This Great Community | Part 3: The sexism starts early

The Balance’s Imbalance

To sidebar for a bit, I don’t remember exactly the date the Balance first came into existence, but it was around this time that I started posting there actively. With what I had gleaned and learned on my own, I wanted to share it. I have an annoying desire to constantly help others. It’s what got me into my current mess. But I knew if I wanted to carve a path for other players, and other girls, to not face the same scrutiny and hurdles I had so far, that the best way to do so was to share the resources and knowledge of gameplay so they could be readily equipped with the information I had to hunt and discover. If there was an accurate resource they could point to about their play, it would be a lot harder to scrutinize what they were doing under any other rationale – even their gender.

Frankly though, I liked helping. Growing up my “what do you want to be when you grow up” job answer was always a teacher. I ended up both knowing I’d be unable to pay my loans if I pursued that, and eventually realized my social anxiety would be way too crippling to pursue it as a career. But teaching over a chat program? Sign me up. I wasn’t out for the pink name. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t care about it. I would’ve kept doing what I was doing regardless of the role. I just wanted to help players avoid what I went through. Ey, there’s a plot trend for you.

Apparently I was nominated once or twice as a mentor before finally being added to the team. Ahri thought I was too steadfast in my opinions at first. I later learned a collection of some of the other mentors had made comments like “she can’t be a mentor, girls can’t theorycraft,” and the like. The Balance was also considerably more toxic back then. People were outwardly sexist even on the staff. I remember Bevin, a former bard mentor and I believe also a moderator at one point, who was actively against my presence. Through a ton of convincing the closest I got him to acknowledging me was that I was “like a football team coach; I couldn’t play as well as the players on the team, but I could teach them.” Talk about knocking the wind out of your sails.

There were plenty more conversations in the mentor lounge too that would make your eyes bleed. Unfortunately I can’t go digging as I no longer have access to the channel. Suffice to say the perception of the Balance back then was decidedly accurate. 

And I took on the job even still, knowing I’d become the punching bag. That if I could take all these hits, maybe others could follow after who wouldn’t have to take them. To be fully transparent, I wasn’t always the only female member on the staff, but I was the one with the biggest mouth. Usually the other girls, when there were any of the retired ones, would just duck and cover when some bullshit was brewing. I did not. I was by far the longest standing consistently accurate female member of the staff. It might actually be back to all male mentors now that I’m gone.

I was not exactly anyone’s favorite on the team.

There were some hot ticket items that stick out to me that should help demonstrate some of the issues with the server. Some of these are older, some more recent:

• The #Hall_of_Shame channel: exactly what it sounds like, Skye and Co. thought it would be fun to have this channel to post screencaps of the really dumb shit people say or do in the server. To collectively laugh at them. I was disgusted. I think that one I actually threatened to quit over if they didn’t remove it. The worst part is, after the extremely long debate, do you know what the reason used to justify why it was removed was? That people using the Better Discord mod could see the channel name.
  That’s it. They didn’t care about the fact that we literally had a shitlist channel. They just didn’t want to get caught.

• Everything to do with the Balance’s Patreon. I had to put my foot down when people started making the association that SaltedXIV was getting funds from it. I most certainly do not. 

• The severe lack of activity of the administration

• The lack of transparency between moderation and mentors

• Suicide jokes, and why they “should be allowed” and similar toxic “jokes” – sorry not sorry for helping to get :blobhung: and :feelschromosomeman: removed

• People defending Old Bear when all his victims came forward

• Lack of consideration for off-server decorum and behaviors (see: second post)

• Simultaneous use of off-server decorum and behaviors to justify moderation action when it suited their wants (see: first post)

• Outwardly degrading server members in the lounge well past the point of frustrated venting where it was clearly just a shitfest. 

The list goes on. I’m a vocal one. I see shit, I point it out. That’s not how women are expected, or supposed to act. When a man does it, they’re just doing their job. When a woman points out a criticism, she’s a “bitch,” “difficult to work with,” etc. If you’ve ever taken any workplace sexism courses, you’ll know the trends I’m referring to — it’s well documented. But this wasn’t a workplace, and I shouldn’t have had to deal with it here.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m past the point about worry about the repercussions of me telling my story here.

There would soon be another wrench to the scrutiny I faced though. Thus enters chief community figure, Nemekh. [post link]

But let’s focus on the Balance here and talk about some of the staff:

Current Head Admins

• Skye

• Lyra Rose (aka Eiryla, or ‘Toad Lyra’)

• Zyrk

• Lyra (AnAnime)

• Bongo

Skye means well, but is crippled both by her “irl” sitaution. 
However Skye is also really bad at delegating and relinquishing power where it’s needed. This honestly just means stuff never gets done. It’s why the Balance website is in its current state of dilapidation. It’s why her discord bot is always unfinished. It’s why her server contributions are actually quite minimal and why her Patreon is so contentious. And it’s why the staff often struggles to make big changes. I don’t dislike Skye, but she’s a poor server admin and owner. She also will occasionally go “off book” in some of her actions – creating more chaos and issues for the staff with the inconsistencies.

Lyra Rose is, honestly, useless as a Balance Admin. They do, quite literally, nothing as far as administration on the Balance is concerned, and from what I’ve been told they sit out of most moderation issues as well. That said, Lyra Rose has been instrumental when it comes to SaltedXIV’s success and its content. They’re the writer behind all of the encounter guides you see posted here, as well as the new player FAQ, and the gearing and unlock guide. So, in short, useless when it comes to the Balance, but pivotal for SaltedXIV.

Zyrk is notoriously the absentee admin. He will disappear for months at a time, then come back and take on 10 projects at once and knock them out, then disappear into the realm of inactivity again. Basically, helpful when he’s around, but everyone is left scrambling to cover for him when he spontaneously disappears. I think he’s on hiatus of late because of the stress I’ve caused from the “current” situation.

Lyra, the other one, is a somewhat newer add to the team. He does genuinely care about the server. But he’s powertrippy at some points, and then overcompensates for his proclivity to act too severely in other turns. Meaning sometimes he goes too far, sometimes he’s too scared to go far enough. I thought he was a friend I could lean on, and let him lean on me. That was apparently only a one-way street.

Finally Bongo, who is very fresh to the admin team. He also genuinely cares about the server, but is also new to the role and from what I’ve seen, still trying to get his bearings on when it is and isn’t appropriate for him to act. 

As for the moderation team – despite the list being not that short, most are extremely inactive. The process to add new ones is difficult – not just on the inside, frankly I know from my own experience it’s hard to find people willing to take on the thankless job. However this does often leave the server in a state of disarray when shit hits the fan.

And it was certainly going to.

As for the structure of the mentor-viewable staff channels, from what I remember (there were a lot, and we couldn’t see the moderation channels):
Please also note I’m unable to see any of the following channels anymore:

• General “Mentor Lounge” – with the latest meme name of the moment which was in truth actually a staff lounge that all staff could see, including “retired mentors.” There were many shit posts, and often venting about issue users on the server. Notably, I’m not included here after my forced retirement.

• Srs Staff Room – this was where important server conversations were had that affected us. Major issues, channel renames, rearrangements of channels, you name it, it was probably discussed there. Also importantly, nothing is supposed to be leaked from this channel.

• Projects – a dead channel that I had most of the posts in

• Website – (there was an older version of this channel that only selected people with the website role could view) this new iteration was made for discussions about the SaltedXIV once we had officially entered into a partnership. I’d occasionally post updates or people would ask me questions about posting in there

• Mentor_bot_spam – exactly what it sounds like, they have our own private bot channel for obvious reasons, plus here’s where mentors primarily made/edit Kupo bot FAQ commands

• Mentor Appointment Room – the nomination room. Last year when they formalized the process for electing new members, this became the permanent stand in. Someone is nominated, issues about them are discussed for 72 hours, a poll is put up for 72 hours, and then depending on the results they are or are not made a mentor (the timing of those is subject to change). The channel is completely purged after each nomination and nominees aren’t supposed to be privy of any of the conversations that transpired here.

• There were a few other channels like the trello announcement one which had a webhook to the staff trello board, a srs_tl;dr where recaps of length discussions in the srs room were sometimes put, and I think a couple of others I’m forgetting.

But I want to talk about the #srs_staff_room for a bit. Obviously this is the channel I shot my loud mouth off in the most whenever I saw something crappy going on. I have also been framed for leaking from the channel, with the repercussion that, if found I was doing so, my role would be revoked. Remember, target, right? Look at this quality moderation tactic:

The ironic context here is twofold though. First, because of the reason I was talking to Tobio that night. Tobio was stirring the pot in the summoner channels. And even though Nemekh hated my guts at that point, I didn’t hate his, and was trying to help from behind the scenes. I had enough of a rapport with Tobio that I struck up a conversation with him to help diffuse the pot stirring. Splitting his attention and sucking out some of the energy he had. One topic I used for this was talking about other communities that hate us. Which included Nemekh’s. And one community, Emiin’s, came up. It’s a public server that’s free to join, so Tobio hopped in it to see what had been said about him. And quickly found a comment from Zack, someone who notably has also had a bone to pick with me. It was something along the lines of Zack implying tobio was “butthurt” about not being made a Scholar Mentor after writing the guide for it. 

So, Tobio being Tobio, confronted him about the rather old comment. Zack, in response was ADAMANT the only place he had ever made such a comment was in the srs staff room. Therefore, someone leaked it to him. And, “oh hey, doesn’t Levi talk to Tobio?”

Everything there after was a game of guilty until proven innocent. I’m explaining this event because I want people to understand the dance I was so routinely put through to dodge the bullets being lodged at me. I knew if I came right out and said I was talking to Tobio but didn’t leak anything, the staff would just assume I was lying about the second half, deleted whatever I leaked, and they’d have my ass for it. But if I said nothing they’d take Zack for his word and also have my ass. Zack literally bought his way into the role, afterall.

Now let’s dial it back. This is a discord server. For a video game. It’s often said the server takes itself way too seriously, and boy if this was ever a case of it. I played my part in that too, I know. But I also wanted to keep helping the community, and the best place for me to do that was to be part of the Balance, not excommunicated from it. 

So I danced the dance. I asked for what message was leaked, so we could confirm something actually was. That I had tried searching for messages from Zack that mentioned Tobio or the topic we “knew” was leaked in any way and there was actually no message matching. So I pressed the moderation team to find the message that was supposedly leaked. Responses were along the lines of “we’re working on it.” Which was amusing, because you know, it didn’t exist.

The heat was on though, and so was the heat in the discussion. Skye was out for blood and ready to make the head roll of whomever the leaker was. Egged on by Nemekh, of course. 

I pressed, again, for them to provide the message that was leaked. Or to confront Tobio and see what information they could get from him. I was hoping they’d ask Tobio, and Tobio would say “it wasn’t a leak, it’s right here in Emiin’s server” — but they wouldn’t talk to him. Or if they did, they didn’t act on it.

When Despair, the moderator from the above screenshot, finally pulled his game in my DMs, I shared the context I had from mine with Tobio:

And asked, again, for them to verify the message that was leaked. And with this context, pushed them to join Emiin’s server and find the message in question for themselves.

They dragged their feet, I think eventually Nethar stepped up and found the offending message publicly available in the server, as I said it was.

Crisis averted? But another hit to the reputation. I would keep taking a lot of those.