Complaint about general IC and OOC abuse of players playing borgs

[gondor2222]

I generally play a borg since it allows me to switch jobs within a round as needed and helps in situations where humanoid crew would be more vulnerable or unprepared to use the right tools.

Over the weeks I've noticed a steady increase in casual racism, theft, killing and even outright banning of borgs for little to no reason. Non-antags frequently steal items that I acquire to do my job, such as skateboards, cash, and mining resources. People openly tell me that I'm not a person and can't have opinions about protecting my own existence or trying to follow my laws because I'm just a borg. One engineer turned on the SM while I was still inside it, killing me instantly, then laughed and bragged about it over public comms by saying "it wasn't telling me what it was doing so I'm not worried about it being gone now". Almost everything that goes wrong with station atmospherics and the engine, along with even mundane and non-dangerous happenings on the station get blamed on me, such as minor gas leaks, explosions, SM delamination alerts, and griefing.

So far this has also translated into several players immediately ahelping to complain about me whenever something goes wrong with their shift, a phenomenon I like to call "walking while borg". These include:

• Two attempts to fill the station with a very low dose of N2O (safe on air alarms) to cause giggling, one of "funny" laws and the second with a much lower dose as part of a test. I was warned via admin message not to do this more or less because it "might be misunderstood as an attempt to grief", with people screaming over comms that I was trying to kill them just because distro contained 0.8% N2O more than halfway into the shift.
• Questioning by admins on my responsibility for a partial SM delamination, which I was AFK for and which I was only aware of because I returned when I heard alarms. I was the one who FIXED it and people STILL blamed me over public comms as it unfolded and after.
• A near beating-to-death by HoS for being seen in a maintenance tunnel (HoS wrongly believed someone had been kidnapped and attempted to kill me on sight because "she assumed I had kidnapped them", even though I was nonfunctional, blind, and DYING in the halls while onlookers were literally accusing her of a hate crime.
• Carrying a fuel tank on a shuttle that doesn't have one - a member of command shot multiple lasers at it, blew it up, and *I* was banned by Degg444 for it.

I'd like to emphasize that I don't blame Degg444 in particular for the incident. This is a trend of players baselessly accusing borgs of a variety of crimes just because they're a convenient target. If a borg carries a fuel tank onto a shuttle and a bunch of players ahelp in to say "borg blew up the shuttle" it makes sense that the admin might start from the assumption that the borg did it. The problem arises when players use metagaming tactics to ruin the gameplay experience for borgs and even get them banned. "I killed the borg because some rounds they're rogue" should not be a valid justification for smashing borgs to bits on sight, feeding them to the engine, or preemptively shooting them with lasers. And once elevated to ahelp, admins should not be assuming borgs to be guilty *of any accusation in all rounds* just because they are subverted *in some rounds*. Or at the very least, players should not be asked to wait up to seven days for evidence proving their innocence to be read on the plea forums when there was no evidence indicating a crime was committed in the first place.

I'm not trying to appeal that ban here; it has already been 24 hours and the more likely issue anyway is that i continue to be banned temporarily again and again because of baseless accusations until I am eventually banned permanently. Moreover there is the possibility that the "shuttle grief" ban will count against me on future grief accusations, resulting in me more easily being banned next time with no evidence just because "he has already been banned for this once"

[DoctorDrugs]

hello there apologies it has taken so long to get to this, been a few things that have popped up that have taken a good deal of the head admin's attention. First I would like to comment on people attacking and intentionally killing borg players. If someone is actively doing so and it's not a mistake or accident IE someone turning on say an Emitter and it killing a borg outside of the view range of the person turning on said emitter, then people should be ahelping about it so that admins are notified of it. Admins are not omnipotent and while they can see everything there's a lot of information that flies past especially when there's a lot going on in game, an ahelp works to make sure the issue at hand is being looked into at worst you might get a response about it being ahelp'd already by another party. Someone intentionally killing other players then bragging about doing so goes against the spirit of the rules when that player is not their direct target. 

As for the phenomenon you call "walking the borg" I'll address this point by point, 1) releasing N2O regardless of amount is seen as sabotage it's clearly outlined in space law as it can easily prove quite dangerous even in what people might consider low amounts. That wouldn't be considered a prank or harmless joke and most reasonable people would consider it griefing or attempts at sabotage. 2) When it comes to SM delaminations it's not uncommon for admins to attempt to figure out exactly what went wrong with something that unexpectantly exploded and cause a large bit of damage, you wouldn't be the only one admins would contact asking what caused the delamination. 3) This is something that should be ahelp'd when it happens so that it's properly dealt with and most likely is one person not understanding what happened with assuming you were involved when you weren't. 4) there's very limited reason to carry a fuel tank onto a shuttle and usually that's due to someone attempting to grief, there's also a good chance that the admin in the mess of logs with so many people in close proximity to each other and a lot going on saw your ckey attached as the last one to interact with it. Accidents happen and in this case the admin misidentified the cause of the explosion, those situations can be fixed with an unban request as it's a mistake on our part it's of course one of the kinds of exceptions to the generally held rule of upholding timed bans till they run their course. I have updated the timed ban for shuttle grief so that it's not held against you in the future due to the mistake.

In the end personally I have not heard of any mass amount of borg hate in general from most long time players or staff. It more seems to be a lot of coincidences happening to you over a short period, taking into your short history on paradise that assumption kind of lines up with what you're seeing. If players were mass antagonizing and attacking borg players for the smallest of things I believe it would be a lot more talked about and addressed than just a few things here in there out of the total amount of rounds happening over the last few months. The biggest thing I can honestly state here is that if you're feeling like someone is intentionally killing you in game or just short of such then you should make sure to ahelp those people so it can be handled for sure. 

[DoctorDrugs]

Seeing as no follow up posts were made and this being more than a couple weeks old I will move this to resolved as I have still not heard of any mass hate towards borg players in general or been pointed towards specific targeting of players.