Staff Complaint - Sycmos, Bear

[thezblah]

BYOND Key: thezblah
Staff BYOND Key: sycmos, Bear (forum IDs, believe ckeys to be the same though not relevant in this case as this all took place over forums)
Game ID: relevant posts/appeals: CCIA Complaint, Appeal 1, Appeal 2
Reason for complaint: To contest a CCIA ruling and subsequent action taken during the appeal process.
Evidence/logs/etc: None provided at this time.
Additional remarks: This complaint is not against Sycmos and Bear but against decisions made by them in the linked posts.  First is the decision to terminate my character in the CCIA complaint filed against them.  It's clear in the initial complaint that the complainant wasn't vouching for removal of the character.  Additionally the grounds of "previous complaints and offenses" seems unrealistic, in my opinion.  Even though the character in question did have a prior CCIA action it was over a year prior to the one in question.  Most real places of employment will waive past offenses after a certain amount of time has elapses when considering new offenses.  Given that a year passed in between I do not believe the incident in question on it's own was severe enough to warrant outright termination.

Second, as for Bear, my complaint is about the second, closed appeal.  I was informed that the rule change mentioned was made after my appeal was received.  Arguments for or against said rule aside, as I know my voice carries little weight with policy changes, I do not believe the original ruling was made with such absolute permanency in mind.  When I made the first appeal I was told that not enough time had passed at that I could try again at the end of April.  I inquired heavily as to whether the ruling was, in fact, final and the appeal process was merely a formality and told that while appeals are not often approved it was still possible.  For it now to be decided, in light of my allegedly possible appeal, that such decisions are now final with no chance of reversal strikes me as quite unfair. Calling again to realistic parallels, it is not uncommon for productive workers terminated for behavioral issues (as seen in this case) to be allowed to reapply with the same company after a waiting period.  In cases where terminations are permanent and irrevocable are usually in cases involving unproductive workers or in cases with gross misconduct (which I do not believe this incident was.)

I cannot stress enough that I don't think Sycmos and Bear are poor staff members.  All of my interactions with staff have been generally positive but when informed of this new ruling I was told that the only recourse left to me was a staff complaint. I do believe that this series of decisions has created an unintentionally unfair situation and genuinely want to give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt.  Otherwise it would be very easy to believe that the very coincidental timing of these changes was nothing short of malicious.  I understand the implications and difficulty in making an exception in such a case but I believe that given the change of rules during this process that the perceived intent behind the initial ruling doesn't match the finality now given to it and I do believe that all further termination decisions will be handed out with with the consideration that they are irreversible.  

[Bear]

Hi there, thank you for taking my advice to make the staff complaint and do not worry, neither I or Sycmos would see such things as a bad thing. Staff complaints are a very important process in our system to help against unfair or perhaps incorrect judgements. if I am honest I believe this is a better way to do this in general for terminated characters. The policy change was spurred by your character, though it was not because of your character specifically. After consulting the CCIA team as well as the former CCIA lead, this change's support was almost unanimous. In the end, while many real life corporations have appeals as well as governmental appeals to combat wrongful terminations, we have to remember that we are in a corporate dystopia where being fired from a megacorporation is financial ruin and rather permanent.

I will let @Sycmos explain their rationale on the why your character was terminated, though when pulling your character's history, I will be honest when I say I would have upheld the decision personally.

Edited May 22, 2023 by Bear

[Sycmos]

I want to preface my response with the assurance to anyone reading this that terminations are not handed out lightly - they are, at their most essential, a character-ending decision. Terminations are considered a last resort by CCIA personnel, and are only utilized when an offense is so grievous that any other punishment would not suffice, or when a character has exhausted the good will of their parent company and by the extension the SCC.

That being said, I stand by my decision to terminate Samantha Welstrom, and I will tell you why.



Between the end of 2643 and the early months of 2465 Samantha accrued 8 canonical charges (those striked out are from antag rounds and thus non-canon) of various degrees of severity, from petty hooliganism to acts of intended malice. Six of these eight charges were accrued in less than two months time, which prompted a Review Request by another character, Kathira El-Hashem:

The information detailed in their record as well as their extensive violation history in a brief period prompted CCIA at the time to permanently reassign Samantha to Janitor on January 2nd, 2022. This change can be seen in their history of rounds, as detailed in the WI:



Samantha was then present for the remainder of January as a Janitor without issue, and then their activity broke apart into long spurts of inactivity until January of this year:



No formal appeal to be reinstated as Shaft Miner was documented at this time, as far as I can see in our archives. By and large this flew under the radar until the most recent Incident Report in which Samantha was named as the offender: 

We can see here that not only was Samantha charged for this behavior (though was deemed inadequate by the reporter of the IR, thus leading to its report), but she also was charged for i103 - Minor Assault only a few days later.

Samantha's prior CCIA note regarding her reassignment to Janitor mentions that "any further infractions will result in the termination of employment aboard the NSS Aurora". One might be tempted to retort with the technicality of the note only mentioning the NSS Aurora and not the SCCV Horizon, but ultimately this has little ground given that we had moved to the Horizon map only three months later from the date of the reassignment and Samantha was largely inactive for the remainder of 2022/2464.




"Most real places of employment will waive past offenses after a certain amount of time has elapses when considering new offenses.  Given that a year passed in between I do not believe the incident in question on it's own was severe enough to warrant outright termination."

While this may be the case for 'most real places of employment', the reality that Samantha was more or less absent for the majority of the year and returned to regular employment only to be wrapped up in an Incident Report and accrue two charges in less than a week tells me that there's very little to consider about whether or not Samantha had actually changed her behavior and was ready to join the Horizon crew as a productive staffer. A statute of limitations on consideration of offenses does not work when a player can simply sit out for months at a time until they fall out of public view - it creates an unfair environment for characters who follow regulations and are regularly present on the ship. If a character can accrue a number of charges and simply go inactive to allow them to fall off it opens the door to bad behavior without due recompense.

For the reasons I've detailed here and for the sake of preventing patterns of behavior like this in the future I decided to terminate Samantha Welstrom.

[thezblah]

As for going back to shaft mining, in the message sent to me about that action I was told that I would be able to re-promote at my leisure but to wait a minimum of a month.  I was not under the impression I had to apply for the original position back. 

Edited May 22, 2023 by thezblah

[Sycmos]

56 minutes ago, thezblah said:

As for going back to shaft mining, in the message sent to me about that action I was told that I would be able to re-promote at my leisure but to wait a minimum of a month.  I was not under the impression I had to apply for the original position back. 

I was not aware of this at the time, nor was it documented anywhere, but I don't feel that it was of any influence or consequence to my decision in any case. As my hours likely differ from when you are usually available I was not aware Samantha had been active again until the aforementioned Incident Report.

[thezblah]

Quote

Between the end of 2643 and the early months of 2465 Samantha accrued 8 canonical charges (those striked out are from antag rounds and thus non-canon) of various degrees of severity, from petty hooliganism to acts of intended malice. Six of these eight charges were accrued in less than two months time, which prompted a Review Request by another character, Kathira El-Hashem:

Half of the charges leading up to the first CCIA review were situations where all parties involved were at fault or the citing officer(s) refused to acknowledge provocations or charge the other involved parties.  By that time Samantha had a poor reputation among security and I was unaware that CCIA complaints even existed to correct these issues until I received a message stating she had been demoted.

I never had a chance to even bring up these complaints as the first I heard of the January 2022/2064 action against Samantha was a notification of the final ruling.  Even though I had a chance for Samantha to defend herself in the termination action, in light of the seemingly no-contest ruling from before and her security record I can understand the termination order.  However, that security record was greatly exaggerated by the parties involved.

For instance the charge about disposing of the Captain's briefcase was an honest mistake but the Head of Personnel at the time (listed in the extended view of the charge) had made it their goal to get Samantha fired that round, even going so far as ordering Samantha to beg for her job in front of a crowd when threatened with a suspension (which was then carried out when refused).

The charge about harassing a cargo tech and disobeying a command order involved a cargo tech who would not stop berating Samantha but as far as I know was never charged.  The additional comment about threatening the cadet was a cadet who was had been taunting Samantha during the entire arrest process who, again, was never reprimanded as far as I know.

Additionally, the assault charge from after the 2023 complaint was involving a character/player who was shortly after banned.  I can't remember the exact reasons and it was an "I heard about it" thing but I remember that character clearly and they were constantly picking fights to then turn around and run to security when someone retaliated.  The "fight" as it was, was Samantha slapping or pushing the other person (an engineer I think?) after being goaded most of the round and then said other person beating Samantha into crit with a chair.  The other person was also arrested this time though I believe they may have also been messaged by an admin/mod.  I didn't ahelp the incident but if I remember right someone watching may have, which would have led to or contributed to the alleged ban.

Once I was aware of the process to ICly contest these things too much time had passed, with the exception of the last incident but with the admin involvement in the incident (again, as far as I remember), I didn't think too much of it.  The drop off in activity shortly after the first action was a combination of things.  I was giving space station in general a break after that (so I wouldn't make a fool of myself and get myself banned) but also a lot of real life getting in the way.  At the time the activity drops off completely my job (at the time) had me working so much I had less than an hour of free time on days I was working and would often have to work 10 or more days in a row without a day off.  Even once I changed jobs I was too busy to dedicate much time to hobby pursuits until after the holiday season.  My intention was never to sidestep the consequences of the first decision but had I known of the cascading consequences of my complacency with the situation I would have been more proactive in contesting the charges and that ruling.

All of this was so long ago I don't have any names or logs (aside from the web interface logging the round IDs) so all I can do is recount events as I remember them, but if it's being brought up as a primary reason for termination then I feel as if this needs to be said.  The arrest records rely a lot on the good faith of the participating players which I feel was disabused in a significant portion of these incidents.  I suppose it was my fault for not filing CCIA actions at the time but to the average player it is a rarely advertised and fairly obscure resource.  I did have a forum account but I believe I only made that to access the web interface.  I never had a reason to browse the forums before and outside of that there is little, if any, information about these types of systems that Aurora has in place.

[Sycmos]

While I'm inclined to agree that CCIA require more of a public presence as a resource for players to resolve in-character issues (something that I've personally addressed with other CCIA staff) the reality is that we cannot act without players reporting these behaviors. We are not omniscient, and we cannot preemptively act on issues much like moderators cannot. Many of us are in college or working and are often stretched between these responsibilities, other personal interests, and their CCIA duties. Any issues with past charges needed to be addressed within a reasonable time frame of when they occurred as evidence and testimony become dubious after a long enough period. Whether or not you were aware of CCIA as an organ of in-character moderation does not change the fact that the behaviors displayed by Samantha were not appropriate and worth reporting, either.

I acted on the evidence that was provided to me via the web interface - charge history and a previous CCIA action - and made a decision according to that evidence. The evidence pointed to Samantha continuing the problematic behavior that was previously displayed via her history on the web interface. Regardless of whether those past charges were questionable in nature she still accrued two more violations in a short period and was named an offender in an Incident Report, so I cannot reasonably dismiss that this past behavior was irregular simply because you've shared that you feel her previous offenses were illegitimate. If those past violations were out of character for her then the behavior that led to the Incident Report and her charge of Minor Assault would not have happened - but they did, and they led to the conclusion that she no longer belonged in the workplace.

[thezblah]

The assault charge was a highly irregular incident all around and by the time I could have done anything about it I had already received the termination message.  I had made a point of having Samantha "mellow out" after the long break noted earlier and at the time of the report that lead to termination had gone quite a while without any incidents.  The incident in question was also greatly blown out of proportion and the character reporting it had done so on dubious information.  The littering charge that sparked the whole incident had been resolved earlier in the round but the officer charging the fine never reported that the fine had been paid and instead pocketed the money.  This was pointed out in Samantha's statement during the CCIA process.  Admittedly I could have wrote a better statement but I didn't want to break character.  The culminating incident (Samantha falling off a railing) was an OOC accident stemming from my misunderstanding of mechanics combined with latency issues that I attempted to then explain as an IC accident.  

I understand Samantha is an abrasive, delinquent character and ever since I've brought Samantha over to the Horizon map I had been working to try and balance the character's behavior against what would reasonably be expected of an employee in that situation.  I know I screwed up playing Samantha that round and I know she had an extensive record aboard the Aurora.  Re-reading the report also puts Samantha in a very bad light, as if this was a regular occurrence, which it had not been for quite some time even accounting for my breaks in play time.  I'm not ready to give up on this character yet, it's one of my oldest characters in general and one I've devoted a lot of time making a personality and history for.  So far I've seen that this was a failure of the character and how I've been playing them, which is something I can fix.  It wouldn't be out of character or anything like that as the character has been improving their behavior ever since the demotion CCIA action.  I just want a chance to fix it.  

[thezblah]

It's been abouy a week with no updates, just want to make sure this was still being looked at.

[Alberyk]

The headmins are looking into it.

[thezblah]

Thank you.

[Garnascus]

On 22/05/2023 at 13:19, Sycmos said:

Samantha's prior CCIA note regarding her reassignment to Janitor mentions that "any further infractions will result in the termination of employment aboard the NSS Aurora". One might be tempted to retort with the technicality of the note only mentioning the NSS Aurora and not the SCCV Horizon, but ultimately this has little ground given that we had moved to the Horizon map only three months later from the date of the reassignment and Samantha was largely inactive for the remainder of 2022/2464.

So, after some discussion in the staff discord it seems that your character had it clearly communicated they where on thin ice. Any further infractions would result in your employment being terminated. Sycmos is correct that periods of inactivity are not the same as periods of not receiving any infractions. Given the evidence and paper trails it seems pretty straight forward. 

[thezblah]

Ah, I see.

[thezblah]

Thank you everyone for taking the time to deliberate and respond I'm afraid I've run low on arguments and willpower here.  I do believe, unless there's anything further, that I'm going to give up on this.  It's pretty clear this character is gone and there's nothing I can do about it.

Edited June 8, 2023 by thezblah