. Unfortunately, I have nothing more specific than that.

[Garnascus]

23 hours ago, DeadLantern said:

This kind of antag behavior should be unacceptable to older players who know how the game flow works and what engages crew and what doesn't engage crew.

In my experience as staff for this server the amount of sub-par antags I have been able to punish into a good antag is exactly zero. Its not really an effective way to handle it because how it tends to work in reality is a player thinks up X or Y idea and it just.... doesn't really work that well. You can wax philosophical about "the player should know better" and while there's a grain of truth to that we all have bad days. Antagging is incredibly difficulty and its generally more effective to go back to the drawing board in these cases instead of dishing out a ban. I do not think dasfox's ban history is relevant here because they where banned for ganking, metagaming, stuff like that. All the stuff that is explicitly against the rules.  A good analogy here is that type of "play to win" antaggery is TOO MUCH and here we have NOT ENOUGH. I see that alberyk had a conversation with dasfox and i imagine it went somewhere along the lines of "Hey this didn't work try this next time" or something.

On top of that they have one single other note on their account since their unban. There is no such thing as "being on thin ice" when someone appeals a permaban. I accepted their appeal because i think they have a reasonable chance of being a good player. We are not sitting here waiting for one mistake to send them back to ban land. TLDR Alberyk's judgement seems to be in line with how we generally conduct ourselves as far as staff actions are concerned. 

[DeadLantern]

I understand your point. I'll close this complaint then. I do have a question, though: if DasFox continues to play antag like this, will it ever end up in a ban?

[Alberyk]

2 hours ago, DeadLantern said:

I understand your point. I'll close this complaint then. I do have a question, though: if DasFox continues to play antag like this, will it ever end up in a ban?

I wrote that in their notes, so yes.

[DeadLantern]

Alright, thanks.

[Garnascus]

Locking and archiving.