So there's been some unpleasantness going on between a Primary mod and a primary player, which seems to have manifested itself into an ingame issue in FFA for whatever reason.

We can re-fight the debate about who said what to whom and all that, but I'm not interested in that at this point. I chatted with everyone involved (or attempted to -- Titanium wouldn't talk to me in a constructive manner today, but I got to chat with an IMP'er about it) and looked into the whole issue ingame and on the forums. This includes deleted posts, which I can still view. The way things went down, while unfortunate, were all done within the confines of our general policies based on how the situation unfolded. This was not seen as a "special case" until the point where it crossed the server/mod/player boundaries.

The bottom line is that there was some unfortunate back and forth over a primary deletion, cooler heads didn't prevail and things got worse from there. So with that in mind, I have a couple of points I want to just reiterate in case they weren't PAINFULLY obvious:

- It is NEVER OK to attack a game mod's country because of their mod actions on another server. Our mods want to help the game they love and attacking their countries on other servers because you don't like the way they're modding is just unacceptable. We're still debating how to react to this, because it's so unfortunate and unplanned that we didn't really even consider it.

- If you have an issue with a game mod and/or game admin, bring it to the attention of another staffer. No one attempted to contact qz or I until after Slag's FFA country was killed -- 48hrs after Titanium was banned. We're reasonable (albeit busy) folks, but we make time in the evenings for issues if needed.

- Players are NOT targeted by mods because of their actions or affiliation on any server. Many folks are involved in the oversight for these deletions as well; they're not a platform for any one person to push their agenda against a person and/or group. See the previous point for information on what to do if you think this is going on.

Titanium has said a LOT of unfortunate things recently, likely in the heat of the moment, and once he calms down he needs to find qz or I and discuss what happened in a constructive manner. The manner which he interacted with me via email today was not constructive, as it seemed as though he wants to hurt the game -- not just Slag.

The main point to stress is that there were lots of opportunities for things to get on the right track here, but they didn't. While that's unfortunate, it's something that happened. I think everyone would have preferred to have had this be resolved differently, so we need to be mindful of that to make sure we all keep having a good playing experience.

This part is directed towards everyone on the server in general:
FFA is the outlier of all of our servers we have. It requires special consideration whenever we make changes and was put together because we wanted to offer the classic FFA-style of playing to EE, but that came at the cost of making the game's back-end more complex and not just in obvious ways. Slag has been at the forefront of doing positive things for the FFA server and he's spearheaded most of the changes for it since it was launched last year. When you kill his country, which was looking really really nice, you're negatively impacting your own future. It's very disheartening to watch your country be destroyed because of things you had to do because of admin or mod duties, and its important that we stay connected to the game so the kind of dev FFA has had focused on it continues well into the future.

What we should all take away from this issue is that everyone needs to do more to work together and create a positive playing environment. When we're faced with these kind of situations in the future, let's try to remember to think through how to resolve the situation and try to let cooler heads prevail. We're all on the same side here and at times it helps to step back and remember that, even when dealing with heated issues.

Good post pang;

Now, I haven't followed any of this until today really, having just heard some minor beginnings of it yesterday.

I have to say though, the spirit of the rules in primary is somewhat important, it's there so that people don't get out of hand; typically people get reinstated if they ask nicely and demonstrate an absence of malicious behaviour.



For a clan to go off the word of a member against a moderators country for revenge, without first perhaps trying to resolve the situation though proper administrative channels, is, in my opinion, somewhat against the spirit of the rules itself; players expect certain behaviours on certain servers, we actively moderate to avoid cheating, yet one of our moderators (and developers even) gets persecuted individually for his service to the game. Personally I feel as though the whole clan is treading on some thin ice here. Next time I hope you will consider your actions within the framework of the larger community.



If there was an issue with a moderator, it should be taken up through proper channels (as pang said above, rather than on the forums or through in-game actions).


I don't moderate personally because of the headaches it causes, and the amount of time it takes, so by escalating relatively minor situations you impair our ability to do our jobs. Ask not what you can do for your countries, but what you can do for the community! :) haha

I do not necessarily know the complete circumstances but as far as members doing something at the behest of other members - in an alliance I think it is appropriate to ask "how high?" when a leader says jump. Even if other members are doing something to help them with their goal is not unreasonable. Obviously inter-server collusion (particularly into solo servers) is unacceptable however if his primary server in-game allies were the only ones helping him, and if his FFA pals didn't know why they were doing what they did, then I can't really fault him in primary or his friends in FFA. Obviously taking things between servers and particularly against mods/admins is unreasonable and has its own consequences. I guess it is a question of how to handle taking a hardline stance on a very gray issue.

Nice post.. Imp actedwrongly by taking part,id delete all countries in the kr

mmhmmm

admins and mods have a responsibility to be open, honest, impartial, and fair.

and IMP has no right to kill an admin/mods country cause one of ur members gets deleted in another server....

open to the player involved not the whole community

it's open to a partial sub-set of the community, the leaders of TKO and CC.

primary isnt one of my servers so i cant see anything other then the emails sent to the game email

Ford has made it clear he has access to what we want. If he does, so do you.

i'm not going to get into this

just like i didnt want to get involved when you wanted me to talk sense into slagpit when you were talking to him, i was just glad i had work as an excuse to leave

i thought Fordy said he was shown "some" of the information????

too lazy to go back and check...


Fact remains....

Tits did "something" and got deleted in Primary...

Then gave an admin a spray and continuted that on via emails..

IMP kill a mods country in some form of retaliation...

I still can't work out what this has to do with IMP and why they even got involved..... maybe u guys should of calmed him down and then went to the admins and push his case in a fair and resonable manner....

Eight staff members believe that Titanium's Primary country deserved to be deleted, that Titanium deserved to be banned, and that what IMP did was wrong. The ninth is on vacation.

All IMP wants to do is spread doubt. If they were interested in the truth this would have been handled quite differently and it wouldn't even be an issue today.

IMP is interested in knowing what Titanium said to get banned.

This is information that the leaders of at least two other FFA alliances have access to.

Grow up and stop playing stupid games. This was said to you over four days ago:

<Slagpit> I didn't mind him venting, as I said
<Slagpit> but he threatened to shut down the game
<Slagpit> I know he's your friend and I understand that you won't like our decision
<Slagpit> but if you do that, you're gone forever
<KC> no he didn't
<Slagpit> I read the post
<KC> the post referred to one of your posts
<Slagpit> so what was he trying to say? everyone on the staff interpretted it in another way
<KC> you said the players shut down earth 2025 through their actions. he was referring to that post.
<Slagpit> fluffing Nazi's the whole lot of you...
<Slagpit> That's okay... the game will get it's version of my hell...
<Slagpit> "We" shut down the E:2025 FFA server... "We" can do it again...


The last three lines were what Titanium posted on the forums. He was referring to a post I made where I referenced FFA players shutting down the old FFA server by selfishly running bots.

Whether or not he actually meant bots is irrelevant. He said that he was done playing the game, yet continually threatened the game/servers/admins. Why would we allow someone to access our game and forums when his only reason for being here is to cause some kind harm? Especially when that harm is possibly illegal and almost certainly against the rules?

So you're saying he was banned because of those 3 lines?

I already told you to stop playing stupid games. Reread my post until you understand why he was banned.

so you banned him for those 3 lines and because in his hissy fit, he said that he no longer wants to play the game?

I've talked to Titanium. The Admins need not worry about him running bots on the servers or anything like that.

So back to my original question. What exactly did he do to be deleted in the first place?

"I've talked to Titanium. The Admins need not worry about him running bots on the servers or anything like that."



dont worry the problem has just been solved lol....

Slagpit lost one country, IMP lost one member. That is 16 countries this set, 16 countries next set, so on and so on. But more important than the countries is that we are losing a friend.

Lets face it this game isn't all that exciting. (That is the nature of text based games) What keeps the player base coming back and the admins working hard is the community. So when a member of the community, a friend of ours, gets deleted for what we feel are unjust reasons... we would like to better understand the situation with details.

I've heard Titanium's side of the story. I'm not seeing how the deletion or the banning are justified based on his story. All we've asked for is the admin's side of the story. I'm not seeing how that is too much to ask for. Frankly refusing to speak about it only strengthens my belief that the admins/mods of this game acted hastily and in an unjust manner during the decision process.

Bsnake, you don't like IMP. We get that. But your little comments here aren't really needed. Thank you.

my only question is this

what makes Titanium more special then any other player who gets deleted??

Because there was no reason to delete him. At least nobody has given us a specific reason why he was deleted.

and did Titanium follow the same process every other player has to follow??

I don't know, he may have forgotten the cover sheet on the TPS reports.

Killing an administrator's country for their actions as an administrator is an attempt to dissuade administrators from enforcing the rules. Attempting to dissuade administrators from enforcing the rules and punishing them for enforcing the rules would fall under the "violating the spirit of the rules" clause, so I think that the administrators would be justified in deleting any country that participated in killing Slagpit's country.

Carrying grudges across servers I do not consider to be against the spirit of the rules, so the member who hit me and told me it was because of my actions in primary should not be deleted.

Hitting someone because of their actions on another server is lame, but not worthy of deletion. Killing someone because of their actions as an administrator is worthy of a deletion.

I don't have the exact quote from Titanium, but what he said was to the effect that him and his friends dominate the server and determine what types of retals are acceptable and what types are not acceptable, and that nuclear missiles were not acceptable and that my country would be killed for retalling with nukes.

This does go against the spirit of the rules of it being an individual server and not a team server, where teams of players are not allowed to work together to control the server. Titanium's deletion was justified.

You don't have the exact quote?
I call BS then.every IM/IRC/chat out there has stored logs..You're lying and know it..So do we..

I do have the exact quote, but I won't login to my country to lose the 18 hour bonus to get the quote.

And I don't have the quote for what I was told in-game in FFA because that country is now dead.

Roco, IMP and all the rest out there just a fyi

we have a privacy policy, so we as mods/admins will never give out any information about a specific player. you can keep asking, but we still wouldnt answer

If you dont release anything its going to stay as she said he said u know this right?

Within the spirit of the rules there is this line as a thing not to do. "Doing group kill runs against players without cause."

In this case you nuking Titanium give him "cause" to contact his in-game allies and kill you. That is perfectly within the spirit of the rules clause and he should not have been deleted for it. He never asked for help outside of the game. Nobody created countries just to participate in a kill run. Titanium did not break the "spirit of the rules" clause.

that is the only fact that imp has been given

Umm there is much more to that issue than is being stated in that over-simplified explanation, Rico. I don't know whether that information wasn't told to you by your FFA clan's member or whether it's being purposefully left out.

But as Spawn said, we're not giving out info on any private deletion to other players.
Titanium has already threatened to sue me for posting information (slag said his first name), eh? :p
Maybe he shouldn't threaten to sue us for "releasing information" when his clanmates are shouting "RELEASE INFORMATION!"

Having someone killed off for retalling a landgrab with a nuke is not cause for killing, especially when the nuke was two weeks previous to the threat, and when Titanium states that he and his friends are enforcing a retal policy upon the server and enforcing the unwritten rules of the game.

The rules say:
"These servers are designed for individual play. To make the game fair for all players and accessible to new players, players in the primary, express, and tourney server that attack as a group may be deleted at discretion of ingame moderators. Ingame alliances exist to give bonuses throughout the game: not as a tool or an excuse to dominate the rest of the server. "

Enforcing a retal policy through killing someone for retalling with nukes is using alliances as an excuse to dominate the rest of the server. If you grab someone, you cannot use your allies to force your target to abide by the retal policy of your choosing.

So you retalled with a nuke?
You hypocritical zit,you do it on one server and want to complain about it on another?
Sounds to me like you just stirred the pot to help get someone deleted...

First message from Titanium:
next time you think about launching missiles as a retal, remember me.

My allies are going to eat you for breakfast... and when we are done, we will devour you some more.

Nukes = your death. Remember that. Now run along like a good little idiot.



A later message from Titanium:
You want to launch missiles as retals, go ahead - you will be ruined set after set. Welcome to the game - where we - those who have been here the longest - set the rules.


---------------------------------------
He threatened to have him and his allies kill me if I nuked him.
He also used 'we' when talking about himself and his allies and claimed that they set the rules, which includes killing someone for using nukes as a retal.

That does fit the using alliances to dominate the server (setting the rules ~ dominating the server)

There's much more in the messages he sent. And I'm guessing that in his appeal with slagpit he said some dumb things as well which kept him from possibly being reinstated.

I think cross-server grudges are poor gamesmanship. I also think that while there's certainly nothing stopping an individual player or clan from grinding an axe, I also don't think it's probably a great idea to back a Mod or Admin into a corner by whacking one of his/her countries.

I don't think the Admins can allow the inmates to run the asylum to that degree.

Other than what's been posted here, I don't know a lot of detail and I certainly don't know the history between Slag and Titanium, but I'm guessing there were issues long before the recent disaster happened.

The only reason I'm replying is because this eventually affects all of us in terms of what precedents are and are not set in the game. What happened is just begging for escalation. 8 of 8 Mods/Admins felt that Titanium should be banned and honestly, whether I like that, IMP likes that, or whatever, that's a call that TPTB reserve exclusively to make.

I'm sort of surprised that all the countries involved in the kill run weren't deleted, to be honest. Bad behavior might have the unwanted side-effect of heavy-handedness being applied from Above.

On the other side, some guys showed their support for a friend who they feel got fluffed over.

Lastly, I gotta wonder why Titanium gets banned for some sort of collusion to "take the game down", yet RD does the same very thing on the Team server and not a word is said about it. Maybe someone could help me out on that.

It's not against the rules to use nukes as retals on any server. In primary its against the rules to use a team to make nukes a non-acceptable form of retaliation. On the alliance server your alliance is allowed to make it a policy to not accept nukes as retals and to enforce that policy.

I don't mind alliances working as alliances on the alliance server. But when they do that in primary, that is when it is against the rules.

There is a difference between servers where alliances are allowed, and servers designed for individual play. I'm not hypocritical for working with my alliance on an alliance server, but reporting someone for cheating when they work with their alliance on an individual server.

All i see are threats and NOTHING that breaks any rules..all i get is ,you whined and won..what a baby..

1. Slagpit should have never told people what country was his.
2. He should have had more than ZERO SDI.

First of all, maybe Admin can clarify something for me. While Primary is a server intended for Individual play, each individual could conceivable have 10 different allies.

Now. The fact is that each of those 10 allies brings help to the player's table that he or she would not otherwise have. That's teamwork plain and simple. We can argue semantics about whether it's active or passive support, but aid is aid.

What this seems like is that Policy is saying it's fine to choose your allies who are doing specific things to help you win, but are not permitted to help you retaliate against an attack type that will get you killed on ANY server.

In order to make the argument that using allies in Primary is a bannable offense, then it seems to me that in-game allies should not be allowed on the server.

1. That's his prerogative as a player.

2. That's irrelevant.

Telling someone that you & your friends set the rules and are willing to kill to enforce those rules is equivalent to using your allies to dominate the server.

Or do I need to break the unofficial rules they set and then test him to see if him & his allies will backup his claim that if I break HIS set of rules I will be killed?

Making the explicit threat of obey the rules me & my friends set or we will kill you is breaking the rules, even if they do not kill me.

Removing allies in primary is a suggestion I have made.

My understanding from talking to slagpit is that killruns on people are alright, even if the person being killed was minding their own business and retalled with special attacks after they were first hit with special attacks without provocation.

But what made titanium get deleted was apparently his desire to enforce a set of unwritten rules on the server, which is akin to an attempt to dominate the server (explicitly against the rules), especially when accompanied by the threat of obey these rules or die. That is too similar to the alliance server habits of setting a retal policy, and the setting of retal policies enforced by threat of death is something he wants to keep out of primary.

That's just my understanding of what Slagpit thinks, so I need to accompany this with a disclaimer that I may have misunderstood Slagpit.

i would like to see the Lgs that started all this post them or pm me them

I had to dig thru all the abs and missles that Rockman was throwing at other folks LONG before his spat with Tits,but here it is:

2011-02-04 14:25:09 EM Mikhail Bakunin (#107) MastermindFK (#52) 23401MU
2011-02-04 14:24:58 NM Mikhail Bakunin (#107) MastermindFK (#52) 704A
2011-02-04 14:24:54 NM Mikhail Bakunin (#107) MastermindFK (#52) DH
2011-02-04 10:22:30 PS MastermindFK (#52) Mikhail Bakunin (#107) 370A (694A)

http://www.eestats.com/primary/country/107

yea i would have killed u and got my in game allies to help which is what tits said he was going to do