CONTINUATION OF PREVIOUS CARRD

However, upon being unbanned and rejoining the server on 5/10, one of them received a Stat and Dev QNA Block with zero explanation. The blocks were later removed by a staff member, but the staff member was unable to provide an explanation for where the blocks came from or who added them.

Another rejoined the server on 5/25, receiving the same blocks a few hours after rejoining - again with no explanation. It’s likely that the Dev QNA Block was automatically added by a bot, but a Stat Block has to be manually applied.

These were their roles prior to demotion and the ban. The censored roles pertain to their identity, and shall not be shown for their own safety:

It is still unknown as to who did this, but we’d appreciate it if speculation is kept to a minimum.

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Volunteer Testimonies

All of the testimonies here are from anonymous volunteers. This is to protect their identities, and to shield them against possible retaliation from Sonar’s HR. We’ve seen firsthand how quick they are to immediately ban and silence those who speak up about their experiences - especially on the day that the Recognized Creator document was made public (REMINDER that they are in no way associated with the creation of this document). We’ve taken the necessary precautions to ensure that no harassment goes towards them.However, if HR does discover some of their identities and sees it fit to punish them, know that it will be documented here as well. It is not only abhorrent that they’ve been treated this way for so long, but to think of silencing them after they’ve had enough? That is vile behavior.So please, take in these words with an open heart and mind. That is the first step to making changes - changes that are good, and will benefit everyone as a whole.

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FIRST ANONYMOUS TESTIMONY:

Hello, I am a former CoS mod and this is my experience. let me preface my message by saying i have no ill intentions for my message, i would just like to share my story. The last thing I want is for the people I worked with to be harassed. I moderated for CoS for around 9 months I believe, my time at first was fun and I was very motivated to help volunteer. As time progressed, I began to notice that the staff team and a specific few HR members were not making my time enjoyable. Specifically, my personal interactions with the owner of the game, Erythia, proved to be negative time after time. Erythia would constantly berate and belittle the mods for the smallest things, telling us we were incapable of our jobs and treating us as if we were borderline stupid. she didn't give us in-game mod permissions for many months, yet somehow expected us to continue to mod efficiently. The admins had to fight HR just to get the voices of the mod team heard, especially regarding in-game commands and things of that sort. The mod team also has a tendency to be extremely biased, this is evident mostly during the times when moderator applications are open or if a friend of a staff member did something wrong. i was demoted for accidentally leaking a creature to a friend, this info made its way to a tester we had both considered a friend. This tester then reported me to HR and I was subsequently demoted for it. I would also like to add that I do not believe there was any evidence pointing towards me other than this tester telling HR a leak had occurred to a friend of theirs.Sonar Studios has proven time and time again how terrible their workplace is for volunteers. we are told, because we are just volunteers, that we can take a break whenever we want, go on hiatus, have a mental health day. however, the pressure to moderate and do our jobs was so overbearing that it felt like even taking a little break would result in a demotion, or at least in my experience, that you weren’t fulfilling your job properly. there were many times where there were issues present within the mod team, such as the way different situations were handled, that didnt get fixed or addressed for weeks. on top of that, we were also told there would be (if i remember correctly) monthly staff sync meetings and multiple other meetings to cover certain topics the HR believed we needed retrained on. as far as im aware, these never happened, or only happened once and then never again. there were also multiple times while i was a moderator that i felt too scared to approach my HR in fear that i wouldnt be listened to.if you’re reading this, and are even thinking about taking on a volunteer position with sonar, i seriously advise that you dont.EDIT 2: after talking to to Cinnakxll, we have cleared things up. i would like to preface this by saying we discussed EVERYTHING in the second paragraph of my testimony, and we have come to a concrete conclusion and agreed that parts of my testimony were clouded by my unknowing of certain information, and emotion. i try not to let emotion cloud my judgement, however i found out i was left in the dark about a lot of things, including the grounds of my demotion (i now know cinna had no part in this whatsoever). the last thing i want is to come off as malicious or with bad intent, and my testimony was written before certain details were shared with me. please do not involve or witchhunt parties who are not at fault. i know my first testimony came off very strongly that Cinna was an evil and terrible person, but after further discussion with him, it was clear that i was misunderstanding the situation and did not involve cinnakxll.

EDIT: i was unfairly warned for this, when i believe i shouldnt have been punished at all.

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SECOND ANONYMOUS TESTIMONY:

I wanted to be a tester for quite some time, so I was very happy to apply. I thought it would be fun, as well as being a way for me to get some experience in a worklike environment even though my disabilities were too severe to let me work a real job. I knew it would be hard work, but I never quite expected the level of exhaustion I would face, or being punished for having mental health struggles.Unfortunately, during my time as a tester my real life situation had gone poorly. I was in a very abusive situation, and my mental health plummeted. I approached those in charge of managing the tester team (the one I approached was not cinna due to me being afraid of cinna, but they would have had direct communication with cinna. I have no ill will towards the other manager at the time and wish to keep them anonymous) and informed them about the situation and my mental health. I had requested a lessened load of work, which was met with approval.Despite reducing my workload, my situation did not improve and I continued to express stress. Admittedly, this was something I should not have done, saying too many times that I was stressed out in all sorts or channels. I had also been a bit too open about the tester process at times, not leaking creatures or features but instead talking about processes for testing. I had made mistakes and I wish I had simply been corrected, but instead, I had logged on one day to find I had been demoted. This was devastating, and led to my mental health being made severely worse (despite the fact that I had been told that this decision was made to preserve my mental health). I loved my position as a tester even as stressed as I had been, and the sudden demotion and not being able to have any input on the decision had made my mental health much worse. I spent a lot of time self isolating, full of self blame and anger, and had even considered self harm at times.
Had they simply spoken to me about my behavior, I would've happily corrected myself. Had they brought up that they were concerned about the tester position being worse for my mental health, i likely would've eventually come to the same decision and stepped down on my own. But instead I was denied any chance to correct myself and have any choice over what was best for me at a terrible time in my life.While the circumstances around my demotion was pretty bad, there were a few individual circumstances I'd like to comment on as well.One such incident was the time I saw another tester sacrifice their health for the tester position. This tester was a higher position than me, which meant I felt like I couldn't really comment or argue. But during our recode ea work, this tester mentioned not sleeping for days and using energy drinks to stay up. When I mentioned this was unhealthy and that sleep was important, the tester said they didn't have much of a choice and that work needed to be done.Another topic I wanted to talk about was that working on recode ea was exhausting for us all, and that Erythia definitely made things worse by not allowing Stat testers to do our jobs and instead forcing her broad wishes instead. We were already very overwhelmed restatting all the creatures and adjusting to new mechanics, but Ery kept making broad changes that made things even harder and would not listen when we criticized her ideas. One such example was the dart power on lower tiered aquatics. On release, Ery insisted low tiers should have worse darts than high tiers due to having less powerful fins, and would not listen when we said that this would cause issues. Ery had the final say and we had to scramble to balance her wishes, on top of everything else, despite the fact the community was angry and blamed us.There was also quite a bit of disorganization and leaving testers to sort of self govern. They'd be given a goal within a certain time period but had very little guidance on how to get there, and only ever really interacted with when they'd do something wrong. Most times it was older and more experienced testers repeating the processes they had learned in the past and newer testers copying them, rather than a higher up making decisions overall. During my time as a tester I had a very large project and had tried repeatedly to reach out to ask for minimum and maximum values, to ensure that I wouldn't have had to redo my work. Despite my best efforts, it seems even those above me weren't really sure what to do, since I had to redo a part of my project multiple times, and I am sorry if it is rude but I am a small bit bitter about having to do the extra work during a time when we were already overwhelmed and overworked.

EDIT: Another thing I have come to realize in the later days is that the case of my demotion was very misproperly handled, in that I had received zero warning or initial dm, only the immediate demotion. In the case of a demotion, the user is supposed to be messaged immediately, yet I had to contact one of my supervisors. Not only this, but as previously established the cause of my demotion was my poor mental health and how it was visibly effecting my behavior, so by leaving me panicked and confused in such a way, they had made it even worse and caused even more pain. I had been in such a panic that I had dmed both a tester friend of mine (who is NOT associated with the document, please any who are looking into the carrd do not go after this person, they are innocent) as well as modmail before realizing I should dm one of the people in charge of testers. Once doing so I was informed of my demotion, but I did not receive any apology or even told that they made a mistake on their end. I went about my life thinking they did that intentionally, and spent my time leading up to the creation of the doc full of hurt. The creation of this document, and reaching out and connecting with other ex volunteers who were done wrong, has helped me finally realize and understand these emotions rather than letting them eat away at me inside and continue to hurt me. I hope that the system can improve, because my friends on the team deserve to be happy and volunteer because they love this game, and not because they are threatened with demotion if they falter.

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THIRD ANONYMOUS TESTIMONY:

Alright so, here's my experience with volunteering for the COSAs for the work itself, i don't have much complaints, our team was very kind, welcoming, we were interacting with eachother alot, informing eachother a lot if we had any kind of troubles- Our team by itself is fine, although there have been some things that actually bothered me during the time i was still on the team.I've been on the team for like, 2 years or so, our team was quite neglected by the higher ups, as far as i remember from a few conversations or things i've heard, one of the previous leads of our team was rarely even informed by the higher ups about anything that should be annouced to us, or pretty much anything that they should've been infomed about by the higher ups - pretty much a lot of things happened without even their knowledge in the first place.And as far as i know/remember, there were aswell requests to the higher ups to turn off the automatic translations in the portal as i believe there was such option (I could be wrong though), as those automatic translations were messing up our work- by either resetting it or replacing it with really wonky translations - about which we were receiving quite an amount of complains from the players.And the main issue being the in-game roles, about which we also requested a lot, as they could've happened a lot with the scamming issue which occured a lot, due to us not having the in-game role title which led to people pretending to be one of us, just to scam people.Those were the things that surely needed to be attented, and changed - Unless they have gotten changed already in a matter of those few days or longer amount of time.

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FOURTH ANONYMOUS TESTIMONY:

i don't intend to hurt anyone with this, i just want to explain the circumstances under which i worked for over 2 years while volunteering for cos as a tester. i'd like to stay anonymous but i'm sure some people will know exactly who wrote this; know that i don't have ill intent, i just want my voice to be heard.absolutely the most unpleasant time to have been volunteering was when naut was still around (along with Arc). we were verbally berated, blamed, shut down, silenced, and insulted very often. conditions have absolutely improved since then, although it's not a perfect environment. ery will occasionally make negative comments towards us, calling us "forgetful blue names" and putting us down intentionally. we've on multiple occasions been told directly and indirectly that we are replaceable. whenever there was a leak of some kind, we were almost always the first ones blamed. we would get a tester ping demanding information on the leak when, usually, we weren't connected to it whatsoever. oftentimes, it would be the content creators that had leaked. there were numerous occasions where CCs were reported for something and would always get away with it. i believe this was because of poor management and a bias towards CCs because they give the game attention and money.at one point (around 2-3 years ago) tester chat was closed entirely due to us reacting to an upper management decision and trying to express our opinions on it. this situation was an incredibly long time ago so i don't remember the exact details of the decision, but i believe it was related to sigmatox being tradable (as it had been initially planned to just be 1 per tester, untradeable). most of us were expressing our thoughts in a comprehensible and calm manner, but the situation got out of hand and they closed the chat completely and put new rules into place. they decided that the channel would stay closed with the exception of testing sessions. they completely took away our right to speak in our channels and communicate with one another unless it was for our "volunteering" work, which was starting to feel more like a chore or even a job. the channel remained this way for a while until eventually it was reverted back to how it was before. the "replaceable" threat was very common during this time, as we were told directly that our role could be revoked to "keep the work organized" before they immediately added "your work is very much appreciated" afterwards. this felt extremely condescending and almost sarcastic; our work clearly wasn't appreciated if they're so willing to swap us out for new testers.

this was years ago, but there's still issues with CoS's current system. we're still insulted and blamed for leaks occasionally, and ery has been known to lash out at us at certain times. we're made to feel more like employees than volunteers, but our work is unpaid and feels thankless. originally, all testers were lumped under the same category, and there was no split between stat and bug testers. we all helped out where we could. then the team was split and now stat testers and bug testers aren't allowed to do each other's jobs - bug testers cannot help with stat testing (ex. match-ups) even if they have free time, and stat testers often aren't allowed to help with bug testing. i feel like this decision (made a while back, when lead testers were introduced) created a divide in the role that made us feel more like co-workers than a team/friends.something i found particularly odd was a team member's behavior at times. similarly to another testimony, i noticed how this individual would often bring up their issues with sleeping and how they'd stay up for a long time. it was a bit of an uncomfortable topic and the channel felt awkward whenever it was brought up. sleep deprivation isn't something to be taken lightly, and seeing someone - specifically someone older and a similar/higher rank - talk about always staying up to get work done wasn't exactly healthy for a team full of teenagers and young adults. something i'd also like to add is how more and more of our say in the game's decisions has been taken away recently. we used to help a lot with events, new abilities, new features, etc. we also got to nominate new testers, which was helpful. however, we've lost a lot of that ever since we got lead testers - we have no say in how events work, and we aren't involved at all in the process of picking new testers.most of the "fun" has been taken out of testing, and it's slowly eaten away at any passion i - and several others - had for the game. when i first became tester I was extremely enthusiastic and eager to help the game because it was fun and the other testers felt like my friends, but these last few months i've felt drained and burnt out from the game. volunteering for cos has gotten rid of the spark i used to feel when i played. friends had become co-workers that i barely talked to outside of testing. testing has also become a draining task, considering several times in the past we've been pinged to re-pro a bug without any specific instructions on how (which makes it near impossible to figure out the cause of the bug). however, we were still expected to figure it out, sometimes even within a certain timeframe (ex. cramming event testing on a friday an hour before the update is intended to drop). frequently we were expected to test an event thoroughly within a small timeframe, given very little time to find bugs. this was unfair to expect due to most testers having school/work and not having the time to quickly hop on the game and run through an entire event to find issues within an hour or two.another thing i'd like to mention is the community's treatment of volunteers (specifically testers). it is downright embarrassing and shameful how the players acts towards testers. every time a new creature's stats are dropped, people have something nasty to say. sometimes they'll claim that "whoever made these stats" is incompetent and should be fired, or they'll go further and call them names. additionally, if there's a bug that's gone unfixed, players will blame the bug testers for not fixing it (it's not our job to fix things) and bash us. not to mention the constant harassment over sigmatox. testers are regularly messaged and followed in-game about sig. it's actually ridiculous how far some people will go. i've had players join me in completely irrelevant games, and i along with several other testers have been threatened in the past and even called swears due to not giving them sigmatox. this is a large part of the reason that, initially, testers did not want sigmatox to be tradable at all. we argued it might cause harassment and begging. sigmatox never needed to be tradable; it was meant to be a reward to testers for their work, but now it's just used as something to trade, like a trophy.finally, i'd also like to bring up the situation with the recent bans of several volunteers (myself included). we've since been unbanned, but the fact that we were banned in the first place is embarrassing and insulting. our cases were severely mishandled by management, and we were given apologies that, to be honest, felt shallow ( and were very much copy-pasted) to make up for our reputations being ruined. after spending several years pouring my time into this game, i was demoted and banned for something i did not do. this caused me to lose several friends within the community because they were led to believe that i had done something horrible, or had no context for why i had been banned. even after being unbanned, my reputation feels tainted and i can't talk in the server the same way i did before. i lost my roles and several friends over a misunderstanding that should have been properly investigated.again, i would like to say that this is not intended to hurt anyone. my intentions are to tell the truth about my experience as a tester under Sonar Studios. i do not want anyone to be harassed over this and i wish sonar's volunteers the best because they're lovely people that deserve a better environment. if anyone ends up directly or indirectly damaged by this, that was absolutely not my intention and i apologize. i don't want sonar studios burnt down and torn to shreds; i want to see change and growth, in the game and management.