No, this is not a post in defense to the statements made by @Xalrok in the XA- officialdom thread. Much rather it's an admission of the opposite. I'm finding it hard to express myself, but I'll give it a try regardless. I will however request that people don't turn this thread into an opportunity to snipe at anybody, but to just see it as what it is and take my admissions at face-value. If you can sympathize, then I'm happy, but don't weaponize that sympathy against the people whom might be involved in these disputes.
Let me preface this by giving you the short and narrow of what I'm going to explain at length in the rest of this post. Which is that my behavior has been severely lacking in overall maturity, grace and civility. I've been exceedingly aggressive and in most cases without any warrant for such behavior. It only started to occur to me when I felt like I just wasn't behaving like myself anymore, because by contrast I'm a very quiet and reserved person in reality. I avoid conflict and in most cases even people so as to help bypass the former.
I don't think it's any one person's fault that I'm behaving like this. I do think there are cliques which exist who, whether they know it or not, have a harmful impact on the server by how they throw dirt at the people around them and make them feel like crap. I can't withhold the fact that I've been in such situations, where seemingly without any motivation to do so I've been subject to merciless verbal assault and ridicule. It got me thrown out of the first faction I was a part of when I first joined, and while I did manage to re-join and get past the differences, both the faction and by extension the community have never felt the same to me.
I'm sure this won't be the first time you've heard this, but when you're new here there's an almost indescribable sense of awe and wonder for the apparent scale and depth of the role-play environment and its associated universe. I heavily regret having to admit, that if it weren't for several elements in the community, this feeling would never go away. We're horrible to one another, never kind and never understanding. Behavior like that has a cyclical effect, it chews people up and makes them bitter and unnecessarily rude. It's made me a kind of person that I quite frankly just don't want to be. I know I shouldn't have let my negative experiences harden into spite, but it's hard to steel yourself from its effects when they seem omnipresent. I feel like I need to keep my guard up with people in the community, regardless of how friendly they seem. And at first glance upon that fact introspectively, I know it isn't a healthy way to go about things.
I feel like it's really simple that a good community can prop up a bad game, but if you can't foster community then your game is doomed to fail and die a slow, painful death. I feel like a lot of people, whether intentional or not, are sabotaging the server's overall quality by perpetuating this cycle of abuse. And even though I've struggled to express all of this and put my thoughts into words, I'm sure the things that have turned me bitter won't change. Stuff like this is especially pronounced in smaller communities like ours, and that makes their effects more pervasive and generally more harmful. At least in cases of larger communities, the one or two people with abusive attitudes are drowned out by enough helpful voices that the cycle never loops you into it.
Discovery doesn't have this benefit. And I do have to admit I've become a part of the problem. I'm going to wrap up this post here, I just hope the vicious cycle of spite and bias I've seen circulate through this community can be broken at some point. And please, don't misrepresent any of the things I've just said as a justification to throw stones in our already decrepit glass-house.
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