1. Introduction
This document has grown from a small complaint following a specific incident to a rather large, some may say overly large, list of grievances. The genesis of this was my desire to end my time with the game due to the staff, especially in this case Itzel and Vannah, coming in and antagonizing the player base and spreading lies. I have had some conversations where the nature of what is a lie came up and while one does need an intent to deceive to show a true lie versus just being tragically misinformed, I think a case can be made that there was a point they both knew better but held onto the lie out of desperation or stubbornness.
I know this much to be true, the corporation that controls Discord was never in contact with the Simutronics staff as the staff claimed, the entire incident was a series of blunders by the Simutronics staff, any statements that they were reacting to uncivil behavior was misinformation, and eventual lies, spread by Simutronics staff. They immediately stopped when I threatened to report them to Discord if they continued this lie.
Obviously one lying pair of GM’s is not enough to make someone who has spent 30 years in a gaming community walk away, or I never would have made it to the 30 year mark in the first place. This was simply a straw breaking the camel’s back situation.
Ok, that's why we are where we are.
What follows is a hopefully partial and direct catalogue of real issues.
I have somehow managed to avoid a lot of the various insults over the years that some parties like to throw around as basic attacks, for most of the game I have remarkably been able to avoid misogynistic claims or racist claims or any number of claims some of the more putrid corners of the RP community throw out with abandon and without evidence…thank you for that at least…but also fuck you for engaging in that behavior with anyone else.
I am, to misquote Hamilton, unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors, just know the errors are not done maliciously or intentionally. The critique is intentional, any unknown errors are not.
II. Fuck You Thandiwe – Mother of Assholes
I am going to start with Thandiwe, not because she is the worst but because she is the easiest to document. Never, to my knowledge, has a singular GM shown such disregard for the idea of impartiality as Thandiwe in such a grandiose manner. People will talk about old stories where some individuals got special titles, she would grant them to EVERYONE she liked, there are stories about special items being handed out, she would hand out entire cities, there are stories about some players getting some special attention, she would show a myopic focus on her friends group that would baffle even her supporters at times.
Thandiwe was once the event guru, and she did a marginally competent job in that role, though to be fair her main goal was to ringmaster the work of other GM’s and soothe angry customers spending stupid amounts of money on text weapons. However she was promoted to the highest position within the RP community in 2023 and the community has become more fractured, less civil, and harder to repair every moment since.
Thandiwe is the overly permissive parent, spoon-feeding her beloved child every sweet and indulgence she can think of, or they can beg for, while ignoring every warning sign that she is creating a spoiled, pre-diabetic, odiferous little Oompa Loompa in the process. Having built her own Dudley, she seems genuinely shocked when the Harry Potters of the world find her darling unpleasant to be around. Instead of course-correcting, she doubles down. She praises every inch of their flatulent, fattened little form and wonders why no one else can see the special little flower she has made.
But this world isn’t a nursery. It is shared by multitudes. No matter how many GMs she yanks out to rain down praise, her Dudleys just get angrier that the rest of us are not applauding. After all, Mother Thandiwe tells them they are glorious. She says it again and again. So they stew. They fume. They wait for the world to love them the way she does.
Meanwhile, she keeps shoving more sugar down their throats, whispering how wonderful they are, caught in a vicious cycle that leaves them bloated, bitter, and convinced that the problem must be everyone else.
This kind of environment is of course one that is deadly to RP, which depends on at least the illusion of neutrality and of course we have seen that the person in charge of “world stories” has retreated to the most laser focused, self-indulgent, obscure, and boring stories imaginable as we would expect of someone who is deathly afraid of offending her self created monster.
Thandiwe has managed to get more people pissed off at the empire than I could have ever done alone, she has managed to turn them into an alternative fact factory that avoids hard definitions like the plague because she knows anything definitive would lead to cognitive dissonance. Since rising to the top she has given out so many empire titles she has watered down the currency, no one can tell what her booffurs and baffelwins and sirs and senechals even mean at this point much less care. She has literally portaled her people into other storylines, with actual portals, and acted absolutely amazed that this wasn’t received well. She has built things and then modified them so that her chosen can use them, and when anyone else shows an interest in one of her creations she will modify it again to make it more digestible for her special Duddleys.
Even her structural experiments were deployed in service of the same. A new section of a city was created with strict entry requirements. When her chosen players didn’t meet them, the requirements were quietly rewritten. Citizenship was redefined. Prerequisites bent. Lore logic folded in on itself... all so that access flowed to the same predictable doors.
By 2024, the pattern had hardened. Thandiwe began using her personal NPCs to carry grievances from Discord into the game world, treating story like a megaphone. Yet again, the same voices were amplified, always those in her good graces. She became the dutiful fangirl, giving credence to terrible ideas by layering them onto her NPCs.
Her role in the larger meta, as one of the top GM’s in the entire game, has been equally one sided and hard to follow. She was in 2023 saying she couldn’t go in private discords and by 2025 not only allowing other GM’s to do so but sliding into them herself.
This experience has apparently drained Thandiwe, to the point I could probably just let ChatGpt write most of her letters and NPC interactions directly as it is surely writing them indirectly. There is an old saying that to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. I can truly say that by this definition Thandiwe is truly insane.
It is likely I could have outlasted Thandiwe in her current role, though I eventually reached a point where monetarily I didn’t want to support this game anymore, because there will come a day she gets tired and steps back…and on that day it will be her own creation that is harshest against her as they were against everyone before her. Her own little Frankenstein Monster is at her gate.
