Julius Augustus - Staff Report: Behavior involving Misconduct - Vending Machine
What’s your BYOND key:
Julius Augustus
Round ID:
30221
Your character name:
Snezana ‘Garpia’ Kovaleva
Their BYOND key:
Vending Machine
What are you reporting?:
Behavior involving Misconduct
Description of the incident:
Before the incident: I was playing a survivor on Sorokyne Outpost, my team was mostly non-verbal and thus I hid in caves for a long time until I decided to go find the hive and destroy as much as I can. I carefully navigated the caves to try and get into hive mostly unnoticed. I have entered the queen chamber without alerting a single xeno and started to hit the hive core.
The moment I have started breaking the core, a lesser drone appeared out of it and dragged me into the egg morpher once queen heard the commotion in the hive and screeched me. I have immediatly ahelped it and started getting a message from Vending Machine INSTANTLY, which meant he observed me the entire time, and then denied the report, saying it is not metagaming. Later in Dchat he said that “Lessers can attack everything on weeds”, which is… what? It was also said if I disagree with him I should write a staff report, so here we are.
I do not believe Vending Machine did due diligence to actually check if the lesser was metagaming(I’ve been told there’s tools for it before by other staff) and protected a metagamer from getting punished.
Evidence:
20:50:01: Julius Augustus/(Snezana ‘Garpia’ Kovaleva): I got meta spawned on by a lesser at hive when I started hitting the hive core
20:50:06: Ticket marked!
20:50:18: PM From Vending Machine: not metagaming
20:50:23: Ticket resolved!
I would also like to add that why I am sure the lesser has metagamed is of the way how smug the player was in LOOC after dragging me off, saying things like “That was brave” and such, when I accused him directly, which to me is very suspicious. I do not remember what the lesser said in dchat later, but the lesser’s number was 376 I am pretty sure.
There was another incident with lessers and hivediving not so long ago, where the Co-Host banned a lesser spawning in to nest the scout after he got hugged. Thus was also stated by another member of management:
I understand the confusion caused by the different opinions and rulings on this matter over a long period of time. It was entirely our fault not to clarify this earlier, and I apologize for that.
Let me explain and clarify the situation:
In the example you quoted from Harry, the case was as follows: a Marine was hugged inside the Hive boundaries, and another player observing this joined as a lesser and nested the hugged Marine. This is definitely metagaming, there is no mistake about that.
In the current case, however, a Marine was actively attacking the Hive Core, and a player joined as a Lesser Drone to defend it. I can understand why you thought this might be against the rules and wanted to report it, but this is an exception we allow. If there is an active threat to the Hive Core (not just passing by, but planting a C4 or actively dealing damage to the Core), players are allowed to join as Lesser Drones to defend it.