Those other servers didn't have to deal with the shit we had to deal with that and they were (and still are) faking their population numbers by several magnitudes more than anything we did. But yeah I lied about the small player base bump and that makes me a hypocrite. I justified it to myself that wet least had a fair reason to do such whereas other folks didn't and still don't.

The only staff members I "threw" under the bus would even have been:

Jimmy, because he refused to let me make any changes to militia or any form of PvP on the server, in regards to changes that players were asking for for months. I mentioned that to like 2 people that asked why I wasn't coding any changes to militia, even stuff that the player base largely agreed upon in the forums and seemed like something that should have been changed. I had said forever that it was a general staff decision, and at about the 1 year mark when our playerbase got super low I finally mentioned a name.

And the other was you, because after each of your requested rebalance patches, which I preemptively told you were going to cause the playerbase to have a fucking fit over and a large number of players would probably quit due to it, sure enough our pop dropped again. And I still coded that stuff because I was deferring to your "expertise" on PvM matters / tamer balance / whatnot. And I never once specifically mentioned you were the one requesting this shit, despite players suggesting repeatedly that it was you that was behind it.

For a huge chunk of our playerbase, most of them felt the rest of you guys as staff couldn't have given less of a shit about what they wanted as players. Hell, you guys all even had forum "player" alts that you used to literally "request" and "suggest" changes to the server that fit your playstyle or how you wanted me to code things, but you didn't like that in our staff chat I wasn't in favor of some things, so you went on your alts and tried to "lobby" the playerbase to support your ideas, for whatever reason, which irked me a fucking ton.

You over and over again used your forum alt to ask for bullshit requests like fixing Armor dex values and other insane shit that no players cared about, and Pole and a few other players figured it out, and when it was revealed that you were using forum alts for your own agenda, created the impression that our staff only gave a shit about coding changes that benefited staff's player characters. Especially the militia shit, or lack of us coding any changes that hurt 2.0 guild which had several staff members in it.

I was literally the only player on staff who didn't have a player character, and it infuriated me to no end that the rest of you guys would spend a huge chunk of your time farming / playing while I was working my ass off around the clock coding shit, and then you were perfectly fine asking for patch requests that I knew was going to kill off the player base because for whatever reason it fit your playstyle or how you envisioned some magical balance was going to be struck longterm, even if it caused chunk of the players leave, especially when our pop was already low.

I made some of my own mistakes that I think weren't great that had an impact on the player base, like the Vengeance system and the Murderer ress fee thing, but I offered on multiple occasions to recode / remove those and I did care whether it was affecting our pop our not.

I thought the Punkte donation shop staff member thing, which hurt no one, unless you're suggesting our staff member did in fact spread items all over the server, which changes the context of things, was simply a funny side story about a player for whom there was an entire 20+ pages of UOAC1 documenting the entire situation of how he affected the UOAC1 launch negatively.

I was there for the entire thing when it happened as a player so I'm not just making stuff up, unless you're suggesting that the UOAC1 staff lied in all their posts on the forums back then about the cause of the wipe/reboot, and that they maliciously targeted Punkte and banned him / deleted his house purely out of spite for no reason and he had no impact on their decision to wipe / restart. Otherwise, in the context of my story it was just a staff member playing a prank on someone who had completely fucked up their server and caused chaos they didnt want to deal with, and I thought it was just slightly funny in context in hindsight.

If we had found out who DDOSed us, and they later decided to launch a server, and we showed up and made a goofy show of things in front of them but didn't cause any damage to their server, would everyone be up in arms about it? That's what's baffling me about this whole thing because essentially what we're talking about, and I don't know why everyone thinks there's some insane obligation to go out of your way to help someone who caused harm to them.

If you want to know why I finally quit UOAC, to be perfect honest it was two things:

1) Not being allowed by staff to make the neccessary changes that players had been requesting for almost a year in regards to things like militia and spell changes, stuff that had they been implemented a long, long time ago might have made a genine impact in keeping our players, but it was too late before I got any sort of go-ahead to even start a discussion with the players on the topic (our pop was at about 30).

2) Your attitude that you wanted things a certain specific way and that you would be perfectly content if everyone left the server and we had 30 people left playing, as long as the exact balance you wanted for things you cared about. Because that's what we ended up getting, and I warned you multiple times that the shard's as much our players as it is ours and certain shit just rubs players the wrong way, including the timing of patches and affecting the things that players care most strongly about.