This made me genuinely smile. OK, let's unpack this, because while there are a few truths here, most of it is bullshit. First, this person did show up, and they did confront me over PMs about something I had said when his account had not even existed yet. But let's get to the juicy stuff, shall we?
andy_the_blindy wrote:The admin then just checked his ip and tried to make him afraid by saying he was from germany, but the guy used vpn so no prob.
Yes, I did check his IP, that is my prerogative as a member of staff. No, I did not in any way use this as a method of coercion, or as a means to try to threaten or intimidate him. Second, when I told him that, I theorized that he might have been on a VPN, which he confirmed to me of his own volition without any prompting from me. he then also told me his real location, again, without me having asked for it.
andy_the_blindy wrote:now he insulted a player and said he had no intelegency just becuz he was friends with a banned guy.
I never insulted anyone directly, but I did remark how simter supporters seemed to be crawling out of the woodwork and that anyone who supports him can't be all that intelligent. After that remark, I was confronted by someone over PM that wanted to confirm what I had just said, which I did. His final question to me was something like, "So you're saying that anyone who supports simter is not intelligent, and since I've known him since 2018, that includes me" (paraphrasing), to which I said yes. I then explained to him that admins speaking without the hat on are not speaking as official representatives of the game, but instead, are speaking as a player. This has pretty much been a thing since Ivan took over the game, and I feel like most of the regulars know this. When I put on the admin hat (accompanied by a sound and a message) I write professionally and would never make such remarks, as I'm officiating over a situation.
andy_the_blindy wrote:Also it seams like admin can stop client from logging, cuz the friend told me that he wanted to copy the pms all out but they cleared his hole buffer.
Ah, we come to the best part of all this. the part upon my first read through caused me to grin toothily. No, we most certainly do not have that ability. This player commented over chat how his logs were not being updated. I explained that if you pressed the shift + backslash keys, it would force the client to write the logs to file. He then apparently did this, and came back all affronted because now his ingame buffers were clear. I informed him that this is a normal behavior, the buffers get cleared after the logs are written to file. If you'll notice, I continued to be helpful to him after he had gone on PMing me for quite some time, and it was obvious that he was collecting information on me to spin a tale to try to get me into trouble with the developers.
He went on to say that the logs had not updated, to which I replied that it was odd, as after testing it on my own client, the logs updated. I knew this feature had worked solidly in the past, but because the 4.8 update had recently been released, I figured it was possible there could have been a bug introduced which affected the writing of the logs. Several others who were online at the time confirmed that they tried exporting, and that their logs had updated successfully, so I don't know what to say. Is he lying? Possibly, and given this latest post, probably.
he accused me of being irresponsible and mishandling player data. I'd like to respond to that as it's the one thing out of all of this that I do care about. As a member of staff, I do have the ability to check your IP address as well as a few other pieces of data about the machine that the game is running on. All of this data is non-personally identifiable. In other words, given this data, I could not link it to a singular person, only to the machine. We do this for obvious reasons of restricting alts and catching ban evaders.
I will therefore never apologize for using the tools given to me to help administer the game. But I do take players' privacy seriously and would never misuse that data or allow it to fall into the hands of people to whom it doesn't concern. I challenge anyone to find an online game that guarantees absolute privacy, even from the staff, because in all my years, I haven't found any
I challenge this person to present their evidence of mishandling player data, because I am confident that they can't. Further, I encourage them to give their permission for me to post the PM logs I have, so everyone can see exactly what transpired and draw their own conclusions. I will not do this without the permission from this person; however, as doing so would cross a line I'm not prepared to cross. This is only an encouragement though, it is not a demand, and no repercussion will follow from me if he does not wish to give permission. It is his choice entirely.
One last thing, I assert that the original poster has done more mishandling of data than I have simply by posting his friend's real name. Maybe he had permission to do so, but we don't know that. I consider that a form of doxxing, all be it, a light form, as we'd likely not be able to find this exact person by his name alone. It is certainly a breach of privacy though.
Edit: Corrected VM to VPN.
Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united
