@125
It gets slightly irritating the way you seem to always step into these topics, all the while loudly exclaiming /implying the stupidity of the game and how you'll never, ever play! Better stay far, far away! Your rather simplified viewpoint on the matter makes sense, of course leaving out some crucial details outlined in our previous posts. I guess knowing you have nothing to do with these immature games might give you some partial feeling of satisfaction? Each post you make has something to the effect of I'll be gone now, out the door, etc. If your not willing to discuss them, why the need to post in the first place? Don't get me wrong, I agree with some of these points, but the way you come across shows blatant arrogance. If you want to be taken seriously, I suggest you try and tone down  the post a bit.

@128, I disagree about post 125. That doesn't seem arrogant at all. Arrogance is a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence; post 125 exhibits none of these qualities. Post 125 is just stating an opinion (albeit quite truthful and reasonable). I doubt Jayde cares if anyone reads their posts or not, or whether they're agreed with or not.

I am stating, and sometimes restating, my desire to keep my distance from this game as an object lesson. Your drama lost you a player. I might have tried if not for all the ridiculousness, but now I won't. And why do I say so? Because you aren't getting the picture. Drama continues, and usually it's of similar caliber. This suggests, to me at least, that there is no real focus on the important things. If I am harsh or even a bit high-handed, it is because I have precious little patience, and just enough desire to speak my mind. Combine those two things, and you get the sort of in-the-door out-the-door posts I tend to make regarding certain games.

I also get sick of the back and forth, so I like to simplify the situation where I'm able. Here, I believe I could, and did.

If I have missed details that change the reality of the situation, please enlighten me; I do not believe this is true as of this moment, but I'd be a fool to say that I'm unassailable. Everyone makes mistakes. I can tell you that I haven't deliberately ignored anything, or twisted anything out of true to suit my agenda. I see the facts, and the facts tell me that a bad situation exacerbated by annoying people was made far worse by other annoying people and their questionable behaviour.

What saddens me is that I sometimes get the feeling that I'm shouting into the wind. Will the game ever actually get better, or will it continue to be a laughing-stock largely lacking in professionalism? I'd love to hope that the former is possible, but I just don't see enough change to justify it.

129: Let's knock these out one by one.
UKA: the players wanted it to die, everyone was begging for it, so with the unanimous permission of that team he gave himself the necessary throwing stars to knock out take one hit of this dab and that was that.
PWN: I don't remember that one. PWN was UKA's original name. Someone probably thought they would be cool and unoriginal by using it (sound familiar?) IF you have any argument for Sam using unfair means to destroy that team it would certainly help your case, otherwise i'm dismissing it.
SCM: What's wrong with Sam disbanding a team? No crime there.
New pretender SCM: and here we come to the original argument, of which your only ammunition is a slightly suspicious circumstance in which the devs restarted the server for an update shortly before attacking. Somehow that immediately brings you to the conclusion that they must have been using /give and whatever other unfair means you can think of. I'm not sure what proof you want from us. I could give you the give log if there even is one for that day, but then you'll say we changed it because that's what you'd rather believe. I now realize this battle is pointless and neither side can truly win. On one side we have you. You just believe what you want to believe, which is that your team is the best that ever was and the developers and admins used unfair means to take it down, but with only circumstantial evidence your case is weak. And on the other you have us, being fired at from all sides because we're admins, a big team was destroyed by us and a developer betrayed your team, but we can't gain any ground either because you won't calm down and climb off  your high horse enough to see logic. Unfortunately this makes others believe we used commands and whatever, and I'm not sure I can blame you guys. I'm just sorry we had this misunderstanding and hope you guys will decide to play despite the whining of some. As for you, you just go on believing what you want since it's obvious you won't be convinced. Enjoy living a life of suspicion and anger when things don't go your way. I can't say you'll be missed.

Okay, let's cut the crap and focus on facts.

In the situation for which this topic was created, a few things have been well-established:
1. People generally didn't like SCM
2. SCM may or may not have deliberately been misusing game mechanics to make it really really hard to attack them
3. A game dev badgered someone outside the game so that they could get access to SCM, which is kinda slimy
4. Someone from SCM caved to that pressure; pretty stupid, IMHO
5. when you reset the server, certain base defenses are also reset, which presumably makes bases somewhat easier to attack
6. The server was reset, SCM was attacked almost immediately thereafter, and because of a lot of organization on the part of the devs and their friends, SCM was taken down
7. At least one person involved characterized part of the attack as underhanded, because apparently fair tactics didn't work for some reason; I'm at a loss as to why rules/enforcement of rules wasn't enough here

So in case I need to spell it out, Alec, here's what I'm saying.
Normally, when a reset happens and either no one or everyone is expecting it, everyone's on the same footing. Everyone is a little bit more vulnerable, and either everyone is surprised by it a little, or no one is. In this instance, however, it sounds like some people knew about the reset while others did not, and so when the server was reset, those who knew took immediate advantage before those who didn't could scramble to react.
To my mind, this is analogous to the following situation.
Imagine that you have a friend who works at a store, and the store is going to hold a random one-day sale where it slashes the price of its merchandise by 30%. Now, everyone knows stores have sales sometimes, and most places advertise, but this one isn't advertised; the only reason you know is because your friend told you when maybe he shouldn't have. So the instant the store opens on sale day, you're there and ready to snap up some merchandise.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the people who knew a moment of vulnerability were coming used that knowledge to maximize the effect they could gain from it. They may not have actually used any sort of dev tools to make the fight unfair, but they used prior knowledge to take advantage. If my above analogy didn't work for you, try this. Imagine that you're working staff on a game that has decided to do away with an item because it's OP; the game has informed players that this will be happening but has not given a date, but because you're staff, you know it's happening on Friday. As such, you make a point of selling all those items to an NPC for huge cash before the change. Other players could've done this too, of course, but your intimate knowledge of when it's all going to shake down means you're safe, while other players are uncertain and may miss out. In other words, your insider knowledge allows you to make the best of the situation.
This is one of the arguments for devs not playing their own games.

Now, if I'm misunderstanding something, please do let me know. But I believe, as before, that I've summed things up pretty accurately.

Remember: I'm not actually accusing the devs of cheating here. I feel this was underhanded and slimy, but not actually cheating. the fact that one of the admins actually agrees with some of what I'm saying gives a lot of credence to my stance.

The server is never just, boom and reset. As usual, and this time was no different, I give a warning in advance. Since this one was extraordinary in that base items were cut down to accommodate recent changes in balance, players were given 10 minutes along with 100 wood to store their current inventory. So there's no real scrambling to attack... In fact it was never planned out by us. Everyone, developer or not, had (has) the chance if they wish. Everyone is always in favor of mass base resets over a daily/weekly period, which would be catestrophic IMO, but due to server lag, reboots are somewhat frequent. So to go along with your analogy, the store did it's fair share of advertisement in preparation for the sale, even giving a little Coles Cash in the process.