Like Spike dying offscreen somewhere in that whole mess despite the thread hauling narrative ass to respond as quickly as mechanically possible. That's the biggest one that comes to my mind.
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Staff and BirdBodhisattva- Upheld - ATCT
- Thread starter khan2012
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The Bird
tEM IS GUD...RITER!
- Location
- In that den of villains and scum, OKLAHOMA
It does though?
In here it explains what you can find in cultist simulator, from the tribunal thread.
2024-AT-12: Staff and BirdBodhisattva Upheld
For ease of access: -The infracted post can be found HERE -The moderator infraction can be found HERE -The full text of the infraction will be added in the following spoilers The overall issues in this infraction seem to be two. The moderator stated that (1) offering an option in a quest which...forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Furthermore, the arbitrator is wrong when they say that Cultist Simulator has none of this content. The description for Saliba as a Cyprian says "Saliba's charisma strikes with the force of a hammer. It is horribly difficult to refuse his desires." and he is consistently described in an overtly predatory fashion; the Cult Business for Grail followers is called "Seduce a Stranger" and when sending a Cyprian on it says "No-one refuses a Cyprian. Almost no-one." This is a straightforward description of magical mental influence for the purpose of sexual exploitation: ironically, your previousinfraction was leveled for handling things more closely how Cultist Simulator does it, through suggestion and implication, on the grounds that the vagueness was inappropriate.
Yeah I'm gonna be frank most of these are still extremely sexless and vague by most peoples standards. Beyond that they're a handful of lines of flavor text that are, I'm going to be frank, extremely missable in most cases, in some cases debatable, and such an overall grotesquely MINOR part of the game that I'm honestly surprised you thought this was a winning argument.
Like I 100% stand by my statement that CultSim is a deeply sexless game.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This discussion has been very illuminating. Please do continue.
If you're talking strictly in terms of getting large amounts of content read and examined then ... sort of? Certainly if I were paying someone then I could roll up their contract and bop them on the head with it until they clock in for their third straight day in the salt mines, but that would not be, you know, good. Even if we could afford to employ people full time and even if we could afford to compensate them commensurately to the work (which not even Facebook, which has roughly infinity times more money than we do, can manage without burning through moderators) the scale of the website is enough that there would still be a bottleneck. In order to have enough eyes to keep an eye on everything on a website of SV's size we would probably need roughly a thousand moderators.
All content moderation relies on user reporting regardless of whether its volunteer, like most hobbyist forums, or professional like in social media, so even if we could afford to employ full time moderators, which at this stage is simply not possible, especially at the volume of content that SV generates, we would still need users to get stuff in front of us. As can be seen and as we already know from past examples that doesn't always work, but it's really the only way.
One thing I will say is that sometimes there are just no easy outs, there really are just times when you've gotta read the thread. That's not exactly sustainable and we can't just point a mod at a years long story and say 'have at it.' Dealing with that sometimes means jumping on the grenade yourself, there's a potentially problematic story of overwhelming size which I have committed to looking at in detail, for example. But even that isn't sustainable either, I'm a fast reader and Squishy is a fast reader, but there's still a bottleneck there. It's a tough a problem. When the dust has settled on the immediate issue it's something I'm going to spend some time with.
If you're talking strictly in terms of getting large amounts of content read and examined then ... sort of? Certainly if I were paying someone then I could roll up their contract and bop them on the head with it until they clock in for their third straight day in the salt mines, but that would not be, you know, good. Even if we could afford to employ people full time and even if we could afford to compensate them commensurately to the work (which not even Facebook, which has roughly infinity times more money than we do, can manage without burning through moderators) the scale of the website is enough that there would still be a bottleneck. In order to have enough eyes to keep an eye on everything on a website of SV's size we would probably need roughly a thousand moderators.
All content moderation relies on user reporting regardless of whether its volunteer, like most hobbyist forums, or professional like in social media, so even if we could afford to employ full time moderators, which at this stage is simply not possible, especially at the volume of content that SV generates, we would still need users to get stuff in front of us. As can be seen and as we already know from past examples that doesn't always work, but it's really the only way.
One thing I will say is that sometimes there are just no easy outs, there really are just times when you've gotta read the thread. That's not exactly sustainable and we can't just point a mod at a years long story and say 'have at it.' Dealing with that sometimes means jumping on the grenade yourself, there's a potentially problematic story of overwhelming size which I have committed to looking at in detail, for example. But even that isn't sustainable either, I'm a fast reader and Squishy is a fast reader, but there's still a bottleneck there. It's a tough a problem. When the dust has settled on the immediate issue it's something I'm going to spend some time with.
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
To clarify: are you being sarcastic and calling the discussion worthless, or is this an honest statement?
I ask because this sounds very sarcastic to me.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
100% serious.
- Location
- Tusita Heaven
I'm in the process of drafting my own comments on all this. And it will be aimed specifically as feedback to the staff, since (respectfully) I don't think me engaging with the thread as a whole would be productive.
I am writing something akin to a "user's experience feedback". Although I don't think it will be done today.
Regardless, I assume my feedback would also be welcome. Kindly let me know if the present consensus (among staff) is that something I say would not be welcome.
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- It/Its
Grail in game is mostly cannibalism and shit, again CS is a very sexless game
- Location
- .... earth
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- He/Him
Its a deeply 'most things'-less game. Its got violence magic, and doesnt show any violence. Its got death magic, and doesn't really show death. Its got creating magic, and doesn't show any crafting. Its got a mind control/sex magic (grail, the one we are talking about rn) and doesn't show any mind control or sex, just implies them.
An attempt at writing them fleshes out those implied things.
The Bird
tEM IS GUD...RITER!
- Location
- In that den of villains and scum, OKLAHOMA
What a very clever post that 100% misses the point being discussed.
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
Exactly this; I must admit I'm surprised at the pure "Cultist Simulator is a sexless game" statements. Cultist Simulator relies so much on implication that "your brain" is practically part of the game hardware. As an example for those unfamiliar with the game who might be here on page ~17 of this thread (somehow): the Lantern ascension path in Cultist Simulator has you take prisoners, have "a conversation" with them, and produce corpses and an increase in power. If I remember right, the details are (as typical for the game) left very vague.
Many things can be discussed about the quest, but I think it's very incorrect to claim "Cultist Simulator is a sexless game" (as the sex stuff is similarly hidden in vagueness).
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Whaaaat the guy who's response to 'Dude you literally just broke an outright promise to not force Regrettable Actions and The Wolf onto people by making them corrupt someone they care about with Pure Evil?' was 'Huh? Man I promised that like. A year ago. That was ages ago. Times changed. I felt bad! If you feel that's a breach of trust that's on you 
' is an asshole and not nice person?
Shocking.
' is an asshole and not nice person?Shocking.
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- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Forgive me if this is just not a useful suggestion, as I suspect it might be. But one alternative might be to try to make a... regulated version of the collective examination that has ended up happening in this thread. If a potentially problematic thread is identified, give a request for users to comb through it for relevant evidence and ask some thread participants to describe the content of the thread. Then have moderators double-check the most noteworthy stuff.
Obviously, I can think of several problems with this idea that I'm not sure how to deal with, but if possible to implement it would avoid needing a single person to read the entire thread.
Sucal
Forced to return
My issue has nothing to do with degenerate erotica and everything to do with putting cartoon ponies through the full horror/cultists simulator treatment. People can have whatever fetish they want, it being pony based isn't something I'd judge.
It's more wondering why someone would do that to the cast of MLP in the first place. What makes people want to see cartoon ponies go through that
Killed off is a strong but not entirely incorrect term for a character that is alive in story, but yes after 8 months of the quest being dead the qm decided that to resurrect it ought to be mirrored by a death and resurrection in quest. I personally think it was less spite and more something to jumpstart the eldritch nonsense thought processes given the length of time between infraction and thread restoration.
As for somebody else's question as to why a pony may end herself, narratively it was because her entire family died when the changelings sacked canterlot in response to the strike upon their hive and the loss of their ability to lie to reality to perfectly disguise themselves as anyone, whose well-being she had been working her hooves off for for the majority of her life.
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
I didn't know that; why isn't there more discussion in this thread about points like this? Like, I really feel like there could be strong valid things to say about this quest and the issue in the tribunal, but many of the points being mentioned are going about it the wrong way.Whaaaat the guy who's response to 'Dude you literally just broke an outright promise to not force Regrettable Actions and The Wolf onto people by making them corrupt someone they care about with Pure Evil?' was 'Huh? Man I promised that like. A year ago. That was ages ago. Times changed. I felt bad! If you feel that's a breach of trust that's on you
Shocking.
If the QM promised not to do it, and then went and did again (but this time with rape!)... that's a really big point in favour of the "QM did it entirely needlessly" line of thought. Conversely, "Cultist Simulator was sexless" is a very weak point even if it were true.
Daecl
CURSED BY THE DICE
The space that the original work does not explore is most often the most immediate space that fanfiction explores. Action movies, spy thrillers, horror movies, get coffeeshop AUs. Lighter franchises like MLP get the likes of Fallout Equestria and the Conversion Bureau.
FruitSyrup
Sweeter than honey~
- Location
- United Kingom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
it's quite shocking to me that there are people claiming without a hint or irony or disingenuousness that a game that references quite bad things happening in the implicit rather than the explicit is roughly a comparable degree of "what the fuck" to such acts and incidents being written out in full detail.
- Location
- Somewhere North. It's cold here.
Why does anyone like anything? It's intriguing, it's strange, it makes you curious. Super dark versions of children's media has been a thing for forever.
The Bird
tEM IS GUD...RITER!
- Location
- In that den of villains and scum, OKLAHOMA
I'm going to be blunt, that wasn't my only point and the fact that people have latched onto it is in itself eyebrow raising.
- Location
- florida
"We can control what we say but now how people take it." -a dollar store fortune cookie
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- She/They
When I followed the quest, I wasn't in it to see cartoon ponies be subjected to the horrors of Cultist Simulator, I was in it to find the answer to the mystery of how a setting that looked like Cultist Simulator became a setting that looked like My Little Pony. I've never watched MLP, I had no prior attachment to the cast, just a pop culture osmosis knowledge of the show. When I saw "MLP / Cultist Simulator Quest," my reaction was "How does that even work?" So I took a look, and found that the answer was "quite well, actually, the worldbuilding intersects here, here, and here, and you've only scratched the surface."
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
Well I for one just didn't originally see your original post; I latched onto "Cultist Simulator is sexless" since it was a multi-post sub-debate that I felt qualified to chime in on and seemed relevant. That is: since people already were discussing that point more, it makes sense that people who rejoin the thread after stepping away will notice that as the current thread of discussion.
This was the final conclusion on the topic back then regarding the whole "restarting the Quest" business, although it was later amended with the last Stain also being voted on as well so it doesn't affect our actual counter; so I don't see how
is actually true given the final posts by the QM on the topic?
(Though it wasn't the easiest to find if you aren't looking or have a habit of sometimes digging through threads like I do, it makes sense)
MC_Lovecraft
Cat Social Worker
- Location
- Texas
- Pronouns
- He/They
Do people really leave a thread, return to it later, and not catch up on all the posts that have occurred in that time, before commenting? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that. I typically go back and read at least the last ten pages of discussion before I join an in-progress thread to make sure I'm not retreading old ground, and I had assumed this was fairly standard practice. For a thread that I was already active in before, I don't understand how you would arrive at the position of being interested enough to rejoin the thread, but not interested enough to catch up on the conversation first. That seems like madness to me, and probably the cause of a huge number of misunderstandings on this site.
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Remembering now when after the first infraction for pony rape it was all "I don't see why this couldn't have been handled privately" and "this should have just been a DM" which is now in somehow an even worse light
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