The official server flamewar topic

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AnonDuck
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by AnonDuck »

From an "insiders" point of view..

What is only partially visible to the users here is the amount of vitriol and hatred that Platyna has spewed at the admins and developers over this. What you see on the forums is only about 1/5th of it. Of course people will blow off some steam and act silly after being abused and harassed like that for months!

The responses here are not as petty as they seem.. In fact at this point it's becoming sort of a running joke. Which is good as this has been stressful for everyone involved and people need to laugh a little.

If you'd take time to get to know the current admins on IRC, or if they'd make some of the threads on the private section of the forum public (about how carefully and correctly they are attempting to handle this situation) you might begin to see why most(all?) of the developers stuck with this branch of the project.
Spoiler:
Or you can just listen to crazy rants about how poorly these VOLUNTEERS handle everything and how they have a crazy "lust for power" and want to control everything. They are all evil and have nothing better to do than spend their free time making art, creating content, writing code, fending off weekly DDoS attacks, helping people who forgot their passwords, planning events, doing their best to come up with decent policies that almost every weirdo involved can agree on, etc.

And oh the data! TMW admins copied the data illegally! Because you know if you host a website with a company and that company's sysadmin copies all of the site's data and sets up a clone of their own, that's perfectly OK right? The sysadmin owns the company's data because they hosted it right? There's multiple ways to look at this and the law hasn't stated clearly that hosting providers are NOT the owners of the data they are contracted to host.... right?

How did they get to be admins anyway? They couldn't be admins because they have the most technical knowledge and have semi-decent teamwork skills. That wouldn't make sense. It couldn't be because of how often their name shows up in 'git log'.. Nope. They are admins because they are evil power-hungry jerks that want to control you all. They even bot in the game every day because that's easier than just editing the data files!

*hands out tin foil hats* :lol:
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Platyna
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Platyna »

blackrazor wrote:Well, both themanaworld.org and themanaworld.net are valid servers, with all the same data as of March 9th, 2013, and from there it diverges. Most of the players are playing on themanaworld.org from what I can see. In my opinion, the admins from both servers are engaging in petty kindergarten-style flame-wars, taunts, mud-slinging that would have gotten normal players banned under ordinary circumstances. It seems that sanity has taken a vacation from both places, and I would recommend playing on Evol or Land of Fire, or maybe something completely different, until things settle down and people decide to behave themselves and enforce the rules of civil behavior.

I am starting to think that neither TMWC nor Platyna deserve the server player files, and that the players should elect a new set of admins that will avoid starting anymore senseless crap and will honestly try to unite the community, heal the wounds, and encourage meaningful content development that the players can notice and enjoy.

From a quasi-legal (I'm not a lawyer, and I doubt anyone here has the money for an international business court case), both the forum data (all these posts) and the server data (player saves) are not covered by GPL. Every group or committee running this project, from Elven, Bjorn, Jax, Platyna, GHP, TMWC, etc was irresponsible not to ever make a constitution clearly defining the ownership of those files and rules for changing admins and hosting, so now we have this kaka-storm as a thank-you for that awesome level of foresight.

The only clear thing is that Elvenprogrammer owns the domain name themanaworld.org. One could make a sort-of legal argument that Platyna owns the files, since she hosted the software on her machine for years, in the absence of any formal agreement, contract, or constitution. She claims furthermore that Elven and Bjorn abandoned the project and their stake in it, and have only come back recently, to settle accounts with her, and because there is now actually something tangible over which to fight, which wasn't the case when they left.

Elven, Bjorn, on the other hand could (and likely have) denied Platyna's claims, and could still make a claim to the project, as original propagators of it. Elven, in particular, has some legal muscle regarding this, since he owns the domain name themanaworld.org, which was used as TMW's official domain for all these years.

Lately, I hear that the project belongs to those who develop its content, which sounds awesome cool in theory, but in practice means that any rogue developer that makes a substantial improvement or change in the future and remains active, can then lay a claim to ownership.

Heck, while we're at it, let's say that the project belongs to the community, and hold nominations and then elections for our admins, in the same way as we do for GMs.

I don't really know who the project belongs to, and I'm starting not to care anymore, either. All of have effectively destroyed the dream of OSS that it would be a grass-roots empowering and community-owned wonderful happy utopia. Instead, you have found a way to make it filthy, sneaky, dirty, nasty, just like the real "law of the jungle" corporate world, to which this was supposed to stand in stark contrast.

Seriously, with all this nastiness from all sides, how are any of you better than each other? How are any of you better than a pay project from the corporate world. There used to be a credo here, that you worked with everyone, even if you had differences with them. Maybe it was always a lie, carefully hidden, but now it is a lie, laid bare for all to see. You should all (admins) be ashamed of yourselves for destroying such a nice thing and for failing to make a constitution that would have removed all this ambiguity in the first place.

I think we need to start over. i am disgusted by what I see here now from all the people in power.
How come? I do not troll anyone, I am also not calling people who oppose me thundercounts, not to mention that it is not me who is contantly deranging threads and trying to ridicule those who think that I am a person who should be deciding what happens with the files.

I pointed out important things - such as o11c changing rules application himself, or that I was kicked out the server without breaking any rules - all that was trolled or locked.

So called TMWC shows how immature they are.

What would you expect from me? That I will let the people like this destroy six years or so of my work?

Regards.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Jaxad0127 »

Platyna wrote:or that I was kicked out the server without breaking any rules - all that was trolled or locked.
You were kicked from the server because you were breaking the rules. Rules that you, yourself, promote.
Platyna wrote:What would you expect from me? That I will let the people like this destroy six years or so of my work?
What was destroyed? They left you with a copy of everything.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by blackrazor »

MadCamel wrote: And oh the data! TMW admins copied the data illegally! Because you know if you host a website with a company and that company's sysadmin copies all of the site's data and sets up a clone of their own, that's perfectly OK right? The sysadmin owns the company's data because they hosted it right? There's multiple ways to look at this and the law hasn't stated clearly that hosting providers are NOT the owners of the data they are contracted to host.... right?

How did they get to be admins anyway? They couldn't be admins because they have the most technical knowledge and have semi-decent teamwork skills. That wouldn't make sense. It couldn't be because of how often their name shows up in 'git log'.. Nope. They are admins because they are evil power-hungry jerks that want to control you all. They even bot in the game every day because that's easier than just editing the data files!
Platyna isn't a hosting company. If you rent space from a hosting company, they make you sign contracts that you own your data and are responsible for it legally, and usually also limiting their liability if anything goes wrong. Did anyone sign such a contract with Platyna? Please show me proof such a contract exists. Please also show me proof, in the form of an agreement or contract that Platyna was "just hosting" and that she intended never to have any claim on the non-GPLed data that resided on her machine for all these years. Please show me proof that this TMW project even exists as a legal entity. Where is its certificate of incorporation or even a constitution outlining its own existence, assets, and succession of officers?

I do blame Platyna for spreading her power so thin that others were able to lay claim to the files and create this mega-kakastorm of disturbance. I do blame Platyna for never writing a constitution that clearly outlined who owned what assets, and what where the rules of succession of officers (admins). That blame falls equally on Elven, Bjorn, Jax, GHP, TMWC for also failing to write a constitution that would have clarified all of this ambiguity and thus perhaps prevented this whole mess from occurring.

I never called anyone evil. I remain respectful of the excellent development, moderation, admin, and hosting work done in the past, but ever since March 9th, 2013, all of that has taken a backseat to this enormous pissing contest. I think the TMWC should have been a lot more conscious about how badly their choice was going to hurt the community and how bad the optics were going to be in the way they chose to do it. And I think Platyna should have taken a step back long ago to ask why every senior staff on these boards (Bjorn, Elven, Jax, crush, Big Crunch, o11c, Frost, maybe Jen too) seems to have a score to settle with her. Granted, effective top-admins can be unpopular (no one likes to follow rules it seems), but this level of animosity is not normal, and it takes two sides to tango, and one side has a lot of people, so what happened there to make it so unanimous. Now, that gives a reason to make a fork, but this whole cloning of people's data files was going to create chaos, and everyone should have known that was going to be a bad, irresponsible idea.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Kazenawa »

blackrazor wrote:Please show me proof that this TMW project even exists as a legal entity. Where is its certificate of incorporation or even a constitution outlining its own existence, assets, and succession of officers?
Here is the critical point...
Stop claiming for owner rights since nothing has been established. In this case, each server is authorized, there's none "fake" one or i don't know any other adjectve you'll be able to fine to qualify it...
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by o11c »

blackrazor wrote: Did anyone sign such a contract with Platyna? Please show me proof such a contract exists. Please also show me proof, in the form of an agreement or contract that Platyna was "just hosting" and that she intended never to have any claim on the non-GPLed data that resided on her machine for all these years. Please show me proof that this TMW project even exists as a legal entity. Where is its certificate of incorporation or even a constitution outlining its own existence, assets, and succession of officers?

I do blame Platyna for spreading her power so thin that others were able to lay claim to the files and create this mega-kakastorm of disturbance. I do blame Platyna for never writing a constitution that clearly outlined who owned what assets, and what where the rules of succession of officers (admins). That blame falls equally on Elven, Bjorn, Jax, GHP, TMWC for also failing to write a constitution that would have clarified all of this ambiguity and thus perhaps prevented this whole mess from occurring.
That's just the thing - there *was* such an agreement. Granted, it wasn't signed on paper (with all the people in different countries, that would be hard), but it was an agreement nonetheless.

It didn't take her long to claim dictatorial power after the ManaServ split, though.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by blackrazor »

o11c wrote: That's just the thing - there *was* such an agreement. Granted, it wasn't signed on paper (with all the people in different countries, that would be hard), but it was an agreement nonetheless.

It didn't take her long to claim dictatorial power after the ManaServ split, though.
It's the modern age, and even an electronic contract emailed around, with the .png (or similar format) of everyone's signatures would be something. Do you have such a thing? Do you have any document at all that all parties will agree to having been a party of, or that there is proof they were a party of? If so, I would ask to please post a link of it to the forums.

If no such document exists, then you have nothing that protects or justifies you in the choices you have made recently. Again, there needs to be proof that Platyna intended only to host, and proof that the project even legally exists, with a formal claim of its assets (the data files) and succession of officers. If you lack all of this, then what legal justification do you have to take the actions you have taken with the cloning of files from someone else's computer, without their authorization, and with no hosting contract to protect you. How can there be claims that the files belong to the project, if the project doesn't even exist legally speaking?

Also, it would have been better to have clear legal rights, one way or the other, for one server or the other (.org vs. .net) and have one single version of the data files that goes in one place, and the other gets erased. The other server without legal standing to those files can just make a fork and start new. But in cloning the data instead, you created it in two places, creating confusion and chaos, and degrading the uniqueness of each person's playing experience and the uniqueness of the fantasy world in which they had those experiences. A fork (without cloned data) would have been a much more responsible approach.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Kazenawa »

blackrazor wrote:Also, it would have been better to have clear legal rights, one way or the other, for one server or the other (.org vs. .net) and have one single version of the data files that goes in one place, and the other gets erased. The other server without legal standing to those files can just make a fork and start new. But in cloning the data instead, you created it in two places, creating confusion and chaos, and degrading the uniqueness of each person's playing experience and the uniqueness of the fantasy world in which they had those experiences. A fork (without cloned data) would have been a much more responsible approach.
Many times i hear about .org has more players than .net.
Though, there's something to not forget. When the server occured, by default, players had no choice to connect on .org and most of them wasn't really aware of the situation.
Don't know about developpers, of what happened deeper inside. Also, i would like to be able to see the number of players of both servers if, when the move occured, we had a choice to make... I think it would seriously be much more balanced...
From a player's point of view, it's normal that you don't want to make things twice with the same chars. Now, of course, many players who played a lot on .org won't re-do it again on .net, supposing they would like to join.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by prsm »

blackrazor wrote:
o11c wrote: That's just the thing - there *was* such an agreement. Granted, it wasn't signed on paper (with all the people in different countries, that would be hard), but it was an agreement nonetheless.

It didn't take her long to claim dictatorial power after the ManaServ split, though.
It's the modern age, and even an electronic contract emailed around, with the .png (or similar format) of everyone's signatures would be something. Do you have such a thing? Do you have any document at all that all parties will agree to having been a party of, or that there is proof they were a party of? If so, I would ask to please post a link of it to the forums.

If no such document exists, then you have nothing that protects or justifies you in the choices you have made recently. Again, there needs to be proof that Platyna intended only to host, and proof that the project even legally exists, with a formal claim of its assets (the data files) and succession of officers. If you lack all of this, then what legal justification do you have to take the actions you have taken with the cloning of files from someone else's computer, without their authorization, and with no hosting contract to protect you. How can there be claims that the files belong to the project, if the project doesn't even exist legally speaking?

Also, it would have been better to have clear legal rights, one way or the other, for one server or the other (.org vs. .net) and have one single version of the data files that goes in one place, and the other gets erased. The other server without legal standing to those files can just make a fork and start new. But in cloning the data instead, you created it in two places, creating confusion and chaos, and degrading the uniqueness of each person's playing experience and the uniqueness of the fantasy world in which they had those experiences. A fork (without cloned data) would have been a much more responsible approach.
That is very easy to say after the fact, no one knew how ugly this would and did get. When it got to the breaking point, it was far to late.
IN A PERFECT WORLD ..... Most if not all TMWC came years after the project was started.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by GARRETTtheGREAT »

It seems like everyone is extremely eager to keep things going as they are now. Why don't we keep doing this from now on?

Spamming, flaming, and DDoSing could be incorporated into the game. For example, there could be a daily quest where you have to insult "Platyna" and "o11c" NPCs. We could even have a leaderboard for it, since winning an online flame war is such a high priority for everyone.

If it were up to me, I'd just delete all other content in the game, since this is way more fun anyway.

Hell, let's just delete the game entirely and make the forums the main event, like they are currently.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Kazenawa »

prsm wrote:That is very easy to say after the fact, no one knew how ugly this would and did get. [...]
That is also a very easy answer.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by prsm »

Kazenawa wrote:
prsm wrote:That is very easy to say after the fact, no one knew how ugly this would and did get. [...]
That is also a very easy answer.
Yes it is, the trouble started and festered years before i climbed on board.
The hard answer would take pages to write and would include me saying
derogatory comments, something i have tried not to do.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Kazenawa »

prsm wrote: Yes it is, the trouble started and festered years before i climbed on board.
The hard answer would take pages to write and would include me saying
derogatory comments, something i have tried not to do.
Thanks for keeping it then. The less we will have such kind of comments, the best this war would potentially resolve.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by Platyna »

@Jaxad0127

First of all, on the another post, below (well I should get used that you manipulate data) there is clearly stated that it was posted on FORUMS in PLAYER TALK, and no one was kicked, banned, warned - just the thread has been moved to a different FORUM.

Also my server is not a fork. I do everything to not insult you, but it is a simple thought, that you are manipulative liar, here is a proof:
Jaxad's sig at forums.themanaworld.net wrote: These forums are an unauthorized fork of The REAL Mana World. The admin of these forums is refusing to do her legal duty of removing personal information upon request. I never signed up for these forums. I signed up for TMW.org.
Also there were countless discussions about forks etc. and NO ONE had any problems when they were on OFF TOPIC forums.

And in game we don't have chats for different topics, we use ONE CHAT, so I can't imagine how twisted logic must've lead you to the conclusion that I have forbidden to talk about other servers...

About flames - my initial post was a simple concern about the fact that all discussions critical to the server move are being trolled, ridiculed and then locked. And it was RENAMED to "official flameware thrad" by Crush - showing his real intent what are the standards of discussion on this forum now.

Not to mention that my posts are being trolled by current admin, host, GMs and other "TMWC" members and NO MODERATOR reacted! See examples few posts above, while the issue is very serious.

@Dyna

No, they didn't told me, they said they have sent an email but I never got it, it is hard to respond to emails you never got. I have valid reasons to think that it is a lie, as all that move was plotted on a secret channel.

@prms:
That is very easy to say after the fact, no one knew how ugly this would and did get. When it got to the breaking point, it was far to late.
IN A PERFECT WORLD .....
Sure, copy someone elses files, threat the domain owner to do what you want, and do not expect that it will not get ugly...
Most if not all TMWC came years after the project was started.
Silly thing isn't it? They came to my server and to my forums (as Bjorn and Elven said that eathena server is not worth to work on and then left)...and they keep saying they have rights to the userfiles. Curiosum.

Regards.
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Re: The official server-move flamewar topic

Post by mistergrey »

GARRETTtheGREAT wrote:It seems like everyone is extremely eager to keep things going as they are now. Why don't we keep doing this from now on?

Spamming, flaming, and DDoSing could be incorporated into the game. For example, there could be a daily quest where you have to insult "Platyna" and "o11c" NPCs. We could even have a leaderboard for it, since winning an online flame war is such a high priority for everyone.

If it were up to me, I'd just delete all other content in the game, since this is way more fun anyway.

Hell, let's just delete the game entirely and make the forums the main event, like they are currently.
Ha, someone with some sense!

I'm sad it's become a "he said-she said" kind of situation, but I will say that limiting it to one topic was a nice idea. What I don't get is this.. I think we can all agree that we stuck around so long, almost entirely because of our love for the community, odd and dramatic as it is. Yes, there were many problems, both in public and behind the scenes. But why are so many people just determined to pick a side, and then bash the one they decided against? If anything, that's the truly childish action.. and I've seen a number of truly pleasant people I've enjoyed talking to in the past, spewing out hateful arguments on one side or the other. It's just... well, sad. Try and remember that we're all people first, not evil tyrants, power snatching groups, sycophants, or flunkies.

Now, for some humor that may get me killed :twisted:
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