[Stickymayhem] Declaring a purge of non-antagonist players, and spawning an ERT to carry it out

[Slignerd]

Byond account:
Slignerd

Character:
magicarp

Admin:
Stickymayhem

Time and Server:
14:00-14:45 CET

Round ID:
85162

Screencaps:
Link

Detailed summary:
During a wizard round, the wizard wasn't much of a threat and the round progressed smoothly. Xenobio has created a number of sentient magicarps, who were generally helpful, assisting the crew with stuff like clearing out the shadowshrooms infesting the station.

Intending to intervene with the friendly wizard, Stickymayhem dismissed deadchat's suggestion of spawning another wizard, and instead spawned an ERT inquisition that was instructed to purge all magical presence from the station. This included the wizard, but also non-antagonist players, such as every single xenobio simple mob, golems, and crewmembers with angel wings. They were given desert eagles, which was a one shot kill on magicarps.

I believe that an admin encouraging "gotta claim the valids" approach to dealing with non-antagonist players and spawning an ERT for that purpose is in an incredibly bad taste.

[Stickymayhem]

Within the first 10 minutes, the wizard, who was fairly new, made a deal with the Head of Security and Captain to kill a crewmember and otherwise not fuck shit up. After this happened, the round turned into xenobio extended.

At around the hour mark, I spawned an inquisition to root out the wizard. It made sense, it would make the round more interesting, bring people back into the game as an antagonistic force and have some interesting interactions with xenobio. After killing a couple of MAGIcarps, xenobio went for a full scale attack on them, killing on with fireball carps, multiple golem attacks and mobs charging into the chapel as they defended it.

The inquisition was told to purge magical creatures and they did. They didn't even kill the angel. The reason xenobio came under attack is because they retaliated against the killing of clearly magical mobs and went for a full scae response on the chapel. At that point all the golems and mobs were reasonably valid.

Magicarps are really not that protected, and being upset over dying as a ghost role that was being continously replenished is really silly.

[Ispiria]

10. Losing is part of the game.
Your character will frequently die, sometimes without even a possibility of avoiding it. Events will often be out of your control. No matter how good or prepared you are, sometimes you just lose.

Also just to further clarify a bit, if the ERT had been sent with a specific objective of "Kill this one angel-winged guy" for no particular reason then yes, that would probably be viewed as something less than cool, but an ERT tasked with killing magic-users an hour into a stale wizard round sounds like a perfectly fair way to get ghosts back in and spice things up a bit. Innocent players dying as unintended collateral to admin-triggered events is unfortunate, but it's part of the cost that sometimes has to be paid if admins are to interact with a round at all.

As for the ghost roles, xenobio mobs are exceptionally cheap lives and I've always viewed them as being about as expendable and valid as drones; any minor provocation at all is enough to kill them, and getting swept up in an anti-magic Inquisition event seems unfortunate for them but also thematically appropriate - moreso if xenobio then led a counterattack against the ERT.

An admin encouraging "gotta claim the valids" as it was so eloquently stated may certainly become a problem if it's established as a running practice of the admin in question, but a one-off episode of a silly Inquisition killing magic-users is just a slightly aggressive gimmick and doesn't really seem to constitute abuse.

[Gigapuddi420]

They were given desert eagles, which was a one shot kill on magicarps.

I think only the command had that. I was the security officer and I only had the re-skinned advanced laser gun and a e-gun. Golems were mostly ignored until we saw some creepy ones (alien golems) and already acted, by that point all the golems were pushing down inquisitors and taking batons when we tried to arrest them. After that we were constantly being attacked by golems and the purge more or less became about them. We did successfully destroy some artifacts like the Staff of Animate thanks to the Captain pointing it out.

[Rustledjimm]

I do not think this is encouraging valids. It does not change any convention on what is and is not valid to players. A small group of players were spawned and given objectives during an antag round that had clearly become stale. If people are calling for another wizard then people wanted something to be happening. Spawning a wizard at a wizard is rather commonplace, quite ordinary, done a lot. Sticky wanted to try something different out and we recently had Inquisition added as an ERT option (all equipment they had by the way were default, sticky gave them no extra goodies and didn't spawn any extra desert eagles than the one started with).

This was actually an interesting way to change up the round from what I can see and caused more interaction with the crew as Gigapuddi420's testimony states. Different things happen in this game, non-antagonists die all the time. To be given the chance at a second life as a magicarp and dying again is better than dying and sitting the entire rest of the round out. If other xenobio creature ended up being hostile and you were caught up in it, well that's part of the roleplaying game. Other players actions are going to affect your game, positively and negatively. It's why I always tell people to try and care a little less, this is just a game. People die, people live, but if you ever get mad at the game all you're doing is losing.

I understand disliking 'muh valid' culture but I'd like to re-iterate that this does not change any convention on what is valid and what is not valid nor do I believe spawning a four-man team, with specific objectives, is at all an issue unless it's way overdone.

[Anuv]

I was the ERT chaplain. Things were fine until I saw carps fireballing and golems attacking/dragging teammates. I could've attacked the angel but didn't. I only remember killing simplemobs as instructed, with no other attacks done. It was a nice bit of action to an otherwise awful friendly wizard round, and he even escaped and greentexted.

[Anuv]

Also the soulstone belt didn't work, as I was noncult and using it made me get stunned and fall over in pain.

[Durkel]

Both friendly wizard and xenobio are a plague unto the server. Sticky is a good boy who didn do nuffin wrong here besides trying to make a stale round into a non stale one.

[Rustledjimm]

This has been resolved. No admin misconduct has been found. This is at best feedback to the admin for them to consider.

I will note that I'm displeased this was taken further than just this complaint but posted on their feedback without even waiting to hear the outcome of this complaint and an argument was started there. If a player has a serious complaint about admin conduct it looks much better to await an outcome then to try and spread the argument across the forums. It does not reflect well on the player to try and spread the argument to other parts of the forums while the outcome of the complaint is yet to be finalised.

I hope in future we can avoid such a situation again.