I’m going to once again throw my two cents in here, as AGR’s prime target (Even if he’s doing a ‘better’ job of hiding that fact now.)
Literally everyone I speak two is in two camps, and I have found no one left neutral after they have observed AGR-influenced conversation:
- People who are fed up with AGR and have confessed to me that they are less willing to interact in spaces so long as AGR is able to continue being toxic and vile (The majority)
- People who join AGR and start being just as toxic and vile (The minority)
We’ve all tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and the option to disengage, basically hundreds of times at this point, and all it has earned him is more and more timeouts and bans, as he doubles down on his insults and slander, refuses to justify anything he says, just calling anyone who doesn’t immediately support him an enemy and slandering them endlessly.
He’ll claim things like “False Narratives” and then refuse to actually prove why they’re false, and when someone brings conversational receipts, he gets irate and calls people names for publicly posting something that makes him look bad. I’ve tried for literal months to ignore him and it has only encouraged him.
Just yesterday I had to purge a base64 encoded message from one of the COSM channels that got relayed from ADI after being sent by one of AGR’s corp members, which was frankly full of vile language (disgusting sexual euphemisms being the biggest one) towards COSM, Schaitr and anyone not explicitly friendly or neutral to all of AGR’s methods.
I have personally witnessed how his relentless stream of obscenities has degraded COSM’s reputation over the past few months. We’re now in a position where we have to walk on eggshells every time we want to do something that might have an impact on anyone not already in the corp, because despite everything, the sheer frequency of his false claims has buried itself into people’s consciousnesses.
Furthermore, he goes out of his way to target new players in the IC region, particularly those who are interested in COSM, sending them DMs and repeating his talking points away from places where we can defend ourselves.
We have built something we love, brick by brick, in this game, and I see how much everyone in the Combine enjoys their time here. I’ve seen notably less of that since AGR started his mission, and I’ve seen a lot of people retreat away from spaces where AGR or conversation about him is involved, which is most spaces, both ingame and out of game.
To see the name and reputation of something we have all worked so hard to build dragged down through the mud because of one person’s vendetta is unbelievably disheartening, and I’m getting to the point where I’m not going to keep playing this game if there aren’t concrete consequences that protect the people who, I feel, actually try to go above and beyond to make the game a better experience.
Some people have gotten antsy about whatever precedent a global mute is setting, but from what I understand this isn’t his first strike, and if he doesn’t listen to a developer instructing him to tone it down, I don’t know what else can be done here. I don’t want to advocate for a ban, but there does come a point where the looming threat of his return will be enough to make players leave the game.
I, for one, am seriously reconsidering my yearly pro purchase because this man has drained so much fun out of the game.
