[NecromancerAnne] Ban Note Appeal

[Ghilker]

BYOND account: Ghilker
Character name: Ghilkerium
Ban type: Server/role
Ban length: 3 Days server/7 days Antag
Ban reason:

Spoiler:

Time ban was placed: 03-10-2019 at 10:37 (server time)
Server you were playing on when banned: Sybil
Round ID in which ban was placed: 120618
Your side of the story: I'm not appealing the Ban itself, because i think it was deserved and i should have sticked to a private server to do my testings (even tho i only do that if i'm antag). What i'm contesting is the ban reason. I didnt use an exploit to kill everyone on the station, because the interaction between SM and Fusion not always work out and most of the time wont spread beyond the SM chamber (also this is not an exploit but is a feature of the server that need to be nerfed to ground, where hot gases heats up the SM crystal causing it to delaminate at a faster rate generating a big amount of radiation and power); what i used is just fusion flood to heat up the station by putting the hot gases into waste and distro, similar to a plasma flood but hotter and then i went around the station unwrenching pipes to haste up the flood since once started would have been impossible to stop.
All i want is to the ban reason to reflect the situation, since radiations didnt kill, but heat did.
Also when i joined i saw that the server had 30 people online, i dont know how many are really playing and the thing about antag items not avaiable under a certain amount of people was a thing i didnt know at the time.
For the last part, i dont know how to code, i'm making the most with what i can do and will report my discovery to the Github

[imsxz]

This isn't an exploit, it's fusion being a shitty game mechanic. As for points 2 and 3, 2 has never been bannable outside of EXTREME cases such as the ol' spam recall while murderboning on deadpop after being warned about doing it before. 3 isnt bannable unless he intentionally made it uninhabitable. Apologies if I made any incorrect assumptions, the ban reason didn't state intention to fuck up arrivals or past warnings for lowpop murderbone, so I assume there were none.

[TheMythicGhost]

As per his own admission, and logs can clarify this when Necro finally responds to this, but a relevant precedent regarding the instadeath field Fusion to SM to distro bug/exploit is the following:

Lone antagonists can do whatever they want.
Short of metagaming/comms, bug/exploit abuse, erotic/creepy stuff, OOC in IC or IC in OOC, and spawn-camping arrivals. Team antagonists can do whatever they want as per lone antagonists, as long as it doesn’t harm their team. Non-antagonists can do whatever they want to antagonists as per lone antagonists, but non-antagonists are not allowed to pre-emptively search for, hinder or otherwise seek conflict with antagonists without reasonable prior cause. Non-antags acting like an antag can be treated as an antag.

If he himself admitted to exploiting a known bug to instantly kill everyone, regardless of antagonist status, it is a rule 4 violation. Just thought I'd post the relevant precedent.

Also, the relevant log files for the round the incident took place are as follows: src, statbus, scrubby

[Ghilker]

problem is that i wasnt trying to use the fusion-SM "bug" (since is not a bug nor an exploit) to kill everyone, i made 2 fusion canisters for this purpose, one was to test what would need to get the SM to produce high amount of power (and i told the other admin that if i'm an antag i try this to do some testing wich i wont do anymore on live if is this bad) and then i used the other canister of fusion and hooked it up to distro and that was what killed everyone because the air got very very hot

also yes i didnt get any prior warning about any of this (not that is needed anymore)

edit: also there were 25 players online at the time https://scrubby.melonmesa.com/round/120618

[Reyn]

Server you were playing on when banned: <Server name, eg, Bagil/Sybil/Terry/Event Hall>

Sorry to interrupt, but you forgot to fill this in. That's all.

[Ghilker]

Edited, thanks!

[Shirbu]

I will copypaste what I explained in the admin bus.

Ghilkerium, a plasmaman atmos tech, was putting a canister of reacted fusion gas into the SM (reacted meaning very VERY hot, anywhere from 1e15 to 1e31 kelvin) when I PM'd him asking him what he hoped to achieve in doing so. He was a traitor, so I was not immediately put off by his actions, but I had recalled seeing him do the exact same thing on multiple occasions prior, with people in deadchat claiming that it would produce infinite rads, and kill all life on the station, and I wanted to know what was precisely happening. I began my admin PM by stating that I was just asking out of curiosity, and he answered my PM quickly, explaining that if conditions were correct, fusion gas put into the SM would produce what is effectively infinite rads.
It was at this point that I was told by Anne that that qualified as malicious bug exploitation, and that people in Arrivals were dying from rads. I sent a second PM, retracting my initial claim of friendly curiosity, letting the atmos tech know that this his actions were killing people in arrivals, and he reacted with apology, and said that he would do this only on a private server in the future. Since there was no history of this in his notes (though I was aware of his attempting this in the past), and there was no admin intervention in what could be considered to be a logical interaction between the supermatter crystal and insanely hot gasses, I resolved to leave a note/warning that he was officially warned to not do this in the future. At the time of my reporting that that was what I was going to do, Anne requested that a ban be placed for malicious bug exploitation. I fully agree with this decision, but I had begun my PM claiming that I was asking out of genuine interest rather than with the intent to incriminate, and didn't want to break the trust I had, however foolishly, built between myself and the atmos tech who responded honestly and with the intent to explain, and thus asked Anne to handle the ban in my stead.

[Shirbu]

It would not be hard to interpret the interaction between fusion and the SM not as a bug so much as an oversight. The supermatter crystal producing radiation that scales with the heat of its surrounding gasses is not unintended behavior, though when the values get as high as when fusion gets involved (up to one-tenth the Planck temperature, 1e31 kelvin) its anyone's guess which behaviors make sense, and which don't.

Irrespective, having the entire station z-level die from wall-penetrating, stack-overflowing radiation levels should not happen.

[Ghilker]

Yes I apologized and told you that I would try to reenact that experiment on a live server.
This one did not worked out, since radiation wasn't being produced at all by the SM
What I did was put my fusion canister into distro and allowed it to heat up the entirety of the station.
Then I went around unwrenching pipes that made the hot gases gush out to further spread the heat. Those gases are very hot and highly radioactive, thus the confusion about the radiation deaths.
What I ask is for the note placed on me to be corrected with the fact that I did not used a bug or exploit, but that I just flooded.
Im not contesting that what I did was right or wrong entirely, just that the note is not saying what I really did to end that round

[skoglol]

Maybe skirting the line into peanut posting, but ghilker clearly doesn't know how atmos works to an extent where he is able to defend himself. Stop kicking the retard.
- Gases are NOT radioactive.
- Putting hot gas into SM to make it emit rads is not an exploit, nor a bug. The amount of radiation due to the extreme heat is an oversight at best.
- He claims that the SM did not in fact emit instant husking rad waves, hence not even taking advantage of the oversight above. (Again, this boils down to not understanding atmos or any of what is happening.)
- Fusion heat in distro let onto station will spread the heat due to gas interaction, so not hitting arrivals shuttle is nigh impossible if the heat is high enough. If the arrivals shuttle is meant to be 100% safe (its not), then code/mapping needs to account for that. Do you ban the tesla releaser for destroying arrivals shuttle?
- Murderbone or tesla/singulo release is not disallowed on lowpop by rules or headmin rulings. Why would killing everyone with a fusion flood be.

Ghilker repeatedly trying to fuck shit up (reaching the nan or overflow states on his fusion gas interactions) is closer to actual bug abuse, but not relevant for this appeal.

Edit: Edited the peanut part out, when collaborating on a thread avoid giving your opinion.

[Ghilker]

It's been more than a week, can this be sorted?

[NecromancerAnne]

I'm sorry this has taken as long as it has to be responded too. I actually have been exceptionally busy as of late and actually I passed this onto the headmins to resolve because it was a note appeal, as I knew I wouldn't get to it in a timely manner. That hasn't happened either, so I'm responding now.

I'll start by saying that the note was based on the information I was given by Shirbu and his conversation with you, and the ahelp exchange between the two of you. I was observing this conversation and he was telling me what he believed to be happening. Given I would consider Shirbu to be an experienced engineer player who knows his stuff better than I do, and that he said he had used similar things, I took his word for it.

I was mostly resolved to keeping this to a coversation until another admin pointed out that you essentially stated rather plainly you actually were deliberately utilizing these mechanics because you know full well they're broken and this is some kind of effort on your part to force change through excessive use of the mechanic.

If you are aware something is broken, and you overuse it because it is broken, then admit that this overuse is also because in your own words, you wanting the coders to fix the thing you are overusing, then that seems to me like exploitation or at the very least an attempt to find broken mechanics to actually exploit.

Let's not beat around the bush here. Whether it was a cascading heatwave that kills everyone alive within an atmosphere with 100% reliability and replication that is almost trivial to those who know how to do it, or a radiation cascade from pouring fusion into the supermatter that does the same job. You know these things are excessively powerful and unanswerable. And you are using them over and over and over again becaue you want to find the way to make them actually break the game.

I'll budge on the fact that as an admin I probably shouldn't label this as an exploit so hastely. But I will say that using something to excess is almost certanly something I can act on, and especially with seemingly malicious intent for the playerbase in order to bully someone into making game changes.

Here is a hint: do what Oranges often states enough already. If you want to see change, be the one to make that change. What you're doing is making everyone else sit through another round of you gaming shitcode to your advantage to make some empty statement about the state of the code, which is no noble act when you are in a long line of similar people who are doing the same thing for even less noble reasons.

So I will clarify in the note that rather than you actively having exploited something in this round, you are deliberately attempting to utilize poorly designed mechanics to a malicious degree in order to both strongarm the playerbase into rectifying the code, and that you are actually looking for exploitation in live rounds to which everyone else has to put up with the fallout (no pun intended). Demonstrating mechanics like this is otherwise fine and interesting only once or twice and simply to show something new. Not live refining of a technique to discover the perfect way to actually break the game in half to reach potentially unintended effects of poorly designed code.

[Ghilker]

Just some clarifications

I was mostly resolved to keeping this to a coversation until another admin pointed out that you essentially stated rather plainly you actually were deliberately utilizing these mechanics because you know full well they're broken and this is some kind of effort on your part to force change through excessive use of the mechanic.

What i told the other admin was that was trying to reproduce the radiation boom by heating up the SM, i knew about it, but i never done that and i wanted to see what temperatures makes that happen (the other times he saw me putting the fusion canister in the SM were because i was an antag and that was a quick way to delaminate the SM, at that time i wasnt aware of fusion/SM interactions)

If you are aware something is broken, and you overuse it because it is broken, then admit that this overuse is also because in your own words, you wanting the coders to fix the thing you are overusing, then that seems to me like exploitation or at the very least an attempt to find broken mechanics to actually exploit.

Is not exploitation, because i used a feature to heat up the station, how's my fault that is coded badly? also i dont overuse it, is not everytime that i get antag, most time i do fusion is to beat my own record of doing it. Also i never flood the station before the one hour mark (unless shits are already going down)

Let's not beat around the bush here. Whether it was a cascading heatwave that kills everyone alive within an atmosphere with 100% reliability and replication that is almost trivial to those who know how to do it, or a radiation cascade from pouring fusion into the supermatter that does the same job. You know these things are excessively powerful and unanswerable. And you are using them over and over and over again becaue you want to find the way to make them actually break the game.

I'm not trying to find a way to break the game, where did you get that? Also as you say later "If you want to see change, be the one to make that change" well i'm not a coder, i have no idea how to do things and how to make those changes, otherwise i would do it, all i can do is report the things that happens.
Even a plasmaflood well done is impossible to stop and reliable and replicable 100%

So I will clarify in the note that rather than you actively having exploited something in this round, you are deliberately attempting to utilize poorly designed mechanics to a malicious degree in order to both strongarm the playerbase into rectifying the code, and that you are actually looking for exploitation in live rounds to which everyone else has to put up with the fallout (no pun intended).

i was antagonist, what malicious degree? the radiation thing was a test i've done ONCE on a live server, and i dont look for exploitations to abuse, i look for bugs to report, now if doing fusion and using it to flood is bug abuse i dont know what to say to you
also what you are saying is that atmos shouldnt use fusion as a mean to kill the life in the station because is an exploitation.

[Hulkamania]

I'm going to be moving this thread as the administrator has already given a final denial, but also including a couple of things.

We have in the past banned when someone knowingly uses something that is an absolutely unfair exploit (such as generating infinite amounts of TC) that takes little to all counterplay away from any efforts people would make to stop it.
Additionally I would like to point out again that the author of this thread has openly admitted to deserving the ban, so while the specifics might be important they're more fit to a policy thread rather than a ban appeal. The administrator has amended the note according to what they think is fair and that is the end of the appeal.