Underhanded shenanigans

Hai all. It's me deathprophet. I was content to leave things in peace but I figured id let you all know. I was accused or miraculously crapping 72 minor tokens from space. Because the dm team could not figure out where they came from, I was accused of the fault. Keep in mind it became a straight ban, no due process, no following their own rules of dealing with a supposed offense. I'm sure this will get taken down as well as they even banned me from the forums... So enjoy your twisted dm team lads n ladies. Ask king for my skype if ya need me. I hope that y'all find a good home once the team finally pushes the server in the toilet.

I was content to let you leave in peace, too, even though you've pretty-much been non-stop smearing people in Skype since Sapphire first noticed this issue.

I have the correspondence in question where the DM's respectfully and repeatedly asked you to please give us any information you may have about why you impossibly have all those tokens. At every turn, you refused not only to provide information, but to even discuss it. Instead, you continued to take umbrage and made it clear that you had no interest in being part of this community.

And so now you show up to smear people when you find out the feeling is now mutual? A dozen things could have been done to amicably resolve this issue. You could have explained how you got them. You could have said you had no idea how you got them, instead of making up a lie. You could have offered to give them back. You could have worked WITH us instead of jumping on your high horse and smearing people at every opportunity.

YOU refused any due process at every turn, and now you want to show up here and claim that due process was not followed? Incredible.

This DM team has been very cool/naive about letting people who are banned manipulate the facts, and never giving their own side of the story. Maybe that policy should get re-visited.

There are a lot of problems here on DB that need to be addressed faster than they are getting addressed. But, as far as I'm concerned, one of them just was.

Please go away now.

The player forgot to mention that we found this out a long time ago already and have spend a lot of time and effort to find evidence and to try to solve the issue with him together. Several DMs have contacted you, deathprophet, several times asking you to solve this with us together and find out why there are no logs of most of your tokens anywhere at all while those logs exist for other players. Every single time you showed no interest to talk to anyone of us no matter how nice we asked and how often we tried to give you a chance. Apparently we are twisted and trash for taking WEEKS to try to work together with you to AVOID having to ban you.

You collected almost 3 epic tokens in three months. This is impossible for someone who has not permakilled a character with a lot of tokens which was not the case.

Geez, I thought I was doing good for almost making 2 epics on all of my characters combined in the last 3+ years.

The truth of the matter is staff followed the evidence where it lead.

We choose not to bring these matters fully to the community precisely because what most members of this community seek is a quiet, calm atmosphere to enjoy their recreation time together.

Some of us are teachers, some of us are nurses, some of us are combat veterans who have seen far more than anyone ever should, some of us are performers, some of us are students, still others are artists and scientists.

The one thing I can pretty much be assured of is none of us are interested in dealing with drama when we are here.

The circumstancial evidence surrounding Deathprophet and their ban lead me to two conclusions. If he was not at fault for a targeted and pre-planned attempt to distribute un-earned rewards and then cover the tracks, then they were unwilling to be honest with us when we asked.

If Deathprophet wishes to discuss this further I am willing to do so in a mature and calm fashion.

Until then.

Mirror

These are the last PMs and the replies send to DeathProphet after he was already contacted serveral times before, including on Skype by HDM Mirror.

Carbuncle wrote:

Deathprophet,

The staff has already contacted you about the very great amount of RP tokens your character seems to have collected in an almost impossible short amount of time. Our Headbuilder has looked into the issue in the Server-Database and it looks like the tokens were not aquired through RP or given by DMs or any other legal way.
HDM Mirror has already tried to contact you in order to solve this mysterious accumulation of tokens on your Character but you were unable or unwilling to work with him.
We would like to offer you this last chance to work with us and help us solve this issue, or explain the tokens amount and to clear this up.

best regards
Your DB Staff

DeathProphet wrote:

The simple fact that yall cant solve things in the rules set before you is reason enough fore me not to care. Your suppose to take steps in dealing with any issue, not just say hey you did something sooo perma ban. I didn't do a damn thing and I'm tired of trying to explain something that I've no idea how it happened. You tell me I didn't accumulate them through rp, I say otherwise. Neither side can prove it. All you know is that you don't know how I got them. So I must have done something right? Yall can take your elitism and shove it.

Carbuncle wrote:

Deathprohet,
our Headbuilder investigated the issue on the Database and is absolutely postive that you did not gain the tokens through the RP script or through DMs.
You aquired only one medium token from Flumph, one token from Carbuncle and then a few lesser tokens from various DMs. Wich makes it 11 lesser tokens. There are still 63 tokens wich remain unclear where they came from. The RP token script tokens can only be aquired at a rate of 1 per ten days. Wich does not fit the time you spend on our server. As you see something is amiss here.
Since you say you accumalated them in a legal way, please give us some examples and explain, as we are trying to work with you here to get to the bottom of this. Contrary to your impression we are trying to solve this with you instead of outright banning you.

What i can say here is that you definatly did not gain those tokens through the above mentioned methods, according to the Headbuilder, as that would be documented in the database.

best regards
AHDM Carbuncle.

DeathProphet wrote:

Unfortunately I do not keep a record of when and where I receive tokens. Also, as I've stated to Mirror, I've no desire to return to DLB. The way the server is ran is completely unappealing to me.

Please be constructive in any comments in this thread.

It's unfortunate how he acted so defensive. If he simply said I don't know where they came from. The DMs coulda taken the ones that mysteriously appeared regardless of how it happened and it prolly would have been ok.

As far as his skype goes... if the King he was referring to was me uhm... I don't recall him ever giving me his skype.

from what i see th staff tried to work it out and the refusal of the player to aide them in this or offer any other evidence on his behalf there was little else can be done to figure it out..

with that and the constant coming back and stirring up trouble instead of taking the chance they offered is not something i would tolerate..

i have lost many tokens that couldnt be found due to an un known reason likely a bug.. this included epic tokens a post about it should still be here somewhere i was told i could never get these back even though i know i had them..

did i get flaming mad yes i nearly unplugged the server i stepped back and though thinking about it still makes me mad and i felt like i was being accused of lying about it.. i moved on and took the loss cause the dm said he went through 2 years logs and did not see them anywhere.. now did he i have no idea honestly and i have no reason to not believe him..

do i get mad very much so but i choose to try and not flame about it in public tho on occasion i may fail in my attemps i do try..

me personaly if i had known this and been in charge still i would have banned you as well after having tried to work it out.. and now after all this trouble rousing or trying to i would ban you from the forums as well and if possible delete your accounts.. after an ip ban and so on..

i will stay out of this but i have already stated my opinion and leave it to the dm's to work out what to do and why..

i may not always agree with or get along with staff but i do trust them at this point and have no reason not to.. i support the staff on this one..

Why does he have to prove it exactly? Why was he banned before any maliciousness was proven?

Are there no server logs of whom grants tokens where? logs of any one remote accessing the server.. etc etc. If not it's time to re-evaluate the scripts because any number of unmerited tokens could be floating about intentionally or unintentionally.

Another more subtle way to go about it would be to remove the tokens quietly and see what happens next. (if hacking is suspected but frankly why bother with tokens? could have gone for items instead if using this mindset)

This is yet again another case of a sledgehammer being used to kill a fly. (The very accusation of hacking/cheating is offensive and may have caused this spiral of hostility...)

Hey, when you get tired of a server, it's time to act dumb. On DLB that often takes the shape of fighting-for-your-extreme-god-granted-democratic-rights-and-liberties.

There are indeed logs of such, logs that for this one character in question were conspicuously missing, indicating someone with the necessary privileges or know how went in and wiped the entries from the database. Without going into specifics, we have evidence that indicates someone else provided the tokens or taught DP the means of doing so themselves. DP had enough of an affiliation with the individual in question to make this a strong possibility. (That individual has also been dealt with)

Now, he was given weeks during which he was politely asked to explain or give possible reasons for having acquired so many tokens so rapidly. When he chose to give a reason it did not match up with the staff's knowledge of the character and event presence. He was also largely hostile and recalcitrant when questioned, and despite more patience than should otherwise be afforded to a potential threat to the server and the many players we have an obligation to see to and safeguard their enjoyment of the server, was allowed to continue playing while we continued to try and work toward a solution.

Eventually DP decided he would rather leave the server than accept that staff's questions were for determining how to protect against this eventuality again. He was given one last chance and a number of weeks to be forthcoming at which we likely would have given him a slap on the wrist and ended the matter.

Regrettably he chose to react with the same hostility, and his smear campaign to sour relations was the final straw leading to a regrettable banning after much consideration. Was DP an innocent victim? Perhaps. What evidence we have suggests there was much more to it, especially with his behaviour taken into account. Are there logs for server access, tokens etc? Yes, and like anything in computing they can be circumvented or vandalised. DP being the only possible source of info on how this might have been achieved so we could plug the problem chose to obstruct rather than aid. Could this have been handled differently? Perhaps, but the issue itself is not the problem but the player's refusal to cooperate, smearing of community members, and potential for further damage. No immediate accusation was made of cheating, he was first approached with simple curiosity, but the answer given did not match the facts and further digging was met with the issues mentioned.

Thus he was banned so as to prevent the possibility of it happening again. Should he wish to attempt to reconcile with staff and be more forthcoming it could be reviewed but that is up to staff as a whole. Regardless, the ban was made with the continued prosperity and integrity of all our players in mind, and not taken lightly. We have found no evidence of any other characters being tampered with or acquiring mysterious tokens, and are working to make sure this cannot happen again (at least by the same means).

We, as DMs, are here to serve you, the players by resolving any issues, providing plots, and doing all we can to make your experience a pleasant one for yourself and others. No decision is ever made lightly, and we truly do regret having to cast out players, but it is always done in the spirit of protecting or improving the game for all others. Likewise, much of what went on behind the scenes is not made public due to security concerns, and to protect the individuals in question. Indeed, if anything, this much has been made public only because DPs lies and insults have an impact on the community, and outweighed the benefits of keeping the matter strictly between staff and he.

If anyone wishes to ask questions or discuss concerns, please feel free to PM myself or another member of staff. I cannot promise we'll be able to answer everything, but we'll do our utmost to try and ensure your worries are addressed

All the best, and happy RPing

Kalundelyr wrote:

Hey, when you get tired of a server, it's time to act dumb. On DLB that often takes the shape of fighting-for-your-extreme-god-granted-democratic-rights-and-liberties.

Or by posting witless snide attacks? i don't remember ever seeing you log in actually.
It was a legit question and i'd ask it again now do kindly bugger off.


ADM_Ouroboros : Thank you for clearing it up.

At Kalundelyr:

Please refrain from posting snide remarks here. If you want to criticize something do it properly.

At Eizendur:

I do not want to see another flaming war here.

There was a hint of sarcasm but hardly "indirect" enough to be considered snide. It was a very straight and simple comment. In other words : if he still wanted to play on DB he would have answered the questions. In other words take 2 : Perhaps he already decided he was going to leave DB before the questioning began, thus the unwillingness to answer properly simple questions ?