Justice for the Synthetic Council
For those of you who aren't aware of who I am, my name is Jakk and I've been a member of the Synthetic Council since day one. Emerald specifically contacted me and asked me to help her with organizing the first election, which I did, and as a result she automatically placed me on the council.
1. This is not an attack on Dean or Monkeyfist, I find them to be very funny and respectable people. I appreciate Monkeyfist for bringing synthetics into the game back in the day, he has my gratitude for creating the role. I respect Dean because he strikes me as a sincerely good man who wants nothing else besides making the game fun for people.
2. This is an attack on the lack of freedom that whitelist councils have. I seek a communion between us and the developers, we are literally elected from the whitelisted people to bring changes to the role that benefit us. Better rules, more players, resolving reports, and personally I'd like to see us having a role in creating lore for the role. It doesn't come with any mechanical changes, it's just writing on paper, we deserve a right to have access to that.
I am creating this in order to bring awareness to the mistreatment of the Synthetic Council. We were mislead by the developers, and as a result Omicega and I have wasted our time creating lore for our favorite role.
In the first term, there was Sleepy, MattAtlas, Omicega, SovietKitty, and myself. During this time, we did not experience much conflict with the development team, things went smoothly and we would just +1/-1 applications, resolve reports, and create new rulings here and there. Things were simple and nice. Sleepy and I talked of writing some lore for synthetic units (seeing as we recently split off from the Fox timeline), to which we received no backlash from developers. Term 1 ended, I ran again, and I got in again with Enceri, Zane, Thesoldier (replaced with Vampmare and Soluble), and Omicega.
This is where the issues began to rise.
Sleepy begins to write a lore document for predators, which inspires me to get off my ass and make some real changes. When I ran for the synthetic council all those months back, I wanted to sincerely improve the role for players, there were certain things I found lackluster or just plain annoying. Specifically, there was a lack of lore surrounding the synthetics, and seeing as we are now our own entity, I decided to take it upon myself to try and write something up. I rewatched Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant to get some creative inspiration, and then on January 29th, I began to write up the lore document. I started off with the mechanics and materials that make up a synthetic, mostly taken from the AvP wiki with myself changing some numbers and adding information, and then began to work on the history of synthetics.
I nearly finish the history of synthetics when the developers decided to remove the Generation 1 synthetic from Almayer circulation. While I did not (and still do not) agree with this change, I understand why they did this, they are an obsolete support unit and should be replaced with the newer generations. The only reason I bring this up is because Dean found out about a lore document that he didn't know existed, and after reading it, he talked to us about it.
https://imgur.com/a/Db2WVoo
Thusly, with Dean literally STATING that "I don't think it'll take much to revise it to fit these changes.", I took that as a go-ahead to continue working on this document. A little after this, Omicega adds an entire page about rogue synths, so now it has become a conjoined effort of Omi and myself. I sent it to Dean once again, and he told me he'd get to it when he could. A day later, he sends me this:
https://imgur.com/a/8AUitLu
A week or two after this, I am told that all lore is going to be posted on the forums and TopHat would like it put in timeline form, so I scrap the original paragraphs and start doing the timeline of synthetics. My idea behind the history is to give explanations for why synthetics are the way they are, they have firearm restrictions and not entire combat restrictions because the USCM had instances of CLF stabbing their marines to death, while the synth stands there and does nothing. Shit like that.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I've had no word from Dean on the "revisions" of the lore document, so I figure he probably forgot about it and tagged him with it again in the councils chat. He tells me to contact Monkeyfist, which I do, and I am responded to with the statement that Monkey is using certain parts of the document and scrapping others for his rewrite of the new lore. When I respond asking why we can't work together on it, he responds with this:
https://imgur.com/a/ivJmrTA
That statement alone conflicts with the statement of what the Synthetic Council does:
https://imgur.com/a/lROczXB
Dean said earlier that the head developer and the head manager are in charge of whitelist lore, I contacted both, said I'd get a revision from the head developer, and no revision is made. It is a blatant stripping down of the document that Omicega and I worked on, and then immediately stating after "thank you for making it but you guys aren't in charge of lore". I say mislead because Dean did not contact me earlier saying that I shouldn't bother working on the lore document, instead I finished it all for nothing. We should've been told from the start that we have no say in the lore, but instead we were led on to believe that, with Dean's approval, our lore document would've been shipped off to the wiki and application subforum for the world to enjoy.
CM players, developers, heads, I implore you, consider the fact that the whitelist councils were created for the betterment of the whitelisted role. Those elected into them are chosen by the whitelisted people because they trust that the council members can do good for their role. All I ask for is the right to assist with creating the lore for their respective whitelisted role, all I ask for is the acknowledgement of our hard work on this lore document, all I ask for is acknowledgement that we, the councils, should be able to work together with the developers on the history of these beloved roles.
Thank you for reading this.