Re: ''availers'' Post.

[Deleted User 009 0]

Hello Asulon,

Today I'd like to fully and publicly address a recent accusation that has been made against me personally by LOTC's original founder, availer. I'm not going to try and cover this up because there is nothing to hide, so I thought the best solution to the problem would to publicly address the entire situation and then be done with it.

Before I start responding to availer's post, let me just explain what has happened for those who haven't noticed. Availer (the original founder of LOTC) who was kicked out of the project late last year, almost immediately after minecon as a result of his inactivity and failure to want to continue and expand the project, made a post on our official forums early this morning condemning and slandering us as just a bunch of "... adolescent(s) who has committed blackmail and theft." You can find a full copy of his post here, please feel free to read it so you can hear his "side of the story" before reading the truth about all this down bellow.

Ok, so let's start at the very beginning of his letter to us. I'll be taking bits and pieces of it and responding to each in an educated and factual manner.

I'm Availer, founder and former lead developer of LoTC. Earlier last year I was forcefully removed as the owner of LoTC illegally by "Vaquxine" the current programmer working on LoTC.

I won't even touch on the fact that he claims to be the "lead developer" right now, I'll get back to that in a bit. More importantly, his statement that he was forcefully removed as the owner illegally by none other that myself, Vaquxine is invalid. His removal came as a result of ALL the senior GMs, that being me, shiftnative, nekodanie, tythus, and tyrion agreed that it was for the better of the server. At the time, we had made a formal post as to our reasoning for kicking him out of the LOTC team and that old archived post can be found and read here. Please read this post if you were not around back when this originally happened on November 26 as it explains our reasoning as to WHY we had to kick him out of the development team.

During it's development, I had personally worked around 1250 hours on this project.

1250 hours, or 52 days is how long availer claims to have worked on this project, but what did he really do? Well, early on in the project he was true to his word he was an amazing leader, he had innovative ideas, great planning, great leadership, etc. This all changed as time went on, and availer became less and less involved in the project.

Working on advertising, managing, development, lore, text, web design, system admin, programming and art.

This is what he claims he was doing during these 1250 hours. It is true that he did work on advertising, some text, a bit of art, etc. But the fact that he claims he worked on being a "system admin, programming, web design" is just a joke. I (Vaquxine) did ALL of the programming for this server; I coded every single plugin we use from SCRATCH. Our entire skill system, or /register system, buddy system, permit system, housing system, racial system, mob altering system, event system, everything you see on LOTC that is not in vanilla minecraft is basically made by me. As for web design, availer did not code our site, nor our forums. Not even our teamspeak. I implemented our teamspeak, customized and recoded our site and forums, I was the one who actually implemented it to start. Availer bought the website theme, then messaged me on skype asking me to implement it. I installed nginx, configured php, uploaded the theme, bought the actual machines we were on, etc, etc. Availer was NEVER part of the technical side of the server, he was a big part of advertising and art at the very start of the server, but as I said earlier this all changed as time went on and eventually he spent MAYBE an hour a week online, and a few minutes of that time was spent on barking orders at us and giving us endless things we should do while he just sat back and took all the $ in.

The first mistake occured when money became involved in the project. Vaquxine who was a programmer during this time began to request money for his services. Knowing that he was an integral part of the team I personally, without discussing it with any of the GM team, began to pay him a weekly payment of $50.

Money was never not involved in the project. Money is needed to run the server, whether we wish it did or not. I was the lead programmer at the time, and still am; I was the one who coded everything for the server and maintained everything. I had gotten frustrated at the fact that I knew availer was making a lot $ at the time because paypal e-mails were being forwarded to me so I could update VIPs and stuff in-game as this was before I had implemented the automated donation system. I had told availer that day that I was going to quit, because I didn't like working my ass off every day for nothing. I literally spent time from the moment I woke up to the moment I went asleep programming all the thousands of different aspects of the server and was getting nothing to show for it. I told availer I quit, he then asked me what he could do to keep me around, I told him I wanted payment. We agreed on a % per week based on donations after the amount needed to maintain and upgrade the server was taken out of the picture.

LoTC was developing and things were fine.

As availer said himself, things were just fine at this time, I was being payed for programming the server and doing the main legwork for it, and at the same time we were expanding outwards and increasing our population. Everything was just dandy ... until the next chapter in the story.

Things quickly began to go downhill with development, player count decreased and even though we had gone to minecon we only had a fraction of the player base before, it was getting relatively stale.

Availer is completely correct. Things went downhill and began to die because availer, our leader, began to just randomly AFK for weeks at a time only to pop in occasionally to tell us what we could be doing better. He was still the only person receiving the donation $ at this time, and we had no idea where it was going.

The second mistake was moving to Legendary Servers

We moved to the server hosting company I had started and lead for a few months, Legendary Servers, after our current host (ProvisionHost) held our server hostage as a result of availer forgetting to pay the bill for the server. We were offline for over 48 hours while we were trying to get in contact with availer, none of us had the money to pay for the bill, and the phone # and contact information availer gave us to contact him with was all disconnected. I actually ended up paying the bill ($400 at the time) out of my own pocket at the time after we couldn't get in contact with availer. As a result of this, we decided to move to my company Legendary Servers so that if this situation occurred again, I could just keep the server online until availer decided to come back online again and send some of the $ to me to pay for the hardware. We made a post about this back when we originally switched over, the archived version of this post can be found here. Availer thought the idea was brilliant back then, probably because he knew it ment he had to be online even LESS while still raking in the $.

Vaquxine banned my IP from the website, banned my account, banned me from teamspeak and removed access to the FB group.

The original post made back in Nov. 26 addresses this statement. To summarize, the choice to expel availer from the community was a combined choice between me, native, danie, tyrion, and tythus (and at the time, Respiren) as it was for the better of the server. If you want more details about this particular statement, read the original response we made, there's a link up at the top of the post.

As soon as I was removed a new credit system was added. Vaquxine recieved $150 from donations in 5 minutes, over $500 in 30 minutes.

The credit system was added before the switch happened. This old system allowed players to basically purchase skill levels with IRL $. This was my idea originally, and availer LOVED it when I told him about it, he even said things to me such as "... Now we can finally start to get some real dosh (money) out of this project man!" I agreed, and the system was implemented. Two weeks AFTER it was added, I had seen the thousands and thousands of dollars that he had been making and I started to get angry that he was making the most (and really only) money and yet he was still the LEAST active. He literally would sign on every month just to check in with us and pay me for staying onboard.

The server currently costs no more than $200 a month to keep up.

The main server host machine costs $550/month. The website host costs $300/month. We spend all the other $ on new GFX for the site, advertising, and supporting our community.

The server recieves on my estimates around $5000-$6000 per month.

Last month (February), LOTC received $1,650. $550 was used to pay for the monthly server bill of the main host, another $300 for the site. We payed $150 to pumpkin_eaters for his GFX work, and plan to pay him further for more graphics. That left us with $650 excess at the end of the month. This money was stored as it always is for tax reasons. I do pay taxes on all the income this server receives and we pay ~20-30% tax, hence why 20-30% of the monthly bill needs to be put away for tax reasons.

Furthermore I was absolutely appalled to hear Vaquxine saying that we have barely enough donation money to keep the server up.

Did I studder? It's true unfortunately, lately LOTC donations have dipped bellow the margin and we want to make sure the server isn't impacted by this by making our players aware of the situation.

You can also read the forum posts and see the countless of people who have already donated $500 or are upgrading to that package.

No one has. The one only Aether VIP we currently have is Cedric, and he has donated $500 in the past, so we gave him the rank for free. Get your facts straight, availer.

At first I did not want to escalate matters, mainly because I was assured by Native that LoTC would be taken care of and secondly because I did not have the time or energy to deal with the current predicament.

Are you kidding me? You flamed every single senior GM for days after the event, telling them how terrible they are to let this happen, you made personal and physical threats against me personally, and tried to get the entire community to hop back into your pocket. You didn't have the energy OR the time, that's why this happened to start with, availer.

Please spread the truth concerning what has happened in LoTC. Please be aware of what is happening at the moment.

Well I guess you can consider the truth *puts on glasses* spread. YEAAAAAAH!!! - But in all seriousness, nothing is being hid availer, as you can see from this post...

I have always loved LoTC and it has always been in my heart, I have laboured for thousands of hours to develop a seamless beautiful world for people from all over to meet and interact in a moderated roleplaying enviroment.

I believe you availer, I truly do. You were a great friend and awesome person to work with while it lasted, I wish we could have continued to work together on this amazing project. If things could have just stayed they were in the Summer of 2011, I think LOTC would be much more sucesfull than it is now. But if we had not acted (and by we, I mean the senior GM's) and lessened your role in the server, it would have died. I didn't want to ban, harm, or insult you availer, I never have and never will. We DEMOTED you, we never BANNED you.

P.S. I'm sorry it's come to this availer, wish it hadn't. Regardless of what happens with LOTC, I wish you good luck in life, and I hope your successful mate!

[Walter 22]

TL;DR

@volutional: Get owned.

Well written, Vaq. Thanks for streaming it, too. Cleared a ton up!

[Volutional 935]

TL:DR

Vaq is baus.

Edit: Very correct.

[similan 4]

greedy man

[Arkelos 1027]

Tehlulu is reading this in a silly voice.

-flails at-

Well written

[Deleted User 009 0]

Fixed hyperlinks, they didn't copy from original wordpress post.

[Mr_Boomer337 56]

Well, I haven't heard of his new post.... Going to read it now..

[Praetor 1550]

Well wrote.

[Ned Lud 1260]

Thanks for the transparency. Even as a new player that started in August, I could see which way the wind was blowing back then. Hard work did not go unnoticed and I feel that these decisions were made justly, collectively and for the best. I support the current administration and think you guys are doing a fine job.

[Sawses 58]

I do believe you deserve applause, GMs/Admins. :D

[Aren Whitestorm 65]

I stand beside you Vaq.

[Alakabam 582]

[Ogedi 50]

Hmmm...

[BannanaToYou 196]

I am also Aether Vip, I also demand to be added into the post :3

[Rilath 3719]

Availer, I think it's safe to say that most of the community did, and probably still does love you. Truthfully, I had no objections to your amount of time on the server, because whenever I met you in game, I had a lot of fun roleplay with you and I enjoyed it immensely. I wish the GM's would let you back, but I seriously doubt that will happen. But nonetheless, I miss you availer. The old you.