Hi. Zephyr previously of and now fired from AoA here. I didn’t want to post all about this initially, but I feel like a few things need to be corrected, and shared.

@64bitjedi said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The incident of discussion was overseen by Cujo and Zephyr, and my understanding after the ruling was that it was done to their satisfaction. Subsequent incidents were not brought to my attention until this thread was sent my way.

I’m sorry, what? When? I have no recollection of ever investigating or clearing you of anything.

When the people who will defend others leave a space, that space gets worse.

I wholeheartedly agree that when people who object to harassment leave the game it makes the game worse. You know full well that I spent years advocating for players who were harassed, only to be met with the repeated refrain of “It was just jokes.” or similar excuses. No amount of evidence, and no number of complaints was ever enough.

As I said to Cujo after he dismissed me by @mail at 1:40 in the morning when he hoped I was already gone for the night, it ceases to be a joke when a player says stop. After that point it becomes harassment. “It’s just a joke” is what bullies say to justify their behavior if anyone dares call them out. The fact that this alone seems to not be understood by the headwiz of AoA is a problem. Not the only one, clearly, but one of them.

Cujo has also recently been claiming he banned someone who harassed one of my characters as some shining example of how he does take it seriously, except that’s not what actually happened. He didn’t ban the guy after I showed Cujo the weird incident. He banned the guy some time later when the player in question posted “This game sucks and I’m leaving, but not for a month so come say goodbye.” to one of the boards. Cujo showed him the door that night. It wasn’t for me, or because I was bothered by the guy, it was because he shat on the game out in the open, and Cujo got mad.

Banshee, you were there for a lot of this. You knew. You complained about some of these predatory people personally because you were stuck with them in your group. Pretending you don’t know is dishonest and you know it.

People need to know there is someone they can report this stuff to.

Yep. They sure do.

Which is why it’s funny that when I stood up and said I don’t think the person we’ve gotten so many complaints about for years should be given access to staff powers and all that it entails, I was kicked off of staff, and then off the game as a whole. Within a week my entire roster of characters has been nuked except my primary, which has been wiped of everything, moved to the retired characters lounge, and had her password changed, and the same was done to people who were known to be my friends. I never indicated to him I was leaving, so what precisely motivated this? Could it be that again Cujo got mad? Why would anyone trust staff if a member of staff can’t stand up and say this is wrong without Cujo going scorched earth on them, and their friends?

Additionally I’m also hearing a whole slew of lies about why I was remove as an admin. First it was that I stole code, then apparently I demanded Cujo give me the game itself, and then I demanded a copy of the game for my own use, then it was because I was too angry about Hadrix and I was a safety risk. It would be hilarious if the person saying this weren’t the headwiz of the game who is now concocting stories because he realizes that in a fit he removed someone who not only tried to stop harassment, but was also harassed, and maybe that looks bad. It’s also funny how the alleged code theft and demands weren’t given as a reason why I was being removed from staff when he @mailed me.

Cujo cannot be trusted. Period.

Ultimately I’m not sorry that I’m gone, I’m only sorry that I didn’t just leave sooner. An optimistic part of me kept wanting to believe I could help people if I just said the right things to make Cujo understand why all of this was so wrong. He is good at sometimes appearing as though he can be rational and reasoned with, but based on everything I’ve seen here about Cujo’s previous behavior, that is clearly never going to happen because he himself is a guilty of some pretty skeevy stuff.

@CuriousGamer

I don’t know about posting it on the forum. I know that the admin of AoA are watching this like a hawk. Before I was kicked off staff I watched them all commiserate over how awful they thought this post was, and assure that they knew everyone here was just a bunch of angry, lying people who were banned from games. No proof is enough proof for some people, and when presented both it and the person who posts it is ripped to shreds. Granted posting here at all puts me at risk of it too.

As satisfying as it is to see all of this finally aired out, it’s also disappointing to be repeatedly painted as the villain in a place I invested 7 years playing, and 4 or 5 years on staff trying to help. It’s not fun.

DM if you want to see it for now, I guess? I can shoot logs over to people who aren’t in the flying monkeys camp.

@Das-Auto

I find it funny that I was kicked off of staff on the 11th, and it was on the 15th that we discovered alts had been deleted and mains couldn’t be logged into. At no point did I say I was leaving to him, or to anyone on staff, and his own mail to me expressed that he hoped I would stay and still play there. At no point did friends of mine, who also had been on within the last 30 days, say they were retiring from the game.

As usual Cujo is making up reasons after the fact because he knows he did something he shouldn’t have and it looks bad.

@blu said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

This.

I was puzzling with Zephyr why I didn’t say something when I left the last time, but I think I just couldn’t go through rehashing everything.

I almost didn’t for similar reasons. Not having all that noise is so nice once you’re gone, and talking about it feels like inviting it back in.

@hellfrog said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Chani said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

If I banned everyone that was a problem, no one would be here playing.”

If this was actually said, that’s lol. lmao.

He said it to me many times when discussing problem players.

@Anony-Mouse

The real reason Cujo refuses to remove transit times for space flight is because of how many planets have vendors on them, and how many people are insanely obsessed with going to as many vendors as possible. Some went to so many planets that he actually has the how many planets a player has landed on in a day tracked, among many other things.

Ironically one of the absolute worst vendor obsessed people was given a staff bit and now likely has access to seeing the entire list of valuable vendor items that are on vendors at any given time. Which he had made so that he could see what was where and could remove really valuable items from that vendor if someone he didn’t like was heading there.

Dude created a system that forces players to visit vendors to get items, and then he punishes them for it. Just another of the AoA puzzles.

@Meg said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

but when you have a culture of rot, then is more rot really contributing to it when it starts at the top?

Yes. I’d say any rot deserves to be pointed out from the top all the way down.

I think it needs to be emphasized here that isn’t people being being squeamish about seeing underwear a couple of times. It was clearly a fetish for the player, and it was one that they forced people to be a participant in. Over and over. Consent didn’t matter, stating outright that you do not consent didn’t matter, public, private, event? It didn’t matter. If she was in the scene, you were likely going to be subject to her pants magically coming off and oh my god isn’t this so embarrassing. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that it probably happened on a hundred occasions or more.

If that’s your thing, fine, but these “accidental” scenarios need to happen with people who actively consent OOC to being a participant in it. Most did not, and that did not stop her. Telling her not to do it anymore didn’t stop her. She didn’t care. That was the problem. That deserves to be highlighted.

Having previously been staff on a Star Wars game for many years, let me just emphasize that having minor players or characters is asking for a world of trouble. More than once I had to put a stop to some real sketchy stuff from people trying to skirt the rules against underage characters that we did have. I don’t want to imagine the trouble of minor players and characters being welcomed on a game.

@imstillhere said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Did you know that one of the staff fucked with it to Anonymously give out “CharacterName’s Used Dirty Panties” gifts to various people, including me? That was @Zephyr 's char, she can verify that it was very much without her knowledge or consent.

I can back this up. It was the inactive staff member Halcyon that decided it would be hilarious to abuse his continued access to his staff charbit/powers and log into a long time idle feature character, then give out anonymous gifts in the form of my characters ‘used panties’ to several people. I know because I happened to be in the room at the time and saw several people opening them. There were quite a few more gifts that the coder of the game, Yeti, had to go in and manually remove before they were opened. It was not great, especially as it was the first year the tree was ever put up for players to give silly gifts to one another, and it kind of ruined the whole thing for me.

I will also note that this wasn’t something like ribbing between friends. I had maybe two or three brief interactions with Halcyon in my entire time on the game because he was part of the original game, not the revamped version for the last trilogy. He hadn’t been active staff since probably before 2010. This guy was basically a stranger to me, and when given even the most mild of push back against it, rather than apologize the dude just fucked off the game and didn’t log on for a year. Cujo claimed he told him to apologize, but there were never any consequences to not doing so. Cujo flat refused to do anything about him having a staff bit, or staff powers even if he didn’t want to take the entire bit away. I don’t think he viewed it as a problem at all other than it became something that someone complained to him about, and he was annoyed that he had to do something.

@CuriousGamer

I did, I have a log and screen shots of that and the entire conversation that followed.

@Meg said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

but when you have a culture of rot, then is more rot really contributing to it when it starts at the top?

Yes. I’d say any rot deserves to be pointed out from the top all the way down.

I think it needs to be emphasized here that isn’t people being being squeamish about seeing underwear a couple of times. It was clearly a fetish for the player, and it was one that they forced people to be a participant in. Over and over. Consent didn’t matter, stating outright that you do not consent didn’t matter, public, private, event? It didn’t matter. If she was in the scene, you were likely going to be subject to her pants magically coming off and oh my god isn’t this so embarrassing. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that it probably happened on a hundred occasions or more.

If that’s your thing, fine, but these “accidental” scenarios need to happen with people who actively consent OOC to being a participant in it. Most did not, and that did not stop her. Telling her not to do it anymore didn’t stop her. She didn’t care. That was the problem. That deserves to be highlighted.

@Ashkuri said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

On this game if you are harassed, and particularly if you are harassed by a popular player who appears to generate activity, there is no help for you.

Cujo doesn’t need to be like “guyz you can have your toon back,” Cujo needs to be here saying “I won’t tolerate bad behavior, I’ll take it seriously, this is my house and I’ll keep it clean.

Especially since one of the worst offenders is on staff as Reverberate. The only people Cujo has ever treated harshly are people who have been critical of the game in some way. He’s also never going to clean house because he knows he’d have to take himself out with the rest of the trash.

@SqeakyClean said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Wait what was even the fucking point of the sith take over then? (We know the reason) Why not just have a drawn out war between equal powers?
Sound like some old school back tracking.

So initially the point was supposed to be digging Cujo out of the hole that he’d gotten himself into with the First Order not being defeated once we got past canon movie stuff. There was a push to try and make it restoring order against pirates and warlords and stuff, smaller scale story, but he didn’t want that. So we wound up in this protracted fight that no one was interested in fighting because, what was the point? Cool the First Order wins this, the Resistance wins that, there’s no point to any of it, this is the war that never ends.

It was going to be a clean slate where players could affect the story, and build a new resistance to eventually defeat the Sith. Except that Cujo drove out the people who actually generated roleplay. I don’t just mean the events, but the day to day scenes and little one off fun things that @Ashkuri was so fond of running.

Cujo never saw the importance in the day to day on the game. He and Banshee both argued with me that posts were enough in the main story and people should just be cool with those and RP off what they read, offering no avenue to actually participate in it. They don’t know how to deal with the social side of the game, because everyone on staff now is either antisocial, or hateful.

They poisoned the well, and now they’re shocked that everything is dying.

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

NOT ONLY THAT, but there used to be a secret vendor with crazy mark-up prices… so that you could buy, say… 10 personal scanners for 2,000 each, then sell them for 25,000 each. Or some similar crazy markup.
Who needs to abuse the trading system, when you can abuse the vendor code, instead?

That wasn’t a thing when I was staff, but personal scanners had also been long removed. I’m not surprised that they’d do that though. They also have it set up so that you can always see who purchases what on a vendor at any time, and for how much, so buying things for cheap and selling them for more had been eliminated for the most part, outside of a few instances that were unintentional and fixed. This is all outdated information by a year and a half though, I haven’t been on the game since then so who knows what other gross ways they’ve found to screw people over.

@Anony-Mouse

The real reason Cujo refuses to remove transit times for space flight is because of how many planets have vendors on them, and how many people are insanely obsessed with going to as many vendors as possible. Some went to so many planets that he actually has the how many planets a player has landed on in a day tracked, among many other things.

Ironically one of the absolute worst vendor obsessed people was given a staff bit and now likely has access to seeing the entire list of valuable vendor items that are on vendors at any given time. Which he had made so that he could see what was where and could remove really valuable items from that vendor if someone he didn’t like was heading there.

Dude created a system that forces players to visit vendors to get items, and then he punishes them for it. Just another of the AoA puzzles.

@imstillhere said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Did you know that one of the staff fucked with it to Anonymously give out “CharacterName’s Used Dirty Panties” gifts to various people, including me? That was @Zephyr 's char, she can verify that it was very much without her knowledge or consent.

I can back this up. It was the inactive staff member Halcyon that decided it would be hilarious to abuse his continued access to his staff charbit/powers and log into a long time idle feature character, then give out anonymous gifts in the form of my characters ‘used panties’ to several people. I know because I happened to be in the room at the time and saw several people opening them. There were quite a few more gifts that the coder of the game, Yeti, had to go in and manually remove before they were opened. It was not great, especially as it was the first year the tree was ever put up for players to give silly gifts to one another, and it kind of ruined the whole thing for me.

I will also note that this wasn’t something like ribbing between friends. I had maybe two or three brief interactions with Halcyon in my entire time on the game because he was part of the original game, not the revamped version for the last trilogy. He hadn’t been active staff since probably before 2010. This guy was basically a stranger to me, and when given even the most mild of push back against it, rather than apologize the dude just fucked off the game and didn’t log on for a year. Cujo claimed he told him to apologize, but there were never any consequences to not doing so. Cujo flat refused to do anything about him having a staff bit, or staff powers even if he didn’t want to take the entire bit away. I don’t think he viewed it as a problem at all other than it became something that someone complained to him about, and he was annoyed that he had to do something.

@Roz said in Pax Republica - Discussion:

Please note that what will happen if you ban the existence of any TS on a game while allowing underage players is that there will be people who target the underage players to involve them in sexual stuff and then put them in a position where they can’t go to staff about it without the fear of being banned. That is: you make it more difficult to report.

Yeah. That change just makes me even less inclined to think this is going to be a good place. We all know TS is going to happen, it always does and you’re unlikely to ever stop it entirely. Especially with manipulative and predatory sorts, of which there are an abundance in this hobby.

I really hope they read this and take what’s being said to heart, because otherwise they’re going to see an influx of bad actors showing up.

@Pavel said in Pax Republica - Discussion:

Even if certain species mature at ages humans would consider ‘under age’, I’d still suggest mandating an 18+ (for players and characters) limit.

Sure, Mission Vao might have technically been an adult at 14, but she was still child-like in many aspects and there was no romantic nor sexual content involving her. You can’t say the same for people on your game.

There were always excuses like that from people who wanted to play/play with underage characters, and 99 times out of 100 they wanted to do so for creepy reasons. I could not care less if it’s canon, opening that door is inviting bad things to your game.

Having previously been staff on a Star Wars game for many years, let me just emphasize that having minor players or characters is asking for a world of trouble. More than once I had to put a stop to some real sketchy stuff from people trying to skirt the rules against underage characters that we did have. I don’t want to imagine the trouble of minor players and characters being welcomed on a game.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

That seems dumb to me, but I can’t quite articulate exactly why…

It is absolutely dumb for exploit reasons, but they’ve got someone who was caught more than once exploiting systems on staff now, so clearly none of that matters.