Not to Distract from Nergal's Story, But Here's Mine:

I didn't YELL at anyone on Discord. I asked a specific question and got a specific answer.

I did tell one of their sycophants to STFU though, when he kept trying to interrupt and derail my question.

I've stopped playing and taken away all their power over me. In effect, I've now changed the game through my absence. Pretty sure staff won't care. A couple of players might care for a short time.

Stick your finger in a glass of water, then remove it. Then look carefully at the glass. That's about how much difference any one player makes when they quit Arm.

But it makes a hell of a lot of difference to the individual who just quit.

You know, I genuinely hate this vague allusion bullshit. "You guys?" Which guys? "Some shit?" What shit?

I mean, I get why you avoid specifics. "Everyone did bad things which I can't be fucking bothered to list because Column A is a multi-decade pattern of harassment and Column B is commented positively that a third party leaked outdated lore that in no way impacted the present game world" isn't exactly a good rebuttal to what I said. It would have been honest, just, not good.

Who specifically painted themselves as saints? Can you cite examples? Because it sounds like a biased inference of events.

Shit, I don't know, maybe replying to ShaLeah (who isn't Jeshin and wasn't who I was talking to) by elaborating on your original point instead of changing the subject like you just did. This is pretty basic.

Soooo... you've gone from everyone is part of the problem (or "guilty") in your first part, and now no one is guilty...

... but now almost everyone is guilty again. I'm going somewhere with this, don't smash the reply button and try winging your way through a response yet.

The problem is "the problem". What does that mean? When I and some of the people who've been here a long time talk about Arm's problems, we talk about very specific things. We talk about the ridiculously petty abuse of power by staff, the cheating, censorship, poor game design decisions, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, red tape bureaucracy, irresponsibility, bad writing, elitism, creating their own problems and trickling that down on players, bureaucracy, sexual harassment, tacit endorsement of people writing child porn, and the general toxicity of the GDB.

On the other hand, when people come here and throw stones at us, specificity is rarely anywhere to be found. As I mentioned at the top I genuinely hate it. I'm not angry because... well... I'd need to know what to be angry about and very few of the fuckers who come here can tell me what "the problem" I'm contributing to is. What I hate about it is the intellectual laziness of it all. I'm responding to mud from people who think they're throwing bricks.

Here's a lightning round of things this board has supported happening here. If I miss "the problem" you wanted some degree of rebuttal to, feel free to actually say what the fuck it is with specific language when/if you respond:

• Thing: People told their side of the story.
  Complaint: "Bias! Revealing game secrets! Creating hostility!"
  Counter: Okay, sure, but those are reactions to behavior. What "problem" wouldn't have existed if people didn't react to it? Because the "problem" there was the cause and what happened here was the effect.
• Thing: Game mechanics, code, and maps were posted here.
  Complaint: "CHEATING! MINMAXING! JAYWALKING!"
  Counter: That's entirely possible. Where'd we get them again? Oh yeah, people who were cheating. Because players cheated, minmaxed, and jaywalked prior to this board, often getting the same docs we reposted leaked to them by staffers due to favoritism. Posting them publicly leveled the playing field.
• Thing: Players and former staff air grievances, things that happened behind closed doors, etc., like the OP did.
  Complaint: "It drives players / potential players away from the game!"
  Counter: That's a red herring to avoid addressing whether or not those things really happened, which is the whole fucking point. If they happened, people should know they happened, or there won't be any cause to change the game to stop those things from happening. In addition to that, there are two things that many MANY people have said when they wind up switching from Them to Us. One is they thought the stories here were bullshit until they found themselves in one of them. The other is they assumed what happened to them occurred in a vacuum until they found this forum.
• Thing: A bunch of old lore got posted
  Complaint: "SPOILERS! RUINED IMMERSION! PEOPLE KNOWING THINGS IC THEY SHOULDN'T THAT ONLY MY CHARACTERS SHOULD KNOW BECAUSE I'VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS AND METAGAME!"
  Counter: It was 2/3 of the alphabet from a wiki that hadn't been updated in over a decade. Why the hell is lore the staff isn't bothering to keep alive a game-ruiner to reveal? Particularly since the game's various cliques all share what they know OOC. The erosion of some shitheads' idea that they're the only players who get to gossip OOC because they put their time in can't happen often enough.

... and here's what we haven't:

• Thing: Doxxing, crashing the game, IRL harassment, etc.
  Complaint: (see "Thing", add vitriol)
  Counter: All of that has been actively discouraged here. It's a non-point. I can't say that no one here is guilty of that kind of thing, only that pretending it's endorsed here is patently false. Just as a quick example to wrap up this lightning round...
  
  When the Wiki got put up online as a website, I was the one who spotted the contact information page. I shot a quick message to the guy who leaked it, who I had never spoken to prior, and let him know it was in there. He took that info down almost immediately because exposing people's RL stuff was never a goal. jcarter proactively stripped out things like that himself. Nobody had to threaten the leaker or any of us to get us to look out for people we criticize. We've known where the line is.

Well Terminal, in a way you're correct, but when looking to assign responsibility it quickly becomes a chicken or egg problem, which came first? But the reality of the situation is in a game environment, it's perfectly reasonable and healthy to hold the staff to a higher standard. This problem is not exclusive to Arm, it's a very real, very human problem, and can be found everywhere. At the end of the day, it's logical to say that those with the power to change these things bear responsibility.