Admin Feedback Thread (Archived)

[aerelm]

For the sake of transparency (since that's what people keep asking for, but every single time they get any extent of it they end up entirely missing the actual point and instead focus on arguing the rather unimportant wording of each paragraph instead), here's a quote of what I posted in the discussion thread in admin subforum:

I'm not really a furry-hater in general, as I generally don't really care about them. Over the years though, I haven't had even a single interaction with a furry in disco that I'd call "enjoyable". Every run-in I've had with every single furry char has been standard disco RP with furry elements forced on top of it, which is why I'm not a fan of those characters in disco and would even go as far as calling them immersion-breaking each to a certain degree (depending on how hard the player behind it is trying to come out as a furry). The simple fact about Discovery (and Freelancer in general) lore in my opinion is that furries have absolutely no place in it. If we were in a roleplaying environment based on an open ended scifi setting, then furries wouldn't have been a stretch, but keep in mind that we're roleplaying in a setting based strictly on a lore established around the original Freelancer storyline. There were humans, AIs and aliens, but no furries.

Funny (and sad) thing is, I don't think I've seen any actual furry-haters in Disco over the years. That says a lot, considering how much furries get "harassed" (the way you put it) in the community. Most furries I've RPed with have tried to force their characters on me, and even if I as an individual don't really care and reluctantly go along with it (while tryin to cut the RP short and get out of there to find a more interesting interaction) I completely understand why it might irk other people and make them react the way they do. Simply put, the way I see it furry characters don't bring anything productive to the game, and the friction they cause is in no way healthy or constructive.

Now the main question would be: Do I personally consider them a big enough problem to do anything to stop it? I guess I'll have to say no in this case, otherwise I probably would've brought it up long before, but just because I'm not in favor of banning furries, doesn't mean I'd like to do anything to support them and make their lives any less of a living hell in disco than it already is (though frankly, if given just two options, I'd rather ban furry RP from disco than support it). People who keep playing furries after their newbie days in Disco know the community attitude toward the whole thing enough to know full well the type of reactions they'd get, so imho they're just getting what they're asking for, and if anything, they should be the ones taking a hammer or two to the head for acting like trollbaits.

My personal opinion is that we should either continue the way things currently are, by "staying indifferent about it" (for lack of a better word) and let the community deal with it among themselves, or ban furry RP altogether due to being outside of disco lore. I personally wouldn't be in favor of any other move as green, cause officially displaying even a partial tolerance toward something like this is a can of worms you seriously don't want to open, cause there's a whole pile of "we have green-stamped furries, so why not green-stamped this or that as well?!" buried inside.

P.S: Discovery has always been advertised as "closest RP environment to the original FL storyline", and imho we should do our best to keep it that way. If people like FL and furries, they can always go /v/lancer or whatever that ripoff mod was called.

Also, here's what I voted at the conclusion:

[N] Aerelm: After considering its pros and cons some more, I've also changed my stance to a definite N on this. They don't add anything worthwhile to the server to be worth tolerating their immersion breaking/out of lore/whatever you wanna call it state. I've also had the time to go through some of the roleplay posted by a few furry chars, and noticed they can play the exact same characters as human with no problems, so the whoof whoof is excessive and unnecessary and doesnt really fit with the general direction of the mod.

tl;dr of the above: Any "productive furry RP" that I found (and mind you, that's besides the some 10 hours I spent this past week reading through some furry RP that I honestly wish I hadn't) could've just as well been done with a non-furry character, and the fact is, I couldn't find even a single piece of RP where being a furry actually added to the quality of that roleplay or was in any way critical to existence of that character. Those very same roleplays that people are now linking and complaining about being nullified with this new announcement can easily be revalidated by nothing more than removing the furry pic from the transmission bar, so I fail to see how the "furries added to server RP" arguments hold any merit. There's no denying that some players who happened to play furry chars had impact on the progression of various RP lines over the years (but so does any other longstanding player who's focused on any character more than a mere couple of months), but if you look through those roleplays again you'll realize the "furry element" of their RP had none to minimal role in those RPs and often didn't even come into play. So a decision to prohibit that "furry element" would have zero impact on similar roleplays in future.

As a side note: The subject of other "out of place" elements also came up and was (and is being) discussed. The stretch even went as far as a mention or two of plain anime charpics and whether they added to RP in any way, so just because furries received their own announcement doesn't mean they were the sole focus of the discussion, it just means we decided to take it one step at a time.