WARNING: arctic gaming admins corrupt

[MacThule]

My account is encrypted, and I play on a few different servers. Arctic was one of the main ones until about 15 minutes ago an admin god-moded his friend's ship out of being trapped in the hull of my protected home station then unprotected my station so his non-admin friend could blow it up.

It's my bad though, because when I first started on Arctic, some players were chatting that an admin had interfered in a faction war to help a friend. They seemed pissed about it, but were still on server so I thought maybe it was exaggeration or something.

So after investing a week into building up with my brother and one friend, I went and did some raiding.

I found some undocked ships by a faction's protected home base - snuck into one and stripped it, blew up the ones with faction mods protecting. The faction declared war, obviously. All good - time for fun, right?

So I'm heading back to my base and someone trying to send a faction message goofs and it goes out on public saying something like "hey, there's Mac's base, lets take his stuff." I'm not worried because my base has been attacked before, it's faction home and I'm on my way there anyway so maybe I'll catch them with their pants down...

I do - I de-cloak one just off my home station and lay into him. He runs away. Turns out he wasn't from the faction I attacked though, he was from the largest faction on Arctic "The Borg", which is the admins' faction. All good - people got allies, right?

Then another ship shows up. Big. Pretty. Obviously someone's special baby. I've slipped into my base from the docks at this point. He starts pounding me but obviously can't hurt my station. But he just sits there right off my hull shooting at me for 3-4 minutes, pops my astronaut through the walls a couple times with his blast radius. So I figure if he wants to be like that I'll get him back - I enter my build block and web his pretty little baby. Strap it right to my hull from all sides with lines of invulnerable blocks, and send out a public message inviting people to come see my war trophy.

Then he stops shooting - the ship just sits there for a minute or two and suddenly the server drops me.

I log right back in. I go back into build block so he can't keep popping me through the walls and as I'm watching his ship suddenly become non-collisive and phases right through my hull web, backing out slowly. No explosions, no nothing - he's just in god mode now passing through solid hull smooth as silk.

Then he starts shooting my station again but now my station has magically become unprotected and he's destroying it. Then he starts griefing me as I respawn.

I'm screaming bullshit in public chat now, and the admin IVlast3r (not the guy griefing my respawn after trashing my protected station and magically phasing through solid hull wrapped around his ship, who is "not an admin"...... ) tells me he's the only admin on and the guy attacking me isn't admin so it couldn't be cheating. As if he couldn't have cheated for him. Then he tells me it must have been a spy got into my base and changed its status. Except my faction isn't public, and the faction block is inside a closed space that can only be accessed in build mode for exactly that reason. Then he tells me maybe my station went unprotected because my FP were negative. Except that they were negative when the guy first showed up and started attacking my station only 10 minutes earlier. Then he says a turn tick must have passed and the server only just registered that my FP were negative. Except my FP were -1173, and I only had 7 sectors claimed, with 4 fairly active players so I know I didn't go 1173 in the hole in one tick. No answer as to how the ship phased through my hull or why the server booted me right before it happened. Admin runs out of excuses and calmly says he doesn't know what happened but that it sounds like it was obviously my fault and his friend with the magic ship says "lol - yeah, learn how to play, bro."

Just putting out a fair warning to those playing on Arctic Gaming - the admins will jack you if they or their friends want to kill your protected home station, and they will act in public chat like they don't know what you're talking about.

Don't waste your time.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Uh oh, dramas inbound!

*Grabs popcorn*

 

[Orphaniel]

The rights of people playing on servers, and of the administrators upon servers are something that does occasionally come up: the situations leading to such discussions are never good, sadly.

Some claim that servers have a requirement to provide for the players, to make sure things are fair and balanced. Unfortunately, I am forced to play devil's advocate and say that is not so. When you play on a server, you are entering the server owner's domain, he and by extension his admins are gods, you live by their rules, obey their laws, and those laws might not actually apply to them. Of course, a server like that will not last long; good servers that are worth the time and effort treat the players like paying customers, they do not place themselves above the players, but instead below them, to serve, not to lord over (though invariably some lording over is necessary).

It sounds like a bad situation, which you described, I daresay that by entrapping the large ship which laid siege to you, you basically brought on whatever might come, legal or no. I cannot, of course, pass much judgement, not having been there. I can only imagine that they thought they had good reason to do as they did, as you thought you were well withing your rights to 'web' that attacking ship.

I hope you tried to at least talk to the admins there before posting this. In any case, if you had a poor experience it IS your right to tell others about it. If the admins there are as thoughtless as you say, I can only hope they change their ways, or it might soon ring empty.

( maybe.. maybe you'll look at my sig and go there )

 

[Admiralkio]

*click*
*grabs snacks*
*nom nom nom*
This'll be good.

 

[Comr4de]

Yo OP, tab+F6 will let you do that phasing through walls bullshit. If he got some momentum going, then hit Tab+F6, it would've re-rendered the blocks and treated them like they weren't there. If you do it enough you can phase through just about anything.

Honestly though it DOES sound like you ran out of FP tbh but I might be reading it wrong

 

[Megacrafter127]

Also, godmode doesn't include noclipping. And there is no "noclip-mode" in starmade.

 

[aceface]

So I figure if he wants to be like that I'll get him back - I enter my build block and web his pretty little baby. Strap it right to my hull from all sides with lines of invulnerable blocks, and send out a public message inviting people to come see my war trophy.

nice one xD, he got rekt.

 

[CrunkPrime]

I was actually there while this was happening. Well, on the server anyway.

I have no idea what your actual faction points where, or if mods/admins can modify faction points, but I do know that once you reach zero points, anybody can come along and damage your base. And thats what the admins/mods were saying happened.

My only beef with the server is that it seems to go down at totally random times, and sometimes the server straight up crashes. Reaaally annoying. Like for instance its down right now, after it was running fine all night. I have no idea why its even down since it was running fine.

 

[CyberTao]

The game has this really weird no-clipping 'fix' for collisions, I remember someone on the build server smacking around against the sides of my ship until it activated and he could freely clip through because he was too lazy for build mode or something. Could have also been tab+f6, but that has varying success depending on computer specs/size of objects (can be quite jittery if things are loading fast enough).

Remember each death counts against your FP, as does member no longer being counted as 'active' (logged in during the last 48 hours). Seems like you just got a FP update at a really bad time. That said, aren't you suppose to lose further away systems and only losing homebase once all of them are gone?

 

[DreeadPiratePinky]

It's fairly hard to go negative faction unless the server admins have altered default settings. Active players gain 50 faction points an hour while online and 20 while off line. You lose 8 faction points from death and have "new death protection" for 30 min. Meaning at most you can lose 16 faction points an hour (and you have gained 50 cause you are online netting you 50-16=34 points). This is of course assuming you aren't overly extended in your system claims (-10 faction/hour for each system over 1).

 

[karkinosz]

You lose 8 faction points from death

You lose more if you are in a larger faction fyi.

 

[DreeadPiratePinky]

I didn't know that. I've never been in a large faction.

 

[Snk]

Your webbing of a ship was an interesting idea. Kind of cheap though. But interesting

 

[IvIast3r]

well seeing as how your story has changed three times now,
http://starmadedock.net/threads/arctic-gaming.5132/#post-85529
https://starmade-servers.com/server/979/comments/

i am going to declare that you sir are butthurt

and as for the negative faction points: we will say that all 4 players are 100% active
so for these 4 players they generate 50 faction points each per hour for a total of 4800 in one day
now you owned 7 territories that were spread out, your home base is initially free in terms of faction points expenses
there is a 10 added for the distance from the center of the main galaxy, ontop of that there is another 2 points added for distance from home base. and you automatically spend 10 faction points for just owning the system per hour.

now with all this information we can now calculate the faction point deficit you would be generating per hour and per day

so 70 points from just owning 7 systems and then we will assume that you were 25 systems away from the center that will be another 245 faction points spent per hour for all 7 claimed systems, now for simplicity we are going to ignore the extra 2 points for whatever systems that might have been away from your home base. so currently you are now spending 315 faction points to your 200 faction points income, for a deficit of 115 per hour or -2760 faction points per day.
*all these calculations are just rough estimates*

so now that we have established that you could not sustain the systems that your faction owned, lets move on to the "noclip"

Now from what I have found out from the player that killed you, is that you trapped his ship with hull blocks and then he proceeded to fly out. This causes the server to detect a stuck ship, which in turn applies a hard coded feature called out force. If the out force cannot remove the stuck object the server will enable no-clip for the stuck ship which allowed him to fly out. Even if the server couldn't get the ship unstuck, all he has to do was warp and he would have been home free.

now that we have established that the other player could have gotten out no matter what you did, lets move on to why you disconnected and why your base became vulnerable.

the server crashed due to a java io exception, it happens to every server, nothing on our end that we can do about it. when the server auto rebooted it most likely did all the calculations of your negative faction points and then made your homebase vulnerable.

and once again i was the only admin on at the time of the incident and i did not "god mode" the guy that killed you

 

[Smoke]

I am Also an admin on Arctic Gaming as Locutus. We don't do that. Why would we, IvIast3r pays straight cash for the server, we play on the server. We want a healthy community, predatory admins are a number F&$#&*%$ ONE population killer.
Flat out, the server speed on Arctic is too fast.
150 equals flyin through asteroids, and missiles BYPASSING shields.
However, 150, is fun. The Arctic Gaming BALANCED server has 80 to combat tunneling until it gets fixed.
[DOUBLEPOST=1424336977,1424336870][/DOUBLEPOST]I have also instituted collision damage as a TEST to discourage exploits in clipping on the BALANCED server.

 

[Orphaniel]

Well, there you have it, with this information it seems the admins are not at fault (that was an unlikely outcome in any case)