Greetings,
Yesterday I have been reported by runner Psarthex that there might be some actual issues going on with the current moderation team.
I will try to sum up the huge wall of text he sent me because it would be much too long to translate everything. Long story short, the current moderators wouldn't listen to the community's suggestions about categories, as well as other rules, such as the music thing in runs, audio cuts that sometimes happen because of Twitch, and so on. Now, I don't know anything about the Resident Evil series, so I'd be glad if I could be explained such strict criterias for accepting or rejecting runs since, to me, it doesn't really affect the game like cheats would do. Also, he mentions the neverending rejection of his own runs for dubious reasons. However, I will not talk further about this because he takes responsibility for his behaviour so maybe we can bring this back later.
From what I've heard, my opinion so far is that everybody has a part of guilt : Psarthex didn't really react in a decent manner, but as for the moderators (As far as I could see, especially Carcinogen and SuccintAndPunchy), they don't seem to be especially encline to listen to the community's opinion (not only talking for Psarthex here). The deletion of threads alerting about the situation with a moderator are, to me, censorship, therefore not something we wish to see here. The condescending tone that SuccintAndPunchy takes everytime he posts something isn't either a good representation of a moderator. Not mentioning, having only at most 2 active moderators out of 8 doesn't help.
Please keep the discussions in this thread calm and courteous. As I said, I've had Psarthex' version of what happens, and I'm solely here to gather more facts from all sides, also from people who are external to the actual story. I am willing to find a solution that would please the most. This can inlude (not exhaustive) : Changing moderators, finding consensus on the rules and categories, maybe other things I can't think about right now.
Gyoo.
[quote]the current moderators wouldn't listen to the community's suggestions about categories[/quote]
This all stems from a single thread where someone asked for a category literally involving hacking the game to use trainer cheats. I rejected this pretty much out of hand for reasons that I should hope are super obvious. Someone then asked for like, categories for individual segments of the game which is also a bad idea for different reasons that I explained in that thread (there isn't a single portion of that run that's unaffected by stuff done before or after it, so you can't really compartmentalise them into categories). At which point, Psarthex chooses to get incredibly snippy with the moderation because he's been doing that borderline constantly for almost no reason for literal months, so I get snippy back and fire a dumb potshot about his stream layout and lock the thread because it's going absolutely nowhere and just became episode eight million of "Psarthex throws shit at the mods for no reason".
The dumb potshot about his stream layout was pointless and bitchy and a mistake.
He then starts two more threads that have almost nothing to do with the actual content of the game moderation and is literally just attempting to start a fight with me, so I delete those as well. It was a very personal beef and had nothing to do with the game or its moderation, it was purely that I gave him personal shit. It does not belong on the game forum and I maintain that position. Me not liking someone is not a moderation issue. Me not allowing someone to air their dirty laundry on the game forum is not censorship, it flat out does not belong on this website.
This also ignores relevant context which is that Psarthex has repeatedly attempted to start pointless drama with the moderators before I even was one, again for almost no particular reason. He is, bluntly, kind of a troll. There is no way for me to really put that civilly but it's part of why he meets such an incredibly terse reaction from all of the moderators.
[quote] audio cuts that sometimes happen because of Twitch[/quote]
I don't like this rule either and fought for its removal way the fuck back when it was introduced. It's a pain in the ass. The rationale for its existence is that Resident Evil is a game series that sees a fair amount of regular cheating for some reason, and the easiest way to check for splicing is audio discrepancies. If audio is muted entirely, that isn't possible.
I don't think it's worth it, but there you go. I don't like the rule, but just because I don't like it doesn't mean I can't not enforce it when I've been placed as a mod of the game. That's not my prerogative.
[quote] they don't seem to be especially encline to listen to the community's opinion[/quote]
This is absurdly annoying considering I have done nothing but repeatedly pressure the mods (back before I was one) to hurry up on things like the DLC boards and the audio rule when that was an issue. I didn't listen to a pair of bad suggestions, so that means I'm never inclined to listen to the "community" opinion. I disagree entirely.
[quote]The condescending tone that SuccintAndPunchy takes everytime he posts something isn't either a good representation of a moderator.[/quote]
Again, kind of ignoring all of the relevant context in favour of precisely two posts in a bad thread.
[quote] he mentions the neverending rejection of his own runs for dubious reasons[/quote]
His runs have been rejected for two reasons.
1.) His first run violated the audio rule by having the audio unceremoniously die for the last few minutes. Given the last time this happened and a run with missing audio was passed through, Psarthex started a thread just to give the mods shit for making a mistake, we erred on the side of extreme caution, because we didn't feel like giving him more of a chance to shit on us, as he does basically everytime. But it was a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
2.) His second run features a bunch of insane, freakish over-the-top shit including, using a voice modulator to say hateful garbage and literally encouraging all of his viewers to message me hateful messages. The latter, I want to emphasize, is an extreme violation of both Twitch and Youtube terms of service. As well as those of like, basic human decency. He would later go on to encourage his viewers to harass Carcinogen while he was streaming, which again, bannable offense. Speedrun.com bizarrely has almost no policies about what you can and can't post on the website, it's basically being left entirely to moderator discretion here, and we feel as though "Run literally violates Twitch/Youtube ToS for not being a terrible person" is a pretty justifiable reason to not want to publish a run on the leaderboard. We cannot and should not allow or encourage that type of behaviour.
If you consider that a "dubious reason" then I honestly don't know what to say.
That's the total summation of events. I genuinely do not think anything needs changing besides the audio rule.
To be honest, I just want my legit WR to be accepted now, even if I kinda roasted Succinct on it. And that's not lasting 1h30. This drama is ridiculous, and I'm a big part of that, but jesus, I made my point; Succinct loves to criticize others freely but can't take a little roast without calling out "Harassment and intimidation" from me. Anyway, Gyoo you know my side of the story, I'll let others tell what's their opinion about that. (Over the fact that everyone recognize that it's ridiculous)
Edit: I never encouraged anyone to harass Carcinogen or even you, people ask on my stream why aren't my runs on the leaderboard, I tell them the story, some of them might think you're a ludicrous persons, that's on them if they want to tell you what they think. I never said anything like "Go on carcinogen stream to say dumbshit" or whatever. I didn't even know some of them went to carci's stream. In fact I went on it, trying to discuss that whole matter and I was perma-banned even before saying anything. And for Gordon, poking you on Twitter, he does what he wants dude, I never encouraged that shit, I'm even talking about that on the run in French.
- Run is here:
Everyone can review it, see what are you talking about. Yeah we're making fun of you with chat. That WR happened after 3hrs of stream, I was fed up with that stupid category, so I started to use my voice transformer roleplaying as my sister during that long-ass intro.
You can even see what chat is saying here because i forgot to show the twitch chat on that sweet new layout
I'd like to see which ToS i'm violating tbh.
Edit2:
That's literally the "hate shit" you're talking about. You can tell from my voice i was so aggressive towards you
You literally encouraged all of your viewers to send me hate shit within the run itself. And they in fact, totally did, across a bunch of my social media. I don't call "harassment" lightly, but that is basically the textbook definition of it.
There is a fine line between "a little roast" and "doing things that can get you banned off most websites". I can absolutely take a little roast, but that is way way way over the line.
If you do another run that doesn't contain absurd, personally spiteful, witch-hunt starting junk in it, it'll be accepted just fine. You can even flip me off at the end, I'm bigger than that. It's specifically the part where you start encouraging everyone watching you to throw shit at me where it becomes completely unacceptable. Publishing that run would just be ok'ing that type of behaviour and possibly cause more harassment for me since now more people can see you calling for it.
[quote]I'd like to see which ToS I'm violating tbh.[/quote]
[quote]defame, harass, abuse, threaten or defraud users of the Twitch Services,[/quote]
https://www.twitch.tv/p/terms-of-service
youtube has a similar paragraph
he didn't, he told his chat to say something about you in chat for the wr vid so you'd see it. his viewers already hated you because you rejected two of his wr runs and have been manipulating the other mods saying he's the bad guy "entirely"
Simply say I would post to say the lines are incredibly blurred on content that can be submitted. At least at the moment.
Flaming / Simply hating on other users is 100% not allowed on the forums and is a bannable offense, but a video doing exactly that, which is embed / essentially hosted on SRC is by extension allowed? Yeah, I believe a run that is important to the games progression should be allowed, it's just something I consider rather odd.
The problem with SRC at the moment, being totally honest, is that there are no definite ground rules, and everything is kind of best judgment type thing. Content that talks about controversial topics with no intent to specifically offend anyone... it would be ludicrous to reject those, but content specifically singling out or targeting an individual is entirely another thing. The content belongs to Youtube/Twitch but it is being hosted, by extension, on this website so it is also this website's responsibility. Or at least it should be if the forum rule stands as it is.
This isn't specifically directed at anyone in here, this is more a "perfect place to explain this particular issue with the site as a whole type thing", since it is being discussed.
[quote]and have been manipulating the other mods[/quote]
Yeah, no. Total lie.
[quote]he told his chat to say something about you in chat for the wr vid so you'd see it.[/quote]
You can literally hear him tell people in that video to tell me I should stop moderating and any type of call to "tell someone" stuff will inevitably result in some people taking it too fucking far and he should know that. Considering he literally joined in with the viewers who took it upon themselves after that to harass me on twitter, I do not even remotely buy this innocent act.
Also, I don't see how that's acceptable even if it were true.
like he didn't do this awful thing, he did this other slightly less awful thing?
[quote] you because you rejected two of his wr runs[/quote]
No, not just me. I conferred with the other mods on both decisions, I did not make them unilaterally.
If that's really the matter, now that my run has been verified (Legit gameplay/no cheats) I can edit it, mute the parts where i'm talking about Succinct. So no "offend" part will be heard
Thank you for your replies so far. I'll read everything once I am back from work. I'd just want to give a quick reply to FurryWulfz' post : [quote]The problem with SRC at the moment, being totally honest, is that there are no definite ground rules, and everything is kind of best judgment type thing. Content that talks about controversial topics with no intent to specifically offend anyone, it would be ludicrous to reject those, but content specifically singling out or targeting an individual is entirely another thing.
This isn't specifically directed at anyone in here, this is more a "perfect place to explain this particular issue with the site as a whole type thing", since it is being discussed.[/quote] This is something we're working on (like, for real). It just takes a lot of time if we want to cover the most cases for the first shot. Moreover, the staff's availability vary greatly so it doesn't help to give any ETA.
[quote] I can edit it, mute the parts where i'm talking about Succinct.[/quote]
Problem is that then clashes with the rule about not muting audio.
I deleted two troll threads. Otherwise every other post he's ever made is still up on this website.
Regarding the audio rule, that was specifically discussed closer to release due to the high amount of runs that were being submitted at once. There was almost 30+ runs a day being submitted and mods were being essentially pressured (there are even a few threads on here, we ignored them pretty much but you can see the extent of what I mean) to verify runs quickly. People were impatient.
Doing that with no audio or music that covers the entire audio was difficult when there was a backlog of like... 35-40 runs to cover closer to when the game came out, especially when the World Record was changing non-stop.
If the desire to go more lax on this rule is wanted, then by all means. I demodded myself a little while ago, so I have no idea the current situation with the run flow still coming in, but I imagine it's nowhere near as bad as at tha games launch. I still, personally, stand by my stance that audio, being that we've identified cheaters in the other games in the past via audio entirely, should be somewhat required, but if that's a position current mods feel they are comfortable to handle, then they should go for it.
i don't think talking about a toxic mod is a "troll thread"
he may have been acting stupid in those threads, but you didn't even reply, Instant delete goes the forum that explains he's the good guy in this situation, In a Joking Manner.
[quote]explain what a troll thread is.[/quote]
I explained pretty clearly in my first post. I read those threads and found they didn't have anything to do with the game or its moderation so much as just trying to insult me (and FurryWulfz, for some reason?) and start a fight. The game forum isn't for personal attacks or fights.
Good people also don't incite harassment of multiple other people.
In a few words, my experience with psarthex is like this:
I told Punchy to reject the video on Twitter and I DID use the phrase "buttbaby" to describe it. Punchy was right, the video violates Twitch TOS and encourages harassment, whether it is a WR or not. He then took my tweets and intentionally misrepresented them to say "Carcinogen bans runs for personal reasons", at which point he had several people come to my stream to talk shit about me.
Twitch is my full-time job and my primary source of income. He sent users to harass me about leaderboard stuff to try to incite drama in my chat while I was working. He tried to bring it to my doorstep out of petty vindictiveness. He literally attempted to put me on the spot in front of my viewers by sending people (who aren't even involved) to my stream to try to get me to talk about it and look bad. It failed gloriously because it was only like 3 people, but the point is that it happened at all.
He then messaged me on Twitch complaining that I didn't come to his Twitch chat to discuss it. It is my belief that the discussion should be here and ONLY here, not some random Twitch chat where outside users who don't even speedrun RE7 can influence the conversation and he can just clown me the entire time. I'm not stupid enough to waste my time on petty bullshit like that.
I blocked him on Twitter to remove his ability to retweet me so people would quit coming to my stream, and blocked him on Twitch to keep him out of my chat and out of my work. Moderation duties at Speedrun.com don't require me to discuss leaderboard stuff on my stream, mostly because it's not the time or place to do so, but more importantly, it is not the content of my stream.
Psarthex aimed to make the #1 spot on the leaderboard (as in the first thing people will click when they come to the page of the most popular RE speedgame) about DRAMA AND HARASSMENT OF ANOTHER USER. He goaded users to harass others. The shit psarthex has put me through in the last 3 days over this crap is not acceptable and I never even talked to the guy aside from one forum post months ago.
As a supermod for this game since the beginning I think that all of this shit has been blown out of proportion.
If you end up looking past the name of the runner that has submitted a run (and you clearly have problems with him on a personal level at this point) and you decide to reject based on that, you are going to give him more reasons to keep this "drama" going.
It is extremely retarded that Psarthex's chatters ended up attempting to troll Carcinogen's chat when all this shit started with Succint's first rejection and it was all a matter of clarifying the reason behind that rejection via this forum or DMs. You can't reject someone's run because you think he's violating ToS or whatever without going into details and expecting that person to just "stop" attempting to get his supposedly legit run up the leaderboards. So this could have been resolved without global sr.com admins getting involved.
Also if someone wants new categories please make good suggestions not troll ones, thank you.
I'm sick of seeing the "RE community" drawn as this fucking shithole of pointless drama every 3-4 months for stupid reasons like this. This community has NEVER been in the spotlight for good reasons. That's really sad tbh.
