Accepted Appetite Ruining Kebab Appeal

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feelsgoodman

Enter LE MONKE, a corpulent ape
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Howdy. Unlike last time when I posted Pirate's unban appeal and saved the community for the 100th time, this time I was actually asked to post an unban appeal.

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Anyways, here's what ARK has to say.

Hello

I don't know if this is supposed to be appealable, but this is my attempt to, at the very least, find out what's going on with my forum ban. Which specific incidents were being taken into account when I was banned for persistently poor behavior? How long is the ban set to be?

This isn't me trying to play dumb, I have a few ideas on what it might've all been over, I just want to know what's actually going on instead of making assumptions. I've been trying to get word from CMs about it for over a week.


Thanks
 
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Hi feels. Hi ARK.

I'm going to be responding to this thread as if I were addressing ARK. I will attempt a self-contained response. Some links may be inacessible without proper forum permissions but are kept here for the sake of organization.

Regarding your attempt to contact the CMs, Tanknut, Cindy and Skylion all report not having received anything from you in that regard.

May 17th
You were originally banned from the server for metagame after your character, K. D. Kuskova, fled to the city and barricaded herself in an apartment through a series of circumstances that felt very suspicious to staff. As is customary, the staff's policy is to use bans as a means to initiate dialogue in the subsequent unban request thread. Ban reductions, if not outright ban lifts, are common, provided the dialogue is productive. Unfortunately, this was not the case. As was told to you at the time, you had a combative tone, claimed victimhood over every scenario, believed that staff was out to get you, and then told them to "fuck off", calling one of them "very smug".

You claimed to be indignant from the treatment you received and used this as justification for the manner in which you behaved in that thread. You also perpetuated this belief that admins were "out to get you". We do not understand where this patently false belief comes from, especially since:
  1. You were allowed to pursue all kinds of rogue behavior with your UNSS agent in direct contradiction to the SCL and faction lead, under the claim that you were the only one keeping the faction alive
  2. You've had the privilege of having your character un-PKed in early February after she had miscalculated and willingly walked into a trap.
  3. Admins workshopped with you on your authorization thread regarding BMD group supply lines despite a critical aspect of it had gone awry (the courier letters being intercepted). This authorization request ended up being approved anyway.
  4. Your character was deliberately not acted against for the longest time despite having been identified as a liability to the FSB. This came as a result of a precedent we were building up to give everyone's characters a chance to see through to the end of the server. After weeks and weeks of delay, by the time the FSB finally began to do something it was in the most harmless way possible (a smear campaign), precisely to telegraph to you, the roleplayer, that things were moving into serious territory (in reality, they had been for a long time now).

Courtesies were extended to you as a roleplayer and to the story you were writing with your character. In return, we received friction and hostility. Sadly, this behavior did not limit itself to the unban thread. In truth, for months you'd occasionally show pointless hostility and unnecessarily charged commentary. Although not bannable in of itself, it is symptomatic of a greater issue. Given the persistently combative behavior, the team came to the conclusion that you did not demonstrate the ability to reflect upon your actions and so the ban stuck.


May 27th
You added a post to your BOHEMIAN CITIZENS' SOCIETY thread. In this post (since deleted and voided by us), you called for mobilization against the People's Transitionary Government. This is dubious territory, given that a natural consequence of being banned is the inability to influence the IC events taking place in the server, yet here you were with a major declaration that would escalate things to a new level. But what was really egregious was the activities that the front would supposedly begin to partake in.

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Production of Gen-4 post-humans funded by anonymous off-screen sponsors? Assaults on teleportation-related facilities and collecting portal data for guerilla operations? Not only were you circumventing the ban by trying to influence the roleplay in the server through the forums, you were doing so in a majorly disruptive manner without having even attempted to procure authorizations. I think it's pretty obvious why the team had an immediate problem with this.

Only after the post had been deleted did you seek to procure auths. In here you stated that the post detailed the group's purported activities and was not a statement of their resources, although that's not how I'd interpret the first bulletin point. You also said you were "flavor-posting" to add diversity to the evolving off-screen story. Not that this is a crime, but surely you can understand that part of the team's job is to curate the setting at large, otherwise what prevents people from coming up with all sorts of fantasies? Also,

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You claimed to have no intention to have any character killed in the epilogue, but this is simply far too charged for anyone to believe otherwise, especially given the number of active players contained in this faction. In fact, we know for a fact that shortly after this Imp's character Natalia Sorrentino (Prime Minister of the PTG) was shot by sniper in an attempt to assassinate Katerina Karbysheva, one of the names listed here. Despite the IC misindentification, Imp, being a good sport, took the single /gme of the sniper and debated self-PKing despite it being contrary to his wishes. Ultimately he chose not to, but the consequences were still severe. Not only was the character barred from participating in the server finale literally an hour before it was set to begin, but the character also underwent extreme bodily modification to survive. Quite a heavy burden for a roleplayer to unexpectedly carry at the very last minute. I for one am not convinced that these things aren't related.

Do you see the disparity here? The disparity between the admins and the members of the FSB/PTG constantly giving and giving, while you continue to insist on admin persecution, on retorting with combative attitudes, and on demanding that your character triumphs even after you have been barred from influencing the server further.

For this reason I must ask, rhetorically so, if your confusion over the ban comes from a place of honest desire to cooperate or does it come from a place of argumentation? Are you going to read this response with the eyes of someone who understands they've done wrong and genuinely wishes to make ammends or are you going to nitpick things apart in search for reasons to play the victim? I for one would hope the former, because you are a good roleplayer and I believe you are capable of contributing the community, but not in the manner that you have been conducting yourself.
 
That was a pretty good way to sum it up

I'm not really here to fight about anything, and I understand where the people affected are coming from. I think it sucks that people were as hurt as they were about everything over the last six months, I wish they'd reached out, I remember making a reasonably high-profile forum post asking for them to do so when complaints like these first reached my ear.

Other than that, being kept in the dark about most of these tensions, I had no real way of reading the room and adjusting to people accordingly - and what I did get to know about mostly centered around questions of fairness in the IC tensions between Kuskova and the FSB, which I like to think I've at least done my part in by, just like you, refraining from extreme actions (& talking down several characters over the months who were ready to start PKing their characters on their own accord). The overall hurt feelings on the OOC side was not really something I knew a lot about until after my server ban, and by then I was hurt too.

I didn't think staff were out to get me per se, but I felt very worried about the fact that I was in conflict with a group that had staff access, who were constantly watching my character & had PK auths on her for months, whose members occasionally shared stuff I did on the server through logs - while I had none of that on my side. There were things said to me in DMs by some of those people that gave me the idea that they really shouldn't be trying to invest so heavily in their roleplay & staff at the same time, and I worried for how that might dilute the IC conflict.

That said, as far as a direct response to the appeal goes (which is about the IC forum post I made)
  1. I felt that the server ban itself made a sufficient point about the attitude stuff & thought it settled the issue,
  2. I don't understand why we couldn't have had a conversation about my thread in DMs & why you think I was being dishonest about my intentions for it in the auth post - I've been combative before in my DMs sure, but I don't ever remember outright lying to anyone as a habit OOCly,
  3. Nothing about that post indicates that I want my character (Kuskova) to secure a triumph. She's not mentioned anywhere, and what little hints at her existence is intentionally vague so that people can read it however they want
Was I bitter about how my ban was handled? Of course I was. Did it make me more likely to be uncharitable to the groups & plotlines being endorsed by staff? Yes, it did. Did I decide to plot against staff characters' lives as retaliation? Fuck no. That was something BCS players decided to pull together and go through with themselves, and only after two of their members were heavily persecuted & one of them soft-PKed for the finale. I didn't involve myself in any of the planning for that. In fact, there was no plan to PK anyone until like a day before the finale. It all came together very spontaneously which is why there was no auth post beforehand. Why am I suspiciously in the loop about all of this? Because they were messaging me as a courtesy about it, and I cheered them on because I liked seeing them take initiative & because I was hurt. But I didn't actually tell them to do anything, and I wasn't actually trying to write my (post-finale) anti-royalist post in a bid to influence things ingame. I felt like any unjust PKs or actions could easily be circumvented regardless by the staff team - so why would I bother with any of that? It's the epilogue, I just want to have fun writing stuff on forums, and it's part of why I decided to appeal

Lastly, I'd like this appeal to be made public so that the players involved can give their opinion on the situation they were involved in, because I'm not sure how else I can make you believe me that I wasn't out here masterminding some PK plot on a staff team that could effortlessly nullify it if they felt that's what I was trying to do at any point
 
Bump.

Also, question: how long is this forum ban going to be? As far as I was aware, the effective ban from the server was a month in duration. Is that also the story for the forums, or are you permanently banning him?
 
Hello. I typed up a great first draft of about 1000 words a few days ago, which was only about half of what I wanted to write, but unbeknownst to me leaving my computer on doesn't always result in my computer staying on. I've lost that draft, so it'll take me a couple more days to draft up an opinion worthy of the heightened level of scrutiny required in reviewing this appeal. Since I don't want you to wait any more without some kind of response, here's my own preliminary opinion.

First, to answer your question, Feels, this comes on appeal from a permanent community ban. This ban is separate from the other ban Appetite received for metagame.

Next, since I don't want to leave you without anything while I write a new response, I'll leave a question that I was going to ask you before the untimely demise of my previous draft. How do you reconcile your statement in your appeal here that you didn't think staff were out to get you per se with a fairly extensive history of questioning the neutrality of playerbased groups like FSB or eventually the primary PTG faction? I understand complaints of possible lack of neutrality and complaints of active targeting can be quite different at times, but they seem very enmeshed here to me.

I also want to mention just as a quick heads-up that while the HL2 admin team does have open access to most on-server logs, we do have ethical rules in place which require server staff never use logs for their own self-gain. Complaints of admin metagame do get investigated, and the Community Leadership team has tools which allow them to see when certain admin tools are used. This is not particularly novel for this iteration, nor previous ones. If you think that happened, you should raise the issue with Community Leadership.

I conclude for now, pending a more thorough post addressing the merits of your appeal, by saying that I appreciate your candor in this appeal. To address your last point before wrapping up, I'm not aware of any rules which prevent you from sharing this appeal and our responses with others. I think it is pragmatic that community ban appeals are kept in a hidden board, since it gives both the team and the appellant a modicum of privacy from prying eyes, but that confidentiality is discretionary on the part of the appellant.
 
In the interest of not dragging this out any longer than it has to be, the consensus is that the ban sticks for another 3 months. You'll be able to rejoin the forums and server (whatever we're running at that point) on September 13th
 
Ironically I lost my own draft of my reply to Brea's stuff, but luckily i screenshotted it for proofreading by ARK before I did that.

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Three months seems a bit extreme--would you consider lowering it down to a month, and include that caveat that he cannot post in the NiP thread?

He tells me that he would also like to get on the server for some one-on-one preplanned RP sessions with certain characters to close up their stories. The way I see it, nobody is doing anything with the actual server anymore, so I don't think he's going to blow up everyone's characters or anything like that. So I'd like to request that you unban him from the server so he can get some closure for his character.

I think that would go a long way towards mending rifts for future cooperation, especially if you think it's fine that he comes back for TNB's next server. My philosophy with this stuff is that I usually end up hating some folks by the end of a server, and then I suddenly find at the beginning of a new server that the best, most enjoyable characters I'm gelling with are from the very people I used to not like. It'd be a good gesture to show him that you're interested in burying the hatchet and starting from a neutral point going forward. He was a serious contributor to NiP, and I think we'd be lucky to have a mind like him pushing plots forward on the next server.

One other thing--it would be good to have Brea's draft about what ARK did. I know Tanknut wants to settle this but I wasn't able to get back to this thread to continue the discussion because of yesterday's activity and my late work schedule today.
 
Hi.

After re-reading the entirety of the original appeal, this appeal, and several documents that've been sent to me privately, I've decided to completely withdraw this ban. This comes with a request from me: don't let yourself get too caught up in things again, and try to come at this from as relaxed of an angle as you can. This little thing is a hobby and I hate when it becomes such a massive stressor to the point where friendships can be broken over a roleplay situation gone bad.

I'm taking the weight of removing this appeal onto myself and it does not come from a long bureaucratic decision-making process between multiple people, though I obviously did inform all necessary teams of it and waited for any pertinent feedback that could change my decision. With that kept in mind, please refrain from any behaviors that've been mentioned to have contributed to your ban. Even if you believe that you were correct in how you acted at times and feel that you were justified, we ended up here somehow and I'd like to see history not repeat itself.

Unbanned. Welcome back, and I hope you have a good time closing out your characters on the server.
 

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