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[BloodBird]

Concerning the SDII and god-moding...

I have a serious bone to pick with Nikita Alterana and possibly her new friend Myxx. As I am rather disappointed at Niki and likely Myxx as well, but don't want my post to be condemned to the hellish nightmare we call the catacombs, I will do my best to remain of neutral volume and tone and maintain an air of icy-calm. I'll be frank, however.

-----

“The FIO answers directly to the President and its works are shrouded in secrecy and covert operations. It is believed to operate an extensive spy network that is only rivaled by the Jovians.”

FIO description.

Now, a little about the SDII, (Special Department of Internal Investigations) most notable the fact delivered from a number of defectors who believe the SDII to be a violation of the Federation's ideals (not to say they defected to other nations for personal gain, though that may well have been the case in some situations):

“The Black Eagles have a well-equipped, highly trained paramilitary arm. Black Eagle-uniformed troops have been seen on more than one occasion conducting security sweeps in high-sensitivity public zones. They are trained in every manner of covert infiltration, spaceborne and terrestrial, as well as the use of cutting-edge weaponry and tools of the trade. Due to prohibitive selection and training their numbers are not great at present, but growing rapidly.”

“The Black Eagles have a presence in space, though reports vary widely about the extent of their operational capacity. They are known to travel in specially commissioned dark-hulled versions of Gallente Navy staples. The exact capabilities of these vessels are unknown, but they are invariably reported to be more powerful than both their standard and Navy counterparts. Reports also unanimously agree that the Eagles possess a capsuleer contingent numbering over one hundred pilots (and presumably growing).”

“The Black Eagles have built up a ruthless image, one that indicates the agency will go to considerable lengths to make sure its objectives are met. This is the area most sparsely commented on by former agents. With very few exceptions, defectors have completely disavowed all knowledge of the illicit activities so often attributed to the Eagles, such as torture, blackmail and kidnapping. Whether this is down to the extreme sensitivity of such subjects or the actual absence of such activities from the modus operandi remains wholly unknown.”

From this, we gain a few insightful revelations... all these are noted above, and the ultimate conclusion is simple – the SDII are not unknowing, incompetent push-overs.



This brings me to the gist of the matter. Let's start on top and move down...

“This morning, a strike team assigned to the Risen Angels on behalf of Dominations successfully completed its first combat operation under my command.”

So far so good, ignoring the fact a relatively new Capsuleer force who claims loyalty to the Angels were assigned an apparently super-competent task-force. Moving on...

“The operation occurred at roughly 0700 NEST in Eugales at one of the Federal Defense Union's Deadspace Operations Station, the one where Myxx's Family, recently captured by the FIO, were being held for “questioning.”

How did your group know where these people where? How did you know the exact location of the dead-space station? Who told you? Seriphyn? Why would he, and did he also give you the exact coordinates to this place? Answer please.

“There were no causalities taken on by our forces during the operation; during which Members of the strike team wearing federal uniforms infiltrated the apartment block and escorted out Myxx's family. Minor combat broke out across several decks during the withdrawal, but all our soldiers survived, as well as Myxx's family.”

I could, for effect, tell you that I can't say how absurd this claim is, but I am just about to do so anyway so...

Let's begin. First of all, the infiltration means. You managed to find this station's location. Information held by one of the most secretive factions around. You managed to get on-board this station wearing Federal uniforms – a group of soldiers who the station attenders let on-board despite never having seen them before. Their security checks passed. Who got them the falsified SDII ID-tags and how did they work?

Secondly following the fact they managed to get onto the station, apparently in a ship that also cleared for arrival... they made their way to the apartment complex, past any and all security checks, and escorted out a group of people that were supposed to be there. Under house arrest. For questioning.

Apparently you had release papers for them too, and they were or seemed legitimate enough to get you far, if not all the way off the station. Oh wait...

“Minor combat” broke out across “several decks” during the time you left. So it appears the SDII were not utterly incompetent after all, saw through your ruse, and opened fire. If your objective however was to extract the family, I do wonder why you had forces across several decks.

Ignoring that, combat did break out. However, here is one more of the glaring errors you made.

“No friendly losses to the Angels.” Right. So a force that has a “well-equipped, highly trained paramilitary arm” and are “trained in every manner of covert infiltration, space-borne and terrestrial, as well as the use of cutting-edge weaponry and tools of the trade” not to mention that “due to prohibitive selection and training their numbers are not great at present, but growing rapidly” did not manage to kill even one Angel operative during this whole incident. Not one single casualty.

Let's move on. I am going to ignore the entire justificational your-the-evil-ones rant from Myxx about this and go on to the perhaps biggest error you made.

“Oh, and Seriphyn, my personnel left you a little present in the apartment. I'd advise you evacuate the apartment block before trying to go in there and collect the present as I'm really not sure how much damage a tactical nuke will do to your squishy human interrogators.”

Somehow, your strike-team knew where the facility was. They landed a ship there – that cleared security – and got their properly SDII-uniformed and armed soldiers past security checks and ID-examinations, they were also somehow scheduled to be there right then right there.

And they did this lugging around a tactical nuke, that even while being concealed, passed any and all means of scanning or inspection. You promptly carrier this past all manner of security and left it, armed, in the apartment you extracted the family from.

So, let's review.

You found out where one of the most secretive organizations in the cluster, had a secret base, and you found out that this exact station was the one who had the people you looked for.

You managed to get a ship and crew to this station without alerting or shooting yourself past the space-born guards flying above-Navy grade ships, if they even had any ships there, cloaked or otherwise.

You got past security with a tactical nuke in tow past any and all checkpoints, and you did this by either gunning down or lying to extremely competent or hand-picked men who specialize in knowledge and in keeping this knowledge.

You left the nuke in the apartment and took off with the family, back past all the security you walked by on your way in. Somehow despite combat it never occurred to the station attendants to shoot-up your ship, or hermetically seal the station once alarms went off – if they did – and no-one considered the idea of closing off any and all exits from the station, thus denying your men the right to leave.

You got out of the station, and apparently no ships were scrambled to stop you, or they were to incompetent to intercept you and shoot you down.

And despite overcoming all this, not one of your own operatives were harmed or killed.

-----

I was in severe dis-belief when you claimed that you had found survivors on Seyllin I, I assumed that you were merely god-moding despite numerous people informing you of this fact, repeatedly. I was in severe dis-belief when you claimed to be hunted down by an apparently super-incompetent FIO in space, long before even Seyllin. Again, my reaction was something akin to “Yeah, sure. That sounds so likely. Not really.”

This is, perhaps excluding Seyllin, one of your biggest god-moding sessions yet. If what I've heard from Seriphyn is accurate, Myxx and him had a co-opted scenario in place, that he had indeed apprehended Myxx's family as a response to her defection. Why you could not simply roll with that and make a co-opted, seriously fun RP session for all, is beyond me.

Wait, no it's not. This all makes him and his sound like glaring, incompetent, dribbling fools, while making you and yours sound and seem god-like and utterly unstoppable in comparison.

And Niki... that's not good. From the IGS and my information of how things have gone so far it appears that it's been less than the expected result for your corp, mostly. Your smacking turned to whining, and your co-opted RP turned into a god-moding post. I' sorry to say this but I fear less people will be interested in playing with you or RP'ing with you if this keeps up.

And that's a shame. Truly.

[Saede Riordan]

I'm just going to address each issue individually and hopefully you'll see where I was coming from, and yes, it may have been a bit god moddy, but in the end, that post was basically us lashing out at Seriphyn for making us headdesk as much as he did.

“The operation occurred at roughly 0700 NEST in Eugales at one of the Federal Defense Union's Deadspace Operations Station, the one where Myxx's Family, recently captured by the FIO, were being held for “questioning.”

How did your group know where these people where? How did you know the exact location of the dead-space station? Who told you? Seriphyn? Why would he, and did he also give you the exact coordinates to this place? Answer please.

That was one of the compromises with Seriphyn that I decided to keep. The station was originally going to be just the plain old FDU station there, but Seriphyn thought it was sort of over the top to have a bomb set off in the FDU station, and was reaching outside our bounds as players, I agreed and we moved the location to a deadspace outpost.

As for the location of Myxx's family, Myxx rped getting that information out over the course of several days, via various contacts within the FDU, TLF, and RSS, going after the weaker links then the SDII involved in the operation and working the facts out. For details, you'd have to see her, but it was all aboveboard on her part. She also acquired via this method FDU IDs, NOT SDII IDs.

“There were no causalities taken on by our forces during the operation; during which Members of the strike team wearing federal uniforms infiltrated the apartment block and escorted out Myxx's family. Minor combat broke out across several decks during the withdrawal, but all our soldiers survived, as well as Myxx's family.”

I could, for effect, tell you that I can't say how absurd this claim is, but I am just about to do so anyway so...

I'll address each issue separately.

Let's begin. First of all, the infiltration means. You managed to find this station's location. Information held by one of the most secretive factions around. You managed to get on-board this station wearing Federal uniforms – a group of soldiers who the station attenders let on-board despite never having seen them before. Their security checks passed. Who got them the falsified SDII ID-tags and how did they work?

All that is explained above.

Secondly following the fact they managed to get onto the station, apparently in a ship that also cleared for arrival... they made their way to the apartment complex, past any and all security checks, and escorted out a group of people that were supposed to be there. Under house arrest. For questioning.

Apparently you had release papers for them too, and they were or seemed legitimate enough to get you far, if not all the way off the station. Oh wait...

“Minor combat” broke out across “several decks” during the time you left. So it appears the SDII were not utterly incompetent after all, saw through your ruse, and opened fire. If your objective however was to extract the family, I do wonder why you had forces across several decks.

The way we played this was that the SDII had, at most 50-70 people defending Myxx's family. We Brought in 250 marines, and moved them through the station in small groups to converge on the apartment block. We'd said that the FDU IDs fooled the FDU troops, but the SDII were not fooled, forcing engagements. However, because of the confusion caused by our troops wearing FDU uniforms, it delayed and stunted the combat response enough to withdraw.

Ignoring that, combat did break out. However, here is one more of the glaring errors you made.

“No friendly losses to the Angels.” Right. So a force that has a “well-equipped, highly trained paramilitary arm” and are “trained in every manner of covert infiltration, space-borne and terrestrial, as well as the use of cutting-edge weaponry and tools of the trade” not to mention that “due to prohibitive selection and training their numbers are not great at present, but growing rapidly” did not manage to kill even one Angel operative during this whole incident. Not one single casualty.

This was to be honest a failure on my part. The way that Myxx and another member of my corp had decided to do it was to use a series of dice rolls to determine how many of our troops were killed. They made all their rolls, and despite being rather glaringly unrealistic, I said "eh whatever" and went with it. So yes, that ones on me.

“Oh, and Seriphyn, my personnel left you a little present in the apartment. I'd advise you evacuate the apartment block before trying to go in there and collect the present as I'm really not sure how much damage a tactical nuke will do to your squishy human interrogators.”

Somehow, your strike-team knew where the facility was. They landed a ship there – that cleared security – and got their properly SDII-uniformed and armed soldiers past security checks and ID-examinations, they were also somehow scheduled to be there right then right there.

And they did this lugging around a tactical nuke, that even while being concealed, passed any and all means of scanning or inspection. You promptly carrier this past all manner of security and left it, armed, in the apartment you extracted the family from.

Suitcase nuke fits in a suitcase, but yes, that was a wee bit of an oversight on our part, but I don't think its too large of one, since it could have been shielded from the scans, and had a package ID that allowed it to get through without being checked, but yes, I can see how that would be an issue.


-----

I was in severe dis-belief when you claimed that you had found survivors on Seyllin I, I assumed that you were merely god-moding despite numerous people informing you of this fact, repeatedly. I was in severe dis-belief when you claimed to be hunted down by an apparently super-incompetent FIO in space, long before even Seyllin. Again, my reaction was something akin to “Yeah, sure. That sounds so likely. Not really.”

This is, perhaps excluding Seyllin, one of your biggest god-moding sessions yet. If what I've heard from Seriphyn is accurate, Myxx and him had a co-opted scenario in place, that he had indeed apprehended Myxx's family as a response to her defection. Why you could not simply roll with that and make a co-opted, seriously fun RP session for all, is beyond me.

Don't bring up Seyllin. Thats not even anything I'm willing to discuss, merely that I was new at trying to RP and instead of someone taking me OOC and trying to explain it, I was promptly completely shot down and locked out of the community.

So do not bring up Seyllin.

Right, moving along.

Yes, our post was godmoddy but you know, it was supposed to be. The reason we used that post, worded like we did, was that we had spent the last 5 hours listening to Seriphyn tell us that everything we said was untrue, making compromises, going back on those compromises, and whining and whining and wanking about how awesome and superior to everything else the FDU and SDII were. We were pissed off, Ashar was on vent with me while I tried to work this out, he will confirm.
Basically according to Seri, everything we wanted to do wouldn't work. We wanted to do a covert thing, he wanted us to go in guns blazing and blow up the station and march thousands of troops through it and kill off tens of thousands of civilians and blah blah blah. Every time we tried to compromise he came down with "well thats not realistic because I said so and look how awesome the SDII is that would never work" we were at wits end, pissed off, but were starting to work something out, then he came and said that what we'd worked out wouldn't work, and we needed to scale up the conflict again. I said no. No I will not play your stupid inane games. I play this game to RP, not to spend 5 hours discussing how I'm going to make an IGS post. So we said screw it, and posted what we did.

Was it godmoddy? Yes.
Was it inbalanced and wanky? yes
did it shut Seri up? YES

[Silver Night]

[mod]Bloodbird's post:I appreciate that you were trying to keep a neutral tone. However, your post was largely "You're doing it wrong" type stuff. It's fine to disagree with someone's RP, but do it constructively - suggest what you might have done in that situation, for example. Just want to be clear, there is quite a bit of your post that is ok, but there are parts that cross the line. Just saying that someone is god moding and what they are doing is absurd and unbelievable doesn't qualify as constructive criticism.Please remember that we all interpret PF differently, so what you might feel is god-moding, someone else might feel is a perfectly reasonable scenario. Even if they are in the tiny minority on their view (I'm not saying Nikita is or isn't), attacking their approach as god-moding is unlikely to sway their opinion, while introducing them to how your views differ, and how they might have approached it differently, and what your view is probably has a better shot.Nikita's post: Responds to a modded post. Also, goes downhill, personal attacks toward the end.If either or both of you would like to repost within the guidelines, that is totally fine. I recognize there wasn't any ill-intent, and I certainly know how it is when someone seems to be 'messing up' a piece of PF that is dear to your heart (damn you TonyG!)[/mod]