Summer & Salt ಥ_ಥ · @SummersSalt
31st Aug 2021 from TwitLonger
My Experience with Arcadum and his Business.
First of all I was not nearly as personally affected as other women who were hurt by him. I highly implore you to seek out their stories, read them, and give them your support.
I am first going to talk about my personal experiences with Arcadum, some of the things I am going to talk about were said in calls. So they will not have documentation. Please believe what you will. Again to reiterate more, a lot of people involved have many different stories. This is what I personally experienced with him.
My main problems began with Arcadum around a year ago when the Tyre groups formed and had their first few sessions. It was an overall great experience and even though things are a bit of a shit show now, I’m still grateful for that experience. All of the members of the Tyre groups were amazing people who are extremely sweet and kind. So of course a lot of us in the Tyre groups made friends with one another, we even did stuff like have a Shadow x Heart of Tyre Among Us crossover. It was a lot of fun and I was able to make a lot of new friends because of it.
It was during this period that I started to hang out with a lot of the new people I met in the Tyre groups, those being mainly Person X and Person Y (if you know you know, I will not be dragging more people into this). They were just good people who I got along great with. After hanging out with them for a bit, I would occasionally get DMs from Arcadum asking me if I was romantically interested in either of them. This felt very off putting to me, because that was first of all a very personal question from out of the blue, secondly it was none of his business. But I was not romantically interested in either of them, and just wanted to be friends. So I told Arcadum such. He would go on to ask me the same question a few more times as I continued to hang out with those people. Which I said every time, that they were just friends. He would even at times follow me into VR-Chat parties which we would have. He would request to join the lobby off of me and say things like, “I don’t want you in the bad crowd of VR-chat.” And continue to lecture me on such topics.
As I continued to hang out with those people Arcadum then approached me one day asking me why we don't hang out as often. A phrase I would get very familiar with, as he would still do this, without putting in any effort to hangout himself. He said that since he introduced me to Heart of Tyre, I didn’t spend as much time with him. Which I can admit I wasn’t. This was partially because he was busy, but also because I was having fun with new friends that I just made. I said as much and he continued to mention that I didn’t seek him out specifically to hang out with. The conversation died there and he said he wouldn’t bring it up again.
Later that month I invited him to a D&D group that I wanted to run. It included a bunch of my friends like Person X, and people that I hung out with. One night while I was hanging out with a few people from that group, they started asking about my world. So I enthused and explained what the world was like a little bit. We also had someone that had never played before so we walked him through character building, by example of some of the others building their own characters. It kinda turned into an impromptu session 0, but nothing super official yet, I still had a lot to talk to the group about as a whole. While we did this little impromptu session, we pinged Arcadum in the discord to see if he was still interested in playing. He was offline at the time so we didn’t get a response from him. So we didn’t actually do anything relating to the plot or story, other than just me talking a bit about what the world was like, and helping people build their characters.
A few days later I spoke to Arcadum and brought up the impromptu session 0, because he never responded to the ping. He then proceeded, in my eyes, to throw a tantrum of sorts because he wasn't there. The conversation started about him wanting to watch something with me, and it turned into just a mess. The next day when we sat down to watch the show, he vocally berated me a bit. Again this is not something that I have text evidence of, as it happened in a voice call. I can only provide my half of the story. He scolded me in a sense for not hanging out with him as much, and how he could tell I was choosing to hang out with others over him. He would tell me there was no point in lying about that fact, because he could tell. He then went on to say things such as, he made my friends for me. And that without the game I would have never talked to them to begin with. For the rest of the call I had to pretty much just sit in shame as he said that to me, while pretending like I was ok. I felt like at the time I deserved to be yelled at for being a bad friend or something.
After that incident Arcadum continued to act like it never happened and would be chummy with me. Over the next few months and even since then I have kept my distance because I didn’t want to experience an incident like that again. But I would still get the occasional, “Why don’t we hang out more.” and “I’m sad” messages from him. I then figured that he only spoke to me when he wanted pity or when he wanted someone to pat his back.
Arcadum’s Business ethics
I want to talk about how he runs things, because many people do not see what goes on behind all of the smoke and mirrors. I will first give my experience, then speak on what I know about what is going on.
Arcadum refuses to reprimand his players for not doing the required preparations to play in his D&D games. This has happened much more frequently in this phase of his games. I have been making tokens for Arcadum. MapTools is very janky, and requires a little bit of “coding” to make sure all the various macros work well. It’s not just a simple process of linking a picture and calling it a day. It does take quite a bit of work, especially if you want to do the job well. It also should be said that the tokens in the MapTools are the main way to play the game besides the player having their character sheets prepared.
Sometimes I would be given the information to make these tokens for Arcadum only hours before the sessions. Anyone who has had strict deadlines can understand how hard it might be to be told that you need to do a rush job on a task. As if this wasn’t bad enough, not all players would actually even finish building their characters before the first session. That means I would only be given the information to make these characters, characters for people in other campaigns that I did not know, maybe 12 hours before the session was supposed to take place, once I even had to make tokens 2 hours before the session. I cannot say enough how stressful it is to try to do that all from scratch, especially with some players not having even filled in their characters sheets on their own, especially with a deadline so short. I cannot express how many players did not finish their sheets. It felt like I had to build their entire characters for them. Some had only picked their class, and nothing else. While this is more so a complaint on the players, Arcadum refused to push back sessions or just get the proper information that we need in a timely manner to actually run his sessions.
I should also mention that me doing this was also unpaid work. I was volunteering my time and still having to deal with these strict deadlines put on me by Arcadum’s lack of planning.
To add on to how untimely he is, this phase introduced a bunch of new special overlays. Arcadum refused to push back sessions for players, and because of this, I have heard that the people who work on the overlays were only given extremely harsh time frames. Those overlays take a lot of time and work. But instead of pushing back sessions, the artists are expected to meet the deadlines instead.
Continuing on with Arcadum’s rush jobs. He often needs rush art jobs. He forgets to place art orders for sessions, so he would just put them in 12-10 hours before the session was supposed to begin. This was EXTREMELY stressful for the artists, even to the point where they tried to speak to him about it, but rush orders continued to come in.
This is unprofessional.
Arcadum has done things such as, go into an unofficial artist discord, invite a TV star friend into the server, then talk about a TV show he wants to make. He did this by making a channel called “CALLOUS ROW CONCEPTS, NDA DON'T TALK ABOUT.” Not only was this unprofessionally done in a FAN discord - one that Arcadum does not own and does not control, but simply has mod privileges in - a place that was an artist hang out. But he dragged an actual celebrity into the server, then made a channel called NDA assuming that was enough. All without asking the actual owners of the Fan Server if it was ok for him to do this.
I also have general concerns for the people working with him as part of his larger business. If you are working as part of Verum or its larger team, please take care of yourselves and make sure that you are receiving and signing the appropriate documentation that is required for independent contractors. Make sure you do your own research and protect yourself, and if you feel like you haven't been given proper documentation from Arcadum's team, make sure you contact a professional ASAP. Please check here for more information.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/forms-and-associated-taxes-for-independent-contractors
Firing female employees and removing female streamers that you tried to pursue, does not fix the issues that have arisen. It's just pushing everyone to the curb.
I refuse to pity a man, who doesn’t know how to respect the women in his community.
Let alone all of the many people who work for him and his craft.
I’m just done, I want out.
The first time
1) https://i.gyazo.com/0195a660616721ef23817f8394d3076c.png
2) https://i.gyazo.com/33355163e55aafc33b265f09361248ae.png
3) https://i.gyazo.com/ec2c63b390784594f2025c2fdb01f16a.png
The second incident involving the session 0
1) https://i.gyazo.com/b9b0f201cb44dadb8d066cf543e44474.png
2) https://i.gyazo.com/f181e095305869282cc900136ae447cb.png
3) https://i.gyazo.com/603bfcb67091dcaf2c26da3b09e2f193.png
4) https://i.gyazo.com/c1d521483a204029a50c6dfa5c3e0bb9.png
5) https://i.gyazo.com/ebb52ce243a1cc7e082d99032d8fbf2e.png
Evidence its him
https://i.gyazo.com/f588f92b13191bd9848a18cd5fa406cb.png
https://i.gyazo.com/321d4aa7428ba0e5d379c6ea1a1b808d.png