Why did you guys remove another clan's group of servers off the master list?

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MaceMadunusus

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might have been heavy traffic since this thread has had a huge amount of visibility.

I mean, its certainly possible, but highly unlikely that amount of users would result in a noticeable slowdown. Regardless though, LoU confirmed that at least one of the slowdowns was a ddos.
 
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I mean, its certainly possible, but highly unlikely that amount of users would result in a noticeable slowdown. Regardless though, LoU confirmed that at least one of the slowdowns was a ddos.
for everyone that responded there were probably 10 who didnt, and this site NEVER sees anywhere near that traffic.
 

MaceMadunusus

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for everyone that responded there were probably 10 who didnt, and this site NEVER sees anywhere near that traffic.

Yes, but if you know the actual throughput capabilities of the site, it should be able to handle a couple hundred at once. It isn't running off a potato.
 

eezstreet

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So do you just automatically go with "anyone who hasn't been circlejerking on a forum is to be disregarded"?

No wonder why you people can't get new guys.
No, not really. I welcome any counterpoint that has facts behind it.
This guy is just flaming/spouting nonsense about sockpuppet accounts without doing any kind of research. It's not really relevant to the topic at hand and turning this thread into more of a cesspool than it has to be.

(I'm not a member of tR, Mandos, or the MB2 team)
 

Spaghetti

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I am locking this topic for a few hours so I have a chance to begin cleaning up this mess. It will be reopened later. Take the chance to step outside and have a breath of fresh air. A few quick points:
  • Leaked chats were from development's private beta testing chat. This is not where this topic is being discussed in detail internally. Shenghai was responsible for the leak and has been removed from the beta team for violating the terms of his access.
  • The website has been DDoS'd multiple times over the past day.

UPDATE: As this is taking much longer than I anticipated and I need sleep, I will be making the main post tomorrow. The topic will remain locked until then.
 
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Spaghetti

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I am not sure where to begin given the amount of speculation, accusation, and misinformation we have here so far. For the purposes of this response I will try to cover the facts of what has happened, reasons behind the action, some of the team's perspective, and what is going to be done going forwards. Ideally this response would have been made sooner, but our team is made up of several people across different time zones with real life jobs, so internal communication is delayed during the working week.

Brief
Recently we received multiple independent complaints of doxing activity targeted at players (6 at minimum), allegedly undertaken by [tR] members or their close associates. Possibly with the aid of their server (admins using IP logs as a starting point for doxing efforts). This led to an internal topic being created to discuss the situation. Shortly after that a developer, based on their assessment of the reports, decided to de-list the servers immediately out of concern for possible future attacks. This action was not discussed beforehand nor was it approved by the current team leadership. It is our opinion that this should not have been done without proper review of the evidence first. In any case, we will not name this developer: we are a team and individual actions result in collective responsibility.

After the servers were removed and the complaints were posted here, team leadership and others have struggled to investigate the matter (a slow effort given the timing, as explained above). We did not immediately restore the servers in the list as that would have been yet another rash decision on our part.

Our Position
Regarding our general stance on these matters:

First of all it should be clearly understood that [tR] servers were removed from our master server list. They were not taken down or made inaccessible, as this is something we are unable (and would be unwilling) to do. The master server is a service provided by the MBII Team and we reserve the right to de-list game servers from it at our discretion. This is described in the master server’s Terms of Use. As the development team of this mod, our main aim is to provide our players with a fun and safe gaming experience. In situations like this those goals can of course conflict with the rights every server owner has to run their server as they please.

If [tR] servers allow players to freely troll, teamkill and chat without any moderation, that is unfortunate and disappointing, especially for newer players who join the game and can easily draw conclusions on the quality of the entire mod based on their experience in a single server. We however have to draw a line as to what warrants our interference and what doesn’t: if [tR] choose to run their servers in a manner that caters to trolls that is their choice, as it is the choice of players to not join their server and play elsewhere.

The other side of the line though is when doxing, DDoSing, or any other generally illegal activity occurs. We will not stand by and tolerate this if there is anything we can do to mitigate it. If such activities take place then we believe it is our duty as developers to interfere and protect our player base as best we can.

The Case
To start with, I need to make a note that a few individuals posting in this thread were involved with troublemaking and cheating in the past and have been posting under alias, probably to avoid instant association with said past actions. For example, we have [tR] member Paradine, AKA chicknman, Warlock, or riker.

The limited information we will be publicly presenting here has been carefully selected to ensure we do no further harm to the victims of the doxing that has already taken place. This of course puts us in a weaker position as far as demonstrating said claims, but given the scenario I think that is unavoidable. As stated earlier we know of at least six individuals affected so far. If anyone reading this thread has been targeted I encourage them to reach out to us or, if they feel safe doing so, speak out here.

-Doxing directed at CB members:
The complaints we received cover multiple instances of CB members being targeted for harassment. The specific incident we were given evidence for links [tR] member Mooch with doxing of three individuals. This was determined based on IP addresses. Here is an example snippet of the logs with personal information removed:
433:167: say: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: "idgaf if you know my name of where i live"
2433:297: say: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: "also spelled my name wrong anyway dipshit"
2433:381: say: [^0tR^7]*******: "how do i spell it"
2433:517: say: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: "*******"
2433:541: say: [^0tR^7]*******: "oh"
2433:587: say: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: "yep"
2434:40tell: CB^0|^3Wizzard^0-^7JK^0/^5TOR to ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: They have your name?
2434:53tell: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA| to CB^0|^3Wizzard^0-^7JK^0/^5TOR: yep
2437:28ClientUserinfoChanged: 1 n\[^0tR^7]***********\t\3\model\anakin2/srobehup\c1\255\c2\255\hc\100\w\0\l\0\tt\0\tl\0\siegeclass\none\st\\st2\\dt\0\sdt\0\MBClass\0
2439:081: say: ******** the magician: "samus lives in *********** and goes to **************"
2442:107: say: ^0|^7CB^0|^7Samus567^0|VGD/DA|: "they literally just spouted out my facebook basically lol"

-Doxing directed at AOD members:
In this instance we were informed of doxing directed at AOD members, perpetrated by Paradine (involved in gathering information at the very least) and Lyric (disseminating the information). Paradine could not help bragging about this in CB’s Discord:
paradine gibbs info.png

There have been additional reports from trustworthy members of the community, but unfortunately the information could not be corroborated by us so will not be presented here. We still believe this is more than enough though to reach some conclusions.

Our Conclusions
After reviewing the evidence at our disposal, we believe that players associated with [tR] have indeed been involved with doxing of several other players. Effective immediately we are banning from the forums Paradine (ban evasion, doxing), Lyric (doxing), and Mooch (doxing).

On the subject of the [tR] servers, we do not believe there is enough evidence to definitively link the servers or the clan as a whole to the doxing. A proper investigation of the doxing would have involved contacting the servers’ owners as a first step. As team leads we apologize for the rash decision made by one of our members and we will restore the servers to the master list as soon as possible. In our defense we can only say that our intentions were to protect MBII players.

Going forward, we expect [tR] server owners (and every MBII server owner) to be vigilant for activities like this, and help stamp out anyone perpetrating them. In the future if we have evidence of such activities repeatedly taking place with no effort by server owners to mitigate it, we will again be forced to intervene (by communicating with the server owners as a first step, then escalating as necessary).

For those who may believe this is too lenient, [tR]’s ties to past troublemakers and their members’ involvement with doxing are not being ignored. But as a development team we are obligated to take an objective, distant stance and act based on evidence and not personal likes, past drama and hearsay.

Closing Remarks
Before closing, we would like to express our disappointment in the reaction we have seen to this situation and the declining quality of parts of our community, as evident by the responses on this thread and the recent DDoSing of these forums. The animosity displayed toward the team is sad as we spend a great deal of our free time developing the game you play. Of course we will make mistakes, but that does not mean we are not trying to do the best we can.

The comments about censoring, ego and god complexes are simply untrue. If we were censoring or attempting to cover something up this thread would have been locked or deleted right away. Of course the only post that needs to be here is the [tR] server owner’s question as to why his servers were de-listed. Most of the other posts are unnecessary flaming and back and forth hostility, threats and accusations based on nothing but speculation.

Ending this post, we would like to say the current MBII team leadership is dedicated to a professional and objective conduct when it comes to interactions with the MBII community. This thread will be left open for now to allow reasonable comment, but if things get out of hand we will lock it indefinitely.
 
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Interesting conclusions. So the servers are coming back online, then? I suppose this is a fair compromise.

For the record, Mooch was a member of CB for months before hand and likely aquired that info about Samus without illegally doxxing -- assuming that the IP of course was indeed his. Not a defense of the actions, more of a clarification.

Also, I'm fairly sure the AOD fb leaks occured back when lyric got ahold of their info almost a year ago now. So that occured before tR was born. But still, I'm glad some restitution has been given to gibbs and other affected members of AOD. Strange that riker (paradine) would say "we" got -- likely embelishing his role when i think it was mostly, if not entirely lyric's doing.
 
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really glad the team fixed this, thanks.

few things:
whatever cheating/asshattery happened ages ago was a long time ago, i really don't get that people let this terror of days gone seep into current day. people grow up, both the asshats and their vics, move on.

on the note of doxxing, man, this is the internet. when I was a young boy my father took me to the internet and told me: anyhting you post here will always be here.

you can't protect people from doxxing, it's too easy especially when people link cross platforms so readily. (in every mb2 post you can optionally add your FB (like) retweet (twitter) and even have your steam linked under your avatar.

it's really people's own fault for being caught.

That said, honestly there's no excuse for using personal information as a weapon, and that is deplorable. I hope whoever did this gets their just desserts, not the whole community though.
 
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So both sides were right AND wrong then.

There were tr members doxxing people, and that one dude on the mbii team who pulled the trigger based on his own decisions and not that of a collective agreement .

Its kind of sad really, I can't really put faith in anyone here due to the lies and backstabbing. Therefore this will be my last post here and i am going to do what i was doing before, playing a game with my buddy on servers, and keeping out of this community.

Good luck with things everyone, imma go play VIDEO GAMES.
 
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Ok first off id like to thank you for giving an official explanation. I feel that had that been the opening action, this would not have blown up as much, but better late than never.

Now that it HAS been given id like to explain my position of being outspoken and offering tR haven on Mandos server, because people clearly took the wrong meaning from it.

What tR does on their server is frankly, none of my business, i dont agree with doxxing at all, and their loose ways of doing things are rather irritating to me personally.
THAT BEING SAID, we offered them a place on our server because with a lack of official word on what was going on, it appeared entirely like someone simply did not like tR, and just arbitrarily decided to do this, the lack of word/reaction from the staff here made it appear as if it was not being addressed with the community interest in mind, and i feel a lot of us felt that way, and we began drawing lines as a result.
its not tR i was worrying about, because frankly knowing some of them, i knew theyd find a way through it.
It was the precedent of servers being de-listed purely based on ones personal feelings among the dev team. some of tR are not good people, but not all of them are like that, and its un fair to punish those people for the actions of a handful.
Moreover, if the doxxing allegations had been true, we knew that people were safe from any IP grabs on our server, which *i* personally own and manage, and admin accounts are only handed to people who have proven beyond a doubt to be able to handle it.

Anyways, Things got heated, the troll sides of people, including myself showed up, and it was blown up, and for my part in that i apologize.

Mandos servers will remain open to anyone, including tR members, as long as they behave as one would expect an invited guest to behave.
 

k4far

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I am sorry too. Thinking is not my strongest side. I did not like the pressure being directed at the devs so roughly and without consideration for their lives.
 

DaloLorn

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Well, like they say, all's well that ends well, right? :)

It's good to see everyone's calming down at last. Now we can move on to more productive-- oh who am I kidding, we all know what happens when you hand blasters and lightsabers to Star Wars fans. Back to murder and mayhem, am I right?! :p
 
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Thanks for reinstating my servers on the master list. Allow this incident to serve as precedent for future similar situations.
 

Viserys

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Thanks for reinstating my servers on the master list. Allow this incident to serve as precedent for future similar situations.

As we said in the post above, please do not tolerate doxing and other illegal activities on your servers. I also tried contacting you on discord before but you seem to be offline.
 
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