Oblivion Squadron Disciplinary Smite Criticisms from a Player

[pyroshroom]

- Properly formatted version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLx ... sp=sharing


Situation:
Let’s talk about this series of smites against Oblivion Squadron, since it’s already public. The people smited were me (pyroshroom - Mango), Khaze (Fenris) and Southall (A veterinary care assistant) for suspicions of alt abuse without any prior conversation from the administration.

The reason why I am going through all the effort into putting all this together is really in the interest of improving the game for everyone, so I would like it if everyone remains civil in response to this. You can skip to the end if you’re just interested in my suggestions.

I am willing to accept any punishments for violating rule 7 “Don't complain about the discipline publicly (that just creates drama)”. Rule 7 has already been violated by me from the start, and the drama has already started, so to quell the speculation here’s full transparency from my perspective.


Background:
There was a mutually agreed upon war between the leaders of Interplanar Brigades (IB) and Oblivion Squadron (OS) after a series of 3 raids in one week by IB against OS, followed by OS raiding IB twice in one day. During the war, there were a series of successful raid defences by Oblivion Squadron. At the time, Oblivion Squadron was in the process of searching for Interplanar Brigades since they had previously moved their stronghold, and they hadn't set their stronghold from the last time we raided them. We have been unsuccessful in our search, unable to locate any big gathering of Interplanar Brigades characters to attack.


MANGO’s case:
Now for the chronological series of events for my case since it’s the one that I know the most details about:
It starts with me noticing this email (with a similar emails being sent to Khaze and Southall):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QR27j6 ... sp=sharing

The email title says alt abuse, and that I am using information not gained through that character. I haven’t been alt abusing, and I try to think of anything I could be doing across all my characters that could have given me information that would be considered alt abuse.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VlxWnK ... sp=sharing

1) Gurren (https://www.nexusclash.com/clash.php?op ... er&id=7872) is crafting lockpicks for the crafting badge by exiting and entering the TDS stronghold.
2) Mango (https://www.nexusclash.com/clash.php?op ... er&id=7870) is involved in a war against IB, mainly summoning ghouls and ensuring I have AP when they typically raid in the 1800-2200 time frame.
3) Penguin (https://www.nexusclash.com/clash.php?op ... r&id=13728) is mainly working on the heal badge / eating food every so often
4) Phyte (https://www.nexusclash.com/clash.php?op ... er&id=7869) recently got a pact and vassalage from Tem Shop and was searching for pets to kill in stygia (and killing them)
5) Zamasu (https://www.nexusclash.com/clash.php?op ... er&id=7871) is working on the pills taken badge by searching a pharmacy next to the Feral Clowder stronghold.

Since only one of my characters was doing something in the game that could have given me alt knowledge (by virtue of exploring for pets) I immediately snap off this comment in the Nexus Clash General Discord along with messaging Kandarin on discord.

Nexus Clash General Discord message:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YjTyjK ... sp=sharing

Plscks quickly messages me about rule 7, and I stop complaining in public. With this being the full discussion I had with Plscks:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/192ngFv ... sp=sharing

To summarise what is in the conversation: I am initially lost and confused in that conversation, not knowing what I am even defending myself for, initially assuming that it’s related to my nexus champion pet hunting activity, before Plscks clarifies that it was regarding the raid defences, and that we were catching too many, too consistently.
I am only responding to @everyone pings from the Oblivion Squadron discord, so I offer to invite plscks to our channel to see (since he actually has a character in Oblivion Squadron anyways). I also point out we have been analysing Interplanar Brigades raid times, and that we know that they are active between 1800-2200 with a preference for raiding on the hour tick, which is why I have been using a shadow wrap gem around that time.

Eventually, he finally clarifies that it was regarding the actions that occurred prior to the raid on July 22nd. I don’t even remember what happened that day, so I have to go back to my character log and what was being said in the Oblivion Squadron discord at that time.

So here is my character log of that time:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rBuPR5 ... sp=sharing

I created one necrophage and summoned four ghouls at 15:49-15:50 game time after waking up at approximately 8:50 AM Pacific Time, the Interplanar Brigades raid occurs at 16:05, approximately 15 minutes later, which was caught on the doorstep by Southall and pinged into OS chat. During that time interval between me summoning the pets and the raid, I was chatting in OS discord about the recent patch changes for foo lions and messaged Argavyon about the implications of said changes for raids.

Here are the messages in OS discord:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W7lyx8 ... sp=sharing

Message to Argavyon:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zxr1Os ... sp=sharing

So yes, I was coincidentally in the middle of playing the game at that moment, and actively talking to other OS members and a developer, which would explain the rapid response time to the raid once I had been pinged.

Later that same day, Kandarin responds and I further explain myself to them:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Sw0o- ... sp=sharing

Eventually, my ban is reversed as you can read at the end of my Plscks message log:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/192ngFv ... sp=sharing


KHAZE’s case:
Now, the situation for Khaze isn’t as clear, since the admins never clarified what he did, but if it was for the July 22, 2022 raid by IB against OS where he activated Animus of the Wolf. The chat logs show that Southall pinged us all before the ward was tapped and even has pictures of what it looked like outside within the chat. This was very shortly after I was in the middle of talking to Khaze about the recent patch changes.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W7lyx8 ... sp=sharing

He had sent an email to the admin team following the appeal protocol outlined, asking what his actual infarction was, and never received any further clarification.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WJ7JdH ... sp=sharing

Regardless, his ban was reversed eventually as well.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-t_6Q_ ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15swszN ... sp=sharing

So that’s two out of three people involved so far getting their bans reversed.


SOUTHALL’s case:
Now for the last one, Southall, who received a public smiting for 1 week across all his evil characters with also an accusation of alt abuse.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14aFpPX ... sp=sharing

We were in a newly declared war against IB. He was motivated to defend against IB for personal reasons.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ef7wIy ... sp=sharing

Southall provided analysis of IB raid times within OS which showed they have a preference of raiding on the tick usually sometime between 1800-2200 on recent occasions.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18gfeaz ... sp=sharing

He has been manually refreshing constantly around the times we expect IB to raid. Now, this appears to be what plscks was aware of in terms of a change in behavioural patterns. Keep in mind, we were now in a war after IB had successfully raided us 3 times within a week, adept players will learn and develop new tactics in this game, such as having their character go outside while invisible to avoid being spotted and refreshing for hours to catch raids:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vvejOd ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1godhNQ ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Nf32c ... sp=sharing

Southall has even offered browser logs to the admins to show what he was doing and how obsessed he was with refreshing the game.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M4_zzY ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17FsKK7 ... sp=sharing

If someone had insider information on when someone was raiding, they don’t need to refresh constantly. They just have to receive the message that someone is raiding and login and ping everyone else in the discord server.
Can the admins explain why he was also refreshing all day/night on even on days that IB didn’t raid? What kind of person would devote that amount of time to doing that if they already had the insider information.


Now, on the bottom of the very front page, there used to be a list of the online players (at least it did before it was recently removed). It used to look like this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gz6OCT ... sp=sharing

The game itself also allows you to look at the characters profiles and see the player account that is actually playing the character. You can even go down entire faction lists, open the character profiles for everyone in that faction, and look at who is playing those characters.
As an aside, you can even hide your account’s online status when you login so that it doesn’t show up if you didn’t want anyone to find out.
Now to use this information for in-game actions. This is just remembering who plays the important characters within a certain faction, and noticing that they suddenly became active. Similarly, you could even look at the online status of people in the nexus-clash-general discord channel if you wanted to, which doesn’t require constant refreshing. You can hide that status too if you believe it’s such crucial information.
Being online doesn’t necessarily mean that you are currently raiding OS, so the information isn’t that precise anyways.

Furthermore, Southall admitting to the admin investigation the fact he had noticed the forum player list was done in the spirit of complete disclosure was the result of excessive honesty - himself looking for a reason to justify the admin actions. He was never relying on this information in any meaningful way and knew that it wasn't necessarily trustworthy. It was also done after the initial admin action.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dguwyQ ... sp=sharing
Now, the admins are implying that using that forum online account list is taboo, and shouldn’t have been done, and have now removed it. Can anyone explain why it was available in the first place? It doesn’t take extensive consideration to remove and it was evidently very easy to remove quickly.
I can’t think of a single purpose of having that list front and centre on the forums that wouldn’t constitute “Taboo meta-information” by their standards. It just takes someone with the ability to read fast and scroll down the front page to notice that list.

In fact, the active player count number that used to be above the game map was removed to reduce the amount of information that experienced players had access to. It’s either by the admins own oversight that they didn’t notice that list on the front page of their game, or they intentionally left it up and it was permitted for players to know which other players were online at the same time.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RbfHAo ... sp=sharing

The other thing is, they’re saying there have been “other cases and incidents before of people using it for stuff they definitely shouldn’t”. Why wasn’t that list removed the –first- time an incident happened where it was being used inappropriately.

Since the players of this game are being disciplined like children with the automatic timeouts/smites/bans and no prior communication, here’s an analogy:
If your child has been harming themselves by ingesting medications that they shouldn’t be taking, you don’t keep the pills right in front of them. You take it away and hide it out of reach the first time it happens so that it doesn’t happen again.


Player assessment of the situation:
In summary, so far two out of the three smites have been reversed due to a total lack of evidence, and the 3rd person now being accused of different things than they were originally smited for, making this “investigation” appear more like a witch hunt so that the admins can save face. There has been a lot of mistrust generated within the community, and two admins resigning already. I think this is not a reasonable outcome and could have been prevented, and these are my comments on the overall situation:

1) That first email regarding the alt abuse allegations has no specific details for the players to work on and to avoid said misconduct going forward, and no avenue for reparations. There is a presumption by the admins that the players knew what their infraction was, and would be able to appeal adequately from the limited information provided in that email.

2) The case against Mango was extremely flimsy. If more of the admins played the game more often, they might realise that there is very little for a maxed out lich to do all day in a stronghold during the idle time but summon pets, which I do all the time when I have AP/MP. Said pets would die very quickly to any active defender.

If I had full awareness of a raid that would be happening at that time, I should have saved all my AP/MP to defend actively and deal out my 34 damage death touch to everyone immediately, as IB’s raid team can attest to experiencing.

Also, I had used sorcerer’s might in summoning pets, and was required to use tons of blood ice through my sorcerer’s might in order to heal myself to avoid being killed in a few hits by a tank. Which is an unnecessary waste of resources when I could have used up my many soul ice to make tons of pets.

Many pet master players would also share my regret, of being pinged to defend a raid, but having used the majority of their AP/MP already and being unable to do anything to defend.

3) Despite the flimsy case against Mango, the admins went ahead with the smite, with no communication prior to that action on their end. The only way I could have avoided this suspicion for summoning pets (a regular everyday activity by that character) would be to either:

a) See the future and know that there was a raid against me soon and not summon any pets
b) Send a broad message to everyone in nexus clash general discord “I am going to be summoning pets on my lich in OS, are there any planned raids in the next 15 minutes that I should know about?”

Since I unfortunately lack the ability to see the future, I guess I am supposed to warn everyone in Nexus clash that I am going to be summoning pets? That’s a ridiculous expectation and not something that any player/admin does.

4) The incomplete investigation is the other thing, not once through this whole “thorough” Admin investigation was there a request from the admin team to enter the OS discord server to see what was happening during the suspected incidents. Never mind the fact that Rincewind (The absentee admin) is already in the discord server. If they had bothered to enter and complete their investigation, neither Mango or Khaze would have been caught up in the smite for this.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EToxFj ... sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qi9cr3 ... sp=sharing

5) There is also a clear anchoring bias and premature closure bias in this case. On the assumption that the players involved must be involved in wrongdoing / using alt account information. It’s easier to dig in and try to find any supporting evidence for a presumed conclusion to save face, or to close the case with an incomplete investigation. It is much more difficult to consider alternative possibilities and build up the cases for them when you have already committed to one answer, despite being provided new information.

Additionally, there was also likely a bandwagon effect to a certain degree in this case. It’s easy to rely on the work of others who are painting a story leading to one conclusion. The admins should have individually gone through the evidence they had gathered and identified the missing parts of the picture instead of blindly accepting the provided conclusion, since two out of three bans were reversed almost instantly once talking to the involved players. And yeah, you’re all volunteers, and that would take time to do, but you chose to be an admin. None of this would have happened if you had taken the simpler path of either doing nothing due to insufficient evidence or simply delayed your decision until you had a bulletproof case.

6) The forum player list provided imprecise in-game general information, which was also potentially very misleading depending on the actions of the opposing faction. It couldn't reasonably be described as alt abuse or 'spying', and given how incredibly visible the list is, the idea that it could constitute anything more than a minor infraction seems excessive. It's also a tiny fraction of the puzzle in this case.

7) I already went over this earlier, but leaving the “taboo” active player list out on the front page available for anyone to see is a preventable systems failure, especially if there were already incidents involving the inappropriate use of said list in the past.

8) Smites alone are heavily demoralising for all players that receive them, especially if they are innocent.

A smite against multiple players from the same faction at the same time doesn't send a 'naughty, stop doing that' message. It sends a message that the faction is suspected of conspiracy to break the rules (or gross ignorance of them, which obviously wasn't going to be the case amongst players with many years of history with the game), which is insulting and a large part of the source of the drama in this case. The affected players did not feel like they could just take it on the chin, because it wasn't just their reputation on the line. This needed to be a factor in assessing the appropriate level of certainty in the evidence when taking the action.

Regardless, it seems that the raiding/playing mood has been dampened across all the members of Oblivion Squadron. The war between IB and OS has now ended due to the administrative action. Way to end some interesting player generated activities.

9) Southall’s multi-character smite was made public by the admins. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pyEHVT ... sp=sharing
Bob: “One of the biggest points of keeping smites secret is to give the player a chance to appeal privately - if the appeal is successful, it would suck to drag the player's name through the mud.” Unfortunately, it looks like Southall was robbed of that opportunity by the admins themselves.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KJCo1A ... sp=sharing

10) Let’s talk about Rule 7 a bit too: RULE 7: IF YOU FEEL YOU ARE DISCIPLINED UNFAIRLY, USE THE APPEAL PROCESS. Though I have flagrantly violated this rule in my outrage, Khaze did follow the procedure, and sent an email to the admins that went unnoticed for a very long time (essentially over a day), even after Mango was unbanned and had sent proof that would exonerate Khaze as well

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tYlPc0 ... sp=sharing

That is unacceptable in the current age of discord and easy access to talking to the admins. I managed to get a hold of plscks within the minute when I had broken that rule in anger and said @Admin in nexus general discussion. Why should someone actually following the protocol suffer the punishment even longer?

11) Furthermore, within rule 7: “Don't complain about the discipline publicly (that just creates drama)” – you’re very correct that it would create drama when the players involved are innocent, the emotional reactions to being punished for something you are innocent of are easily predictable.

If you had ironclad proof, it would be easy to shut down the complaints of a guilty player.

Bob: “One of the biggest points of keeping smites secret is to give the player a chance to appeal privately - if the appeal is successful, it would suck to drag the player's name through the mud.”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KJCo1A ... sp=sharing

My name has not been dragged through the mud in this case, in fact, I would prefer that this case be fully public, since the admin team already made part of it public with the public smite.

12) Now for the overall outrage and insults being thrown at the admins by other players. Yes, this is inappropriate. I can’t control what other people say, but other players were already made aware of what was happening in this case due to the public smites. Could you not foresee this outcome when you have passionate players that have played this game for years? Have you never been accused and punished for something you didn’t do in your life before? This response should be expected.

The players that have been involved in the verbal abuse who I have spoken to would gladly take their punishment for said abuse.

13) This is a small community, with only about 200 players, this heavy handed administrative action would alienate and greatly discourage many people from playing this game, regardless of it being reversed. It’s already happened once this breath, with players leaving the game forever. Now two admins have resigned, and who knows how many players would quit/reduce their activity over this. How long can you really sustain losing dedicated players that you didn’t have to lose over your direct actions?

14) Kandarin: “But public response demanded IMMEDIATE EVERYTHING NOW”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tpR6UG ... sp=sharing

Isn’t that the very problem with “smite first and ask questions later”? This is a game where you gain AP every 15 minutes, and people are allowed to take actions at any time if they weren’t banned from doing so. The clock started ticking from the moment you made your punitive move prior to any conversation with the players involved.

15) Kandarin: “When there are passionate players they can be expected to work things out outside of court of public opinion”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1031inf ... sp=sharing

No, this is not the first time this has happened even within this breath with innocent people being punished and leaving the game permanently, there is clearly something that needs to change about the administration disciplinary process. Since the community is already so small, it doesn’t take many people to be aware of what is happening for reputations to be damaged.


Recommendations:
Clearly mistakes have been made, and we are all human, nobody expects the admins to be absolutely perfect. Though as the authority in this game, the players do hold you to a higher standard, and the team should be improving and learning from their mistakes. Now I’m just going to make a few suggestions, you don’t have to accept them or implement them, but just a few ideas that might avoid this in the future.

1. Communication with the suspected players should really take place before punishment/smites when possible so that everyone can clarify what is happening. The initial email if it is required (for players not on discord) should contain more details about the specific infarction. In fact ‘smiting’ is really no longer an appropriate response for most player actions. This is a small player community based around people building several characters to role play, chat and compete against each other in different ways. It prizes interaction, collaboration, and communication.

Punitive smiting should only be used when a player is either intentionally being abusive/highly offensive, or when repeated admin/player communications have failed to resolve an issue

2. If a smite is going to be public, there should be an announcement regarding what happened and why, which has happened before in this breath. Public smites without communications should be reserved for cases with concrete evidence of multi-account abuse or blatant offensive rule breaks / cheating / alt abuse. Large games will do this for convenience but you will never see bans for things without concrete evidence.

3. Regarding Rule 7: if the players in question want to make their case public, they should be allowed to do so, trying to conceal these cases will just create rumours and drive further speculation.

4. Admin team reversing bans: It would be nice if there was a public announcement regarding the resolution of these cases that were already public in some way. A public apology would be appreciated too for the stress and emotional turmoil of the players through such an ordeal. I did receive a private apology from Plscks as you can see in my messages which I did appreciate.


And a final word for the admins that have resigned:
Plscks: Sorry you went through all that, you were a great developer, and I appreciated all the work you had put into the game despite my disagreement with you in this incident.

Thonk: Thanks for spending the time to look through our discord server, and seeing that there could be a legitimate explanation for what happened, and fighting on our behalf. We never fully knew what your contributions were behind the scenes, but we will miss you.

[Kraufen]

Thanks for this post. It was good to know details since so much of it was made public.

[elimyx]

+1 to thank you for clearly and concisely sharing details with the nexal public, since this was... a lot. Also +1 to the list of recommendations, while I'm here. They seem sane and fair for all parties involved, and involve several things that I'm surprised weren't already in place.

But as an unrelated player, and (usually) the primary defensive PM of a small faction to boot, how the smites were handled has made me nervous. I also tend to log in at strange hours to upkeep my pets and putter around the SH - learning that doing so at the wrong time could be evidence of guilt in a certain light is a shock and a half, and reinforces some past stress about how intra-faction zerg flags are handled when one of the affected characters has pets. This is likely a minor detail compared to everything else, but it bears mentioning all the same. ("Many pet master players would also share my regret, of being pinged to defend a raid, but having used the majority of their AP/MP already and being unable to do anything to defend." - hah, yeah, know this feeling intimately. Most of my petwall's usually dead by then, too.)

I dunno. I'm hoping something constructive comes of this, because the loss of trust and the departure of at least a few community members over what would otherwise be a minor issue has been heartbreaking.

[Lychwood]

Thank you for posting this. This whole situation has been a little bewildering and only seeing the bits that filtered down through the grapevine even moreso. Honestly, I don't have anything concrete to add since I wasn't involved on either end of the situation. But I have some thoughts, and unfortunately those tend to run long. I sneeze in paragraph format. Anyway.

From what I know of the people involved, I think that everyone was ultimately coming at this with good intentions. It's just that good intentions aren't always a guarantee of good results. We're all human, and humans are a big pile of biases inside a trenchcoat. And the remedy for that is good, open, honest communication with a willingness to re-examine your assumptions.

Modding and remediation are difficult to handle even when you have huge teams and a lot of resources to devote to it, with advanced monitoring systems at their fingertips. It's harder when it's just a handful of people with full-time jobs to attend, and even harder when a lot of the rules involved are based on the honor system regarding out-of-game communication where concrete proof can be elusive.

I think that with a community this small and close-knit, traditional approaches to moderating are going to have problems. In a way, trying to de-personalize the punishment might actually detract from the intended effect of not wanting to hurt people's feelings. When you're used to being on personable terms with the admin team and being able to hash things out over DM, the sudden switch to silence and formal routes of communication can feel a lot more intimidating and harsh--especially when you don't immediately know what's going on. In that vein, I agree with a lot of the outlined recommendations even if they would be unthinkable in a bigger game. Mainly because our community dynamics are a lot different from those of bigger games.

Generally speaking, most of the players here don't act out of malice or intent to abuse the system. Pretty much everybody knows everybody else, and most of us that have stuck around realize that people who shit where they eat don't tend to last around here. To that end, I think the vast majority of problems we have can be talked over or mediated the same way one might approach strife within a friend group. We have, of course, run into folks that wouldn't work on. People who didn't care about the community, weren't invested in the continued success of the game, and simply wanted to stomp around a sandbox for their own amusement. I think those players generally get sniffed out by the rest of us pretty readily, and I think those are the types of people who should be copping heavier, sterner punishments.

I know the Admins have said they've already read this and that they're working on a response. I also know that such a response will probably take some time and polish since it isn't easy to line up the celestial bodies to get them all into a chat at the same time. All I can say is that I hope what comes from this is a resolve to improve our communication and problem-solving skills as a community, players and devs alike.

We all make mistakes, and when they happen the best thing that we can do is keep our heads cool and learn from them.










P.S. I hope this soapbox isn't too soapboxy

[Nightwielder]

I think that with a community this small and close-knit, traditional approaches to moderating are going to have problems. In a way, trying to de-personalize the punishment might actually detract from the intended effect of not wanting to hurt people's feelings. When you're used to being on personable terms with the admin team and being able to hash things out over DM, the sudden switch to silence and formal routes of communication can feel a lot more intimidating and harsh--especially when you don't immediately know what's going on. In that vein, I agree with a lot of the outlined recommendations even if they would be unthinkable in a bigger game. Mainly because our community dynamics are a lot different from those of bigger games.

Generally speaking, most of the players here don't act out of malice or intent to abuse the system. Pretty much everybody knows everybody else, and most of us that have stuck around realize that people who shit where they eat don't tend to last around here. To that end, I think the vast majority of problems we have can be talked over or mediated the same way one might approach strife within a friend group. We have, of course, run into folks that wouldn't work on. People who didn't care about the community, weren't invested in the continued success of the game, and simply wanted to stomp around a sandbox for their own amusement. I think those players generally get sniffed out by the rest of us pretty readily, and I think those are the types of people who should be copping heavier, sterner punishments.

This was really well said and I 100% agree with this assessment, and just wanted to add that the nature of this community is the reason I am still here why I love this game. It is one of the games greatest strengths imo and I think taking the community aspect into consideration when choosing how to deal with conflicts is very important to maintain it.

[Klapaucius]

This has been an overall terrible outcome for everyone involved. How draining and upsetting. At this point, I'm feeling pretty sad about the impact this has had on a number of people ranging from friends to friendly acquaintances across the Nexus.

I think Lychwood made a lot of excellent points about what playing in a small game with a tight-knit community means for moderation processes, and how having a personal relationship with someone makes putting on the mod hat fraught, most especially in cases where there is ambiguity. I would like to nominate him for a moderation position.

A smite against multiple players from the same faction at the same time doesn't send a 'naughty, stop doing that' message. It sends a message that the faction is suspected of conspiracy to break the rules (or gross ignorance of them, which obviously wasn't going to be the case amongst players with many years of history with the game), which is insulting and a large part of the source of the drama in this case. The affected players did not feel like they could just take it on the chin, because it wasn't just their reputation on the line. This needed to be a factor in assessing the appropriate level of certainty in the evidence when taking the action. obamaquotingobama.meme

IMO this is why this situation escalated and upset the people that it did (which was amplified in some cases by lingering resentments held by certain people). Its a big part of why the original admin action grated against me, alongside what appeared to be a lack of clearly communicated unambiguous evidence or any direct discussion of the suspicions with the affected people.

To filter my point through the prism of the present case: if Fenris and mango were being accused of guilt by association, that should have been made clear to them at the time of the admin action so that they didn't have to scour their history to come up with possible justifications. If Southall was in particular under suspicion of obtaining illegitimate knowledge through unknown means, was there really anything to lose by asking him about it?

Losing plscks and thonk from the dev/admin team is awful. They poured their hearts and minds (and memes thank you thonk) into making the game better, and we all benefited from it. I hope they come back in some capacity when and if they're ready to.

Everyone makes mistakes. It would be great to learn from them in a systematic way.

[Lychwood]

I would like to nominate him for a moderation position.

As an incredibly soft boi, I am both flattered and intimidated by the notion.

But I love this community, so if it seems like I could be of any use in working on these sorts of problems then I would happily lend a hand.