My experience working for Arcadum for 3 years

Before I begin, I would like to preface this that I’m physically and vocally masculine presenting, as such I didn’t receive the full brunt of what other individuals have experienced in their interactions with Arcadum, if you wish to learn about their stories they will be in the replies to this tweet, but this here will be my story from my experience working for Arcadum as moderator, dungeon master, administrator of discipline, art director, and youtube manager. I would also like to take this moment to apologize to those I have wronged while working under Arcadum. Under the guise of professionalism and doing the job that was assigned to me I have hurt people and done things that I am not proud of because I either didn’t see the full picture, I was trying to be fair, I was manipulated into taking Arcadum’s side on the matter, or I just didn’t believe them. Regardless if I am at fault for those actions or not, they were wrong and I will try to be better going forward. In addition, I apologize if I misconstrue any events from the early years of Verum as I no longer have access to those logs so I will be working from memory.

===Moderation, Discipline, and Hypocrisy===

I joined Arcadum’s server over three years ago when he was just starting out on Twitch. I found him through Ster and fell in love with his world, his skill, and his ambition to create a living world set inside a dnd setting. I saw the potential he had and decided that he was a man worth supporting to see his passion become a reality and a success, and the more I got to know him (well, the side he publicly presented) the more I wanted to put myself out there to help him through what I believed he could achieve. So I signed up to be a moderator, and that’s when the first issue arose.

I will not detail the names of those involved for sake of their privacy, but the situation was that we had an issue of harassment going on between two players in the Living World. One of the players (whom I will label as Melanie for ease of narrative) reported an individual harassing them in their PMs, pushing uncomfortable topics and asking where they lived. Arcadum was out on a trip when this was taking place, so de-facto leadership fell to Tiffany, who called for this individual to be banned immediately. However, there was some hesitation from the mod team to act on that because a) Melanie had asked for clemency for her harasser and requested that they not be banned because of her, and b) Arcadum had never told us that Tiffany would run things if he were ever absent for a fire, as such some of the moderation was adamant in waiting for Arcadum to return to make the final call. Which ultimately was what happened, we waited for Arcadum to return to make a decision, to which we decided to ban the harasser but give some leniency by making the ban only temporary due the clemency requested by Melanie. The harasser was eventually banned again for doing the same thing to another user, but his case set a horrible precedent that sets up the event that follows a few months later after I was ascended to the role of administrator of discipline.

The next situation has to do with another harasser by the name of Aphro and the many victims he targeted on the server. Here’s an unlisted video on my old youtube channel that I kept for transparency and archiving for the server which seems to have resurfaced due to the relevance of the situation so I will link it here ( https://youtu.be/LItvia2I9sc ) as well as the document being read details a lot about what was transpiring with Aphro and the other users. But to explain the moderation side of things, multiple users came to the mods to report Aphro’s behavior, they did so anonymously as to not make their identities potentially known to the harasser and to keep some level of bias down for some of the members of the mod team who may not like the reporters in questions should their identities be known. As such we deliberated on the evidence provided to us, speaking with both Aphro, and in a private meeting (neither of which I was not present for, but both Arcadum and another mod(s) were) with the anonymous reporters. Many of us wished to remove Aphro outright, but due to the precedent established by the previous case with Melanie and her harasser, we were faced with the dilemma of “fairness” and maintaining precedent. So Arcadum and the team decided that out of fairness to other users also banned, that Aphro’s ban only be temporary as well, but this like the previous decision was a terrible and stupid mistake and it came to a head when Aphro returned from his ban. His victims felt like they were being forced to interact with him, and in-hindsight yes, they were absolutely right. Aphro had no right being there, and it was only through the push back from the victims that he was immediately re-banned for good and policy changed going forward that such acts be intolerable, and I made sure as admin that that would be the case. However, this pushback also consisted of leaks, public attacks, and other unprofessional behavior, that I only see now was warranted to get Aphro’s ban reenacted before he could hurt more individuals on the server. So one victim who went public (the one who posted the main document in the video above) was banned for attacking Arcadum and the mods for their decision to let Aphro return, and with the victim’s ban a few of the others left with him in solidarity. Even with the ban being reinstated, the damage to Arcadum’s image and by association my mod team and I’s image was already done, and we had lost the confidence in much of the community that day and rightly so. This situation was one I deeply regret having mishandled, and I don’t think any of those involved will forgive me, but I apologize for not standing up for you all. I chose “fairness” over justice, and that’s something I learned and hope to never repeat going forward.

Both these cases happened towards the early days of Arcadum’s twitch career, the first happening towards the end of Phase 1 of the Living World and resolving towards the start of Phase 2 (Mid to late 2018). And the second case happening in Phase 2 of the Living World (Late 2018/Early 2019). These cases serve to show the pain that the community has endured and what Arcadum should have learned to take to heart. That was the case for myself and the mod team when we removed harassers from the server without hesitance and without return going forward from those previous cases, and I thought Arcadum had also learned and grown from this experience when he booted out Cryaotic, Witwix, and IAmSp00n from his campaigns, but I know now that that was painfully far from the truth and I feel so stupid for having believed him enough from his past actions to become hesitant in believing the words of Folkona, Chicka, and Cri when I first heard wind about their interactions with Arcadum. I didn’t know the entire story, and what I did know was discredited by Arcadum, a master of manipulation by trade through his own admission. I can never forgive myself for not believing these individuals when they first spoke up, but I believe them now and I, among many others, will support their voices.

Arcadum has had more than enough chances to become a better person, and he chose not to. He chose to double down, hide, and manipulate. He willingly did this from then to now, and if that isn’t despicable, I don’t know what is. But there is more to this story than just his hypocrisy, his abuse runs deep into his business as well.

===Abuse of Artists and Staff===

Much of the accounts here will be anecdotal as there are too many instances to cite one by one but I do have many archival recordings that can back most, if not all, of my recounts. It pays to be professional and live in a one-party recording consent state, I guess. Regardless, my accounts are as follows: during my time as discipline admin and one of many dungeon masters within the living world, one of my main expectations was to attend weekly staff and admin meetings where Arcadum would go over the agenda of the week and assign tasks to be done. Rarely did a meeting ever go off without an incident involving Arcadum raising his voice, engaging in shouting matches, or ruthlessly critiquing the ideas and/or opinions of one of his staff. Many, including myself, even chose to hold their tongue in fear of Arcadum retaliating in the way that he does. He excused his behavior as necessary as he says that ideas need to be put through a crucible and defended on the spot by the person who proposed them, but the manner he approached this was almost always cruel, harsh, brutal, and unnecessary. The same could be said of the expectations he made of volunteers, placing unreasonable workloads and deadlines to meet, especially during the Violet arc where many rp events had to be run daily among other duties such as tracking the economy, making players items, writing mechanics, and other back-end maintenance. He ran his team of entirely volunteers with no respect for their time, mental and physical well being, or other responsibilities outside of Verum. If we couldn’t work as much as him, then we as a team were failing his vision, and we had to work to the bone to keep things running for no payoff other than maybe a verbal pat on the back. The patreon was one avenue to mitigate this, but in the entire time it was active we were only ever paid once for a couple hundred each. (Though, I myself only ever got one payment from the patreon when I became a DM, so I do not know if other payments were sent out before my time on the team)

But this brings me to my time as Art Director for Arcadum and how he approached the community of artists that congregated around his world from all manner of communities. As an artist myself, the way Arcadum treated his artists hurt me dearly as I gradually became more and more disappointed in how many times I had to remind him to clean up his behavior and ease back his expectations of them. It was like pulling teeth to get him to stop handing out crunch orders and 1-5 day rush deadlines, and each time I had no choice but to submit his request to the artists. It hurt me every single time to see the artists work so hard in so little time for something that could have been prepared WEEKS in advance. He even made rush orders for art that wasn’t even used until three-four weeks later. I got so used to it that I had to take matters into my own hands towards the end of my career with him and add an additional week to what Arcadum was asking for because I knew from experience that he wouldn’t be needing the art within one-three days. And each time I implored the artists to add a rush fee for their work, and I really hope all of them did.

Another way he mistreated the artists was how he used them for free concept art. He would announce these hangout concept art streams where he would invite the artists to join him on stream so that they could draw art of ideas he had in his mind. Now at first it wasn’t that bad, the artists were willingly volunteering their time and they got some nice exposure to Arcadum’s large community. Nat20 and Loocah especially rose to prominence in the community through their amazing design work on the Tearn and Ho’ask races. But these concept streams soon became overbearing with how often they were being set up and how their concept art was being used to promote the stream without much credit to the artists in question other than a simple “these were made by my community.” It then crossed a line when Arcadum asked me to create a channel in the unofficial artist hangout server to serve as the work channel for a secret Callous Row TV Show concept art event (which couldn’t info about couldn’t leave the server at the time) that I didn’t even know was happening until the moment of, aside from a “special event” that Arcadum teased earlier in the day. I was already in bad relations with the owners of the hangout server for not getting things cleared through them first for I prior PR incident involving Arcadum and an artist’s original character, so to not tell them about this event and the channel being made for it until the moment of put both Arcadum, and by association, myself in hot water with them. Both the owners have since forgiven me for what happened and place the blame on Arcadum, but one thing he had said during that meeting irked me a lot. He had said something along the lines of “I only did this here because I wasn’t sure I would be able to pay for it otherwise” and that is completely fucking bullshit, because I’ve been running the numbers and managing the budget for Arcadum’s art expenses and he had more than enough to offer compensation to each of the artists who contributed to the event, and I made sure that he knew that, and after that I made sure to offer each artist there an option of compensation on their own terms or donation. And I made sure they were paid for their work. But to do this, for something as secret as an unannounced tv project where no NDAs could be signed and using volunteer labor as a means to support a project that could bring in a larger tier of financial success than what Arcadum already makes is downright shameful and exploitative.

This is on top of his absolute incompetence in crediting the artist’s he uses for his NPC and enemy tokens. He says he tries to credit each artist by making sure the artist signature is present in the handout art, but that is far too minimal for any sort of credit that can either barely be seen or understood by the audience, or barely seen at all with how quickly he mouses over the art. The best way he could credit the artist is to make sure he shouts them out upon art reveal and/or putting a label with the artist’s username on the token itself, he has done both of these and is always given the info needed to continue doing it, but almost every time he chooses not to.

===My Own Exploitation===

Now I will discuss how Arcadum has treated me and my professional positions. As I mentioned previously, Arcadum frequently made crunch orders and rush deadlines from the artists I organized for him to take on official work (in my spare time prior to being assigned the role of Art Director), and because of those orders I constantly had to stay up to the most ungodly of hours to make sure that the artist could get the feedback they needed in time to get their done by the deadline. It got to the point where I needed to wake up every hour and a half to make sure I could both give feedback to the artists and maintain some level of sleep. It was exhausting, but I did it for the artists to make sure they would be paid for their work and for those that put their soul into it, make sure their piece was made into merch so that they could get additional income for their effort (though the merch side of things with Novo.tv is a completely separate fire with its own host of practices unfriendly to the artists they sign contracts with).

Not to mention early in my career as Art Director I had to remind Arcadum to constantly pay his artists, it got so bad that I had to pay some artists in Arcadum’s stead out of my own pocket to make sure that they could pay for bills on time, money that was never reimbursed to me despite logs visible to him saying that I did so. All of this I did out of contract and without pay, and I invested around a +$1000 of my own money to the artists of this server to make sure that they were happy and well treated when Arcadum couldn’t bother to take the time out of his day to do it himself. Which brings me to my next point, Arcadum loves to drag his feet, months he has told the admins of his server that he would be paying them for their work and it took me venting to Tiffany back in march to actually see any payment negotiation take place regarding my positions as Discipline Admin, Art Director, and now Youtube manager. Three positions that require a lot of time commitment to always be available and severely limit my choices should I seek additional work outside of Verum. I was so in deep and mission critical to his business that I expected at least to be paid market standard for at least one of these positions, but for all three positions, a low balled salary of only $1500 a month. Pitiful for a full time position and barely scraping by minimum wage for a part time. Now I will say I accepted this because in a pandemic I had nowhere else to turn to and because I was unvaccinated at the time I didn’t want to risk the welfare of my family or my own, so I had to take what income I could find. But I will not lie when I said I felt exploited, knowing how much he spent on art, how much he spent on his stream, how much he earned from his youtube that I and the youtube team helped him through blood, sweat and tears, reach an ad revenue of 10K a month from $800 a month within a span of 4 months. He never talked to me about a pay raise and I was never in a position to ask for one knowing how vulnerable I would be if I did. The only thing he ever did was pile more work on me. Manage an animated series, find screenwriters, and what hurt me the most, do his dirty work in explaining to my friend and fellow director in Verum why she’s being removed from a position she, just like myself, devoted so much time, dedication, and love to.

===The Last Straw===

Back on Tuesday (Aug 24th, 2021) I had learned from Tiffany that she and Arcadum had split for personal reasons. Not knowing at the time what exactly was going on or how terrible the situation really was but wanting to respect their privacy and of my support to both their endeavors regardless of a natural split that can happen in a relationship, I reached out to Arcadum to let him know that I would be there to support him should he need anything. He later messages me at 2am in the morning to tell me to re-add Kelli once he talked with Tiffany, and so I made note of that, but then Kelli reaches out to me because Arcadum said to her that I would explain what happened. I never was told anything and tried to console her and support through what was going on, but I didn’t understand myself why she was being removed in the first place. And so I waited, and waited, and waited all night to see if Arcadum would give me the heads up to re-add Kelli, but he never did. So I took actions into my own hands and re-added her myself, as I saw no issue in doing and did not believe she did anything wrong to warrant removal, to leave her out would cause more harm than good to the work process she provides and oversees as the music director for Verum. And I made it clear to Arcadum that what he made me do was very unprofessional and unbecoming of my role in his business.

What follows is the most flip flopping I have ever seen, I wake up to see that Kelli was once again removed. He then calls me to explain himself that Kelli and the other girls that were kicked from Verum needed to be removed because Tiff demanded it. Now that didn’t sit right with me because Tiffany herself had she didn’t want anyone’s livelihood to be affected by their relationship issues, so that didn’t make sense. But he then said that I could remove the bans and re-add Kelli to her position, and so I did and told Kelli as well, but with the back and forth going on she didn’t want to join until she heard from Arcadum himself. Which, three times the charm, he ends re-banning the people he told me to ban not long after that, so I’m fucking pissed. I get in another call with him and there I make my decision that I will leave the team if Kelli is not reinstated, because at this point things have been ridiculously unprofessional and I could not work having been pushed this far, having Kelli been pushed this far. Later that night though, I get in another call with him, Kelli, myself, and one other for Arcadum to explain what’s happening. Here in this call he guilt tripped Kelli and I, and Kelli with audible tears, dropped position and friendship with him herself. And I could not admire her more for the strength she displayed that night, and couldn’t help but pity Arcadum for having to do what he did. He begged me to stay, he knew how important I was to his stream, to the artists, to the youtube, he knew how much they relied on me and he guilted me into conceding that I would keep working until someone else could replace me.

I am not a cruel person, so I thought about it more and gave Arcadum a proposal. Let me take what I’ve organized for him in the Worker’s Collective and let me re-purpose it to an independent organization, so that I and the artists, musicians, and other creative workers could have one level of separation to protect their livelihood and protect them from receiving any backlash for associating with you. He would he would consider it, and later that night, Kelli shared her story to me, and I never felt so fucking betrayed and so fucking ashamed. That man lied to my face, Kelli’s face, and everyone’s face. He didn’t want to protect the people he was kicking, he wanted to silence them. For people like me who relied on his money to survive, he preyed and took advantage of my good will for others to keep me silent. I talked with him three other times after that. I waited for him to tell the truth, but each time he deceived and omitted the truth to save his skin. Not to the staff, not to the admins, not to anyone. He tried to praise out of nowhere in the staff meeting, and it felt so forced and fake. He cornered in a voice call to discuss my proposal, and he questioned my professionalism of over 3 years by asking if I would run off with the group if he accepted. He asked why I lost faith in him, and that was a very loaded question. One that was difficult to answer without letting on more than I know and without endangering Kelli’s confidentiality. So I made it clear that I did not lose faith in him, but I feared my team’s getting hurt should the worse come and he would get cancelled for his actions. I will be transparent, he made me a deal, that should he get cancelled, the group that I organized would transition to me. Now, that deal has no bearing, as I was never under any contract with him, let any contract for all my position, so he had no control over me or the people in that server. But he tried his best to make it seem like he did. And I will not lie, I felt so vulnerable my entire time talking with him. The worst thing I experienced in that call was he had the audacity to make me walk through the thought process of removing Kelli as if it was some sort of loyalty test. To make me say that he had every right to remove her for any reason, because technically, yes, he did have the power to remove anyone for any reason. But that didn’t make that right. Not one bit.

I was being honest when I said I didn’t lose faith in him. I always look to the good in people, however little there may have been to learn and be better, but I lost what little faith I had after that last call. And I made up my mind that he doesn’t deserve me, Kelli, the women he abused, the artists, the musicians, and every single person in his community. Not one person.

===Closing===

I implore everyone to read all these stories, and keep them to heart. Believe the victims and stand up to abuse and manipulation.

I said it before and I will say it again. The nights I spent talking with Kelli and mutually supporting each other through this, I could not help but admire the strength and endurance she displayed. That so many women and others have displayed in the past day. I feel sorry for what you had endured all these years, and I’m so sorry that I did not realize just how bad it was until now. I feel sorry that I was not strong enough to speak my story until now.

I am thankful for everyone who supported me through this endeavor and who have chosen to stick with me as we grow past it.

But thank you most of all to Kelli, for being the wind keeping me aloft and the echo for my shackled voice, and the voice of so many others.

Goodbye, Arcadum. Take this harsh lesson, and be better.

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