Fairly accurate account of events, although I disagree on a few points, and to help fill a few missing links:
- There was never any logged evidence of a laggy mass core spawn during the May 22nd-June 1st timelines, and that is something that the server would have logged, if it really did occur.
- The double-standard regarding my admin roles, vs those of more experienced players such as yourself and other team members, is quite interesting. On one hand, there's criticism levied against me for using the best tools I had at the time, to eliminate whole-server lag perpetrated by your team's intentional actions. At the same time you're making an appeal that your team's actions should be excused: no, an experienced player, someone with years(?) of admin experience, should have known better than to dock a lag-inducing logic controlled missile spammer in a public place intended as a safe haven for all, there is no plausible excuse that justifies this.
- A number of players did in fact express displeasure with your presence, but as we've always maintained, unless what you're doing causes whole-server issues, its usually not deserving of Admin attention/energy. That rule still persists to this day...much to the dismay of some natives.
- As for the topic of whether or not you and I discussed lag-inducing designs, we did, and it was usually in the #general channel while others were present - that was intentional for obvious reasons. As StarBit's underlying theme has always been: if it causes whole-server lag, it's banned...and frequent reminders has proven important.
- If a ship was spawned by admins during the month of May, it would have only been in response to restoration of an admin deleted entity; at the time we were transitioning procedures from a "delete it all" lag mitigation strategy, to a toolkit that simply identified and disabled lag inducing entities (more info about that toolkit below). If malice was not the determination, and if a player appealed to admins, we would often respawn an admin-deleted entity for them. As time has gone on though, our procedures have evolved. For instance, in the case of your detached injector inside an unattended and undocked ship during the latter-half of May. The detached entity was TPed out of the hull, lag stopped, and I moved onto log analysis to gauge malice or incompetence. My preference is to attribute incompetence before malice, but your prior 3.5 years of community participation, alongside our many prior discussions about lag-inducing designs, led me towards a conclusion of malice, and hence your 7-day suspension. To this day, I still hate the idea of banning players, but you + bros have certainly taught us its a necessity at the most extreme of times...even when you could have sent the same message (about a need to improve StarMade's physics/collision routines) far less destructively, see below.
- At the time of these events, the physical hardware behind our server was dual Xeon E5-2630 CPUs, 192GB of RAM, and 500GB in a hardware RAID1 array atop enterprise grade SSDs, running on IBM X-Series branded equipment hosted in a colocation facility with well in excess of 1Gbps available bandwidth through multihomed backbone uplinks. If you recall, we actually talked quite a bit about this in private, when I learned you were looking for a place to host your equipment...positive discussions... Either way though, in the past month, we've upgraded to 1TB enterprise grade SSDs (RAID1), and dual E5-2697 CPUs. The point is, even before our hardware upgrade, hardware has never lacked for StarBits: our original, and ongoing mission, is to provide a persistent universe capable of supporting as many Traders, Miners, Builders, and Fighters as the game engine itself is capable of, in such a way that each community role helps bolster, and places reasonable interdependencies, between the others.
- In acknowledgement of my Perma AFK Admin reputation, and aside from our FAQ which already addresses this topic; we're developing a new toolkit affectionally called PAFKA, admins are only humans after-all. I would like to minimize the human dependency as much as possible. After-all, I run this server because I largely enjoy playing in the StarMade and Minecraft worlds - wearing the admin hat means I spend less time playing, more time working; not a desired outcome.
- There is a reason we don't enforce hard limits on our server; because we expect players to be considerate, responsible, to act with a basic level of self-restraint, and by-and-large, nearly everyone does exactly this.
- Admins will not vett any specific ship design, and that reason is rooted in your own implications: by occasionally visiting your sector to observe what was causing lag (usually undocking stuff from a shipyard, or large entities on rails, IIRC). Such visits were never comprehensive, and never an endorsement of designs; you were trusted to behave responsibility, and to use your 3.5 years of experience and skills in a non-abusive way, as you initially presented yourself as doing...but when you failed to follow our well-published community-backed rules, and did so maliciously, you left Admins with no choice but to respond.
Grossly abusive behavior isn't necessary in online communities, server access is a privilege, not an entitlement. Much akin to drunk drivers IRL: it is a reality of a world with many personal freedoms, not a necessity. It really shouldn't be necessary for Admins to always be present, logs should be adequate for looking into the past, and StarMade is supposed to be a platform where a broad player population should not be negatively affected by a few toxic or self-entitled actors.
In the future, your efforts to gain respect, positive attention, and acknowledgement would be better placed, by alerting Schine to bugs and defects you find in the game - not exploiting them for your own ego or entertainment. Try instead helping the developers build a platform where we all can have truly massive battles, foster larger communities, and have actual fun flying through an imaginary universe of nearly infinite possibilities...instead of...this... Please.
Consider adding your constructive thoughts and feedback to the growing list of "How to help improve servers" suggestions in my signature, or come up with your own. Please.
Finally: your honestly and transparency is appreciated (even if it
directly contradicts your earlier statements on this matter), your positive contributions, energy, and enthusiasm will be missed, your toxicity and bad behavior cannot be overlooked: I wish you the best of luck in someone else's multiverse.
Fly Safe,
- Erth
