New review suggests staff still suck at conflict resolution

It's just.. bizarre. If it's true that sucks and Shaloonsh should be off staff, if it isn't true what the fuck happened to these players to make them go to these lengths? When I was mad I would just take a long break and usually be let back. Despite popular belief I never actively pursued malicious acts towards staff or the game. I guess my post at WOTC was "malicious" in their eyes though.

if we're alleging that the whole thing is fabricated and that the person fabricated discord chats entirely, it seems silly that they would make a mistake about kadius not being a house that shalooonsh administers.

i also checked the IP address listed. according to the blacklist check on what's my ip address (https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check), it's blacklisted by two lists. that seems strange for a normal perosn's home IP address, so correct me if i'm wrong here but it seems more likely that that was an IP address used from a public access point.

Kaitrena = Mehtastic? You decide.

eh, i'm not defending shalooonsh at all. i had him as a storyteller once and i thought he did a solid job. i do think he's a bit two-faced though, as he posted here for a little bit complaining about arm and then was trashing these boards on the GDB and claiming members (of which he's one) are terrible awful blah blah blah. i typically don't have a dog in these races, and my opinion has us that if you like arm play it, if you don't then don't waste your time on it. i think staff are a detrimental factor to it, but i'm not interested in turning people away from the game. i just get annoyed when people blow smoke up my ass and claim everything is perfect and it's all the players faults for everything.

when i see that post and others like it, i take them all with a grain of salt. i'm not going to accept them as THE TRUTH, but i'm also not going to claim they're fake. i've been surprised before. I didn't believe the KingBronn post was legitimate and then you had @qwerty actually giving evidence that it was true. and i had someone pretend to be me on the TMS forums. i think on this one i'd be surprised if it's fake. personally, i find shabago's rebuttal to not have any evidence behind it. particularly moreso given shaleah coming out and claiming shalooonsh has a pattern of action of deleting this sort of stuff.

if it's fake, i don't believe it's the same person behind it but that's about a 70/30 split on confidence. going further with that line of thought, it'd mean shalooonsh has really pissed off multiple people. i'm of the mindset that a person generally doesn't have multiple people with grudges against them for no reason. i'm not going to accept a rumor as the truth, but i've found that rumors tend to have some aspect of the truth to them and usually specific ones don't pop up and circulate for years because of no good reason.

Hey, check it out. On the GDB Shabago has posted a new announcement about this.

I found "C" to be particularly noteworthy.

C) As seen on the review and screenshots provided, staff were able to find direct links to another account that has been with us for years, with various matches to this 'new' account in various ways. This account in question has been well known to hold a personal grudge against Shalooonsh for some time now.

Direct links to another account? What's that about? I read the whole review and while they posted the name of a character, I don't know how you'd tie that back to a different account.

this was posted by namino

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I've read this post, and the admin's response post on their forums, and I have a few thoughts. I apologize for the wall of text in advance.

Firstly, I am semi-active/previously quite active on the discord community. I'm Namino, if that matters to anyone. I haven't played in a few years after having a number of bad experiences, the majority of them occurring while, drumroll, Shalooonsh was my staffer. Personally, I find this post very credible. I find the admin's response post also plausible.

The difference between these two is I feel like this post is making an effort to provide some semblance of evidence, even if it's weak evidence, via screenshots and so forth. Whenever Armageddon Staff review accusations of their own, typically the response boils down to "we look into it and either A) took action which we will not describe in any way, shape, or form or B) didn't find it credible for reasons we won't back up in any way, shape, or form". I am willing to bet that if you were go to that forum post and ask them to show the IP addresses and dates that lined up or failed to line up, you'd be laughed out of the room to requesting actual verification of their claims. This response is actually significantly better than their usual, which is, I quote: "As always we don't go into details of what actions may or may not have been taken".

Secondly, Shalooonsh, even if this particular accusation is not true, is an infected boil on the ass end of that game. His ability to fucking linger around poisoning the well for as long as he has is worthy of the bards, and I mean that: it's impressive what he gets away with. Almost everyone who's played the game has a story about Shalooonsh hamfistedly animating some authority figure in order to hold them down and dump all over them for minor infractions to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His behavior extends out of the game to the discord server as well, where he gets his jollies banning people or threatening to ban them for inconsistent and arbitrary reasons, when he can take a moment to stop openly masturbating about how cool he is.

Shalooonsh is a textbook narcissist who sits there huffing his own farts and describing the mouthfeel to the rest of us and awaiting adulation for it. Based on conversations with people who've known him (Blaze) in real life, my professional diagnosis is that he's someone who never amounted to much IRL, was never provided any semblance of authority or command despite believing himself worthy of it, and as such when was given the tiniest sliver of authority in a virtual world, immediately decided to push it to the absolute bounds of what was possible in order to comfort himself. He's a disaster, and as long as he's around, there's no reason to believe the staff at large really cares about their playerbase, as they're willingly providing a route for a staffer with a laundry list of past abuses to continue the pattern. They wouldn't do that if they cared.

Finally, this is a story of two sides. One side is saying they're being abused by staff. The other side is saying all these DOZENS of accusations are the result of some coordinated League of Shadows style cabal of former players bent on the destruction of the game. Occam's Razor would tell us that multiple accusations of the exact same pattern would hint at some semblance of truth rather than some gran conspiracy. I'm going to put Occam's Razor aside, and consider the conspiracy hypothesis, which is literally no better.

If your text based hobbyist MUD is so fucked up that it engenders feelings so hostile that a group of former players start coordinating to "bring down the house" from the shadows, really, how is that any better than having a sexual predator on your staff? I can't think of a single other MUD I've played where things were so bad that a group of former players decided that no lie was too brazen, no act too immoral, as long as it hurt the staff. It takes serious effort to piss people off that badly and it probably didn't just happen by accident. So whichever side of this argument is true, it all loops back to Armageddon having a serious staffing problem.