Negative Review: Mikelands AUS Server - My (Unfortunate) Experience

[Dire Venom]

First of all, the vast majority of players on the mikeland server are amazing!
Ive had a great amount of fun over the past 7 months on this server.
The owner of this server, MikeSheen, is a great guy who provides fun and top notch hardware for his servers.

HOWEVER, I can no longer bear to play on this server.
My reason: Excessive admin abuse and treatment of other players.
The local server manager, K10wN plays on multiple accounts on the server, and often goes by different guises and hides the fact hes admin.
His secondary account, named 'Joshua' logs in every once in a while to spawn kill new players and prevent them from leaving spawn for over an hour. Im not often on when 'Joshua' is on, due to timezones so have had very little experience with him. Also I have heard other players complain about admin abuse before, such as http://starmadedock.net/threads/negative-review-mikelands-aus-server-my-experience.7359/
however I largely dismissed them due to my mostly positive experiences so far.

Back to MY experience, I recorded the same 5 players being spawn killed by the admins ship (it had 19 mill shields, and was fully made of advanced armor (!! so expensive!!)) pretty constantly over the course of an hour.
If this wanst enough, he was abusing them in chat and threatening to log into his admin account to delete players ships.
A number of players managed to escape him, however he some how knew exactly where we jumped to moments after we jumped in a random direction as well as the location of all my factions bases (These were hidden bases 700-800 km away from spawn that were marked as undiscovered stations and had NO jumpgates to them and were not my home base). They had only ever been visited by an admin when they teleported to me a while ago.

When I rescued players from spawn (as soon as they left spawn he killed them), he became aggressive towards me and somehow (even though only the admin knew where all my far reaching bases were) he teleported there and completely destroyed them. These bases had been untouched for 6 months as well :/

His use of language against these newer players was unreasonable as well as his treatment of them.
The players he was spawn killing eventually gave up and quit the server.
Now I too have decided to quit, despite having a number of capital ships and months of work on the server.

In the 1 and a half years of playing Starmade this is honestly the most disgusting behavior Ive ever seen and I would advise players to steer clear off this server if they want a fun, fair playing experience.
While the server is great most of the time, as soon as k10wN gets bored, hell log into Joshua and make your experience there a nightmare (as well as change the rules to suit himself).
My experience has been mostly positive due to the other players, however I will no longer play this server due to the disgusting behavior of 'Joshua' the admin.

Also, whenever someone complains about him, he goes running off to MikeSheen (whos a great guy, but misguided in his trust of k10wN) who then gets the server to create lots of positive reviews for the server so that no one will read the negative reviews (THIS is what happened to ALL of the other negative review for this SERVER).

Fly safe,
Dire_Venom
[DOUBLEPOST=1436138702,1436138360][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, Im currently on the lookout for a new server to spend my time one (Which doesnt have admin abuse).
If anyone could please suggest some servers (or your favourite server) I'd be very grateful.
P.s, on a whole the mikeland community is AMAZING and I dont want to taint their image at all. By all means play and enjoy yourself on their other servers!

 

[Comr4de]

Shattered skies is pretty good. Most of the player council is on there, and a few schine staff members play on there as their preferred server

 

[Dire Venom]

Shattered skies is pretty good. Most of the player council is on there, and a few schine staff members play on there as their preferred server

Thank you very much!!
Ill give it a go latter today.

 

[SuperWookie]

I would remove names and such from this mate, they reported my post and had it taken down because I named names. Just goes to show I wasn't lying though huh.

 

[Reilly Reese]

GenXNova is home to Nest of Orion and their members regularly hit spawn with free blocks and ships for players.

Basically the complete opposite of "Joshua"

K10wN Please stop insulting and killing your visitors.

 

[Lecic]

GenXNova is home to Nest of Orion and their members regularly hit spawn with free blocks and ships for players.

Thanks for the promo.

And yeah, if you're looking for a server, GenXNova is a pretty good choice. Shattered Skies is a good choice too, if you'd prefer a server with no mass limit.

 

[Dire Venom]

I just find it weird, other players on said who Joshua was, yet K10wN had been a pretty decent admin previously.
I just dont understand why this would happen.

@Thadius Faran Thanks for your suggestion! Ill try it out.

(If by any chance the player in question is not who I have been told they are, I profusely apologize if thats the case, but multiple do players think the player is them... )

EDIT: If there are rules against posting players names on the forum lease let me Know and I'll remove them from the post.
Thank you!

 

[SuperWookie]

(If by any chance the player in question is not who I have been told they are, I profusely apologize if thats the case, but multiple do players think the player is them... )

Oh no its definitely him, he told me himself on their IRC lol

 

[Reilly Reese]

Somehow you managed to make the quote quote me xD


I think i'll be seeing what happens on Mikeland for myself.

 

[SuperWookie]

Somehow you managed to make the quote quote me xD

Its those l33t hax I still have from my time on Mikelands

 

[CyberTao]

Thanks for the promo

I read that as porno at first.

 

[RabidBat]

Wow, after the crap we went through it is still going on? I must admit it is not surprising though, you let bad behaviour get a free pass it is of course going to continue and get worse.

Sadly I wouldn't hold my breathe that the owner will wake up to the badmin abuse, give a damn and do anything about it.
It will be the players fault and if you provide proof or logical points it will be 'it's MY server, I pay for it, you should be grateful and we have rules' and comments about logs, how the logs do not show any evidence (because reading through several weeks of constantly updating logs is hard for some), and again it doesn't matter if you provide any proof. It will be ignored or stated that 'you could of faked that.'

Whatever is said and done it will not be the admins fault.

No doubt their low ban list numbers will also be quoted despite the fact many players just quit out of frustration before they can be banned.

I'd say more but it's hard to know what one can and cannot say on this forum when it comes to such matters.

 

[CyberTao]

Spoiler: Off-topic

(because reading through several weeks of constantly updating logs is hard for some)

Unless the server has never been restarted in it's history, the old logs are static. The game makes a new log.txt.0 and turns the old one into log.txt.1 and so on, and even if it is the live feed, it isnt hard to pull out a snippet.

 

[RabidBat]

Spoiler: Off-topic

Unless the server has never been restarted in it's history, the old logs are static. The game makes a new log.txt.0 and turns the old one into log.txt.1 and so on, and even if it is the live feed, it isnt hard to pull out a snippet.

I know this, but thanks for confirming it
It is just a case of despite many players seeing and experiencing things themselves the logs always seem to, almost magically, show nothing if you know what I mean.

 

[Dire Venom]

All I wanted was a a fun and fair server to play on, instead I see players abused and I lose months worth of work because someone got a bit crabby.
If an admin wants to play the game without admin privilges, I totaly respect that that but the two shouldn't mix.
please do keep in mind that this incident is NOT reflective of the coummuntity as a whole, and MIKELAND is a great server hoster.

It would also be great to hear from Mikeland to clear a few things up.
Thank you very much and fly safe!

 

[mikesheen]

It would also be great to hear from Mikeland to clear a few things up.

Hi Dire, could you please make a ticket on our ticket system for any complaints or issues. I will not be dealing with, or commenting on any issues on the starmadedock forums.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[K10wN]

No admin commands or means were used to find or destroy your 'non-homebase' DireVenom. Your homebase was set to 7,2,2 which contained a protected warp gate. This can be found in the Faction menu. This warp gate connected to a 2nd warp gate (no homebase setting on the 2nd gate) some 700km away. There is a line on the map connecting them if you knew what you were doing. As there was no further linked gates, it was obvious your 'hidden' base was somewhere near the 2nd wargate, so I again looked at the map and picked the station who's name was out of place. The station there was not set as homebase (silly). Your own bad management allowed for your station and ships to be destroyed. There was no need, nor would I use admin commands to find it's location.

The ship I was flying is the smallest ship in the faction. This non-admin faction works very hard to gain the resources it has to build powerful ships. Your missiles cannot do damage if they do not reach their target. I have several anti-missile turrets on the ship. Your cannon range is less than the range of missiles, so it was easy to take out your cannon turrets with my missiles from a safe range and destroy any missile that was fired toward me. This is what homebase protection is for!

The players who were being killed (three people, not five) set me as enemy, not the other way around. The turrets on the ship killed them a few times as they tried to fly away from spawn in bare cores. With the time limit on death penalties they would have only suffered loss from the first death. I then warped to your homebase warpgate at 7,2,2 to avoid killing them more. **EDIT: These players are still playing on the server. The only person who quit was you.**

As Mikesheen has stated. If you have an issue and think that my conduct is not acceptable, make a ticket at mikeland. All of what happens is recorded in the logs and he does check them.

The admin faction does not declare war, nor do admin controlled ships contain weapons.

 

[RabidBat]

Will Dires ticket actually get looked at properly if he submits one, or will klown investigate himself again and once more conclude he was not at fault like was the case with my ticket?

 

[K10wN]

Will Dires ticket actually get looked at properly if he submits one, or will klown investigate himself again and once more conclude he was not at fault like was the case with my ticket?

Why do you continue with this Rabid? You were banned from the server with no chance of it ever being removed before the ticket was answered. Yes I answered your ticket. No one else wanted to deal with your crap anymore.

 

[CyberTao]

The turrets on the ship killed them a few times as they tried to fly away from spawn in bare cores. With the time limit on death penalties they would have only suffered loss from the first death. I then warped to your homebase warpgate at 7,2,2 to avoid killing them more. **EDIT: These players are still playing on the server. The only person who quit was you.**

This bit. Why warp to someone elses homebase to avoid killing people? And if you knew what was happening, why not disable the turrets? More over, why is the spawn not protected?

Also, just because they didn't "lose" anything does not make it any less valid. The problem is not losing, it's not being able to do anything at all.

It also seems as though those 3 noobs were in a faction together? Would be weird for a small faction to be hanging around spawn, nor would I think they would have set up personal enemies on someone randomly.

Is it just me? Or is there questions?