I'll bite, why do people hate the SLP?

Moon Guard
61

Well I’m glad we can at least talk this out.

I could have totally explained it to you better, but I don’t see that as the root issue. You were on a pretty destructive path at the time and had also earned a temp block for spamming up the wiki activity with deletion requests post-drama which was meant to give you time to cool down and consider the request and keep the logs from getting decimated at a time we had a small wave of vandalism we were trying to keep track of. That then turned into hostilities. The punishments you had gotten were earned, and separate.

The SLP, and the Wiki bans however, were separate things. If they weren’t they’d of happened at the exact same time for the exact same reasons. However that doesn’t discredit:

This is terrible, and undeserved. The push to cancel you over having a bad moment in your time on Moon Guard isn’t merited. You might attribute this to starting with the SLP ban, and while there’s nothing the SLP mods could really do unless they know about you getting harassed or who’s doing it; I will say again I think your gripe is pretty justified, especially if you think this was the result of your experience with the SLP.

I can’t really verify people from SLP or other projects are doing this to you since I’ve never really seen anything about it. I will once again though, offer to have my DM’s open if you want to keep talking about it. My discord tag is still posted above if there’s anything you wanna talk about.

To add: Hopefully this is at least helping somehow. I’ve seen you doing better re-integrating so hopefully this is a little restorative for you.

62

Okay, so there’s a chance that it is coming from someone inside the group.

Do you have a picture saved of this message by chance? Because that’s a pretty serious thing. I mean a criminally liable thing, because if you had done that very thing? Someone could easily get charged with involuntary manslaughter and it’s not hard to figure out who did it either given Tumblr actually will cooperate with law enforcement. Did you report that by any chance?

Well, yes, if it were my project and people were harassing you I’d almost certainly tell you I didn’t condone it either while trying to figure out whom was responsible within my project for doing so. Seems like a completely logical response to me.

63

Pretty much the crux of this entire issue. None of this would have happened if someone had just communicated to me. You guys can’t just give people bans without explaining why they happened, and then hold it against us when we’re clueless about it. I wouldn’t have argued as strongly as I did if I felt like it hadn’t come out of nowhere, because it did, and I challenged both Maxen and Berenal that if they could show me a direct message from a moderator or admin to me about this behavior beforehand that I would drop the entire thing.

That challenge still stands, because neither one could provide.

One came via an anonymous post on a tumblr page that was deleted by the owner of said page after I messaged them about it, and another came from a throwaway anonymous tumblr via direct messages - which I don’t have access to anymore since I deleted that tumblr. I guess you just have my word, and even if I had the proof, not much to glean from an anonymous message that says ‘kill yourself’. Sorry.

Yes, Maxen did the thing he should have done - two years after the harassment initially started. Maybe I’m wrong, but like I said, I don’t think he put much effort into trying to find out who did it or try to stop it. Not like he made a public announcement saying to stop harassing people who disagree with the Law Project.

64

I wanna see screenshots now lol

65

No need to apologize but, Brady, why didn’t you report that? :anguished: Tumblr can follow IPs on the Anonymous accounts. I really feel like you could have had something there, I don’t know how their account restoration works, I just know about all of what they can pull that a law enforcement agency can actually work with and there’s a lot there; believe me. I guess we have nothing but your word to go on here. I just know, most people don’t hold grudges for three years over nothing unless they have an extreme mental health condition impacting their life, so I believe your concerns are valid 100% as I don’t know you, so I’m not going to come off and dismiss this as if it were gang-stalking. I wished you’d have reported that or saved a screenshot of it though.

Can we give Maxen the benefit of the doubt potentially? I don’t know what his IRL is like, but running a guild can be exhausting, so I can’t imagine what running a guild and a bunch of server projects is like. Maybe he just got emotionally burned out from what was happening to you or having to pick up pieces from something he couldn’t control; you said the harassment was anonymous, so what if he never actually was able to find out because they’re a professional in electronic harassment and don’t go about bragging to others about what they did? It seems you aren’t certain of who it came from, just the camp it came from.

66

Making an announcement sends a powerful visual statement, but if they get a visual cue their efforts are working enough to be bothersome, it gets worse. That being said; there’s always more sources that this could come from.

I’m inclined to believe you without screenshots because I do remember one of your old GMs was insistent in telling everyone you had a mental disorder which was pretty harsh to spread around and is also, harassment. This being after you exposed said GM for something egregious. Sorry you’ve been getting the raw end on that sort of stuff.

67

Didn’t think to at the time. Was kind of busy having a mental breakdown.

I have, numerous times. I’ve contemplated the idea that the harassment doesn’t always come from the SLP camp, but the reactions I’ve gotten get so strong in response that it just steels my resolve that it is. Based on the other testimonies from other people in this thread and other people I’ve talked to over the years who also had bad run-ins with SLP, I’m hardly alone in what I’ve experienced.

I don’t think Maxen is responsible for every threat, every harsh word, every vile thing that’s ever been said where it involves him and his projects. I try to be empathetic, understanding, compassionate, even, but with everything that’s happened to me, and to others, I’m really just at the point where I truly think there’s something fundamentally wrong with these projects. No other server projects on the server experience this on such a dramatic level (I can’t speak for the WrA projects).

There’s a common thread, else this thread wouldn’t have even started in the first place.

Yeah, thanks.

68

Understandable.

Maybe it doesn’t though, but you’ve been holding this anger for three years now that you want to believe it does. You want to believe that everything that happens to you is somehow linked to them. Anger can misguide us and hamper our judgment.

That is letting an echo-chamber influence your decision though and we all know that’s not healthy.

That’s not true at all. COBRA was absolutely horrible, that was Horde side and WrA has it’s own issues with this kind of stuff. There have been people doxxed, harassed, and threatened on WrA before. So this isn’t just something related to the SLP project as you believe.

69

Is the op ok?

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70

“Hello Imperial citizens, what is going on in this thread?”

“By the Emperor!”

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71

Hello my fellow lurkers

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72

This is absolutely and completely hilar. Please continue.

73

After getting dragged for years as a result of a ban that I don’t think was justified at all, and being surrounded by others who suffered the same thing, I have little reason to give reasonable doubt towards the SLP. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not. Not much to do about it now.

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74

I think this is a healthy discussion between the three parties involved. And I am glad for this discussion to carry a tone of respect for one another while remaining in their own perspectives.

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75

I think being in an echo-chamber for so long and being gassed up by people who think the same is just poisoning you and it’s going to leave you exhausted, bud. I believe it’s time to move on. I know you deleted your tumblr and such. There’s plenty of other people to RP with on the server and I hope you found that peace, if not, maybe try a different server or faction or game even. Sometimes taking a long break and doing something else and isolating ourselves from the situation is the best thing we can do. It’ll save you on the mental health crisis you’ve had over this for sure.

Yes, you’ll likely think about it, but the longer you isolate from it the more I believe you’ll begin to see that grudge slide away.

Maybe then it’s time to push on. :slight_smile: You don’t have to hang onto it anymore, Brady. It was three years ago. I hate that justice can’t be had for you from what happened on Tumblr and believe me, I’d seek that for you if I had the ability to do so, but I don’t. I’m sorry you went through that and nobody, literally nobody deserves to be told to “kill themselves” that is an absolutely vile and disgusting thing to wish on another human-being. However, it’s a ghost of the past, and unfortunately I do not believe it is one we can chase now.

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76

Theres something else I wanna say to zaria, but not here. Soon tho

77

Usually I do not force myself to suffer through reading one of these threads, but today seems a bit different. I’ll throw in a perspective, for whatever it is worth.

I am not a moderator for SLP or for any of the separate communities spawned by the same individuals, nor do I believe I would qualify as a friend to said individuals.

I do, however, participate in SLP to the extent that time and rp feasibility allows and contribute that which I am able. I also have past experience being a moderator for a large discord community and that experience influences my present opinion.

Moderating a huge RP group is hard. Making the perfect call, even half of the time, is hard. And when your moderators are a team, I promise you the drama that goes on in a moderator channel can reach boggling degrees of absurdity. I do not presume for a moment, that every decision SLP has ever made was made with confidence. I do not presume for a moment, that every decision SLP has ever made was made without regret. And once a choice is made, its twice as hard to undo.

I hate to see that people had a bad experience, and that it looks like they’ll never get to resolve what occurred. But I discourage anyone from trying to portray SLP as being defined in its entirety by its shortcomings. There is a genuine interest among the participants and the leadership to create a shared and enjoyable space for RP.

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78

@Meatslab Aww that’s so sweet <3 Thanksies!

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79

@Bradytwo I feel your pain, buddy. I’m in a similar situation to you.

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80

I guess I’ll bite too. I lead the project, after all.

I think going over my intent when I founded the SLP is a good place to start. I run a Stormwind based RP guild, and I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I shared the resources I’ve been working on, like graphics, documents, and collected research, etc, with others, so that they might enrich their RP with it and utilize these documents if they wanted to. Same goes for the Moon Guard Wiki, Warcraft Conquest, and the Grand Alliance. I just want to share graphics and resources and make cool RP events happen for those who think my work is worthy of taking part in. It worked, and the projects that I’ve concepted with others have blossomed into common names on the server, each with at least a couple hundred to a thousand players who’ve decided to work with them.

For the SLP, at least, that initial intent has been pretty skewed over the years. I think that those who have posted so far have gone over the issues with it pretty well. Inherently by its in-character design of drafting laws and electing people to certain fancy titles, competition has led a great number of impatient people to skip the RP part of things and go straight for accusations to try and get people banned OOC in order to remove “obstacles” to their IC grabs for power and influence.

It’s a soul crushing and darn near weekly thing for myself and the moderators of the project to try and deal with. We didn’t always make the right calls, and I imagine we won’t make all the right calls in the future. Bad decisions have piled up over the five or so years the project has been in operation. There have been a lot of wonky precedents and straight up unfair bans (and ban revocations) that we would like to review and patch up to the best of our ability when we can with our other time and resource obligations. The sheer volume of “ban this person because X!” which we find out months later was just motivated by competition, personal beef, or outright lies is staggering.

It’s burned out more than a dozen individual mods who quit the team because it’s a thankless job where people go after each of us, and sometimes our real life family members, if they disagree with how we ruled on this make believe community. If they can’t get someone they hate banned, or if we ban someone who decides to get revenge, we’re lambasted publicly and privately in any number of mediums imaginable.

I bear a good deal of blame, sure, for not always making proper judgement calls or not catching or acting on things immediately. But I don’t think I’m entirely to blame. There are and will always be malicious actors on this server with the single desire of seizing power and hurting other people who get in their way, and the SLP seems to be a beacon for those types of people to try to flex on others. When those things occur, they’re often broadcasted publicly and each case has taken a chip out of the project’s reputation.

I don’t condone harassment of any kind on Tumblr or other means. As someone who was harassed relentlessly in the early 2010s on social media and other mediums over stuff in this game, I don’t wish for that upon anyone and condemn it wholeheartedly. Heck, I still get harassed, and lied about, and dragged through anything that might stick, but I try to keep my head above water for other people’s sake when I can and my own mental health permits.

TLDR, the “are you winning at RP dad?” meme is spot freaking on.

WITH THAT SAID, the project’s been coasting along and still has a lot of neat open-source resources for people to use that I and others have been cobbling together. Banners, wax seals, coats of arms, help with drawing maps, documents, certificates, RP guides on a wide variety of topics, cool ceremonies, and yes, even some cool political RP are what the SLP still has going for it. Literally everything is opt-in and can be ignored despite what some people say. Heck, even people not in the project can use these resources if they want to. It’s all open source stuff.

I’m trying my best, and that’s really all I can ask from myself. I run multiple projects and think I’ve brought some cool stuff together that a lot of people do decide to utilize in their RP, and for that I’m proud. I’m proud of the moderation teams I work with and for all the people who do stick around and continue to make cool RP events and content happen.

Brady, or anyone, really, if you want to DM me about the SLP or anything at all, my Discord DMs are always open. I might not respond immediately, and if I don’t, please ping me again. I’ll answer to the best of my ability.

My Discord ID:
Maxen#9406

For those watching with baited breath, you can now commence picking apart my post and smugly posting clips of it with witty responses either here or on Tumblr. Live your best life.

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