*A Winter of Discontent - Printable Version

*A Winter of Discontent - Printable Version

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*A Winter of Discontent - Baron1898 - 08-06-2022

A Winter of Discontent

The Darkest Days in League History

Volume I | Volume II

March 9, 2019. The league was buzzing, awash with excitement and activity. Five days prior, the reddit recruitment drive had opened the gates to the famous draft class of Season 15. Yours truly posted her second ever media article that morning, and I was far from alone - the entire rookie class was writing and creating and infusing the atmosphere with unrivaled energy.

That same morning, @bovovovo posted a terse announcement in the forum stepping down from his spot in Head Office. Absent an explanation as to why he left, he instead told people to PM him directly if they wanted to know. Only a short time later, @Muford also left his Head Office position without ever posting publicly.

We rookies, and most of the league, had no idea that we had just witnessed the end of one of the bleakest periods in ISFL history.

Introduction: The Eleventh Hour

[Image: 05bn4Bx.png]

Credit to @Swanty

It is difficult to conceive just how different the league used to be. Before the S15 class, there had not been a draft class with over 50 new creates in well over a calendar year. Just by looking at the graph above, one can easily see just how starved the league was for recruitment. The smallest three draft classes of all time, and eleven of the bottom sixteen, all took place in this timeframe. The community was much smaller and less vibrant than it is today.

That does not mean that the community was less explosive. On the contrary, many of the largest scandals and controversies of all time happened while this league was still relatively young. In such a wild environment, toxicity spread with ease. Any given incident could spark endless arguments amidst a sea of replies and responses - and while there have certainly been a fair share of such ignitions even in the modern ISFL, no contemporary scandal could hope to rival the desolate backdrop of the months before March 2019. It was the perfect environment for disaster. And one core incident at its center would illuminate the rotting foundations of the entire league, festering and spreading largely behind the scenes and nearly destroying the NSFL altogether.

Two disclaimers. One, this story involves quite a lot of events and conflict that happened behind the scenes and in private chats, stuff that was never recorded on the forums and which can only be relayed through hearsay of a scant few users, narrators whose view of the past might be unreliable or biased. Two, the drama here is really, really old. It is not in any way meant to be reflective of present-day relationships between the users involved nor meant to dig up old enmities. Nonetheless, into this drama we must wade.

This article is a loose adaptation of one of former commissioner @ADwyer87's extensive, and often frustratingly vague, exit interview podcasts.

Key Listening: HO 3 – The Time of Troubles

Unfortunately, this article had to be split up into volumes because of the forum’s restrictions on post length. You can access the other volume in the navigation bar above.

Part I: Draft Mockery

It began in the Season 12 offseason. The New Orleans Second Line, fresh off their fourth straight Ultimus appearance and third straight matchup against the Baltimore Hawks, came home with their second franchise title. The upcoming pool of draftees looked pretty robust, at least for the standards of the day, and so there were a couple of mock drafts posted in the media forum. One of them, though not the most popular by views or replies, came from @kckolbe.

Key Reading: Draft Tips From an Insider, Without Illegal Insider Info

Kolbe at the time was a prolific media writer and the star young quarterback of the Arizona Outlaws, although he as a user hailed back from Season 2. In lieu of providing specific players he thought would go at each team's selection, kolbe went the route of providing what he saw as each team's positional needs and best choices. The specificity of this varied between teams. He ranged from saying Colorado needed "everything" to outright calling Errol Maddox as Baltimore's pick at 2OA, although he clarified that Baltimore had already announced this pick.

There was only one issue. As the title of the article implied, kolbe was not just any user but an "insider" who was a member of Arizona's war room. Furthermore, the mock draft was published two days after the S12 pre-draft process had already started, and the entire first round had not only been selected but was posted inside the Outlaws war room. That Baltimore selection of Errol Maddox hadn’t even been publicly announced; the Hawks GM at the time, @iamslm22, had told only the Baltimore locker room and three other users in private messages, among them @Oles, Muford, and kolbe.

The 13th Head Office session, which had only begun a day before kolbe's article, consisted of league commissioner Dwyer, Oles, @DeathOnReddit, Muford, and recent hire @bovovovo. HO caught wind of the mock draft, with multiple users across league war rooms piecing together that kolbe's article was in fact a leak, and they were faced with the dilemma of how to deal with the article. If they attempted to take down kolbe's mock while leaving up other mock draft articles, it would have inevitably revealed that his draft was accurate to the community at large and ruined the draft.

Moreover, HO was generally hesitant to communicate with kolbe regarding the impending punishment. Kolbe had held a reputation for contention and drama for a long time and had a history of scorn for HO. According to Dwyer, they worried that telling him of his wrongdoing, or attempting to delete his post, would spur him towards airing out the drama in public and ruining the still-ongoing mock draft PT. So they waited, and the draft aired on December 3 without any hint of brewing trouble.

Funnily enough, during the draft stream on Twitch, kolbe commented that the fact these mock drafts were so accurate stunk of leaking.

Bovo brought the hammer down on kolbe's punishment thread almost immediately after the conclusion of the draft. Although HO acknowledged that everything in kolbe's mock draft could have been reasoned out independently, his access to the results of the draft before publication and his self-admitted desire to boost the average mock draft TPE meant that his article fell under the umbrella of leaking draft information. He was fined $8 million and prohibited from earning mock draft TPE or participating in war room drafting for the next two offseasons.

Key Reading: kckolbe punishment

There was some argument in the comments of this punishment, by which I mean @YoungTB arguing a number of points and most everyone else agreeing with HO's perspective. Of course, there was one notably upset party: kolbe himself. A few hours after the punishment was made public, he said:

Quote:Wow. One would think I would have been contacted by HO to provide my side prior to a punishment. I will be appealing.

I find it disgusting that HO waited this long after my article was published before handing down a punishment, yet still apparently chose not to investigate.

It did not take kolbe long to strike back. Later on December 4, kolbe wrote a long discussion post describing his anger at having been "slandered across the entire league" without ever having first been contacted by HO. He conceded that he already knew who was picked when writing his article but went point by point to demonstrate that each of his predictions could have been reasoned out without any prior knowledge whatsoever. Kolbe also attacked the notion that he would cheat for extra TPE by bringing up past media and actions that proved he was actually a helpful person.

Key Reading: My "Appeal"

In short, kolbe believed that he had done nothing wrong. He had no history of cheating and had not slipped any leaked information into his mock. While most of his post focused on his grounds for appeal, which would be the league's first official appeal of a punishment with the new appeals team, kolbe took the time to go on the offensive against Head Office. He attacked bovo's posting of the punishment thread, suggesting he had the power to unilaterally prevent its posting, and went on to say:

Quote:To all of HO: what the fuck were you doing? You had a week to investigate this, and not once did any of you contact me about this. I hate that this has to be considered an appeal, because appeals take place after the trial has concluded, but I had no trial. This is my initial defense, as I was given no opportunity to defend myself prior to being slandered across the entire league. The fact that we have an appeals process doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your fucking jobs in the first place. This is willful negligence of your responsibilities, and I genuinely hope your pay this season is forfeit as a result.

HO's gamble to not contact kolbe in the middle of their investigation backfired – far from preventing kolbe's ire, it only stoked it. This was compounded when bovo and Oles gave conflicting reasons in this thread why no contact was made. Bovo said that it was such a black and white case that there was no need to reach out; Oles said that it was internal miscommunication because HO was waiting until after the draft. Kolbe, of course, noticed the differences in perspectives.

There were many other smaller threads running through the post. Kolbe disputed that war room members couldn't make mock drafts once the draft had started since it wasn't explicitly written in the rulebook. Other users lamented the prevalence of drama in the league over relatively simple punishments like this one. Still others launched into a debate over how the new appeals system worked. Like many decisions at the time, the entire thread was clouded by a general anti-Head Office sentiment that tended to poison the well of public sentiment.

One small detail in kolbe's tirade was a mention of @7hawk77, a former Head Office member with whom kolbe felt particularly inspired to call out in comparison to bovo. By then inactive, 7hawk77 caught wind of this mention, told kolbe to stay trashy, and then posted a long diatribe-turned-copypasta in the Thunderdome that took a mere seven minutes to get locked. 7hawk77 himself has little relevance to the story thereafter – this was the third-to-last post he ever wrote – but his scathing remarks against kolbe help paint a picture of a controversial user whose actions only sowed more discord from this point onwards.

Further Reading: Good bye knuckleball

The comments were a mess. Oles was quick to argue kolbe's point, stating that everyone in HO had incessantly pushed to launch before the World Series ended despite his objections and that he received minimal help testing despite pleading for backup. Many users took issue with kolbe throwing Oles and others under the bus. Kolbe and Oles personally went back and forth many times in the thread, arguing over how much power kolbe had had as commish in the league's start-up and how many of the issues were his responsibility. Kolbe was furious about what he saw as taking the blame for the failures of others.

While kolbe's wild ride as league commissioner was far from over, and neither was the controversy around his blame-shifting and fights with other PBE leaders, he more relevantly went inactive for a spell in the NSFL in early 2018. This did not do much to repair the relationship between him and Oles. Oles actively complained in league discord servers about how kolbe had ruined PBE for him. Kolbe did return to the league by April, right around the time Oles joined Head Office, and was teammates with him for a time in Philadelphia while they both finished out their first players' careers.

The next major skirmish happened in August. Oles posted an announcement detailing an extensive list of reworks touching nearly every facet of TPE earning. Training camp distribution became much more weighted to the start of a career, PT deadlines were pushed to Sunday night, weekend PTs were converted into Trivia posts, Milestones were discarded, and the TPE of the mock draft and season predictions tasks were shifted. Most of these reforms are still intact or nearly intact today.

Key Reading: PPT Rework

Since the changing of the training camps in particular would mean certain seasons of players would lose out on TPE, Oles clarified that the next training camp would include remedial claims for those affected. This was not good enough for kolbe, who asked multiple times in the comments whether retroactively earned TPE would be awarded to players who missed out on the new, higher early TPE camps. Kolbe also raised issue with the fact that this change just happened to be implemented as both Oles and Dwyer started their recreate careers. In his view, the NSFL HO only ever seemed to change the rules when they stood to benefit from it.

The two clashed again two months later in October over the new Trivia point task. Kolbe received no TPE for one week's task because he didn't submit a PM to Oles, who ran the Trivia task at the time. He did post in the appropriate trivia thread. After speaking with both Oles and another member of HO privately, the former denied that kolbe had sent a PM and refused his appeal for the points. Kolbe was infuriated that the trivia instructions were unclear and allowed for no recourse despite his forum comment. Writing the Thunderdome post ultimately did little to improve his fortunes.

At this point, there was no love lost between Oles and kolbe. Each user, from his point of view, resented the other's abuses of power and lack of responsibility for their own actions. The stage was set for a proper conflagration. All that was needed was a spark, a larger incident that just so happened to combine kolbe's long-held dislike of Head Office and his distrust of Oles' motivations.

Flash forward to December 13, 2018. Ten days after the initial punishment, bovo posted the results of kolbe's appeal. The appeals committee concluded that although kolbe's article did fit the bill of draft leaking, and there was precedent for similar actions being punished, this relied on a more inclusive reading of the rules than what was actually written in the rulebook. Therefore, Head Office decided to reduce the severity of kolbe's punishment by shortening his bans on earning mock draft TPE and participating in draft war rooms to one season each.

Key Reading: kckolbe appeal decision

Pretty much everyone agreed that this was a fair appeal, even kolbe, and appreciated the steps Head Office was taking to amend the rules so that this sort of situation wouldn't happen in the future. Kolbe did not hesitate to strike while the iron was hot. Only hours later, he posted a long article in the suggestions forum detailing his experiences and complaints with the punishment and appeals processes and his recommended solutions for each.

Specifically, kolbe smarted over the lack of communication between himself and HO throughout the entire process. He complained that HO didn't look through the evidence closely enough and that the result of an appeal went right back to the same HO that punished him. Kolbe's problems and solutions boiled down to accountability. He wanted HO to guarantee the examination of all evidence, including talking to the user involved, and to have their votes on punishments and appeals publicly available for the league to see.

Key Reading: Proposal to HO Punishment Process

There were a good number of comments discussing or criticizing some of his suggestions. The fear of public witch hunts and drama was brought up, including by bovo, as a potential consequence of publishing member votes. @Symmetrik saw no need for the appeals committee to get a final vote in the appeal like kolbe suggested, since their recommendation already expressed their opinion. Kolbe thought them having a vote would counterbalance lingering bias from HO; Dwyer pitched in to dispute such bias, given that HO in this very case had reduced kolbe's punishment.

But the real spice came from a lengthy comment by Oles combing through kolbe's points. Regarding the lack of communication, Oles said:

Quote:Normally someone reaches out, and I make it a priority to do it in cases where I can devote the time to communicating with said person. Now, I shouldn't have to tell you why I saw it as as a possible conflict considering the relationship that we have. Thus, I figured someone else would talk with you and get your side of the story, if I had messaged you there is a chance that it would be detrimental for you to not appeal your side to an already biased source considering what has happened in the past. I should've made sure that someone talked with you no matter what, but it slipped my mind and I was focused on DSFL and real life, since DSFL duties come first for me.

It should be noted that Oles was at this point, in addition to his positions in Head Office and the Player Progression Team, the DSFL commissioner and simmer.

Oles took issue with kolbe's insinuation that HO had not put any effort into investigating the matter before extending punishment. He noted that sim had been an advocate for kolbe's case and had provided evidence regarding knowledge of Maddox at second overall. Like bovo, Oles expressed trepidation that voting records would lead to witch hunts and harassment.

To kolbe, this response was a lie. Because Oles had voted without knowing if kolbe had been contacted by his own admission, he either didn't know all the evidence or knew from the start that kolbe wasn't contacted and voted anyways. Oles struck back almost immediately and denied that kolbe's side of the story equated to automatic innocence or that not having his direct testimony meant not having all available evidence. Clearly exasperated, Oles worked in a personal dig against kolbe's PBE history:

Quote:I also have other stuff to worry about than someone who wants to skirt every possible gray area. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do since I am a commissioner, something you wouldn't know about.

This was a step too far for kolbe. Soon after his appeal concluded, kolbe submitted a report to HO calling out Oles for lying, harassment, and clear bias during the investigation. Kolbe's worst fears were confirmed for him by leaked chat messages he received from a still-unknown whistleblower, one that showed a personal desire for revenge on the part of Oles and that became a rather famous league meme.

[Image: PxY9oeW.png]

Key Reading: "I Wanna Punish That Fucker"

Kolbe posted a laundry list of evidence that he purported to show bias and the pushing of a false narrative. Some of his points were more solid than others. For example, the matter of how kolbe knew the Maddox pick:

Quote:
Quote:I'll give something from my point of view. Hawks did not make the Maddox pick public, and Slm told me, muford, and kolbe who they were planning at 2, along with his locker room iirc. Kolbe then said that Hawks said it publicly, after the draft had started, which is leaking a pick. Even if it had been known before hand, which it wasn't, it would still be leaking a pick from a member of a war room. This isn't the only evidence either.

At this point, I had only mentioned the source once, and that was in the initial article. I did not say it was public, but rather that you told me.

Kolbe was actually incorrect here, or at least the wording was unclear enough that Oles' reading of it was perfectly reasonable. From his mock draft article:

Quote:#2: Baltimore said pre-draft that Maddox is gonna be their pick. Definitely surprising, as they are pretty loaded on receivers, but there it is.

His second piece of evidence, at least the portion referring back to this same Maddox pick, was again rather shaky and dependent on misreading poor word choice.

Quote:
Quote:Now, as for leaking itself. First up, I'd say pick number 2 is a good spot to start. You have said that Slm made this info public multiple times, yet he did not.

Again, he claims that I stated you made the pick public "multiple times." My claim throughout, which was the truth, was that you told ME. So this is twice he has made this false claim. It may be minor, but it is false information that he consistently brings up on his own, demonstrating him going out of his way to spread false information about this case.

From kolbe's appeal:

Quote:#2: I named the exact pick. Again, reference the above discord post.

[For reference:
SPAM11/24/2018
Hey guys, just posting this here before the pre-draft starts, but it looks like Riposte, Maddox, Mughes for the first 3
Riposte is a guess, but Maddox is from slm himself]

The GM of the Balitmore Hawks told me the pick, and I shared it with the locker room immediately. Granted, he could have been lying, but I consider him a friend and did not think he was. Again, nothing in the article that wasn’t already public, because I’d made it public days beforehand.

So did kolbe say slm made the pick public "multiple times"? No, he did not. But by zeroing in on this wording, kolbe deliberately or accidentally missed the rest of Oles' justification for why kolbe posting the Maddox pick in the team discord, even before the draft started, still didn't make his article not leaking information.

Quote:...You have said that Slm made this info public multiple times, yet he did not. A team's locker room is not making it public, messaging it to you is not making it public, you saying it to Outlaws LR is not making it public. A discord channel that is only open to players on the team is not making the pick public, and if slm would have made a similar post saying Hike Mughes was the Outlaws pick, after round 1 had completed, he would have faced a similar punishment. This info was never made public prior to the draft, he could've told you maddox was pick number 2, but ultimately you cant confirm that until the draft happens. That's where my main leaking belief lies and why I think a punishment was fair.

The remainder of kolbe's argument is less easy to disprove from a dispassionate viewpoint. Kolbe accused Oles of making up a restriction against war room members making mock drafts, which, while easy enough to infer from the rulebook, certainly was not written down expressly. Kolbe felt that Oles' invocation of such was therefore completely inadmissible. In essence, the two were simply divided on the matter of strict textualism.

Kolbe's final point again harped on the lack of communication with him and Oles' original justification for it from the appeal article. This, in conjunction with the leaked image, proved to kolbe without a shadow of a doubt that Oles had deliberately targeted him unfairly for punishment in order to exact a personal vendetta. This was not enough proof for Head Office. No action occurred for several days, and after slm told kolbe that "nothing's gonna happen aside from a private reprimand," kolbe went to the court of public opinion by posting the text of his report to the Thunderdome.

The general response was pretty muted compared to other famous drama threads. But ignoring all the shitposters, many of the early replies argued that kolbe was being overly dramatic about personal beef between him and Oles. Putting it plainly, @caltroit_red_flames said that "no one wants to see your dirty laundry." Two replies heated up the drama: YoungTB stating that Oles' leaked messages cast a bad light on his decisions as a member of HO, and kolbe himself looping in the rest of HO with the comment:

Quote:Since then, it's been proven that at least one member of HO did hate me and did allow that hatred to take precedence over procedure and basic integrity, and that the rest of HO, when confronted by violations from one of their own, chose not to punish him despite admitting his actions were wrong.

Slm responded that the leaked picture was taken out of context and was obviously more of a joke by Oles than serious proof of bad intent. Slm also clarified that the exchange happened in GM chat, not HO chat, and that it was unlikely any member of Head Office was the leaker. For kolbe, however, the context of this one message didn't matter when presented with the overwhelming evidence of harassment by Oles across all the other stages of punishment and appeal.

Kolbe was not the only user who viewed this as harassment. Oles himself was incredibly upset by kolbe dragging his name through the mud in thread after thread, week after week, in the culmination of a year's worth of grievances. He, along with Muford, pushed the rest of Head Office to establish new harassment rules and to punish kolbe with them.

Dwyer and bovo did not condone that course of action. Although Oles' anger was understandable, Dwyer felt that the best route was to simply calm down and let it go. He was concerned about the optics of punishing kolbe for harassment after he had just called out a member of Head Office. With @Raven just having replaced DeathonReddit in HO, the motion was put to a vote. Muford and Oles voted to press charges; Dwyer, bovo, and Raven voted against it.

Neither kolbe nor Oles got the harassment charges they desired. Oles' resentment in particular at the 3-2 HO vote against charging kolbe drove a wedge within league upper management. Oles and Muford were afraid that others were out to make them look bad and get rid of them; another camp, primarily headed by bovo and slm, accused the pair of being motivated by personal vendettas. It did not help that the drama with kolbe, far from being an isolated incident, was unfolding side-by-side with a whole host of other controversies.

Part III: Paranoia Strikes Deep

On November 28, the same day that kolbe posted his mock draft article, a new user named @BountyHunter registered on the forums. They joined at 7:25 p.m. and last visited 28 minutes later. Without context, they were less than a blip on the radar, one of many new users who sign up and then decide it isn't for them. What no one realized was that this was no ordinary visitor – this was a multi created by @SwagSloth, a well-known veteran user and star Arizona defensive tackle.

By his own admission, SwagSloth was morbidly curious about creating a multi and finally pulled the trigger on making one. It only took around an hour for him to regret his decision. Fully aware how serious a multi offense was, SwagSloth had every incentive to walk away from the BountyHunter account forever and never speak a word to anyone. He had never even posted. The odds of someone discovering his transgression was infinitesimally small.

That wasn't the road he chose to take. The following night, SwagSloth self-reported his multi to Head Office. In a statement about his reasoning, he said:

Quote:The idea that I might get caught down the road and severely damage my reputation wasn't worth it in hindsight. I've worked for over a year to build a good reputation here and this is a blight on that. I hope that my decision to come forward will count for something in the long run.

SwagSloth's punishment came in the day after, November 30. Because he came forward on his own volition, he received a reduced punishment in line with other multi punishments. SwagSloth was banned from the forums for two weeks, handed an indefinite mod suspension with room to appeal in two seasons, and fined $6 million. Andrew Reese was also given a 4 game suspension.

Key Reading: SwagSloth Punishment

To put it mildly, this ruling was divisive. Multiple users found the scale of punishment incredibly harsh, especially when compared to the much more serious and large-scale multi scheme of @ErMurazor. They reasoned that a decision like this might discourage future users from admitting fault in the future. Other users, including current members of HO, defended punishing SwagSloth as a matter of principle. They saw the Er scandal as a demonstration of why multis needed to be a zero tolerance affair.

Further Reading: The Curious Case of Arizona Multis

There were familiar battle lines drawn in the arguments around SwagSloth's multi. Both in the discussions within HO and in the punishment thread, Oles and Muford – along with Dwyer – favored punishing SwagSloth, even lightly, for clear violation of league multi rules to set a standard. Meanwhile, among those who pushed heavily for reduced or even no punishment at all, inside and outside of HO chat, were kolbe, bovo, and slm. Despite a plea from the latter user, however, SwagSloth's last statement before starting his forum ban affirmed that he would not appeal his punishment.

The Head Office grouping that produced this punishment was short-lived. On December 11, the 14th Head Office session began when Raven replaced DeathOnReddit. Raven, and bovo before him, were the results of long campaigns by Dwyer to get them onboard. HO had struggled for months to pull in viable candidates for replacements whenever a member stepped down. It was shortly after Raven joined that a solution to this problem was created: the position of the HO intern. Dwyer was hoping that an assistant-like role could help reduce the trepidation and fear of a full position and allow the other members to feel out recruits' commitment and contributions.

On December 20, HO hired its first two interns. The first was @Trautner, who graduated to a full-time job in Head Office within a month. The second was @Kendrick, who didn't end up contributing that much during his tenure. Kendrick specifically was hired because of his past successes with recruiting, an area the league was in sore need of improvement.

But Kendrick was something of a notorious figure in the NSFL community. Well-known for getting into fights with other users, Kendrick was also the center of notable controversy two months earlier, when @Drizzy posted an article on October 16 accusing him of stealing signatures. Using an uploaded PSD file of Drizzy's player signature in the SHL, Kendrick had essentially ripped layers from the original image and used some mild cosmetic changes to pass it off as his own work.

Key Reading: intellectual property theft is real

It was widely agreed that Kendrick had indeed plagiarized Drizzy's work. But since Kendrick only used it for a signature and didn't submit the work for graphics credit, was there really a basis for punishment? Head Office didn't think so. After locking the thread, HO posted a punishment thread later that same day where they announced that Kendrick would not be punished for using Drizzy's assets. Their ruling did acknowledge his actions as plagiarism, but since he never gained anything from it besides a signature, they let him off with a warning.

Key Reading: Kendrick Ruling

This was received well… at first. Kendrick's response acknowledged that he had done wrong but admitted that he neither knew Drizzy in SHL or knew where he got the PSD from. Some users, including caltroit, implied that Drizzy was making a mountain out of a molehill and that he should have talked to Kendrick privately first before publicizing the drama. An incensed Drizzy replied:

Quote:Yeah totally silly that I don't want someone who's been making sigs for like ten irl years to straight up steal something he put effort into making. If you contributed something to a league other than a toe curling sense of self righteousness you might have some right to judge but until then just don't bother

Slm agreed with Drizzy's view that Kendrick, as a long-time sim league and graphics veteran, should have known better. He also implied that Kendrick's defense was subpar; when caltroit mentioned Kendrick's earlier defense in the thread, slm clarified that he was talking about his messages with Head Office during the investigation "where he was his usual mature self." Obvious sarcasm aside, the would-be scandal ultimately fizzled out and everyone moved on with their lives.

Until nine days later. HO created a second punishment thread for Kendrick on the 25th, this time detailing how Kendrick had stolen another user's graphics for his S10 Ultimus Week submissions. He was fined 5 TPE and 7 million dollars and was banned from submitting graphics for pay for the season.

Key Reading: Kendrick Punishment

Understandably, a lot of users immediately began clowning on Kendrick. Although the UW graphics were technically submitted on October 5, before the situation with Drizzy, the fact that Kendrick got punished for graphics plagiarism twice in two weeks was hilarious. The season ban part of the punishment prompted two opposite reponses: those who thought it was pointless because Kendrick could simply wait until the ban was over and receive the same GFX pay, and those who thought that Head Office was being very selective with who they chose to punish.

One of the latter users was kolbe. Kolbe attacked DeathOnReddit's and HO's bias by pointing to two previous incidents, both involving Otters players, where the rules were broken and no punishment was handed out. The details of these prior scandals, while interesting in their own right, are too many degrees of separation from our main events to explore in detail.

There are plenty of well-respected users with blemishes on their past, and such blemishes don't preclude a user from later taking a management position. Kendrick did not fit this bill. Notorious even before he twice stole the graphics assets of other users, Kendrick's hiring as an intern made a great many people upset.

Slm was one such unhappy camper. There was a considerable volume of bickering back and forth between him and Head Office concerning Kendrick's hiring. Over the protestations of many in HO, who wanted to give Kendrick a chance, slm stated that he would tell Kendrick how he felt about him if he was invited into GM chat. A worked-up Dwyer then told him that openly disrespecting and fighting HO members were not qualities befitting of a league owner, essentially implying that slm shouldn't have that position. Slm's response, in essence, was "fire me, see what happens."

This game of brinkmanship was, in Dwyer's telling, incredibly dangerous for the health of the league. He worried that if HO attempted to fire slm, slm could theoretically remove and ban them from the site as its owner and install a new Head Office. The only people who could remove slm's perms and prevent such a scenario would be other users with owner privileges: the Admin account that used to belong to @Ballerstorm, and @Bzerkap. Dwyer asked the latter if he would remove slm's perms if Dwyer told him to.

This situation is why HO interns weren't invited to GM chat for many years.

Further escalation along this front could have potentially crippled the NSFL. Thankfully, it did not heat up beyond here. Kendrick ultimately contributed little during his HO internship and was not hired to a full-time position like Trautner.

His short tenure did not lack for league controversy. In the wee hours of the morning of January 8, 2019, @majesiu alerted HO, the New Orleans GMs, and head updater bovo to a discrepancy he found between the player page and TPE totals of Otters tight end Carlito Crush. Crush had spent 61 more TPE than he had earned, which majesiu demonstrated in a discussion thread he posted simultaneously to shine a light on the issue and get Crush fixed.

Key Reading: Crush doesn't add up

In successive updates to the post, however, majesiu stumbled upon and posted further discrepancies in a number of Otters, including Tegan Atwell (+29), Angus Winchester (+22), Greg Clegane (+35), Norman Bagwell (+5), and Gus T.T. Showbiz (+80). He stated in his first post that he did not intend to begin a witch hunt. This did not dissuade certain users from seeing this as one more piece of evidence incriminating Orange County, and a permissive HO, as cheaters.

'Certain users' in this case meaning, surprise surpise, kolbe. Even after majesiu replied that HO was likely carrying out their own investigation/audit instead of replying to the discussion thread, kolbe jumped in to comment, without a shred of irony:

Quote:Also, glad to see the Otter tradition stays strong. The league is quickly getting to the point where the Outlaws are the only team not cheating, and that is a shame for so many reasons.

Considering the recent punishments of both himself and SwagSloth, as well as being the team notorious for the worst cheating scandal of all time, kolbe's comment was somewhat rich. But he was not the only user accusing the Otters of cheating, nor was he the only user at least somewhat concerned that HO might be treating Orange County too favorably.

The intention, at least partially, of majesiu's original thread was to correct the mistakes without stirring up controversy. Bovo went through and audited the players involved, finding that three of the six players accused of being over their TPE were indeed in need of reduction. The other three had the correct total or were slightly under; the discrepancies in their cases came from mistakes in their update threads, either by not accounting for some TPE earned or by not keeping track of their own total TPE.

Had the Otters been cheating? Most likely not. What was more concerning to some people was the way that this would-be drama played out. @manicmav36 released an article the next day criticizing the soap opera theatrics of majesiu's article, and others like it. He lambasted the league's obsession with finding and releasing controversies for public consumption instead of handling things quietly, behind the scenes, through the proper channels.

Quote:Recently we’ve seen a lot of “big” stories being broken to the public. It’s exciting. It generates a ton of attention and discussion, and maybe, one could argue, more interest in the league. But here’s my issue… this isn’t the Wild West. We have rules and regulations here, and there is a proper way to handle a perceived issue. We don’t need people taking every perceived slight public and airing every complaint under the sun.

Key Reading: The NSFL and It's Biggest Current Issue

Manic's arguments were on the whole well-received. Majesiu admitted that he might have gotten "overzealous" in his pursuit of mistakes after the initial discovery, and both users agreed that the wild variance of update thread qualities was largely to blame for this entire fiasco. Many users floated some ideas for reforming the existing system: update page templates, an independent arbiter to check HO, public voting for appeals team, even the return of player agents. The last suggestion, and its history in the league, is a fascinating rabbit hole that this article does not have the scope to cover further.

Of course, not everyone was on the same page. Professional shit-stirrer YoungTB chimed in to decry the article as an attempt by HO to censor the public. Professional laundry-publisher kolbe went a step further. As someone who had posted multiple inflammatory threads "airing every complaint under the sun" both before and during the drama with Oles, kolbe didn't agree with manic's private approach. He said:

Quote:What really annoys me about this is how old a complaint it is. People are always saying to not go public first, but HO is so damn afraid of accountability that they go out of their way to keep secrets that would be so minor if THEY were the ones going public.

Biggest example is the TO complaint I made. Had anyone in HO made an announcement saying that there was a report, and TO had said some stupid but ultimately harmless things, and had been talked to, but that punishment was deemed unnecessary, it would have been one thread of shitposting followed by a complete non-issue. However, since they didn't do it, I felt they were trying to hide it, so I went after them, which started this huge fucking campaign that went off the rails and led to me genuinely considering leaving the site again.

In short, HO expects trust they have never earned, and continues to offer nothing to garner goodwill.

Over the course of the S12 offseason and season, nearly every major institution in the NSFL had become embroiled some controversy or another: Head Office, appeals team, league ownership, updaters, all swept up in the bleak avalanche of drama. Yet more was still to come. As everything else unfolded, another brewing controversy came to life, centered around perhaps the most pivotal and tenuous pillar of any sim league: the simmer.

Continued in Volume II

RE: *A Winter of Discontent - WildfireMicro - 08-07-2022

This is some good reading well done

RE: *A Winter of Discontent - iamslm22 - 08-07-2022

what a read - great job Baron

RE: *A Winter of Discontent - caltroit_red_flames - 08-12-2022

no one wants to see your dirty laundry.

RE: *A Winter of Discontent - Opera_Phantom - 08-13-2022

Another great one, i really enjoy reading these stories