Just chiming in to provide some information to prevent misconceptions. Factual statements will be in green, and my own takes will be in regular text color.
(04-29-2025, 11:42 PM)Ravenna Nagash Wrote: There was absolutely no metagaming involved. The ships were followed in-game with a cloak. No rule or any rule clarification stated at the time that you can't use a cloak in roleplay. In fact, Staff was even asked before posting the roleplay and checked if it's okay and they said that it is. Then, other Staff decided it's not. Also you presume malicious intent when there is absolutely none. I don't know who you are nor I care particularly. I don't hold any grudge nor it is my intention to invalidate anyone's RP. As for the lesson - the only lesson I learned is that I really can't be bothered with RP anymore as you got preferential treatment in my view. Again, no harm, no foul. Rules also got clarified so that's always a plus.
The action was absolutely decided to be metagaming by the entirety of the staff team (moderation/administration) - at no point did you 'ask staff' (someone from the moderation or administration team) you asked Jammi (a developer that is uninvolved in administration) in a very roundabout hypothetical sort of manner and he gave you a noncommital non-answer because he wasn't particularly interested (he repeatedly clarified this after the ruling as well). We decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that everything was done in good faith, or rather, not done in bad enough faith to constitute anything more than a warning - this was communicated in DTR chat, and we received what we believed was indication that you understood, but it seems as though we've regressed somewhat from that.
(04-29-2025, 11:42 PM)Ravenna Nagash Wrote: This is another no-brainer. You really can't warn or sanction a faction on the basis of a rule that doesn't exist. The decision to make it into a community warning was the correct one. That's not preferential treatment. That's unfair treatment rectified.
This is also untrue - the community did recieve an explicit warning regarding this behavior after the Inverness event which predates the DTR turned community warning. The reversion was a bit controversial within the staff team, but it was done in response to some very negative reaction from DTR chat - and it seemed at the time that it would have been counterproductive to warn DTR specifically as it was resulting in people getting extremely defensive and doubling down.
Given the results, I doubt that we'll be changing our rulings like this ever again under similar circumstances.
That being said, I've seen a lot of paranoia in DTR so far - a substantial amount does seem to be justified, we've had more than a few players have actual vendettas against DTR which has resulted in shitty behavior. Unfortunately, this has resulted in some very shitty behavior in turn to other players that are uninvolved - and it's been a feedback loop of grudges fueling more grudges. We sincerely have hoped to foster an atmosphere where players can talk things out and have a working relationship even when their characters may hate one another, but those efforts have largely been disappointing. I genuinely believe that there were things I could have done differently with facilitating communication between people so that killing and dying is fun but not personal, and people could collaborate to tell fun stories together. In that regard, I have not done a good job - and I'm starting to think that I don't really have the capacity to serve that function in a way that will fix things - for that, I am sorry.
While it is true that DTR has benefited from an unusual degree of staff attention with regards to attempting solutions that are reformative rather than punitive, there is no other faction in the situation of needing help as much as DTR does right now. I would like to think that if we saw other factions struggling to this degree, that we would work just as hard to try to get everyone on the same page first, and consider punishments second.
It is also true that we've noticed a lot of reports concerning DTR are found to be more spite (or perhaps tunnelvision) than with merit. We recently did a staff review of all VRs concerning DTR for the last year - and yes, DTR does complain about ganks constantly and engages in that same behavior quite a bit - and because our current definitions of ganking are still a work in progress, but err on the side of more extreme rather than less, none of it really turns out to be actionably bad enough. One of the most tame instances of violation reports on DTR that we've seen in recent memory was a DTR cap and a bomber on a cap, with a second and third DTR caps sitting and watching while doing nothing. It was reported as a 4v1. This happens enough to not be unusual - and not only against DTR, it only seems that people fixate on when DTR is involved and the sanction doesn't go through. Conversely, DTR leadership also recently admitted to 'playing sanctionlancer' and was warned about consequences if it happened again.
There's a lot of misunderstanding and bad faith here - but I still hold out the hope that one day people will click and we can just go back to playing and having fun together. I've personally learned a lot during our work with trying to accomplish this, and there's much that I would have done differently knowing what I know now. But in any case, ALL of you need to start putting in more effort into giving one another the benefit of the doubt and trying to restore some good faith back into this community. Doubling down, getting defensive, and trying to gaslight everyone into believing you've done nothing wrong and are the recipient of unjustified troubles will get you nowhere in this game - or life.
