I have received some additional information on my ban.

At first, I was told that the reason used in my forum ban is “too combative” and that “trying to incite drama” is the reason used in the Discord ban.1 I was also told:

An appeal will not be accepted, and will not be voted on.

I was working on writing the update I promised when I first shared details about my ban, when these very strange2 circumstances became even stranger. Here is Wizard’s Den’s official statement that I was provided regarding my bans:

To anyone concerned:

ChiefEngineer was banned from the community due to growing concerns from upper staff. While the specific details of these concerns are not public, it is substantial enough for us to keep their ban in place to protect the community.

ChiefEngineer has contacted multiple staff in attempts to have them act at the level of PM or higher on his behalf. Some of the requests were concerning and inappropriate, and targeting members of the community. We based our decision on behaviors, not on relations to others.

This decision is supported by the upper staff, being it is an abnormal case involving former staff.

Let’s break this down.

ChiefEngineer

I am not ChiefEngineer. I am Chief_Engineer, or Chief-Engineer, or Chief Engineer, or Chief, or CE, I do not know who “ChiefEngineer” is. I am well known to the project managers, given my past positions within the project’s staff. This same mistake is repeated twice in the official prepared statement that, hopefully, underwent discussion. That such a glaring mistake made it so far along in the process is reflective of the care given to this situation as a whole.

I bring it up so that we can all have a clear example of what a minor issue looks like as we go forward, and so we can contrast it with the other issues present.

Communicating the Ban Reason

It took around 3 days after the ban to get essentially any official communication about the reason, and that communication was essentially that I could not appeal, and there would be no vote. Three days is a long time to still not seem to be able to articulate why you banned someone. Taking almost four days to be able to make a statement that, still, is not very clear about the ban reason is enough to make people think that you’re really struggling to get your story straight.

The Actual Ban Reason

Some Quick Background

In 2024, many others and I left the project for various reasons. Wizden made a whole announcement in response, saying they’d do things like improve accountability and transparency, and enforce professionalism between staff.3 They even linked to the post.4 Among the reasons for leaving and promised improvements was toxicity. Some staff, even some non-staff faced toxicity from staff members to the point that it constituted harassment.

Me Too

I too was a victim of harassment perpetrated by staff. I want to be clear, I was only the victim of harassment, just plain harassment. Unfortunately, I was not the only victim, and not everyone was as lucky as I was. As the departure post said, cases of staff harassing people or just being toxic were not promptly addressed. Some went on for months, others years, and there are some I left before seeing end.

In the case that seems to be relevant here, the offender was eventually banned when someone decided enough was enough and just did it rather than giving the wider leadership team an opportunity to hand out “second” chance #9001 or worse. Unfortunately, that was not the end of it.

I continued to hear about statements they made, about me in particular, to others in their DMs. I include this detail to help give you an idea of how ineffective their ban was in stopping their behavior. Again, towards me, it was only harassment, plain harassment.

With my position at Wizard’s Den at the time, I happened to be a person who much of their problematic behavior towards others was reported to. So when I tell you that I was familiar with their behavior towards other people, it is not because I searched for it, it is not because I happened to witness it, it is because I regularly received reports of varying severity. All of these cases have been brought to Wizard’s Den’s leadership.

Their Appeals

Unlike me, this person was not denied the opportunity to appeal, but in every instance that occurred while I was on staff, the appeal was handled by the appropriate staff team for the ban being appealed and stood no chance. My involvement was closer to that of a victim than staff, and I didn’t actually vote on an outcome.

However, that’s not how things were handled after I left. Whenever this person appeals, I get a notification. Not because I set something up to notify me, but because people familiar with the situation message me about how they can hardly believe what is happening.

Shutting Out Victims

Given everything I know, I feel an ethical obligation to ensure information about what happened is not being suppressed, as it has been in the past. Each time I’ve done this, it has been by messaging a group of three project managers. Which ones has varied due to turnover, but I message three5 and hope that one of them has enough willingness to present a counterargument to what I have been told is usually an extremely one sided “discussion” in an environment that isn’t very welcoming to conflicting opinions.

Wizard’s Den doesn’t seem to understand why I would have any interest in this person’s appeal. They seem to be unfamiliar with the widely understood concept that a victim who is also friends with multiple other victims would have an interest in the outcome of a case involving the offender. Based on the official statement regarding my ban, Wizard’s Den feels that a victim speaking privately to a group of project managers about what happened is a “concerning and inappropriate” attempt “to have them act at the level of PM or higher.”

Never in my time as staff have I described a report given to me, or a request made to me, as “a concerning and inappropriate attempt to have me act at the level of PM or higher.” I have received explicit instructions from players before instructing me to ban someone, or that someone “needs to be banned,” and never have I described that as “an inappropriate attempt to have me act at the level of game admin or higher.” I have received the same about other members of staff, informing me that someone needs to be demoted, and still, I have not described that as “an inappropriate attempt to have me act at the level of PM, Head Game Admin, or higher.”

Protecting the Community

targeting members of the community

I can truly only speculate on who this is referring to. I would not consider a person who was banned for harassment to be a member of the community. If they were a member of the community, it would not explain why “members” is plural or why they are being protected from “targeting” in the form of private messages to a small number of staff involved in considering their appeal.

Decision on Behaviors, not on Relations

We based our decision on behaviors, not on relations to others.

Anyone watching what has been happening recently can see that your relations to others and position in the project dwarf the importance of your behaviors when it comes to the decisions of leadership. Based on everything I have been told, it seems behavior had as much to do with the handling of this person’s most recent appeal as it did for my bans and as it did for some of the other recent decisions, or lack thereof, you may have heard about. Behavior seems to be a non-factor when Wizard’s Den can lean on relations.

My current understanding of the situation is that their appeal was intended to be pushed through in a strikingly similar way to the linked PRs. To what extent this actually happened, I do not know, but it is my understanding that the teams that would have handled the appeal while I was on staff, some of which had all the information available to them to do so, were not involved in handling the appeals. Instead, I am banned from presumably all Wizard’s Den platforms without the opportunity to appeal, for daring to message a few PMs to try to make sure no one tries to suppress what happened again.

While WizDen PMs argue in defense of some, saying that there should be no ban which is unappealable, I am banned explicitly without the ability to appeal, but with every intent to ensure that as few people as possible know what actually happened, including myself.

  1. The forum ban reason is one that I know to be one of the default options, but the Discord one would have been entered manually. ↩

  2. Briefly: forum bans are extremely rare, because they rob the affected person of the ability to appeal. This is typically an unintended side effect of the only official avenue to appeal being on the forums, but in this case appears to be intentional. The given ban reasons are comically inaccurate to anyone familiar with the posts I’ve made recently in Discord and on the forums. They cannot reasonably be described as combative, nor can they be described as intended to incite drama when you consider both that their effect was to successfully convince another person that it is reasonable for some “behind the scenes” to exist in an open source game, and the things I could have posted instead that would have fit perfectly in line with the topic of the thread. ↩

  3. This is an example of something highly related to the topic of that open letter mentioned earlier that I could have focused on in my reply there instead, if my goal was to “incite drama.” Not that it happened, but the glaring lack of improvement in the area of toxicity since the promises of changes. ↩

  4. Including this because I’ve heard rumors that post is being made out to be something that intended to destroy the project. The fact it was linked to by Wizard’s Den as much as it was at the time is pretty strong evidence that it wasn’t interpreted as an attack at the time. Of course, those announcements were made before Wizard’s Den essentially decided to give up on trying to improve things enough for former staff to return. What I’m trying to say is that people claiming the post was trying to destroy the project seem to reflect an attempt by Wizard’s Den to twist the narrative. ↩

  5. In the most recent case, I did talk to a fourth about the situation, but the fourth was after the conversation drifted to the topic from another. I didn’t expect to touch the topic with the fourth at the start of my messages with them, and the conversation didn’t last long. ↩