Player Complaint -- Forester40, Kyres1, GladiatorGames123

[Omicega]

BYOND Key: 
Omicega

Game ID: 
cjm-acdH

Player Byond Key/Character name:
Forester40
Kyres1
GladiatorGames123

Staff involved:
MattAtlas
PersephoneQ

Reason for complaint:
The round was visitors and was pretty much a disaster from the get-go. I don't really have the time or energy to give an exhaustive breakdown of it, but two of the antags are less at fault here, although I still want to include them in the scope of the complaint. I think at around 00:30 to 00:45 round time the first real hostile interaction with antags at all was one opening up on full auto at some other officers -- I was further in at the armoury at the time, getting gear, but at this point they wound up getting dogpiled by security and basically obliterated in record time. It's kind of what you expect when a solo antag opens up against a full security team, regardless of what weapons they're using.

The rest of the round was a long, slow, agonising affair where the two surviving antags tried to essentially play off what I'm assuming was meant to lighten to the tone of the round. Even at the best of times, it's pretty hard to react to antag actions in an HRP manner as it is on Aurora, but after one of the antag team has basically speedrun his way to full armoury distribution with full intent to permakill officers as quickly as he can, it's incredibly hard to sit around, play nice, and really maintain any sort of in-character level at all when the other two are doing a comedy double act in the bar.

I'm making the complaint primarily because I think the ninja who kicked off this whole disaster shouldn't be playing antag anymore, but also because I think the other two failed to read the room after the initial disaster went off. I don't really have a say what kind of gimmick or roleplay the antags come up with when I'm playing security, but on a server that advertises itself as HRP I expect something that doesn't totally rip me out of the round. A short burst of RDM followed by a tongue-in-cheek comedy sketch followed by two hours of people calling the technomancer a 'furry' ICly is excruciating to the point where I think there should be some onus on the two remaining antags to try and stay coherent with whatever's already been established -- essentially to not derail the round into a series of jokes with really poor timing and string it out longer than it needs to go on.

I don't know which antags were associated with which ckeys (although I can certainly guess!), but I want to make it clear that the vast majority of my criticism in this complaint is directed at the first ninja who decided to go loud, especially since I found out after the round that they were essentially egging on head PBs from the start. Both ninjas came onto the ship with rifle-tier ballistics (one generic AR, one LMG).

I am assuming the speaker here is the guy who decided to try and clap Rize Noack out with fully automatic 7.62 roleplay and then fired six rounds into my skull, but I can't actually be sure. I am sure that logs of the round in question can confirm what happened.

I don't really think there should be either an ongoing encouragement or acceptance of this, considering a lot of antags can just walk into the round with assault rifles or worse and -- realistically -- start escalating as quickly as they can justify. I can accept that maybe my complaint about the massive tone dissonance brought on by the Fortnite ninja and the two who decided to turn the round into a limp comedy at the bar is just a matter of taste, but I still would like it addressed anyway if possible. I'm fine with funny rounds which you don't take too seriously and I'm equally fine with your regular old 'four Sol gimmick mercs try to steal the SD' or whatever, but I'm not happy about one round trying to have both and I think the remaining antags could have (and should have) done something to not result in complete whiplash. Ideally they'd go away entirely or something -- the main issue is that once antag #1 has decided to try and decapitate as many security officers as he can, the tone of the round is kind of set and I'm mostly looking to go and actually roleplay with other persistent characters instead of trying to figure out how the fuck I'm meant to have my character tolerate an impromptu pantomime from people who continually ICly admit to being co-workers and happy associates of the guy who shot security about 15-20 times in the head.

Did you attempt to adminhelp the issue at the time? If so, what was the known action taken by administration/moderation?
Yes, I ahelped it -- not the initial ninja charge, but the bar fiasco that came afterwards. I was told to write a complaint at the end of it all regarding the round as a whole by MattAtlas, since he didn't have time to fully take it in the round, and every other member of moderation staff around was directly involved and couldn't have handled it anyway.

Approximate Date/Time:
The round immediately preceding the time of writing.

[kyres1]

I was the technomancer. I didn't entirely grasp the situation in the brig until I arrived there, and at that point I had already taken notice of the ninja who broke off having been killed. I played it off in some comedic fashion, did my sad stuff, and then walked back to the bar to talk the rest over with my ninja coworker. Was it a tonal shift? Yeah, the guy got brutally murdered and I was still playing it funny-like. It's immersion breaking at times, but at that point, I had to either roll with the punches and make people laugh while remaining as IC as possible, or put on some grand fight that would've more than likely frustrated you way more than any antics I could've gotten up to otherwise. Faye advised us in AOOC later in the round that everything was getting confusing due to the improv RP we were patchily working together to make for the other ninja's mess-up, and so we escalated promptly, and wrapped up before the two hour mark with both of us dead to prevent code red from prolonging anything.

My defense here is basically that I had no way of feasibly recovering from this course of events without in some way pissing you off. If the comedic, less serious approach is breaking immersion, I understand. If the alternatives are either to leave or to start a goose chase and half-hour slugfest where one of us epic-ally robusts the other, then I'm sorry, but I would still just choose the comedic alternative. If that's wrong of me to do, I do not care, because at that point you, or anybody making this complaint, would be mad regardless of what occurred.

Essentially I'm saying that there was no success in this round and I blame the sudden escalation and twisting of tone by the ninja breaking off and going hostile in the brig. However, admittedly, when I asked why, Forester said that they requested someone stay quiet and they promptly shouted out, starting the shooting in the first place.

With that said, I have to ask why I'm being put on blast here, precisely, if to my own perception, what I did was the best I could do. My takeaway is that if something like this interrupts your gimmicks or plans, I should just ghost and leave so I don't disrupt your RP further. That's the only conclusion I can come to, considering this was taken to a forum complaint rather than virtually any other avenue of discussion.

Do I think you shouldn't post a complaint? Well, of course not, but if you're posting a complaint, generally you expect or desire something to happen. So, for whatever I did in this round, I deserve to be punished. I don't really care about the procedure of who divines this punishment because it's probably not my place. But I do care about what, precisely, you saw that I personally fucked up enough to warrant it.

[Forester40]

I was the ninja who attacked Rize. Here's my side of the story.

Me and the other ninja were trying to sneak from the cargo desk to the kitchen because the technomancer said they'd meet us there. We tried to rush past the medbay into the maintenance area below the living quarter elevator and were spotted by Rize, a janitor, and someone else. I would've just kept running for maint and hoped they didn't get a good look at us, but the room we were going to rush through had just been mopped and I slipped right in front of them.

Precisely because I didn't want to "speedrun my way to full armory distribution", I tried to threaten Rize and the two other people that saw me not to tell anyone that they saw us there. Shortly after we left, Rize reported us to the rest of security and the armory was summarily opened and the alert level was quickly raised to blue and then red.

A while later, I looked at a suit sensors console to see where Rize was and went to the security lobby to go after them. By that point, the armory was already opened, I think we were already on code red, Rize had heavy armor and a burst rifle, and the last time I saw the other antags they were in the bar surrounded by about four security officers with armory gear, so I thought they were about to get arrested. When I reached Rize, I was about to yell at them when they reported my location on the security channel, again, right in front of me. That's when I attacked them. 

Maybe I could've just not followed through on my threat to go after them if they told people they saw us, but I think part of the reason that threatening people not to call security doesn't seem to work a lot of the time is because people think most antags won't go through with it.

I wasn't "RDMing" and I wasn't out to "decapitate as many security officers as I can". I was trying to kill Rize because I told them "don't report us or i'll shoot you", and they did it, twice, including once right in front of me.

Quote

followed by two hours of people calling the technomancer a 'furry' ICly

That's on whichever players did that. It's not Kyres' fault what other players besides himself say.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Forester40

[MattAtlas]

I will be handling this with @Faris. Due to the size of the logs, the time this will take is probably in the realm of three days, but we should be able to sort this out in a decent time frame.

[MattAtlas]

On 11/08/2022 at 09:28, Forester40 said:

Me and the other ninja were trying to sneak from the cargo desk to the kitchen because the technomancer said they'd meet us there. We tried to rush past the medbay into the maintenance area below the living quarter elevator and were spotted by Rize, a janitor, and someone else. I would've just kept running for maint and hoped they didn't get a good look at us, but the room we were going to rush through had just been mopped and I slipped right in front of them.

The issue I take with this segment is that you admit that this was a very visible gimmick in the first place. You were going to meet up with the technomancer in a public area by walking past public areas full of people, and then you decide that when you see someone, the appropriate course of action is to hold them up and tell them to not talk about you, despite the fact that you are intentionally walking through a public area to be seen. I can understand telling people to not call you out if you're doing a stealthy gimmick, but nothing about what you are saying is stealthy or even close to it.

This is where the problem I have comes in: you are playing a gimmick meant to be public -- or at the very least, one where you know you're going to be seen instantly (around this time both your accomplices were known and were roleplaying in the bar). So why did you deviate from the gimmick to go and murder Rize for calling you out, when the plan you had very clearly involves the antagonists being a publicly known element? It is true that according to escalation rules you are justified in killing someone that called you out. But when that is what you want to happen, this comes off as little more than fishing for a confrontation or for a reason to shoot someone. More problematic than that is the fact that you did not consider the gimmick or your fellow antagonists at all in this course of action. By following Rize to the equipment room from around Medical purely to kill her because she called you out, you essentially completely messed up the gimmick, tone of the round and escalation for the other two antagonists. Being a team antagonist does not mean that you get to ignore your allies to chase kills -- you need to be considerate of the gimmick/story they're building. What you did here was quite clearly the opposite.

A week-long antag ban will be given to Forester. No action will be taken regarding Kyres and Gladiator, as they were dealt a bad hand and there was no real good outcome for them.

[Forester40]

edit: nevermind, the rules say all rulings here are final so i shouldn't argue about them here

Edited August 16, 2022 by Forester40