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+--- Thread: Ban Clarification (/showthread.php?tid=10023)
Ban Clarification - Croakie - 03-03-2023
- Game you were banned from: Sigrogana Legends 2
- In-game name (key): TheDonOfMeiaquar
- Reason you were banned: "For repeatedly gatekeeping, metagaming, harassment, and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly."
- The length of the ban, if you know: Seven Days
- Who banned you, if you know: The GM team as a whole, there wasn't a notice on who itself, but this is what I was told after the fact.
- Why we should unban you:
You're not going to, but I need to clear up misinformation.
- I believe that, the posts from some of the other people treated by this do well to summarize why this seems as problematic as it does, but, despite this situation being incredibly stressful and managed poorly, I am going to try and clarify why I believe the GM's decision here doesn't make the most sense in hopes that they can improve they way they handle things like this in the future.
One of the issues I personally find with the way these were delivered, was the fact that the writting of the ban was admitted to be a copy-paste of a previous writeup for TCBlade when he eventually got banned. I believe it does not lend itself well to the post, and while it might have seemed fitting to mirror it, the fact that it was handled this way only makes the 4 levied bans come off as more of a blanket sweeping ban.
No valuable explanation or reasoning was given to myself, or really anyone else involved during the initial posting, making it further difficult to defend myself. While after the fact I was able to get a few examples from GMs, and they had eventually posted a clarification, they have left me more confused than anything else, as they did not make much sense and seemed to be misconstruded or used as strange justifications. These bans have not seemed to be paired with any communication, and attempts to clarify or gain information have been denied.
To start
=Harassment=
While it is not the first listed reason in for the ban, it is the one that I believe to be actually justifyable and makes sense. I will not pretend that I am without fault here, as many know I have a history and a knack for being very mean spirited toward people in DMs and saying sarchastic and chiding remarks in hopes to 'get back at' or 'get even' with others, when I feel upset or particularly transgressed by them. I am fully accepting that I have been below standard and have dropped the ball in this instance, as I know I've hurt quite a number of people. None of the times I have gone this route were the correct course of action whatsoever, though in my emotional state, I thought that it was the reasonable thing to do.
To them, I am sorry. I am problematic when it comes to talks like this, due to my nature to speak directly, and emotionally instead of thinking about how my words may come across or their purpose, failing to practice polite ettiquitte, and kindness. I'm not going to refute this point because there is nothing to fight or excuse. I want to improve here, as I don't want to continue being as awful as I have been, and I am sorry to those I have negatively impacted. I've been trying to break off conversations faster when I find myself falling into this mood, and its my hope that this will allow me to consider things, and keep myself from blowing up on people.
=Gatekeeping and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly=
Onto another part of the reasoning. I'm combining these because they seem to be the same point, and I happen to find these justifications to be strange and unreasonable. This is something that I am hard pressed to agree with, unlike the previously listed reason which I know to be true and that is has occurred.
The explanation I was given seems to be that it largely concerns my interactions with the other Don, Satoshi. They say that I actively kept him out of Meiaquar-related discussions, claiming it was on the same level of Blade who came before me, which I have to disagree with entirely. Discussions on such did not develop to reach an understanding. Instead, it has come across as the GMs seeing instances where I feel I attempted to act as a leader, and construde a malicious intent behind it, stating that I was underhanded and hypocritcal in how I acted, claiming that I was actively and oocly motivated to prevent my other leader from doing their role. They additionally state that I have a pattern of doing such to him or potentially others(?), which, given I had zero idea what they were even talking about, they seem to be misconstruding things thanks as well to the lack of communication.
Their further justification was the fact that Satoshi was excluded from a guild server for a guild that had appeared in Meiaquar recently, which, as stated by both sides of the matter, both parties are not on friendly terms. Their argument was that it was on the same level as Blade excluding myself from the Meiaquar server for a number of weeks, which didn't make sense to me, because one was a closed server of friends to organize group activities and discussions, while the other was a server meant for the population of meiaquar, to discuss guard activity, and talk over national matters. It doesn't help the argument that a GM was also openly a member of this server, but it was used against me that, while not being the server owner, and just invited due to my relation to the guild leader, I was compliciet in keeping him out and obscuring information from him. Others have informed the gms of the issue of this claim as well, but I am just going off of what I was given.
This server was ran by people that Satoshi does not particularly enjoy, and those who have felt tension between themselves and satoshi. I can't really understand this argument. If this is the case, any server that others are not apart of, that is loosely related to korvara or contain discussions about it is a form of gatekeeping, and I know there are many servers that exist in this field. In their clarification post, they mark this as one of their main points, which I find quite a degree of fault with. Satoshi was informed of major information needing to be brought to his attention, with the only exception being the initial meeting with Duyuei over Talia Dechart, which, he was informed about the meeting, and the day it would occurr on, directly replied to him, and the only reason he was unable to attend was due to recieving the notice to arrive only a handful of hours prior to the meeting itself, which was on a very pressing timelimit.
Satoshi and I are on what I would consider to be good terms. I have spoken to him personally on these matters, and he has been very open to state that if he held issues, he would bring it to my attention. Meiaquar does not function the same as any other nation, due to the two leader system, and in recent months, the cabinet system that we have enacted to spread around the responsibilities of leadership. A few instances have arisen where small busywork type tasks happen upon our desks, and each of us as leaders have undergone sorting them on our own. If there are actual, legitimate cases of gatekeeping and preventing people from performing their role, then, of course I am sorry. I have done so much to prevent anything of the sort, and I actively talk against preventing people from doing the type of roleplay they enjoy, so if I have gatekept people legitimately, then that would be heartbreaking to learn.
"If you make it nigh impossible for others to be included in what your side of things does, it does make it hard for them to do anything. Meetings, prisoner transfers, almost anything short of directly ignoring them ICly."
Again, this makes it seem as though people were directly kept in the dark to prevent them from interacting with roleplay, which I can once again assure was not the case. Nothing was actively done to harm the other Don, in terms of denying him the ability to interact with things, and he was largely informed if anything major was to occurr. The argument of the server is faulty.
"But that doesn’t detract from the crimes we did see. Enacted multiple times over and with clear intent to sow OOC dissent amongst players for some level of IC gain."
As is this, blatantly incorrect, which, is just incredibly unfortunate, because I was hoping for more from the post. Again, this also ignores that a member of the GM team was apart of this server, and seemingly had no qualms with it, and I dont believe this holds up at all.
=Metagaming=
Similar to the previous point, I am hard pressed to find any times where I had exhibited such things. I am prone to talk to people in order to work out confusion or misinformation that increasingly convolutes things, because I think being transparent and talking to people can help keep everyone on a similar page. I'm mostly confused what the GM's mean by this bit, and as I've been told randomly trying to guess only harms me, I'm not sure how to defend it. I try to work with people, while also trying to limit any knowledge I might know OOC from entering IC. I've asked GM's directly to clarify things I had been confused on, and I have spoken to people to try and elaborate or explain certain things.
I was largely uninvolved in the claims of metagaming made in the clarification post, as I was operating off of what people had physically told me. After reviewing the clarification post, I can fully state that the gm's are unfortunately incorrect on those terms. Its weird, because they all personally know how much I am an advocate against doing the very thing that I was accused of doing, and I have spoken to and worked with them to a large degree to ensure it was not happening. I've spoken to multiple gms to prevent this mindset.
"It also includes making up reasons ICly to try to justify an OOC agenda of kicking someone out of a position of power that’s inconvenient to your aims of attacking another faction for more OOC reasons."
This reasoning is also problematic, seeing as, everything I've done has been to try and prevent this exact thing from happening, and the GMs know fully well that I have been trying to prevent misinformation, while only listening to what I've been told in an ic sense. There was no complicentcy in it, because I had actively tried to go against it. I cannot speak for others, but I went off of what I was told, and even then, I tried to peacefully work through and discuss it in order to solve any budding issues.
This wasn't a scenario where people know exactly what they did and are upset that they are caught. It was a scenario where everyone who was smacked with a ban have zero idea where the GM's are coming from, and don't understand the terms at all, given how no one else who've made the appeal have any idea what the GMs mean. I am fairly confused, because I do not see how a lot of these terms have occurred. Players who commit wrongdoings cannot improve when they have zero idea what they've done wrong. I want to believe the Gms have the best of intentions, but I am just left unsure of what to think of things based off of what I've seen from what has been said so far. I've been told not to grasp at random straws, or make guesswork as to why this ban was delivered, when they are under the assumption I even know in the first place, when I honestly don't. I wish the discussion had been more productive, as all this could have been avoided.
*After having seen their clarification, I unfortunately have to disagree with a large amount of it, barring the terms of Harassment, as that is a problem I do have.
To those that do read this, understand, that things being put out have been blatantly miscontruding of things, and it has been highly disappointing. I already had this fully written up, with minor amendments made based on the clarification, but I still planned on releasing it.