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[null]

Well if you ban him for no reason, you might as well ban me....

Honestly, you guys jumped to conclusions, and didn't even consider all the possibilities before you bashed and flamed him, that's some great work there.

I could have said nothing and this thread would have fallen into the boneyard of dead threads, but because we were honest about what happened, we are punished and/or threatened?   I offered my skills in friendship months ago, and i even asked for "Dev" tags, but you only wanted to make enemies out of the "outsiders" including modders and the rest of the community.

I have been disrespected and threatened for stating my own opinions in the official channels (Like: e.g. Jump vs Crosshair)  but called out for "starting drama" and then being antagonize by morons like soupcan.  When i ask questions on discord I'm either ignored or told to "Read the sourcecode", and that's exactly what i did.

In reality, modding cannot be prevented, anyone from anywhere, can do anything, because the sourcecode has been released. It will be changed, if not by me or XGII, by someone else. This is a development planning problem, not a community problem.

Dev's I've said this before, but you should reevaluate what you want out of this mod before burning people at the stake, in your eyes you should see that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and know what possibilities exist for people to come along and change things.

XGII did nothing wrong in this post to warrant a ban,  if you are going to consider things he did previously, why wasn't he already banned?
That makes absolutely no sense??? This auction  is out of spite, and resemblance of horrible leadership, and a perfect example of the current Dev's relationship with the community, 

Even if he was banned for something legitimate, this post should have been locked immediate afterwards,  now the doors wide open to talk Sh*t at XGII when he didn't do anything, and I'm pretty sure even he could keep playing he won't know, so its almost as good as if you did completely ban him.

Thanks to the previous contributors and Dev's for making this game awesome, not so much for the current Dev's that are F'ing up the game for everyone, and not listening to the community.

[Entropy-Soldier]

I left this post open for you to respond, actually, considering I called you out not anticipating that it would go in a completely different direction like that.  I agree that it's not the -best- way of doing things but I figured it wouldn't be fair to deny you a chance to explain yourself or ask for clarification.  Obviously you disagree and I'll keep that in mind for the future.


I don't agree nearly as much with the rest of your post.  Honestly we've made a great effort to be nice to you, I can't think of any instances of us aiming to upset or insult you.  Any time I've told you to "read the source code" it's been because you were pretty much already doing that and snooping around with systems you shouldn't.  Why would I help you crack into our skins system and devalue one of our player rewards?  I was hoping you would take the hint but clearly you think you have some sort of moral privilege to do so because it's -technically- possible.  If everyone thought like this, society would have never gotten past the stone age since it's -technically- possible to do pretty much anything and it's society's fault that you can, right?

Changing server binaries falls outside the scope of what is intended to be moddable in a source engine game.  If you were to do this in TF2 or any other valve game your servers would be black listed, and knowing valve they'd probably go further than that.  Same with cosmetics.  These are intended to be used to reward players for certain things and generate interest in the game through promotional events.  Giving skins out through your own hacked binaries completely undermines this for the benefit of your own server.  Any sensible game developer cracks down on this stuff as quickly as they sniff it out because letting it run rampant can destroy their game.  Sadly I didn't think we'd ever need it, so I don't have a server blacklist system in place yet, but that's generally the go-to for this kind of thing.  5.1 will have one and that will be our solution to this kind of thing if it ever comes to that. 


"I offered my skills in friendship months ago, and i even asked for "Dev" tags, but you only wanted to make enemies out of the "outsiders" including modders and the rest of the community. "

We played some hockey, you asked to join the team as a coder, and I told you that we weren't looking for coders or even actively expanding the team at that moment.  If that's all it takes to make an enemy out of you then you would have never made it on the team anyway.  We constantly criticize eachother and there are rules everyone has to follow, something you don't seem to believe in.  The dev tag itself is mostly to let people know that we're the people to talk to if they have any questions or want to report any bugs.  It's not some medal of honor that you suddenly "deserve" for whatever reason.  If you're not in regular contact with the dev team you should not have it because you do not represent us and are not capable of acting on our behalf.  Asking for one first doesn't give you a casus beli to hack one in.


As for XGII, I take full responsibility.  Everyone wanted to ban him much sooner and I told them we had to stick to the guidelines given in the forum rules and give him a warning and temp ban first.  These obviously had no effect and he continued to do what we explicitly told him not to, but I was kind of hoping something would happen and he would turn things around.  With this thread and plenty of other actions of his it became obvious that was not going to happen.  There has to be a cutoff -somewhere-.  99 is less than 100 but add one more and it's not.  I really try to give people a chance to have a change of heart but I guess it just leads to messy situations like this one.

That being said let me make that mistake one more time and give you another chance to turn things around:
    - Don't give yourself a dev tag
    - Run only official GE:S server binaries
    - Don't give out special skins


At the end of the day yes, this stuff is incredibly easy to do.  Many people could figure out how in a day or two.  And yet you're the first in nearly a year since the release of 5.0 + the several years since 4.2 became open source to do so.  This is because there's an implicit contract that the dev team has control of and responsibility for these things.  If you start respecting this right now, then you can remain in good standing with us and everything will be fine.  If you insist on following this path then I guess I'll just have to correct my previous poor development planning as soon as possible.

I'll give you a chance to respond and then we'll take this to discord/PMs if there's any real reason to continue.  Topic will be locked and archived after that in part for the reasons you've given.

[soupcan]

It was made clear to him in multiple warnings what he was doing wrong. We stand by our decision to ban him.

As for the rest of the post, it seems that you like to make enemies out of anyone who doesn't agree with you. Perhaps the most egregious example is this:

called out for "starting drama" and then being antagonize by morons like soupcan.

For those who were not there to witness it, he attempted to start drama with snarky comments after I made a simple statement.



The monkey business he was referring to was something I literally never wrote a message on, only added to someone else's "reaction" on Discord out of humor. I wrote him a PM asking him to stop, to which his response was to publicly post the PM with the comment "eat me":



That is, to my memory, the extent of my communication with null. If that's all it takes to feel antagonized, then I don't want to live on this planet any more.

[null]

If that's all it takes to feel antagonized, then I don't want to live on this planet any more.

Well I've never thought of being Hannibal Lecter, making his cellmate neighbor swallow his own tongue, but your last statement there sounds a bit psychotic. I'd recommend you seek psychological professional help if you feel like hurting yourself or someone else before you act on your impulses.  Seriously, that strikes a historical cord, and a horrible statement due to past events, what would Nickster say?

[null]

I left this post open for you to respond, actually, considering I called you out not anticipating that it would go in a completely different direction like that...

 
I appreciate you leaving the thread open for me to respond, but seems how this is an ultimatum, there's really no reason to continue. Its a binary decision that you have given me.  Either i follow your demands or i don't, and face certain consequences, whether its a meaningless threat or not.

Any time I've told you to "read the source code" it's been because you were pretty much already doing that and snooping around with systems you shouldn't

And come on, this is `ex post facto`, you're only making this claim because you just found out i made these modifications, if you already knew i was "snooping" you would have said something or someone from the team.  Beside that your sourcecode taunts people to modify skins: 

Changing server binaries falls outside the scope of what is intended to be moddable in a source engine game.

 
To be clear, i never changed any binaries, including the server or the client,  this is another example of you, and your counterparts jumping to conclusions again.

We played some hockey, you asked to join the team as a coder, and I told you that we weren't looking for coders or even actively expanding the team at that moment.

Actually i remember you asking me: "Is there anything i can do for you?"  and i asked if i could have dev tags and you said i could apply as an applicant, and i said:  "okay then, i guess beside that, i just want to play the game and have fun."  and you said,  "well i don't think anyone can take that away from you" 

As for XGII, I take full responsibility.

Look i understand you have to stick up for your team members rash decisions with XGII, but my question still remains, why did this thread/post count towards XGII's 100 out of 100 ban? all he did was ask a question, that it all. I understand once you make a decision its hard to go back on it, but seriously he should be given a Billy Martin, he played by the rules, all he did was change his own client. I'm sorry but there's no way to take responsibility, and then ban him at the same time.

That being said let me make that mistake one more time and give you another chance to turn things around:

I have a quote for you:  “You can never make the same mistake twice because the second time you make it, it's not a mistake, it's a choice.” ― Steven Denn

    - Don't give yourself a dev tag
    - Run only official GE:S server binaries
    - Don't give out special skins

At the end of the day yes, this stuff is incredibly easy to do.  Many people could figure out how in a day or two.  And yet you're the first in nearly a year since the release of 5.0 + the several years since 4.2 became open source to do so.  This is because there's an implicit contract that the dev team has control of and responsibility for these things.  If you start respecting this right now, then you can remain in good standing with us and everything will be fine.  If you insist on following this path then I guess I'll just have to correct my previous poor development planning as soon as possible.

Well if more dev's play on servers then great!  Even if they are checking for modifications imho that's still a win for the community. So if that happens I'd surely drop tags and skins on my servers.  I don't know what contract you are speaking of, but I'm not disrespecting you or the game, i can do whatever i want on my own computers/servers and if you feel like you want to do more development on the game and improve it, that's another win for the community, and i hope you do that. 

I'll give you a chance to respond and then we'll take this to discord/PMs if there's any real reason to continue.  Topic will be locked and archived after that in part for the reasons you've given.

Well, thank you for listening, i hope that happens more from everyone on the Dev team.

-----
Null

QUOTE:  "A very common aspect of psychological abuse and manipulation is for the abuser to claim that the victim is being abusive towards them."

[Entropy-Soldier]

Yep, you're right, I was delivering an ultimatum to you and that's why I was giving you just one more response.  Your choices were to decline and have your servers blacklisted as soon as we are able to do so, or back off and respect these incredibly simple wishes.  My reasoning was made very clear in my last post so I'm not going to restate anything, but just...wow.  I never thought you'd be able to come up with a third option, which is to attempt to piss off everyone on the dev team by taking a joke from Futurama and turning it into a stab at the founder of the project.

Even if you're not modifying the binaries, which was an easy interpretation to have since you referenced the source code being accessible for modification many times, you're still giving out dev tags and reward skins which are the other two things I've explicitly said we do not want you to do.  The comment in the source code was mostly made under the assumption that people would use it to reverse engineer one specific thing which I considered harmless.  I was legitimately congratulating them because if they figured that out then I don't mind them giving themselves the one skin possible to gain with that method.  I kind of assumed anyone with the ability to set up a server and analyze the source code would know not to compromise that investment by directly going against the obvious interests of the dev team but clearly I was wrong and need to keep this in mind for all my future projects.

Anyway, if you're paying for your servers on a monthly basis I'd recommend you avoid renewing them.  Depending on which route we decide to take, and how much of a problem you decide to be, the blacklisting feature I was talking about will either come out in a patch sometime soon or when we're ready to release 5.1.  At that time your servers will be blacklisted and nobody will be able to play on them.  I cannot convey just how much I don't want to do this, because people apparently like your server and you seem to enjoy the game enough to modify it, but not doing so establishes a very dangerous precedent.  There are boundaries with things like this, and if they're not enforced when someone tests the waters then they'll erode very quickly and take the game down with them.

Please understand my position here.  I don't hate you, I don't want to hurt you, and I really wish I didn't have to do this, but I would be grossly neglecting my responsibilities if I did not.  It's a loss for GE:S either way, but given the options my choice is pretty much made for me.  Given that, you will still be allowed to play GE:S and post on the forums provided you don't cause any more trouble, but understand that everyone is ready to be done with this so this is your final warning.  Cause any more trouble, or anything we can even construe as trouble, and your account is getting permanently banned.  I would recommend not posting for a while on the off chance we misinterpret your intentions. 

If it's not -incredibly- obvious everyone wants me to ban you for what you've already said but I would like to at least give you the option to continue to play GE:S and be a part of the community if you so desire, as long as you never host a server again.  I will never understand how you decided having dev tags on your own servers for a short while was worth forcing the dev team to shut them down but now that's the road everyone gets to travel.  It's provides almost no benefit to you and causes a great deal of trouble for people you want to be on good terms with.  Do the people on your server even care at all about something like that?  Or did they just like the environment you provided for them and the community you built?  I seriously doubt any of them think being able to give some people a dev tag is worth compromising their community, but I guess it's not their choice to make.