[Egil]

Relevant Logs: http://pastebin.com/wJ6E1Jsi

tl;dr My faceicon and description were that of teddy bears, and Sly (who I didn't know was Sly and a GM until others said so at the end of the spiel) confronted me about why I was a teddy bear.

Now, there are plenty of other players who have non-realistic/strange faceicons, descriptions, and IC interactions (whether temporarily or otherwise) that, as far as I'm aware, do not get confronted. Skeletons with a Sans/Papyrus playby despite there being no skeleton race and the closest thing to that (Liches) still not fitting. Mechanations that go insane, can get pregnant, or otherwise experience everything that non-artificial life experiences. Players with faceicons of real life people or giant baby faces or what have you that obviously don't fit their character or the ingame universe. There are plenty of examples of folks in the grey area. That's why looking like a teddy bear didn't seem like a big deal, in my mind, and because I had never explained or gave out what I was in IC, I could have been anything from an IC-standpoint. A human in a costume, a mechanation in a suit, a dullahan that had fucked up, whatever. It was definitely never said, by me, that I was an actual teddy bear or anything that wasn't a race on the race board. So when someone I don't know comes out of nowhere and tells me that I can't play a stuffed animal, that doesn't register as 'Oh, this is an admin inquiring about how my character might be breaking the rules', it came off as a random asshole breaking up IC with antagonizing OOC when they didn't have the whole picture and just had 'people complaining to them' over skype.

When I've seen GMs confront people before, whether it's about this sort of issue or something else, I never thought they made a mistake or went too far. The way they handled those situations seemed fair. So for my first interaction with a GM to involve unwarranted aggression and disrupting RP on a supposedly mandatory RP game, I'm pretty taken aback and shocked. I didn't know that GMs did not have a formal method of communicating with potential rulebreakers or really just anyone that they needed to contact. I could have been privately messaged about it- and if GMs don't have a PM function and don't have my skype/key, there's no reason why I can't be dragged off to somewhere more private and be told 'Hey yo, you're not actually a magical stuffed animal, right?' and I'd go 'Oh nah man' and then there would have been no issues. And like I said in the logs I pastebinned, I understand that you can't have leniency with the race thing because then people would be ridiculous shit and the tiny specks of plot that struggle to exist would be obliterated by tumblrites and otherkin- but my faceicons/description weren't that of anything divine or draconic or dimension-shifting or what have you. It was just a big teddy bear. Could be plenty of things, but hey, you don't know for sure, because it just looks like a teddy bear. Just because I look like a teddy bear in IC doesn't mean that I actually am one, and my attempts to make that clear before weren't taken well.

So what's the point of this topic? It's definitely not about the teddy bear, honestly. It's about the interaction between GMs and players, which I didn't even know was an issue before, but apparently it is and I just haven't experienced it until now, according to my peers. So. I'm not requesting special treatment or consideration, just basic human respect and decency. There's no need to assume the worst of someone, especially when they've never caused a problem OOC'ly before and aren't doing something that is very antagonizing, like text spam. I can't speak for anyone else, but if you need something of me, just by revealing to me that you're a GM and not coming out the cut with attitude/aggression will get you 100% compliance from me. And if I'm genuinely in the wrong, I have no issue with changing my faceicons/description or correcting absolutely anything else. It was a literal non-problem that the GM (and whoever was whining to said GM) made a problem, and...

I'd like to know what others think. Do I make a point, am I making a mountain out of a molehill, etc etc. Hit me.

[MegaBlues]

nah, you were in the wrong

sly might have been slightly aggressive, but you definitely didn't help things. and going "nuh uh i dont have to explain it im not breaking the rules" sounds like it's fair, but if you're really just someone in a costume, say so.

as you claimed, there are a lot of people doing stupid things, so if you can't give a clear explanation of what you're doing and why it's okay, you're going to be assumed to be one of them


tl;dr everyone messed up but you messed up the most

[Clockworkers Doll]

In all seriousness, I've never had to deal with this so I can't relate and give you a more long post, but here we go.
Yes, it probably would've been better to only whisper it, pull you off to the side, or paging you (seeing as I think GMs can see your key, may be wrong but I think this is a thing from what I've seen) would've been a generally better idea. I've seen people who accidently break lore or get pulled over for stuff like this happen in OOC and IC and it brings up a lot of room for other players to shit on you or spread rumors and such. Some people will downright avoid you and RPing with you any way they can from this kinda thing. It's also just... Well, it's embarrassing for the player. Can't tell you how huge the heart-attack I had when I self-partied so I could move to alts and then have Chaos yell at me on OOC via the GM channel.
But that doesn't mean Sly did anything extremely wrong, and Blues is actually right so I won't go into it.
From experience, a good idea be putting disclaimers in an obvious, easy-to-see spot in your descriptions to avoid certain things like this. (A simple "(Disclaimer: Not really X/X is fake/etc.)" usually works.) Because I tried to make a character with costumed legs and then Sly got a bunch of comments because I didn't do that. Then I fixed it and shit chilled. I'm assuming you didn't have something like this if this had to happen. If you do, well, make it bigger. It saves the trouble, and if someone metagames that? Well. You just tell a GM about it and move on. And, uh, I'll go over two things that actually caught my eye when reading this.

So when someone I don't know comes out of nowhere and tells me that I can't play a stuffed animal, that doesn't register as 'Oh, this is an admin inquiring about how my character might be breaking the rules', it came off as a random asshole breaking up IC with antagonizing OOC when they didn't have the whole picture and just had 'people complaining to them' over skype.

This is kinda an issue too, and is completely understandable. Coming up within IC parameters can be confusing because both Sly and Chaos don't have things that can identify them as GMs. The cons are exactly what you were talking about, but the pros are that it's a bit easier to catch rulebreakers in the act when nobody knows that's a GM's character. Although most people who've been around for awhile know Reserved Thaumaturge is Slydria and Heavy-Layered Warlord is Chaos.

Skeletons with a Sans/Papyrus playby despite there being no skeleton race and the closest thing to that (Liches) still not fitting. Mechanations that go insane, can get pregnant, or otherwise experience everything that non-artificial life experiences. Players with faceicons of real life people or giant baby faces or what have you that obviously don't fit their character or the ingame universe.

Well, first... Liches have a skeleton skin. Therefore, they are allowed to have skeleton playbys. Case closed. Nobody complains about people that don't have Undertale skeleton playbys either, including myself who before and after Undertale was released, had a Lich who was legit just a skeleton, and his playby was a cartoon gif of a Skeleton dancing. Not to mention all the other people who use that skeleton skin, but don't have playbys. Are they in the wrong for playing skeletons too? Or is it just because of Undertale? Your point is kinda moot, there.
Mechinations are a bit different, and Dev has stated that they cannot be pregnant, but there's not really anything saying that they can't live a normal life or go insane. Hell, I thought the point of Mechinations (for the most part) was to be passing them off as humans for a long time, and that is indeed what most people do. Real-life playbys I don't think are against the rules, but I could be wrong. It's more like real-life face icons and playbys are just not done because almost the entire community uses anime playbys. And we know you're talking about Sora's demon baby icon, let's be real here. It's quite clearly an OOC joke. Michio literally had memes as face icons, so it's not that big of a deal. It's only a slight inconvenience to player who try to play for immersion.

I don't think this was honestly a situation that needed a big deal about it.

[Soapy]

Clockworkers Doll » Sun Jan 10, 2016 9:29 pm[/url]"]It's quite clearly an OOC joke. Michio literally had memes as face icons, so it's not that big of a deal. It's only a slight inconvenience to player who try to play for immersion.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.

[MegaBlues]

that's only an issue if you would, for some reason, rp with michio

[Clockworkers Doll]

Soapy » Mon Jan 11, 2016 4:04 am[/url]"]

Clockworkers Doll » Sun Jan 10, 2016 9:29 pm[/url]"]It's quite clearly an OOC joke. Michio literally had memes as face icons, so it's not that big of a deal. It's only a slight inconvenience to player who try to play for immersion.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.

I never saw anyone really complain about it when it was most prominent, GM or not. Either way, Michio was just an example I had on memory, the point of joke face icons for OOC humor still stands.

[Soapy]

MegaBlues » Sun Jan 10, 2016 10:09 pm[/url]"]that's only an issue if you would, for some reason, rp with michio

Or if he happened to be in the same area as you. There's a reason certain types of people complain about private RP.

[Slydria]

I really wish when I said this:

Reserved Thaumaturge says "(Hope that's an illusion or a costume or something because you can't play a literal stuffed animal.)"

You would have just simply replied with yes, it's a costume. That would have been the end of it. Sending mixed signals with vague answers just complicates things.


I will admit doing it one-on-one would be preferable but the only way to directly send a message in SL2 is via GM Warning (which is a one way communication) and I wasn't certain if you were breaking the rules or not so sending one like that wasn't really a good idea to me. So I just decided to show up in person to try and sort it out.

Mostly didn't keep it private or contained to reassure that it's being dealt with. Not to mention, it might be informative for other players to know some of that.

And yes, I should have just said I was a GM from the get-go, though I just assumed everyone knows that and it didn't cross my mind that you didn't know, I was just under the impression you were just playing hardball.

That said, it really turned into a bigger deal than it should have been. So sorry about that. I really wanted it to just be a quick confirmation too.


On a sidenote just a couple of things I wanna mention:

- The joke faces thing. I'm on the fence about it. While it sometimes irks me, I don't think I'd consider it rule breaking. And using an actual picture of a human for a profile is okay but since most people use anime style pictures, it is pretty jarring when it shows up.

- As for playbys, here's the deal. They're acceptable to an extent. Pictures are fine but when it starts including things like the actual character's personality, descriptions, names/aliases and so on, that definitely treads into blatant copying which is not acceptable.

[Ranylyn]

Disclaimer: You asked what people think, so I'm sharing what I think. I'm not picking on you. My post is more "in general" and I am not aiming to single you out or anything. I'll also say up front that I've had a GM warn me for something that was 100% false ("Antagonizing" by asking them if they could kindly stop spamming OOC with gibberish leet song lyrics, one word per line, so the rest of us could discuss stuff, and then promptly getting ganged up on by the spammers and told off by a GM for getting them riled up. I'm still annoyed about that one. That was bullshit. So let's just say I'm not exactly a GM lapdog. But I also know that is not the norm.


For starters, the tutorial gives every new player a link to the server rules, therefore no one is allowed to claim ignorance about not knowing the rules, since they chose to not read them of their own volition. And the rules state:

(Source: http://sl2.wikia.com/wiki/Server_Rules)

4 - Character races that are not given at character creation are not allowed. The race you select is the race you are; it's as simple as that.

(This wasn't always the case, but it was changed a long time ago. You used to be able to use an existing race to represent something else within reason, but I guess this led to a lot of stupidity and/or metagaming, because yeah, it was changed a long time ago.)

You may be wondering why I bring all this up. Simply put, a lot of people do stupid things and the GMs get a lot of backtalk for trying to enforce the rules, giving the community a negative impression of them. As such, considering how much backtalk they get, I cannot fault them if they seem a little short and aggressive in their enforcements. After all, not everyone is mature enough to admit their mistake, apologize, and work together with the GM to fix it. The more common reaction is for people to get butthurt they aren't getting their way and then complain about it to other people. Yes, Sly could have been more up front about being a GM, but you also shouldn't expect people to accuse you of rulebreaking just to be assholes; even a normal player pointing that out is just trying to help out by making it so you don't need to interact with the GMs directly, in order to make everyone's lives easier. (Or, admittedly, they could just be mistaken about the rules, but a quick check to the rule page - which they should pull up anyways so you can link them to it to show them - would clarify that.)

So basically... the whole situation could have been handled better, yes, but the GMs are generally decently fair and just have a bad reputation because people get butthurt about not getting their way. I see no issue with how Sly addressed the situation. If roleplay was being done at all, the race was an issue.

[Egil]

sly might have been slightly aggressive, but you definitely didn't help things. and going "nuh uh i dont have to explain it im not breaking the rules" sounds like it's fair, but if you're really just someone in a costume, say so.

I didn't necessarily want to give that sort of information out in OOC. If I had known that it was a GM, though, that's an entirely different story.

as you claimed, there are a lot of people doing stupid things, so if you can't give a clear explanation of what you're doing and why it's okay, you're going to be assumed to be one of them

Makes sense. I'll try to give folks the benefit of the doubt in the future.

From experience, a good idea be putting disclaimers in an obvious, easy-to-see spot in your descriptions to avoid certain things like this. (A simple "(Disclaimer: Not really X/X is fake/etc.)" usually works.) Because I tried to make a character with costumed legs and then Sly got a bunch of comments because I didn't do that. Then I fixed it and shit chilled. I'm assuming you didn't have something like this if this had to happen. If you do, well, make it bigger. It saves the trouble, and if someone metagames that? Well. You just tell a GM about it and move on. And, uh, I'll go over two things that actually caught my eye when reading this.

Sounds like a good idea. Seeing as there's no adminhelp or reporting verb or anything like that, though, it seems the only way to contact a GM is to either use OOC or know them personally. The former isn't very productive and the latter seems pretty slimey and underhanded- plus, I can imagine that a dozen people pestering the same GM over and over about rulebreaking can get aggravating, so. How does one go about reporting that sort of thing?

This is kinda an issue too, and is completely understandable. Coming up within IC parameters can be confusing because both Sly and Chaos don't have things that can identify them as GMs. The cons are exactly what you were talking about, but the pros are that it's a bit easier to catch rulebreakers in the act when nobody knows that's a GM's character. Although most people who've been around for awhile know Reserved Thaumaturge is Slydria and Heavy-Layered Warlord is Chaos.

Noted.

Well, first... Liches have a skeleton skin.

I honestly didn't know much about liches beyond them being beings of energy and generally looking like black blobs with general humanoid shapes, so whenever I saw skeletons, I thought they were just GMs or something. Thanks for informing me!

PS I have nothing against Undertale. It's a pretty cool game.

Mechinations are a bit different, and Dev has stated that they cannot be pregnant, but there's not really anything saying that they can't live a normal life or go insane. Hell, I thought the point of Mechinations (for the most part) was to be passing them off as humans for a long time, and that is indeed what most people do. Real-life playbys I don't think are against the rules, but I could be wrong. It's more like real-life face icons and playbys are just not done because almost the entire community uses anime playbys. And we know you're talking about Sora's demon baby icon, let's be real here. It's quite clearly an OOC joke. Michio literally had memes as face icons, so it's not that big of a deal. It's only a slight inconvenience to player who try to play for immersion.

'k.

I really wish when I said this:

Reserved Thaumaturge says "(Hope that's an illusion or a costume or something because you can't play a literal stuffed animal.)"

You would have just simply replied with yes, it's a costume. That would have been the end of it. Sending mixed signals with vague answers just complicates things.

Yeah, I took that way too seriously/aggressively than it actually was meant. I definitely have fault in escalating the situation rather than de-escalating it.

- The joke faces thing. I'm on the fence about it. While it sometimes irks me, I don't think I'd consider it rule breaking. And using an actual picture of a human for a profile is okay but since most people use anime style pictures, it is pretty jarring when it shows up.

- As for playbys, here's the deal. They're acceptable to an extent. Pictures are fine but when it starts including things like the actual character's personality, descriptions, names/aliases and so on, that definitely treads into blatant copying which is not acceptable.

I've seen plenty of instances where folks' characters act just like their playbys (see: Sans) so I 'unno if I'm just spotting them before a GM confronts them or what. Joke faces don't bother me at all personally, they're just a clearly grey-area thing to consider.

Yes, Sly could have been more up front about being a GM, but you also shouldn't expect people to accuse you of rulebreaking just to be assholes; even a normal player pointing that out is just trying to help out by making it so you don't need to interact with the GMs directly, in order to make everyone's lives easier.

Most SL2 players I've interacted with OOC'ly have come off as rude/aggressive, in my experience. This isn't to say that what I experienced is how they really are or says anything about the community, but I think that the way I responded, albeit wrong, was understandable. I definitely didn't consider, atleast, that a player would confront me so that a GM didn't have to. That's just something I couldn't imagine happening in SL2. So, that's my b.

Altogether, I appreciate all of your posts and I'm glad that this was resolved quickly!