Character Complaint - RP - Mayfox

[Sylas]

Gonna go ahead and input this...

Jade you've barely been around to make heavy judgement, or notice their antics. I advanced who /admin who literally every 5-10 minutes just to see who's around. You've not had to IC personally deal with them on a near consistent basis, so I'd really like to have the input of admins who've seen this for the past two months regularly. Namely people like Crashinator08, or Kered2, or other admins that have taken the complaints and seen the issue at hand.

Vincent, people aren't saying that Mayfox should have their head on a stick. I think everyone unilateral agrees that Akram deserves a security job ban until he can demonstrate competency with how he preforms and behaves, and cuts the constant and consistent baby talking and passive aggressive smugness that does nothing but escalates the situation.

A reminder that Heads of Staff aren't suppose to be ERPing and picking and choosing what to attend to, and when doing such, doing it in a way that's simply infuriating. Again, this isn't trying to get someone slung off the server but they absolutely, unequivocally need at least a security dunk for a bit. The situation where he spent nearly an hour cordoning off the expedition bay, only to realize nobody was going to deal with his complete and utter regulation violations, and then run off to ERP after getting cuffed wasted a ton of time from the expedition team and the members.


Incompetency as a head is absolutely something that's a server rule, and what I believe is being addressed here. The general demeanor of Akram is unfitting of head of security, or any head of a department really, and that is the core of what the complaints are about. I have personally ahelped heads who show utter lack of understanding of the mechanics of what they're suppose to run and they've gotten slapped for it. This is a situation that requires a bit more input, so it can be seen by all.

I dont have to be here for every single incident. Ive seen the behavior that actually breaches the rules, and I can warn them away from that behavior.

[Kered]

My experience with Akram has shown them to be nothing but a constant thorn in the side of security. Whilst we are supposed to be in a period of cleaning up security and command they continue to appear as overbearing, intentionally obnoxious, and to deliberately intervene in matters that they have no business intervening in. As others have stated, I do not believe the individual behind the character should be banned in general, but that a headban should be applied across command until their behaviour is sufficiently rectified to the standard we should expect, especially from the intersection of command and security.

Those who I've recieved complaints from have already posted, the most recent of which was the quartermaster deputisation issue, but before that has included seemingly random searches of the explorer staff, attempting to apply incredibly severe punishments with little to no justification, and causing grievances among the security staff. It is quite clear to me, from my wealth of experience with them, that they have every intention to deliberately antagonise people, to cause as much distress to those who wish only to play the game in peace as possible, and to otherwise appear overbearing and obnoxious to the point that it is intolerable.

[VARKA & Selyn]

I had refrained until commenting up until now (despite telling ITR that I would throw my hat in as a supporting voice should they make a complaint of their own, and despite having a draft written up for my own complaint since the 30th of April) due to lack of any significant evidence. Ideally, I wanted to acquire a copy of the records mentioned earlier before they came up as a point of discussion, in the event that they were surreptiously wiped. Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't put it past some people to try that.

Now, however, in a moment of consideration, my hand has been forced. Why? He's apparently foisting off the Explorer searches to his subordinates and coworkers. In a round a few hours ago, the Pathfinder told the Exploration team that - get this - the Warden had asked the Pathfinder to search the rest of the team. Who was Security Commander for that shift? Akram.

As far as other witnesses go, other members of the Exploration Team that shift were Rosa Ventresca (Explorer) and Crystal Lytmon (Pilot). I cannot for the life of me remember the Pathfinder's full name (Eric something, maybe?), though I do know their character is a fennec of some description. I believe Iekin Crane was also on the Explorer channel at the time the Pathfinder told us about this incident.

Enough is enough. This was a pretty blatant attempt to get around what he's already been told not to do.

[ZeroNetAlpha]

Hadn't realized that Akram was the one that ordered that search, but I was playing as Mikeel that round and blatantly told the warden to buzz off, Actually my words were more along the lines of - Actually, fuck it, here's some logs.

Starring:
Eric Graf as The Pathfinder
Mikeel Ka'best as Random Scientist #343
Brock Stall as Nosey Warden

Eric Graf asks, "Hello there warden, looking for someone?"
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Ahz left."
Brock Stall asks, "I take it you looked to see no one had any Contraband on the did you?"
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Not my job, and you'rrrre not allowed in herrre without a warrrrrrant."
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Buzz off."
Eric Graf says, "Afraid I only recently arrived. I didn't have very much time to look anyone over."
Brock Stall asks, "Your not the PF are you Mikeel?"
Brock Stall says, "Well do when you can"

and after a brief delay while Brock left...

Eric Graf says, "I probably won't."

I would like to point out that Brock was the very same QM that I had mentioned in my earlier post as the one who Akram Deputized for the bullshit with carp, despite it not being an emergency. Makes me sorta wonder if there's not some metafriending bullshit going on there.

[StellarWolf]

Hadn't realized that Akram was the one that ordered that search, but I was playing as Mikeel that round and blatantly told the warden to buzz off, Actually my words were more along the lines of - Actually, fuck it, here's some logs.

Starring:
Eric Graf as The Pathfinder
Mikeel Ka'best as Random Scientist #343
Brock Stall as Nosey Warden

Eric Graf asks, "Hello there warden, looking for someone?"
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Ahz left."
Brock Stall asks, "I take it you looked to see no one had any Contraband on the did you?"
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Not my job, and you'rrrre not allowed in herrre without a warrrrrrant."
Mikeel Ka'best says, "Buzz off."
Eric Graf says, "Afraid I only recently arrived. I didn't have very much time to look anyone over."
Brock Stall asks, "Your not the PF are you Mikeel?"
Brock Stall says, "Well do when you can"

and after a brief delay while Brock left...

Eric Graf says, "I probably won't."

I would like to point out that Brock was the very same QM that I had mentioned in my earlier post as the one who Akram Deputized for the bullshit with carp, despite it not being an emergency. Makes me sorta wonder if there's not some metafriending bullshit going on there.

I believe Brock being considered a metafriend with Akram to be a VERY laughable thing to even consider. Regardless, this is about akram, and they befriend literally anyone that doesn't rub them the wrong way (I even have a bit of friendship here and there with the pink tajara regardless of what things he gets into.) Either way, I've noticed him going to the hangar a lot less to do searches, which leads me to believe the admins when they say he has been talked to. Either way, the searches of contraband are in place for a reason and are expected to either be sent to science or to security. A warrant is needed regardless for security, but a pathfinder is mentally expected to control things.

Local Slime Awoo, Stellar

[VARKA & Selyn]

Hadn't realized that Akram was the one that ordered that search, but I was playing as Mikeel that round and blatantly told the warden to buzz off, Actually my words were more along the lines of - Actually, fuck it, here's some logs.

I'm not 100% that he did ask Brock to do so and correlation =/= causation, so I'll say that if I'm wrong then I apologize. I might have been a little hasty there due to lack of sleep as I made that post right as I was clocking out.

Logs are much appreciated, though.

Mostly, I hope Brock's player understands how this looks under the circumstances.

[kevinz000]

Disclaimers:
I have, more or less skimmed some and read some of read the thread but not like, 3-times-triplicate-super-carefully. If I'm missing context, feel free to respond as such.
I was not involved in any of the incidents, so I don't have personal experience with this, my only interaction whatsoever with Akram was him following me in a hallway and saying I looked good or something which I thought was weird and funny but not something I give any shits about so there's that.
I usually admin the main server and stay out of being "directly" involved with these cases, but I'm quite opinionated usually in RP staffchat, especially about security and heads of staff, which I feel are my own "department" in a way, and I usually will have a stronger response if something goes wrong than some random guy going off the hook somewhere else. So yes, I'm usually involved, but I'm not that involved, and most of my admin experience makes me feel like the ""LRP"" server admins have a good reason to be doing what they're doing, and usually the stuff we do on lower RP servers are very beneficial to be "fixing" a server like Citadel RP (don't scream about how I said fix there, we all know there's a lot of issues, even more than main server).
I'm probably going to be incoherent as I've basically considered for a few days on and off how to respond to this to phrase my thoughts properly but I probably wont' be able to because I don't do forum admin stuff other than when I'm about to fucking pass out from exhaustion so lmao deal with it :^)

This situation is quite complicated to me.
I appreciate "fleshed out characters", and I know HRP is somewhere with IC and OOC being far, far more distinct than somewhere like, say, main.
This is is often quoted, to my experience, and I don't entirely disagree with it, as the reason that certain things that would be abhorrent on lower RP servers like MRP main are allowed on RP. While sometimes it seems counterproductive and silly, that's because I have a different mindset on what should be allowed in terms of self antagging and "playing a dickish character", powergaming, security/command policy, adherence to corpregs/spacelaw/SoP/etc and many other similar super-subjective things.
I see this Akram situation as having two parts.
The first part is the whole "his character is annoying and bad and overimposing all the damn time."
The second part is the validhunting/more concrete behavior issues.

I believe Sylas has already addressed the validhunting/etc, which I do hope are noted down in their player notes for future reference as complaint threads are not something that's "indexed" when we consider history unless we somehow remember it off the back of our head which isn't the norm but I digress.

I'm going to be focusing more on the subjective "is your character something acceptable for the station".
In my opinion:
Short answer: ""Yes""
Long answer: It depends.
It's probably not a secret that I'm not a fan of the whole "IC and OOC punishment/character separation", or rather the degree some people give to certain players/characters, as well as the degree certain players/characters think they have.
It's interesting to have a wide variety of characters.
I don't like hugboxes where you're not allowed to be mean. I don't like places that force yo uto be mean, force you to be nice. Natural character development is a thing, and character variance makes RP go around just like drama :^) but I can write for paragrpahs about how I feel about drama and self-antagging/greytiding so ask me if you want me to lmao!
With that said, there's a limit to this.
At a certain point if I feel like you're overdoing it, I'm not going to stop and go "but this is your IC character."
You, as a person OOCly, decided to play this character.
While we're not a LRP meme server on RP, we're also not here with the intention of having a baystation-esque super-serious workplace RP server.
People work all day and come to play a game. It's fun to have some people who are playing less-than-nice or frankly annoying pranksters/characters. It's not fun to have it get to a degree where it starts impacting a lot of people's rounds.

The golden rule is we're all here to have fun. Feel free to disagree, I know the rules don't quote this exactly. But how I interpret my ""job"" as an administrator and code maintainer is to make the server fulfill its targeted ""RP level"" (which are always buzzwords, who the fuck defines what MRP is again?), actually work for its intended audience, and for people to actually have fun here. I could also go on for pages about how admin decisions work and how I view the usual unga dunga admin man bad/when it's justified and when it's not, but that's not something I'm going to do in here unless someone asks me to.

So when it gets to the point of "Do we allow a character to continuously and consistently negatively impact the rounds of others, with the knowledge that technically rulewise they're allowed (I can also lawyer about the rules regarding their playstyle but hey.)", my answer here would be NO.

You, by playing that character, are choosing OOCly to play it in a way that annoys people. That's fine, like previously stated, but sometimes it goes too far. That's what I call being a dick. This is partially why I don't usually do the whole "IC jobban/character ban" move unless I need to. YOU, as a player, screwed up. I'm VERY lenient with warnings most of the times, and if I've had to escalate to bans it's usually going to be an OOC serverban, not a character ban, because in those cases, most of the time, I've given you plenty of time to fix your behavior ICly.
The other golden rule I'd ""quote"" here is, a lot of things are fine in moderation.
It's funny once or twice or even a few times to have an incompetent character show up and fuck things up.
Same if some guy who acts like a caricature of a corporate goon, super-by-the-books-anti-fun, etc etc, all those things that tend to annoy us.
I think those are healthy for the server. I'm not here to want everything to always be boring shade of "just the right level of everything", and that varies from person to person anyways and I understand that as someone who probably breaks the powergaming rule too much.

Always having static, "perfect", boring players/characters gets you a chatbox, not a video game with the fact that we don't have antagonists or anything other than the IC conflict/drama to be keeping things going, however you feel about drama and however good or bad certain types of conflict/drama tends to be.

But when you get to the point of running a character to the ground, your options start becoming limited.
If it starts impacting enough people with enough negativity to start becoming detrimental to the community/otherwise health of the server, you need to fix yourself, and your character, to have less impact. Whether by playing less, whether by changing the character's traits or not choosing to express it as openly/being so forwards with them, or some other way of mitigating the impact you have on the server. I know this very well personally and I should probably understand it more myself and have told multiple people under rule 1/0/whatever we call it now "admins have final say/don't be a dick caveat" in the past, to tone their gimmicks down in the best interests of the server and community, and this isn't changing. At a certain point, while I don't like to be here to be a character judge because everyone plays differently and once again I respect that, I don't care how funny/interesting you think your character is when I can obviously see the effects of it on everyone else around you. The server doesn't revolve around a single person, player or staff (although it might seem like it at times, staff do have oversight, and people need to stop assuming certain things that have been brought up earlier in the thread).

So in Akram's case:
I don't have the experience in it necessary to say for a concrete fact that "Hey change this or else", I don't see this as obvious enough for me to be putting the foot down on anyone.
But more importantly, I also do not think the character gimmick is a non issue. It's VERY rare for someone to cause a huge amount of drama and upset, and for it to not be their fault at all, not a single bit. It's happened before, and I've seen it happen before, but it's not the usual case. This isn't one of those cases.
Take a hint from the complaint, take a hint from the amount of people upset at you. Take a hint from this elaborate post I've spent ~20 minutes now writing.
If you're causing issues, identify the issue, talk to people (Haha fuck you would not BELIEVE how effective simply talking to people that you tend to upset is at either explaining yourself or at the very least understanding why they're upset at you and whether it's an you issue, them issue, or something else entirely). Do not brush something off just because no 'concrete' admin punishment happens, unless it's ruled as COMPLETELY not your fault, and may I remind people that this thread has no concrete 100% rulings until the headmins have reviewed it, because that's how people get situations where things boil to a fever point, and then the OOC "lynchmobs and riots" happens, and one side ends up VERY upset at how things are handled and eventually quits and/or get banned.
I know you're able to play some interesting, if you'd call it that, characters. I think you are overall, not a terrible person (I'm a bit miffed it's been a day and a half and you've ignored me about responding to this, though, but then again it's taken me like a week lmfao). But Akram, and by extension, you, the person playing him, need to find a resolution to these issues. These issues won't go away. The players who don't hash well with you won't be leaving. For the good of yourself and everyone around you and the server, find a way to fix things.

Good luck.

Addendum: I mostly spoke about the whole "being a dick" thing but this very much applies for character gimmicks that annoy the living hell out of everyone in your general vicinity, even if it'll get you in trouble a lot less of the time.

[Armyguy]

Hadn't realized that Akram was the one that ordered that search, but I was playing as Mikeel that round and blatantly told the warden to buzz off, Actually my words were more along the lines of - Actually, fuck it, here's some logs.

I'm not 100% that he did ask Brock to do so and correlation =/= causation, so I'll say that if I'm wrong then I apologize. I might have been a little hasty there due to lack of sleep as I made that post right as I was clocking out.

Logs are much appreciated, though.

Mostly, I hope Brock's player understands how this looks under the circumstances.

I was 100% just doing on my own.

I just wanted to ask PF if they were following SoP that was it its only secs job to pick up any contraband that's not, A going to Sci, B can't fit in the locker.
And its part or the PFs job to do this so i just droped by to ask if they have/get any contraband if they did.

[HazelBailey]

Kevin has pretty much hit the nail on the head with my overall thoughts. If your character is getting to a point where people are unwilling to play if they see that character, then you seriously do need to step back and think about how you affect others.

[VARKA & Selyn]

I was 100% just doing on my own.

I just wanted to ask PF if they were following SoP that was it its only secs job to pick up any contraband that's not, A going to Sci, B can't fit in the locker.
And its part or the PFs job to do this so i just droped by to ask if they have/get any contraband if they did.

Very well, I retract my earlier concerns. It's easy to jump to conclusions, especially when you're tired.

In future, though, maybe trust Pathfinders (and/or the RD) to do their job a little more. Relations are getting strained, and breathing down everyone's neck(s) won't help them get unstrained.

(We didn't have anything anyway, for the record.)