Citadel Community

BYOND Name of complaint against: MrJWhit

Your BYOND name: Cawingcrow

Date of issue and round ID: 20.10.2019 GMT+2 09:00 / Round ID: 19735

Reason for complaint: for no particular reason, beside grudging and likely giving his friend a reason to murderbone, MrJWhit decided to give Riastlin/Feasel objectives, that allowed him to run around with: A red blood suit, dsword, super glue, Cryptographic Sequencer and adrenals, to murder those, he marked. Obviously, the death toll surpassed the number, that was given. Feasel decided to kill not only those, who joined “late”, but also Security, Assistants and Doctors, that were around. Impacting the secret round enormously.
https://imgur.com/UsemX1I As the picture shows, Feasel wasn’t an antagonist at the round start, as the game does not represent any amount of Telecrystals, that have been used. This is ONLY possible, if someone has been given objectives&Uplink, without being an Antagonist. It’s also unclear, on how many Telecrystals he obtained, as this information wasn’t stated by anyone. (Without Sales, the amount would be at 37TCs. Likely, he also had gear in his backpack or equipment slots, that were concealed but not seen by me.)

So, let's go through these points one at a time.

1. Admins are allowed to do this, as seen by this post by a headmin in #staff-chat:
https://i.imgur.com/HOa0vWd.png
During that particular round, we had around 10-15 latejoiners, for a total pop level of 50. Of the four traitors that spawned, one went SSD at roundstart, two of them didn't appear to be do anything as well (which was proven right that they didn't do anything). So, there are three options, force more people to be antags through the create-antag verb, but the system is imprecise for the amount of antags and not great. Go through the player panel and manually select people to become traitors, which has had problems in the past, namely giving people antag status that have the metashield, and the headache that is dealing with three "I don't want to be a traitor" ahelps.

2. I gave +25TC (for a total of 45TC) for 6 targets. At a rate of 1 objective being between 10TC and 7TC (if you consider "Escape not in custody" an objective or just a check that you didn't get caught), for 6 targets that should be, in theory, around 60TC to 42TC. Which 45 total TC is on the lower end of things.

3. How Feasel chose to go about the objectives was entirely his choice, he was a virologist, he could have made a death virus, could have gone with a powerfirst punching thing, ran around poisoning people, or any of the vast, vast different ways to kill people. I even suggested some of them through subtle message towards him, but gave him the choice himself.
I will note that I did watch some of Feasels attacking, and he only defended himself, or attacked his targets, as seen by this post in #staff-forum.
https://i.imgur.com/7KvgNes.png

4. Feasel was an antag at roundstart, I don't know why the end of the round counter didn't work. I had to do a lot of messing around with the objectives because not all of the targets were working, but Feasel was 100% an antag at roundstart and setting their TC to 45 worked without a problem. This was all done through the Traitor Panel and logged.
Feel free to ask for another admin to confirm that in the logs, I understand why an admin investigating themselves would be bad.

EDIT:
Because it's relevant, I'm not the only admin who will occasionally do these sorts of things.
https://i.imgur.com/gIUBJy2.png

I can understand JWhits actions, but the way they worded on the discord chats ( and I could be wrong as I did not read them too closely so feel free to correct me) it seems to imply that it was done to "punish latejoiners" which is the wrong reason to do it, it should be done to better balance a round that because unbalanced due to latejoiners. A minset of punishing latejoiners specifically for their actions, rather than looking at the problem at its base is gonna lead to even worse problems down the road.

I think JWhit did the right thing for the wrong reasons if im understanding things correctly, but at the end of the day it ends up being the same thing. I'd rather we look at the baseline issue that caused this. All I'd really like to see from JWhit is to figure out the issues they had with applying antag status to those with midround antag set to on or whatever.

EDIT: Saw he added objectives specifically to kill the late joiners. This is dumb.

Latejoiners impact the game in a really bad way for gamemodes that check the initial player count. Nuke ops get fucked by them, Cults and Revs too. People that meta latejoining so that they don't get into a traitor objective should be punished, since no one should be antag-immune. Even I was a feasel's target since I was busy while the game started (on god one of my first early latejoin) and I didn't care since I could've been picked if I was ready roundstart by a normal traitor.

If we can punish people that meta the antags objectives (AKA hiding the hand tele or other things) , why couldn't we punish people that bypass the kill objectives? MrJWhit did a nice little bus and I find the reason to do so pretty good since it teaches (probably) a lesson to peeps that keep doing so. It also wouldn't have been necessary if it wasn't a real problem.

Also if MrJWhit didn't give a robust player the objective it wouldn't have had any impact, since they would've probably died early. And I don't know since when killing sec officers as an antag is bad. The only small bad thing that happened is that some of the latejoiners cryod, replacing the kill objectives by someone that didn't latejoin haha.
Yes my english sucks.

I talked to him about this on the day it happened.
He stepped down from admin later on due to other circumstances.
Codebase changes make stuff like this non-viable now.
Not gonna write a book, I think this is all tied up at this point.