Staff Report - Warfan1815

[MaximusRex]

Staff Report

Your BYOND Key

MaximusRex

Date of Incident

December 20, 2021

Your Character Name?

Cyrus Wilson

Their BYOND Key

Warfan1815

Approximate time and date of the incident

4:00PM

Which Staff Protocols (//showthrea...-and-Protocols) were broken

Preserve the RP and enjoyment of the server.

Description of the incident

During a round on Big Red, Warfan1815 ran a shipside event where Santa was sent into assassinate three targets. I was playing Cyrus Wilson the MP during the event. Around the time of first drop, the crew received an incredibly garbled transmission hinting that something was amiss. No target names were mentioned in the message, and the intent of the transmission wasn't really clear. I took it as an oddity, but not something to be incredibly on guard about. Unknown to me, I was an assassination target.

Shortly after the announcement, I was chatting people marines waiting for second drop, when ARES announced that two lifesigns have flatlined outside their core. I rushed over and found two dead MPs, and that ARES core was breached into with C4.This turns out to be MT shenanigans at first, but the two initially responding MPs are gunned down by Santa. One of the MP IDs was stolen as well, the first of many. Realizing that this situation has gone haywire,and not knowing the identity of the killer, I decided to try and find the mobile crew monitor that spawns in maint. I move south to the maintenance tunnel near upper south pods, and see…Santa Claus. After a quick double take, I follow them into maintenance to say hi, not expecting *Santa Claus* to be the assassin. I'm immediately disarmed and dragged into a side room, where Santa kills me with his pistol. I'm dumbstruck at this point, as I watch Santa drag my body into a corner, where I permadie.

After this, Santa continued to kill MPs and murder anyone who found him, prompting a shipwide manhunt. Santa was stealing IDs, decapitating doctors, and ended up with over ten kills.
I later learned that Santa was spawned in as a Hero subspecies, which has incredible resistances to damage, bone breaks, immunity to pain. It reminded me of a Goonstation traitor round, not an actual RP event.

Overall, the event was extremely poor in taste. The assassination targets had no idea they were being specifically targeted for permakilling. The entire premise of Santa showing up as an assassin is absurd, and the player in control of Santa had almost no restrictions AT ALL to prevent him from going off the rails. I'm not blaming the Santa player, but Warfan for running this kind of event at all.

Evidence

https://i.imgur.com/MOvHDa3.png - My body being hid

What resolution are you seeking?

I'd prefer to see some kind of admonishment on record. However, it's entirely up to the staff team, as I don't know how event-level disciplinary actions are carried out.

[Warfan1815]

I shall be producing a measured response in the morning (GMT) when my mind is more clear.

[BellyMaster]

Snip

I mean, it is almost christmas. A silly event does not really hurt the round. And frankly, MPs in general do not RP that much anyway. Perhaps an alert about a jolly murderer should have been sent out, infact, it likely would have been a good idea. And the jolly murderer should have probably been asked to minimize collateral damage. But sending a report for this seems kind of silly. It was a one time event, and it appears you are using OOC rules to strong arm a mod in to doing nothing fun, ever. Which to me, seems rather entitled of you. MPs have a very unique roll, and are given an immense amount of power over the ship, second only to the Provosts, really. To say that OOC rules were broken, for a holiday themed event, is really just asking for nothing to ever happen that is interesting or exciting. And, speaking for most of the marine/xeno players, as person that regularly does silly/dumb stuff, for no reason other than boredom, I take great offense, and I am sure others would aswell.

That being said, while my opinion is somewhat unwarranted on this discussion, I believe that this mod was fine, the RP standards, especially around significant holidays should be relaxed, not constricted even further. Complaining about this, is, frankly, rude. If you do not want to have any risk, do not sign up for a military space vessel in a fictional universe where supersantas exist. If you want to exist in a world that cares to your every whim and need, I can direct you to many. I assume, some people enjoyed super santa, some people found it to be annoying, and one, apparently, felt the need to create an entire post to embarrass or publicly shame a moderator for running an event.

[FGRSentinel]

I saw a bit of the antics related to the event while observing the round. What I can say about everything is it looked like either far more freedom was given to the person playing Santa or the guy was completely out of control. To add specifics, Santa killed the CE, stole his ID and when he tried to make a getaway ran into a doctor, the CMO, and 2-3 MTs/OTs in maint looking for him and any KIA to revive. I don't remember who shot first but the fight ended with Santa's health bar flashing, the doc decapitated, and everyone else dead. Rather than leave since none of the five were his targets, Santa stole at least the IDs of the doctor and CMO (the latter of which was revived a bit later) and probably stole the IDs off the MTs/OTs, but I can't remember. It's important to note that Santa was appearing as "LCDR Santa" when talking at this point and there were reports that the CMP was also KIA, which indicated that he had stolen the CMP's ID as well and when discussing it in Discord revealed he'd stolen at least two command level IDs in order to give himself all access and had "thrown away" all the unneeded MP IDs he had collected. By this math, he had stolen at least four command-level IDs (CE, CMP, CMO, and at least one other), 2-3 MP IDs, possibly 3 engineering IDs, and the CL's ID by the end, or 7 at a minimum and as many as 11 that I'm personally aware of. All this led to a fairly massive round disruption as Engineering was more or less entirely KIA and perma just before the Xenos hijacked, CIC was completely unable to lead the groundside round, and about a quarter to half of Medbay was either dead or without an ID and therefore had a harder time doing their job. It got bad enough that CIC actually started telling Santa the CL's location after they found out he was the last assassination target, possibly in hopes that he'd finish his mission and promptly leave. I'm not 100% certain though because I went to observe something else, but I do know it took Santa something like 5-10 minutes to kill the CL after an announcement that the CL was in the chapel.

Warfan did say in lastround chat, I believe, that stealing so many IDs was not the intention of the event and in spite of the fact that taking the targets' IDs seemed to be an implied objective, he wasn't really meant to take any others, which did kind of leave me with the feeling that he set the event rolling and then either didn't notice it escalate out of control or just completely lost control over it as the only announcements related to the event from staff I saw as a latejoin to observe was an announcement telling the assassin that he did his job and it was time to leave. This entire sequence of events was likely made all the worse since Santa's large bodycount shipside left the Marines unable to deal with the Almayer Defense after an even more disastrous ground game, partially due to CIC being almost totally focused on the carnage in the halls and maint tunnels, and there was basically nothing done about any of it. Looking at the sequence of events ingame and discussion between the Santa player, Warfan, and people who were in the round on Discord after the round ended it genuinely looked like the entire thing was a mix between a few mistakes and a hands-off approach to managing the event on Warfan's part and the Santa player being both bloodthirsty and either unaware or unconcerned with server rules.

[silencer_pl]

Hey there. I was, in fact, logged in when Warfan did this event and they did it with the help of a senior admin. As this was already being handled before the staff report being made, I don't think logs are necessary here.

There was some valid criticism to be had about the event and I talked to warfan about them. They already came to similar conclusions that were raised in this report and in DMs to us themselves before this report was made. I have also reminded them and all smods of what is considered in-scope for minor events as the conclusion of this one surely crossed over into major territory.

Since its the holidays, we have given smods blanket permission to run Holiday themed events, I have asked warfan to verify his intent with management before he runs any more events like this during this period due to the above. We have also clarified to all staff that by "Holiday themed events" we meant more Christmas cards and less "Santa murders crew".

Since this was not done with malice, I don't think any further punishment is necessary here.

This staff report is now resolved.