[Resolved] Staff Complaint - CakeIsOssim

BYOND Key: KingOfThePing

Staff BYOND Key: No idea, it's about CakeIsOssim, Cake#4864 on Discord

Game ID: -

Reason for complaint: I was treated disrespectfully on my whitelist application.

Evidence/logs/etc:

I compiled and dissected the entire "conversation" between me and this member of staff in this document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YH8YC0CSoXFym-p7WRZgi8u7nCowXbLS/view?ths=true

Additional remarks:

I cannot stress this enough but this complaint is not about the denial of the whitelist application per se, but about the way it got handled. Everything that got blacked out in the provided segments in the documents are merely unrelated pieces of sentences before or after the one in question. This can be seen in the fully shown comments in the supplement.

e: Link should be fixed now.

BYOND Key: KingOfThePing

Staff BYOND Key: No idea, it's about CakeIsOssim, Cake#4864 on Discord

Game ID: -

Reason for complaint: I was treated disrespectfully on my whitelist application.

Evidence/logs/etc:

I compiled and dissected the entire "conversation" between me and this member of staff in this document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vWwurOf9Qo_ylrpZYGuNxTmUBxJkUfww/view?ths=true

Additional remarks:

I cannot stress this enough but this complaint is not about the denial of the whitelist application per se, but about the way it got handled. Everything that got blacked out in the provided segments in the documents are merely unrelated pieces of sentences before or after the one in question. This can be seen in the fully shown comments in the supplement.

Psst. Your document is locked.

Should work properly now.

e: This time it should really work now.

I don't know what to tell you. You made a poor application and off the premise of it we intended to decline it. It made zero sense and continues to, despite this eight page essay on the contrary. Cake himself said that he may just be misinterpreting you, and to feel free to contact him in DMs on the matter if he is. To clarify, he probably meant misinterpreting you as being rude and impatient, seeing as you're just about the only applicant to have ever posted something along the lines of "Still waiting, boys," after a wait. On top of that you were free to apply again at any time you wanted.

"Like I said, your attitude matters. And it really could just be a misunderstanding, but until you have proven to me otherwise, this application is denied. "

"You are free to reapply whenever you so desire, I will not bar you from such. If there is a next time, please reconsider your approach."

"If you have questions or comments, you can contact me on discord at Cake#4864."

Also, I shouldn't have to stress that server numbers aren't indicative of populous ingame. Would there be a shortage of half the jobs on the station, in that case? I can name plenty - Xenobotany rarely gets work, gardeners are few and far between, chaplains are fading away, engine technicians are extremely rare. There's a nondescript amount of beings in the Orion Spur if I recall correctly and the idea that NanoTrasen, a megacorporation with 440 million employees, would be in shortage of any specialization is silly.

With all that said, what do you want from this complaint?

I cannot stress this enough but this complaint is not about the denial of the whitelist application per se, but about the way it got handled.

I can repeat myself over and over again, it is not about the fact that the app got denied, nor about when or how I reapply - which I won't. It is about the fact how I got treated, which I explained in thourough detail in the attached document.

"If you have questions or comments, you can contact me on discord at Cake#4864."

I am not obliged to privately contact someone over something that got openly discussed on a public forum.

With all that said, what do you want from this complaint?

I feel mistreated and voiced my concern. This is the point of making a complaint.

To clarify, he probably meant misinterpreting you as being rude and impatient

And I can repeat this. Cake had expressed concern to me in PMs about potentially misinterpreting you as being hostile towards him, and I'm beginning to think that's the case. So I'll ask you directly - did you intend to be rude, or was that just his imagination?

As for not communicating over PMs, I can't imagine why, but I suppose that's your choice. The forums have a private messenger and you can ping us in the public discord to discuss as well for what it counts.

I have never interacted with Cake before, I do not know what, who and if he even plays, so I do not know why I should have had any reason to be hostile towards him to any degree or why that would be anyone's first assumption. I have never talked to him in private, I don't know anything about him. I could also ask why I haven't been contacted, if there was so much uncertainty about a statement I made? Fact is he interpreted my reply negative, made assumptions and blamed me, amongst other things, to be opinionated.

I can also only repeat myself again: If asking questions back, to clear things up, especially on your first ever application, is considered "attitude manners", then....I do not know what to say about that.

e: Calling this complaint a "[...]big brain autist tier staff complaint" on the general discord because I provided numbers to the points I made, instead of just shittalking someone, does not make this any better.

I have never talked to him in private, I don't know anything about him. I could also ask why I haven't been contacted, if there was so much uncertainty about a statement I made? Fact is he interpreted my reply negative, made assumptions and blamed me, amongst other things, to be opinionated.

Then we'll wait to see what he has to say. If you didn't intend anything to be negative, then my deduction is simply "we denied your app because it wasn't good enough." This is something we did not, and should have communicated, but do note that this was the biggest factor in denying it to begin with.

"e: Calling this complaint a "[...]big brain autist tier staff complaint" on the general discord because I provided numbers to the points I made, instead of just shittalking someone, does not make this any better."

This was not me or cake who said this, so please make sure to include that before someone misinterprets us as calling you autistic.

With no word I have said that you or Cake called it that. I just didn't want to quote the person who did it without asking.

I just discovered a issue with the stats I sent KingOfThePing:

I forgot that xenoarch is a alt-title of scientist.

Currently alt-titles are not logged in the db and therefore I can not pull stats about them.

Since this is a lore team issue I'll be primarily handling this complaint.

Because of work and the holiday please give me some time.

e: Calling this complaint a "[...]big brain autist tier staff complaint" on the general discord because I provided numbers to the points I made, instead of just shittalking someone, does not make this any better.

Who said this?

Who do you think?

Still, I’m 99% sure he isn’t part of the lore team right now.

Ok, I was going to be very upset if it was a loredev. If you feel slighted by a code dev feel free to make a seperate staff complaint - I cant do anything about Fowls attitude nor is it entirely relevant to the complaint as an analogy due to this.

Tbat potentially being a loredev saying that was a major source of alarm and that's why I asked so quickly. I'll hit this tonight or tomorrow with more substance.

Let me open by saying I am sorry you feel wronged by any number of my communications with you. It is not my intention to make people upset, for any reason.

Now, let's get down to the nitty gritty. I read through your essay, and I have noticed parts in it that I could have genuinely done better, and I'll outline them first before getting to the other stuff. Yes, I could have contacted you over private messaging first instead of assuming you would rather do so. Yes, there WAS a misunderstanding of tone, and it was not addressed. Yes, I missed context in your replies to other questions.

When an application is processed and finalized, either accepted or denied, it is standard procedure for it to be locked and archived. Any further deliberation after a final decision has been made is fruitless. It was not an act of spite, if that's the conclusion you came to. Two of the biggest issues I've seen you take out of this is that I was "mocking" and "disrespecting" you, putting those in quotations because they are the words you used. So that'll be my focus of this complaint - I won't be discussing any of the stats or graphs you brought up about the jobs or anything, because frankly, that is fixating on a non-issue. My problem with your application was the seeming attitude you had towards it, whether there really was an 'attitude' or not, it is how I perceived it. And it was not an act of defensiveness or disrespect, as you so claim.

It is half of my responsibility to read through IPC whitelist applications, deliberate them with the appropriate parties, then come to a conclusion on whether I think the application is acceptable or should be denied for another attempt. The other half is wiki work and doing server events, et cetera. Assuming I do not read any of these applications start to finish (multiple times, in fact), is an assertion you have made and it is quite baseless. Not reading something is one matter, and missing context clues or reading between lines is another. Experimentation is not discouraged in my applications, though I cannot speak for the other species maintainers. I still stand by the fact that if you are asked questions about your character, you are expected to answer them. I asked you questions, you did not answer them. Also, going through each one of your figures is going to take too much of my time and yours, so I'll generalize as much as I can without losing a lot of the specific detail.

In my first post, I asked you to tell me more about INGRAM, because I wanted to know more about the character. It did not matter you had already answered a similar question; it was not enough information to satisfy me the first time. I think that is a fairly simple question and does not assume any sort of maliciousness or lack of information - I'm asking you for more, not to tell me what you already told someone else. I asked this because the information you provided on INGRAM was fairly short. The information you provided was quite specific on the jobs and placements of INGRAM, who built it, why, and all of that. What was lacking was the character itself, which is what I was asking for in my first post. You replied in a manner I perceived as not caring about the questions or their meaning, and rather interrogative as to why I was asking the questions. I still was not asking about your roleplay - I asked you to provide more information and justified it with a bit of history as to what happened to IPC players in the past, whose whitelists have had to be stripped because of their character-breaking behavior. Those times were partially my fault because I allowed them to happen under my purview. This will no longer be the case. That should cover your figures one through six.

Here is where we start getting into the weird understandings of each other's tone and intentions. Yes, I interpreted your reply in a negative way. I don't know you, I have never interacted with you. I have only the words in front of me to make conclusions, and I already covered this in saying that I was wrong to not simply ask you about them in private as well as the locking and archiving of applications. Your reply to my questions did not even really include any sort of request for clarification. All you stated was that a sentence was disconnected, you have never broken character, and then asked me to show you something you had yourself written. This goes back to the "not answering any of my questions" thing, which again goes back to the "seeming like you don't really want the whitelist" thing. Where the "misunderstanding" lies is in that very reply. Nothing in your reply strikes me as "asking back." Maybe I'm alone in that belief, and if I am, please inform me and I will retract and apologize for misinterpreting what you said. This goes back to "having nothing to prove," as I am not in the position to have to tell you why exactly I need something from you when I have already done so.

And the final parts of your figures, I gave you exactly what you asked for. In fact, the only actual question I perceived in your post. You cannot call that a mockery, you asked me to provide that information to you. I still stand by what I said before showing you what you asked for, as well. I have to assume you want the whitelist until I start to read things that prove otherwise. There are people who apply just because they want a change of pace, and they do so quite lazily. The only way I can tell is by figuring out the intentions and context of the application. I voiced this concern to you by telling you that you need to help me understand why you want it outside of the one or two sentences in the original post, because you had not been very helpful outside of those two sentences. I was not mocking you, as no one was laughing or joking, or anything for that matter.

In closing, I am not "playing dumb," and if you start doing so out of spite, then we will not be getting anywhere with this. From my point of view, you followed instructions up until I provided you with more instructions, to which you responded with what you thought was a request for clarity and what I thought was an excuse to not follow these instructions. There is no disrespect and no mockery. Since I believed we were not communicating clearly with each other, yes, I confided in kyres that this may be a misunderstanding of intentions. Turns out it was, and because of that, I left it open for another attempt without any prejudice or begrudging of the previous failed attempt. What exactly this is a lesson in, is not up for me to decide any more.

I'll go through this in chronological order, as quickly as I can, so I will only pick the passages that are most important to me:

First of all, I agree that I may have gotten carried away, when writing the essay, there are some parts in it (keyword: Total job numbers graph) where I, to phrase it in the words of another community member, activated turbo-autism mode, that could've been shorter.

When an application is processed and finalized, either accepted or denied, it is standard procedure for it to be locked and archived. Any further deliberation after a final decision has been made is fruitless.

This whole thing shows that this may not be the best course of action, since this all could have been avoided by not finalizing and locking a thread, especially when you yourself admit that there could have been multiple communication issues. It looked to me, like you wanted to just wrap it up as quickly as possible. I for myself felt deprived of the possibility to clear things up and I, clearly, refused to accept that.

Assuming I do not read any of these applications start to finish (multiple times, in fact), is an assertion you have made and it is quite baseless.

I only can work with what I was given. Why I came to this conclusion was explained by me in thourough detail, for example in figure ten, but I will get to that in a bit. I made conclusions made from the replies you gave me.

Not reading something is one matter, and missing context clues or reading between lines is another.

I am sorry, but if you feel like you are missing out something, then I ask you again: Why do you not communicate this, instead of posting the reply you did and locking up the thread afterwards? This is no excuse to me, if I write an application I expect it to be read properly, even if it may not be the best application that has ever been posted.

I still stand by the fact that if you are asked questions about your character, you are expected to answer them.

Which I did, to the best of my abilities, until I didn't understand their relevancy anymore and inquired about them. This lead to the denial of the application.

In my first post, I asked you to tell me more about INGRAM [...] [since] ... It[sic] did not matter you had already answered a similar question; it was not enough information to satisfy me the first time. I think that is a fairly simple question and does not assume any sort of maliciousness or lack of information - I'm asking you for more, not to tell me what you already told someone else.

If you wanted to know more, then why not ask more specific questions, instead of basically just "Tell me more". This felt like the equivalent of asking someone "How do you like the weather?", and I already explained the information I had laid out for the character in the application. Twice. It might've been not a whole load of information, I totally agree, but I asked it in the essay and I do it again: Why do I have to set the character in stone? Just for an application? I can just make another one the, for example, next day after I recieved the application. It makes no sense to insist on a 100% fleshed out character for an application, since you are not even obliged to play that character, after you get your whitelist. Why isnt there a greater emphasis on how a player behaved and played in the past, instead of piecing together some mundane background with the wiki open on the second monitor?

I still was not asking about your roleplay[...]

Stop denying facts. You literally asked me, quote: "Tell me more about INGRAM's interactions with people and how they would be played...". Just so that we are on the same page, here is a definition of roleplay, source can be provided if wanted: "Roleplay | Role-play: The changing of one's behaviour to fulfill a [social] role". I will not go any further into this topic again, since this was also covered in the essay to a great extend. Here you justify it again with the follwing, quote: "...a bit of history as to what happened to IPC players in the past,...", which again leads me to the question I already asked: Why is it not (more) considered how someone played in the past to determine someone's ability to play an alien race? I guess that is why you can comment on whitelist applications, which would be totally fine, if it wouldn't require posting and reposting the link of your application at the end of each round, which I didn't, because I personally find it awfully annoying. Also, as far as I know it is not a requiremnt to do that, yet it seems to have quite some importance. Unclear instructions.

Your reply to my questions did not even really include any sort of request for clarification.

I agree. I could've been much more clearer why I did not outright provide more information. This was clearly a fault from my side.

This goes back to the "not answering any of my questions" thing, which again goes back to the "seeming like you don't really want the whitelist" thing.

I am not able to see the causality between this and not outright answering any question you asked. How do you go from the first part of not outright answering the questions to not wanting the whitelist. I would've understood it, if I wouldn't have answered at all, but here I can't see the connection. From the day of posting the original application to you asking your questions and subsequently denying the application was a time span of twelve days. During this time I was patient, waiting for any information, regarding my whitelist. Again, accusing me of not wanting the whitelist is nothing more than a baseless statement. If I wouldn't have wanted it, I wouldn't have wrote the application, like the years before.

And the final parts of your figures, I gave you exactly what you asked for.

There is not much more to say to this, except that this statement is just plainly wrong. You directly quoted me on something I never said and to prove it you highlighted a sentence, putting it out of context, and even began this part with, quote: "I will humor you nontheless: ...". If you feel like you have to "humor me", so, in other words going along with something that seems stupid or pointless, yet being unable to properly put a statement I made into context, then for me, this is nothing less than a mockery. I stand by my statement that answers that go ad hominem, maybe almost even ad personam, in a situation, where you act in the role of a staff member is an insolence to a normally asked, neutral question. Here is an excerpt from the wiki: "A Xenoarcheologist looks for artifacts. Artifacts are those things most people think are useless, like fossils, alien spoons, bowls, those kinds of things." - Guide to Xenoarcheology. My emphasis is on the second sentence, which I used to explain why an old Baseline Frame was being repurposed for Xenoarcheology on a station that is a mining and research station, instead of a new one being built or bought for a ton of credits. You completelely missed the point in my argumentation (since you also willingly or unwillingly ignored the context) and boiled it down to: "No one plays Xenoarcheology, that's not enough.", which is just not doing it justice.

In closing, I am not "playing dumb, ..."

Bad phrasing from me. I did not intend to say that you are playing dumb. Apologies.

From my point of view, you followed instructions up until I provided you with more instructions...

Strange, this reads completely different in your closing reply to the application, quote: "I am giving you requirements to meet, and you have only opinionated them.".

Hello,

I discussed this complaint with my loremaster deputy [mention]Mofo1995[/mention] who works with me in management of the lore team. Thank you for bringing a concern you had to the complaints board.

There are a few minor problems that Mofo and I both saw in the handling of the application. The first one is the length of time it took for the application to be processed. Ideally an application only sits for around 3 - 4 days. If an application sits for 4 days or more you are encouraged to PM me, Mofo1995, or the maintainer in question, and generally you can go hog wild with poking at us until we get to the application.

The other minor problem is cake locked it without allowing you to respond with an apology or dialogue. Asking you to create a new application, even immediately, may have been a bit hasty, and it came entirely from the (appearance of) hostility from both of you to one another. Almost always denied apps without allowance for a response come when the applicant would need to write an entirely new application for how much rewriting was being asked of them. Looking at the application I feel like the misunderstanding between you two could have been resolved with a little more good-faith back and forth.

I feel that on our end, I can give a general notice to my species maintainers going forward to be more lenient with situations like this, and have species maintainers work to have more dialogue with applicants going forward. This new policy should be able to smooth out any situations like this in the future.

Regarding your situation specifically, you are of course free to immediately reapply. You can reapply with the same character, concept, etc, as long as you address any issues brought up in the original app. The issue Cake has was not with the character, but with the previously mentioned hostility.

Hello, I'll try again to keep it short as short as possible, once again only going over the parts that are most important to me:

Thank you for bringing a concern you had to the complaints board.

I think it is time that I talk a bit about how I felt about how the fact, that I posted a staff complaint on the complaint board, was recieved by some, because in my opinion some interesting things happened. Contrary to what this complaint might look like I do not enjoy posting complaints about someone else and I was hesitant to post it at all, so I gathered some feedback and talked to some Aurora players before doing so. Sadly I was not allowed to directly quote the person I am referring to in the following, so if you think I am being dishonest here, because I, in this case, can not back it up, then ignore my claim that it felt a lot like that person tried to discourage me from filing a staff complaint, because apparently filing a staff complaint is a waste of time and if I have any problem I should discuss them behind closed doors.

But not only that, even here in this thread, after posting my initial post one of the very first things I got greeted with is the following:

With all that said, what do you want from this complaint?

It really is beyond me why I have to justify myself for using my right to file a complaint, if I feel mistreated. If the consensus is that staff complaints are worthless and a waste of time, then why does the complaints board exist in the first place? I won't get into more detail about how various (staff)members of the community talked about this complaint, because I agree that your responsibility is only the lore team - yet this all added up paints a very poor picture. I am not someone who gets offended by getting memed about, I think most people I interact more with can confirm this, but sometimes there is a time to stop, especially if someone has a genuine problem with someone else.

If an application sits for 4 days or more you are encouraged to PM me, Mofo1995, or the maintainer in question, and generally you can go hog wild with poking at us until we get to the application.

This is very interesting, because I faced critique about this, as seen here:

To clarify, he probably meant misinterpreting you as being rude and impatient, seeing as you're just about the only applicant to have ever posted something along the lines of "Still waiting, boys," after a wait.

This again is a prime example how apprently many of my statements were interpreted in a negative way, without any reason at all. I got told that, quote: "I [wasn't] giving you any more of a hard time than I usually give anyone else.". I won't get into more detail again, but I think over the course of this I have proven this statement to be wrong. Being called or "misinterpreted" as being impatient, because I inquired about my whitelist that took over three times longer than a whitelist apparently should take, is not appropiate.

...and it came entirely from the (appearance of) hostility from both of you to one another.

I still do not understand what I have done in the over two years of playing on Aurorastation, so that a simple, non-aggressive reply in the forums from me gets outright interpreted in a negative way. I honestly want to get this explained to me, since I want to improve in this matter. I did not have much interaction with members of staff in the past, but when I had I was always polite and respectful, when it came to, let's call it "official" matters.

Regarding your situation specifically, you are of course free to immediately reapply. You can reapply with the same character, concept, etc, as long as you address any issues brought up in the original app.

The sentence is something that bugs me and I want to explain to why this, in the context of this complaint, is completely worthless to me. The next section might get a bit heated:

To start this I'll state that I won't apply again. Not for IPC nor any other whitelist. Give me one reason why I should, after being treated like how I was. I won't repeat everything again, but how I was treated was not okay and if you want to chalk it up as a misunderstanding, then I have to accept that. But repeating the fact that "[ I ] am free to apply again at any time you wanted." is, again, worth nothing. Sure, I could, but I do not see any reason why I should, especially after filing a complaint against the loredev in question. Cake might be stating that there won't be "any prejudice or begrudging of the previous failed attempt." but after dissecting all of our short converstation I have all reason to believe that this will not be the case. He wasn't able to neutrally interact with me before we had a problem with each other, I do not think he will be able to now, which is not supposed to be critique, but nothing else than the human nature. Also, I say again, for I think the fourth time now, that this complaint was not about the denial of the app per se, and this will be the last time I point that out. So to sum it up: If this is the way I get treated, after interacting with staff for the first time in a way that is beyond writing two sentences on Discord, after over two years of playing on Aurorastation, where I never had any major problems with anyone OOC, yet I am the one who gets accused of attitude problems, then, in my opinion, something is seriously wrong.

I did not mean to ask you to justify your complaint and I apologize for wording it that way. I meant to ask what sort of action you're seeking. This is a great example of miscommunication - I came off more feisty than I intended to.

And I got the answer i think in your last post. I'm completely fine with taking on a synthetic whitelist application you post if you feel more confident that way. I'd offer garuntees that cake isnt holding a grudge but it's an easy thing for me or my partner mofo to handle it. Doing it this way is easier for all involved than simply going back to unlock your archived application.

And who said you cant quote people directly? If someone is being a butthead at you and it's relevant to the complaint, please quote. Just posting the quote without a source can be confusing; I almost went on a scorched earth hunt on my devs for what I thought they said to you before it was revealed that it was a code dev, who I dont oversee.

Alright, first of all I want to thank you for the time you invested in this and taking this complaint serious, in contrast to some others, which I really appreciate, but I think we can wrap this up. I didn't want to make it sound like you wanted me to justify myself, I am sorry if you understood it that way, but the quote I used in that paragraph was from kyres1, not you. I believe that continuing this discussion will lead nowhere, since I am apparently not able to make my point clear and miscommunication seems getting worse.

To your offer of taking an IPC whitelist from me, I again appreciate the gesture, but as I already stated I do not intend to reapply for IPC and will refrain from applying for anything else. I have no interest in investing any more time and effort into this matter anymore.

If someone clearly states that I am not allowed to quote them on what they said, especially with the reason "I do not want to be involved in that." - then I shouldn't do it and neither should anyone else.

I don't know if anyone involved really cares much, but as some closing words I want to say that I don't intend to hold any lasting grudge against Cake or the lore team or anyone, really. I would be lying if I'd say this whole affair didnt upset me in a great way, but this does not mean I will be upset forever, yet I have drawn conclusions from the answers that both were and were not given to the statements I made.

OK, so I'm going to review what action that will be taken as per this complaint's resolution.

Once this complaint closes I will give the announcement and a bit of training to my species maintainers about handling whitelists in situations like this, where they feel the applicant may be coming off as feisty, and encouraging them to try to get more dialogue rather than locking and archiving if they feel slighted. A bit more dialogue is often all we need to better understand each other.

If you ever change your mind and reapply for any whitelist in the future then you can PM me a link to this complaint in the archive (or remind me of the situation in case I forget) and I will personally oversee the whitelist review so you can be more comfortable with the person overseeing it.

This will be open for ~48 hours and then locked and archived if there is no more to be said on this staff complaint.

Per the lack of responses in the alloted time this will be considered resolved. The actions above have been taken. Here is a transcript of the announcement in the staff chat.