This is something that has happened to me in the past, and I thought It should be addressed. What I am about to say is not meant to make anyone in particular look bad, and if you think that I am talking about you, or that you know who I am talking about, please keep it to yourself or talk with me privately. I am going to be referring to things that I've seen in several people, not just one. And yes, it's a bit of a rant, and something I need to get off my chest, in the hopes that doing so will help me to let it go completely.

We all know that meta and power gaming are not allowed in Dead End, and more than that are not fair and causes hurt feelings and people to leave. But there is another problem that some people engage in that tends to be overlooked, and that is implying that someone else is meta or power gaming in IC speech or emotes. It does seem to be mostly newer people who do this, and often some of those who are guilty of cheating themselves. (We see in others that which we know is wrong in ourselves) Eventually they seem to either leave, get banned, or reform so at least it gets resolved. But in the meantime, it can cause a lot of hurt feelings that may never get resolved, and missed opportunity for role play with people refusing to play with certain other players.

Hears how it happens: one player thinks that they are hot stuff and that whatever they do, they are automatically going to succeed. You know the type. Those who never seem to get hit in a fight, or never leave any clues for the cops to follow, or are immune to mace, tasers, thrown objects, meteors, and really anything you might throw at them. So you get in a fight with this person, or you track them down based on the clues they've left despite their best efforts, or you are given information that they don't know someone else knows (possibly because that person is meta gaming). So in retaliation for your perceived meta gaming the other person will emote things like "There is no way they could have known", or "watches the person climb and jump with mad mutant ninja skills", or other phrases that say to all in local chat range, "Hey, this person is cheating!"

This kind of passive aggressive behavior is insidious and can be difficult to explain, let alone prove. The person doing it is often good at making excuses that sound plausible and slipping out of any trouble for it, possibly even ending up well liked by people who have not experienced it from them yet, or who they are more careful not to do it around.

Unfortunately, the most guilty of this are likely not reading this post, or not doing it anymore, so I know that this won't be a magic pill that will stop the problem. But maybe it will help lead to discussions that will help when new people like this come to our sim and we are faced with it from them. The biggest best practice that I learned from this issue is to log my local chat. I've talked about this in other threads (http://deadend.sl/discuss/topic/logging-local-nearbyic-chat/), and it bears repeating here because it is the single most powerful tool you can provide to the GM or admin when you ask them for help. Without it, they are nearly powerless, because everyone knows who they are, and these people behave when they are around. So if you do not provide the needed evidence, you have no right to get angry with the admin for having her hands tied.