Escalation caused by Forgery

[Shadowflame909]

So we have many disguise mechanics in the game. Lings and their DNA sting. Genetics and their scanner. Traitors Voice-Changer and Agent-Card. Morphs, Comms agents. I could list a whole lot.

So very commonly I've found that people have bit the bullet and have killed innocent players for the wrongdoing of the antagonists.

What I want to know is that if this happens, should admins ban or rather continue banning the vigilante/judgment-giver for guessing wrong?

Paranoia is a big part of this game. But I just want a clear policy on how admins should handle the players interacting with these mechanics.

IC issue? Admin Intervention for taking an innocent player out of the round? I'm curious.

[zxaber]

Every time I've had a non-antag player ahelp about being killed due to incorrect information that would otherwise make them valid to the killer, I've ruled it as IC. Though, at that point I track down whoever laid the false info to start with, since if some other non-antag is framing random people in ways they know will result in deaths, I'm gonna bwoink the deceiver.

Basically, I won't ever punish someone for acting on information they have no way of knowing is incorrect.

(I'm assuming we're talking about more effort than "Bob from Botany, who I haven't interacted with at all beforehand, said the janitor is a traitor, so I killed them".)

[Eaglendia]

Basically what zxaber said. This should be an obvious case, but in case it isn't: if you cause someone to be implicated through deception, whatever happens to them is, to a degree, your fault. That's great if you're an antag, but if you're not and you don't have a good reason for doing what you're doing, it might not be so great.

[NecromancerAnne]

I was recently on the receiving end of this is an incredibly bad way and it isn't fun. (Bad as in: there wasn't any real deception the people persecuting me were just dumb as bricks and couldn't tell the difference between their face and a baboon's arse despite a considerable amount of evidence right in front of them including the demasked corpse of the traitor using my ID)

But when I reflect on it I couldn't really hold the people accountable for incompetence when whatever 'deception' that took place was via an antagonist.

Kinda.

Doing something to make another person valid as an non-antagonist meanwhile is pretty blatant self-antagging and almost certainly lies at the feet of the deceiver. 100%.

[Dr_bee]

Originally, years ago, you would get penalized for murdering an innocent even with false information caused by an antag. This heavy handedness helped dis-incentivize murder as a solution to problems. Consider that maybe players shouldnt beat people to death with flimsy information, and if they do they should face consequences for it.

[Arathian]

A ban appeal I have up currently is related to this but the banning admin (Nervere) hasn't responded to it yet.

What happened (in neutral terms) was that I had, what I believed to be, reasonable amount of evidence pointing to 2 players being traitors who just plasmaflooded everything. I killed them based on the evidence I had and I was wrong, it was someone else who did it. I got banned for 2 days for it.

The ban appeal hasn't been resolved yet, so I don't know which way it will go or what the policy currently is. This is a bit confusing to me and, after discussions on discord, it seems even mods will disagree with each other on this. Some think if you fuck up, you deserve to get a ban or at least a note. Some think it's a strict IC issue if done in good faith. So whichever way my appeal goes, this seems like a still grey area unless Nervere uses it as an opportunity to set precedence.

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My personal opinion is that the game is based around paranoia. Punishing people for making bad decisions based on limited information is bad because it will lead to people always taking the safer route. Since my ban, I am far less likely to intervene in fights unless I have almost 100% confirmation someone is a traitor. I saw some dude the other day zipping around and he killed 3 different people before I decided to kill him. Even then, I immediately ahelped to state that I truly believed he was an antag and please don't shit on me if he wasn't.

That doesn't mean that reasonable suspicion shouldn't be required. Obviously "random assistant told me hop is a tator so I flattened the hop" would be a bwoink. "Captain told me random assistant is a traitor, I killed assistant and captain turned out to be a ling" is far more reasonable

[PKPenguin321]

Textbook IC issue. Misdirection and misinformation are part of the game. If an antag convinces sec that an innocent man is a traitor, that antag has just made a good play. I can't believe people are still unclear on this.

[WarbossLincoln]

Textbook IC issue. Misdirection and misinformation are part of the game. If an antag convinces sec that an innocent man is a traitor, that antag has just made a good play. I can't believe people are still unclear on this.

They aren't talking about a crafty antag making some fake evidence and getting someone fucked by Sec. They're talking about dozens of shitlords who will grab the flimsiest excuse to valid someone while claiming they were actually "fooled". Like someone yelling "X IS RUNNING FAST HE HAS ADRENALS" when it's the chemist on meth, then some greyshirt kills him claiming "oops, I thought he was a traitor with adrenals haha"

[NoxVS]

My problem with it is when there is barely any evidence and people immediately seek the nuclear option. I had one round where I was killed and my ID was taken. The guy who killed me used the ID and went around killing, but got caught eventually I believe. I am eventually saved and walking around when a guy sees me and then silently kills and cremates me. IMO its situations like that where the guy acting on the forged evidence should be at fault

[Arathian]

My problem with it is when there is barely any evidence and people immediately seek the nuclear option. I had one round where I was killed and my ID was taken. The guy who killed me used the ID and went around killing, but got caught eventually I believe. I am eventually saved and walking around when a guy sees me and then silently kills and cremates me. IMO its situations like that where the guy acting on the forged evidence should be at fault

*Bwoink*

>Why did you kill this man?

>he literally murdered me 5 minutes ago

>no he didn't

>he has the same name though??

>no he didn't, stolen name, you are now binned

Epic

A guy saw someone with your name murderbone, including him. Obviously you would get lynched.

You needed to make repeated warning in radio that you had your ID stolen and it was NOT you. Expecting to resume the usage of your ID- that was used in murderbone- in peace without any effort on your part, is silly.

[Dr_bee]

My problem with it is when there is barely any evidence and people immediately seek the nuclear option. I had one round where I was killed and my ID was taken. The guy who killed me used the ID and went around killing, but got caught eventually I believe. I am eventually saved and walking around when a guy sees me and then silently kills and cremates me. IMO its situations like that where the guy acting on the forged evidence should be at fault

*Bwoink*

>Why did you kill this man?

>he literally murdered me 5 minutes ago

>no he didn't

>he has the same name though??

>no he didn't, stolen name, you are now binned

Epic

A guy saw someone with your name murderbone, including him. Obviously you would get lynched.

You needed to make repeated warning in radio that you had your ID stolen and it was NOT you. Expecting to resume the usage of your ID- that was used in murderbone- in peace without any effort on your part, is silly.

It shouldnt fall to a victim to prevent being himself from lynched by valid hunting retards. A non-antag shouldnt be this quick to murder in the first place.

[Arathian]

No, it absolutely is and should be up to the players to unvalid themselves. Someone just killed half the station using your name, including that assistant. If you wanna just run around with that ID, it's not everyone else's job to figure out that it was two different people.

That's on you. It's your ass on the line. It's not the murdered assistant's job to put his life at risk (again) in case the guy who killed him 5 minutes ago is now a different dude.

If you can't spent a couple of minutes clearing your name you absolutely deserve to be batoned and toolboxed to death and cremated.

[PKPenguin321]

My problem with it is when there is barely any evidence and people immediately seek the nuclear option. I had one round where I was killed and my ID was taken. The guy who killed me used the ID and went around killing, but got caught eventually I believe. I am eventually saved and walking around when a guy sees me and then silently kills and cremates me. IMO its situations like that where the guy acting on the forged evidence should be at fault

Literally the reason rule 10 exists. Being on the victim end of misdirection can feel lame and frustrating but it's part of the game.

[teepeepee]

Textbook IC issue. Misdirection and misinformation are part of the game. If an antag convinces sec that an innocent man is a traitor, that antag has just made a good play. I can't believe people are still unclear on this.

as clear as we may be on it, some admins are not, and they have a chilling effect on rule-abiding players making us play like pussies because we don't wanna get yeeted by them

[ATHATH]

I echo/support what Zxaber, Arathian, and PKPenguin321 have said so far in this thread.

[Cobby]

Textbook IC issue. Misdirection and misinformation are part of the game. If an antag convinces sec that an innocent man is a traitor, that antag has just made a good play. I can't believe people are still unclear on this.

as clear as we may be on it, some admins are not, and they have a chilling effect on rule-abiding players making us play like pussies because we don't wanna get yeeted by them

just adminwho bro

[NecromancerAnne]

I feel if there are enough people and enough effort from the crew that announced that you are in the clear, and you are still murdered because some guy isn't checking chat or paying attention to announcements, it falls a little more on the guy who chose to put on the blinders to sate the valids. Nox's case is similar to my own but in my case I had all that information being spread around. It's just that the people that it mattered for that info to reach weren't listening.

I do not want to fully encourage punishing people for mistakes. I fee we might want to firmly warn people for not having a full picture of the facts. Even I fall into that sometimes and I often valid pretty frequently, but I do go to some effort to gather evidence so I can back my case up (especially when security is asking why I beat a man to death).

[Calibraptor]

I got a random innocent engineer permabrigged as a comms officer because the engineers built a disposal tube into the SM crystal and some guy had ashed himself, leaving a security helmet behind. So naturally I impersonated an non-existent officer screaming for help over radio, including the engineer's name and a shout of ":s HE'S GONNA ASH ME".

I dunno if the engineer ahelped it but I felt kind of bad yet triumphant that I'd actually bamboozled security into arresting an innocent man.

Paranoia and misinformation is part of the game and you shouldn't be punished for being bamboozled by clever antags.