On November 23, 2024, the staff team had to intervene in a local OOC conversation between the player and another player, where they were talking about their credentials as an IC medic because they are an OOC medic. The Untold Dawn Staff Team felt that this kind of conversation was not appropriate, since it can lead to other players feeling pressured to accept their character’s opinions as “correct” because of their real-world expertise. The player understood and said they would do better.
On November 27, 2024, the staff team had to retcon entire scenes where the player was quizzing staff members and players on their scientific knowledge, which led to a derrailing of a storyline in the game world (the rat plotline). The player took conclusions from holes in these explanations, and declared that the rats had acidic blood. It led to the staff member and players who had been engaging with the plotline filing tickets and offering feedback on feeling overwhelmed to start storylines out of fear of not having enough real life scientific knowledge to run them.
That same day, there was also confusion in tickets about a field clinic project. Investigation of staff showed that most of the confusion happened because of OOC discussions in private DMs where the player was telling another player what rooms they thought should go into this project. This goes against the spirit of our OOC metagaming rules, where you are free to discuss what your character is doing but politicking IC events in OOC channels is not acceptable. The player disagreed with this and said they were only offering brainstorming ideas.
Ultimately, the Untold Dawn staff felt they were spending too much time dealing with the reports of the behavior of a single player and that it was leading to several players and staff members feeling unhappy, unprepared or overwhelmed to roleplay. We also felt that after our first warning four days ago, having to deal both with a retcon and a rules breach report just four days later was not acceptable.
Untold Dawn is a high-quality roleplaying environment where access is obtained through an invitation, which can be rescinded. We have a low tolerance for behavior that disrupts our community and the enjoyment of our players. After a conversation with the player in Discord tickets, the player has had their invitation to the game revoked, although we have told them that they can reapply for an invitation again in three months (February 27, 2025), pending approval from staff.
The player requested to redact logs of the conversation in the Discord ticket between Untold Dawn staff and them. We have decided to comply with this request.