So I’ve been on the games that EvilGrayson is referring to in regards to this players, which means I’ve witnessed their behavior, I know who they are, and I can vouch for all of it and more.
Why?
Because I’m embarrassed to say that I was stupid enough to fall for it for a little while.
I saw these people utterly smear someone in what I believed to be a just campaign against a sex pest who was getting away with it, because said pest was (perceived to be) female and their target was (perceived to be) male, only to watch them turn around and cozy up to that player IC and OOC on the next game. Initially, I was happy to see them do it not only because I was one of the recipients of the pest’s weirdness, but because the pest’s primary target was a character with far less social standing by the theme of the game and would’ve had a very hard time pushing back. I later realized that they weren’t trying to use their standing to help someone who had less influence then they did. They were relishing making a public display of their own influence to people they were trying to impress at the time and anything that vaguely resembled taking a stance was little more than virtue-signaling, something to be discarded as soon as it was inconvenient.
I have personally asked one of these players to stop accosting me for TS because it was making me uncomfortable, an act I felt obligated to apologize to them for if I somehow misled them, only to have them respond by telling me that they were so proud of me for setting a boundary and then promptly make a “joke” about how I can’t control what goes on in their head and they’d continue imagining us in IC threesomes. I played this off as something funny to minimize my discomfort in the moment, a tactic that anyone who has been harassed or abused will be familiar with as way to end the encounter as quickly as possible. Every woman who’s ever been harassed on the street or in a bar knows exactly what I’m talking about.
I watched these people out staff alts without their knowledge or consent and, while most of these alts don’t seem to be a particular secret on the game in question, they also weren’t public. The entire point of providing this list? Proving how many staff characters they were connected to and even romantically involved with as a means of not only influencing the sphere IC, but the game OOC. As someone who supported corporate executives for more than a decade, I can only describe this as the digital equivalent of standing in front of a shelf lined with pictures of shaking powerful people’s hands. It’s not subtle and it’s not supposed to be.
I listened to complaint after complaint from one of these players about an entire sphere on the game, all centered on how the entire playerbase was not only toxic, but specifically homophobic and ableist. While I won’t deny that are problematic players and behaviors in that area of the game, I later found out the majority of the people they were naming and shaming were actually their former TS partners, who they were now turning against for committing crimes as egregious as distancing themselves from the player, setting up boundaries, or–and this is my personal favorite–paying more attention to their other partners in a scene that was specifically about celebrating said other partner. As someone who is both non-binary and neurodivergent, I find this one particularly repugnant. There is a vast difference between ‘people being prejudiced’ and ‘facing the consequences of repeatedly being an asshole’, despite this player’s insistence that any animosity they faced was purely them being victimized and never the result of inappropriate behavior.
There’s a laundry list of other issues that I can point to, from spilling character secrets about people from one game in open spaces on another, to repeatedly claiming that no less than three people were obsessed with them in alarmingly direct parallels to Regina George, to continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single location. It is, frankly, somehow the most spectacularly insidious yet overwhelming set of behaviors that I’ve seen since VASpider and DownWithOPP. Worse yet, they now seem to be expanding out of WoD MU*s and into the world of Ares, where I expect them to only continue behavior I’ve now seen them engaged in on three different games. If you’re a game admin and you’re concerned? Reach out. I’ll provide the details that I can.
