Caution

I wanted to take a few days and think on if I should respond to this publicly, and I decided that I probably should. A few things drove me to this decision...it's come up a few times in Discord (both public and then in the private staff) about Bom basically trying to 'play' people and talk shit about them behind their back, but do this to multiple people at the same time. I've read about probably 7 or 8 people so far this has happened to, including situations where Bom would talk shit about 'Person A' to 'Person B', while also talking shit about 'Person B' to 'Person A'...like simultaneously. Additionally, while I don't give a shit about most of what is in here, there are two allegations in here I do want to address, because some new people may read this and think there's merit here. I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression and subsequently feel uncomfortable, especially while we're working hard to get the community population back up. While I'm not going to respond to most of what is in here, I wanted to respond publicly about the 'dick pic & ban' and 'defend a known pedophile' allegations. I didn't think it warranted a whole new thread, but I did want to just get something out there. I had to take a few days as well, to generally reflect on the allegations and make sure I'm not taking crazy pills and forgetting something. I'm gonna choose my words very carefully here, because while I have no problem putting Bom on blast for shit I know about him, I don't want some other people to have their laundry aired just because a man-child got mad on the internet. Bom choosing sexual allegations is hilarious to me - one of those 'cock pot calling the kettle black' type of situations. Dick pic & ban: The notion that at any point in time I sought out new women, sent them a dick pic, and then banned them if they get upset is beyond absurd lol. A few friends (at the time) had a running joke where they'd tag me in Introduction Threads of women who just joined the community. No more serious than the joke about playing PayDay 2 with me to get promoted. I've never "slid in DM's" of any woman here, ever lol. There have absolutely been times where I've flirted or had a relationship that's slightly more than 'internet friends', but this has always been legal, consensual, and not under any type of quid pro quo to get promoted or something. I'll wait for reference to any specific instance of where I've sent someone a dick pic, let alone subsequently banned them for it afterwards. The closest thing to something like this, that I can think of, was in 2016 when I matched with a woman on Tinder who ironically already had an account here at SG and played on the servers. That whole thing didn't end up working out, and I banned her out of anger / being butthurt or whatever. While she did technically break the racism rules...often...it was me just being petty. Definitely was a childish decision for me to make, but thankfully I try and choose good VP's who can tell me when I'm doing something wrong or bad or whatever. I was 22, lashed out, and made a dumb decision that I apologized to her for, and we have a pretty good friendship to this day and talk fairly often. No, she has never seen my dick lol. Defending a known pedophile: Actual pedophilia is probably the most serious accusation someone can make on here. A lot of people like to grab their pitchforks and torches the second that someone makes an actual allegation of that, but obviously we have to investigate and find if there is merit, let alone proof. There are two situations I can think of that he's talking about. One is drama between an ex couple that met on SG, and was drama associated with their breakup. I'm sort of guessing when this started...maybe back in 2015 ~ ish, but carried for years. A lot of people here simped for the woman and believed pretty much everything she said, without question. There was never any proof and was basically denied by the guy, but he got dragged (and still gets dragged, apparently) for the whole thing. This became so crazy that we had an actual AO get striked, demoted, and then permed because he admittedly fell in love with her and was trying to make the guy's life harder than it needed to be. The ex couple were both higher ups and it was extremely fucking awkward being in meetings alone with them, but nothing ever came out of all this that was anything close to proof. It should be pretty obvious why I'm not going to go around banning people off of accusations. The other situation was the closest thing to actual pedophilia we've had on here. There was a gay male admin that was extremely popular here. He may have been a CA, I don't remember. He was somewhere around 17-19, and we had allegations he was being flirtatious in the servers with young boys, ballparking around 13. Pretty serious allegations. We dug through server logs and had some steam DM's, but never found much on the servers that would stick out as like 'oh yeah they're definitely e-fucking!'. Steam DM's we take with an extreme grain of salt - anybody can (and it has happened here before) fake a steam DM. In 10 minutes, anyone can make an alt steam account, match the picture and name of the person being accused, and pretty much fake whatever they want. I actually leaned a LOT heavier towards the ban vs not banning, and this drove a HUGE rift between me and the VP at the time, because he felt like there just wasn't enough proof and he was friends with the guy. For obvious legal, moral, and ethical reasons, I can't have pedophilia occurring here lol. There's a lot that goes into this though - the vast majority of the world does not have a set law of 18 with no ifs, ands, or buts (including the United States). Obviously, 13 & 19 is not the same as 18 & 17 or something like that. (We've actually had situations of underage women send pics or be overly sexual here to underage guys, which again, still can't happen.) We ended up getting text messages that were allegedly between the admin and the kid on here. We talked with both of them and it was admitted, eventually, from the CA. I banned him soon after and reported him to an FBI cyber division with the proof we had. I never heard back from them, so I have no idea if anything ever happened. Anyways, that's my take on the Bom accusations. Additionally, Poke and Scrolls were both permed after this, Scrolls for saying something to the tune of 'I know your post got deleted Bom, but +1' and Poke for liking Scrolls' post. While we certainly don't want to set the trend of banning people for liking posts, we were in the middle of discussing Poke's Discord Ban and what we're going to do with his rank as LG. Ultimately, we decided to just issue perms on both of them. We're tired of dealing with GG lol, plain and simple. I don't know almost anyone in that group and haven't had to deal with this whole GG situation as long as a lot of other higher ups have because I was AFK awhile, but I'm already tired of it after just being active again for a few months. It's constant discussions, and none of them recognize what they're doing as wrong, at all. They play the 'well I haven't been warned for this SPECIFIC thing' game, and none of us are interested in doing it anymore. I don't lose sleep over them, but I don't want to ban anyone; I hate having to do it and wish it didn't have to come to it, but they were just not understanding how to not be dicks to random people. SG's Discord, servers, nor forums are the place to go on and fuck with random people when you want a laugh, especially when we're trying extremely hard to build our community back. Someone once said a great line to a previous owner of SG who would come back on and spread negativity, and it was something along the lines of "Your attitude here is not helpful and will no longer be tolerated." I don't see any of the GG guys ever getting unbanned, but who knows.

@BoM

I've been exploring shows lately, as normally I don't watch TV too much. I've binged a few things, notably Trailer Park Boyz, Arrested Development, and F is for Family. All have been fantastic, and AD has become my new 'background noise' show. For books, you guys should check out an app called Headway. If you're into personal finance, self-help, etc., it condenses books and their main points into a certain amount of minutes of reading. Sort of like Clif Notes, I guess, but better. Full books though, I just re-read Richest Man in Babylon. Such a great book. I am about to re-read Rich Dad Poor Dad, as well.

The shadow-dash thing definitely gave a death-eater vibe which was super cool, agreed. I think they kept quidditch out due to possible plans to make a quidditch-only game, but that's just my theory. I can't, for the life of me, understand why they wouldn't include it in the game otherwise. They don't even have intentions to add that later in the game, so it's the only thing I can come up with. I wish it would have been a smidge more like GTA or something. Like having aurors and shit after you for doing unforgiveable curses. It kinda seemed like a weird combo of kid-oriented / adult-oriented.

What'd you guys think? After dumping a pretty good amount of hours in and getting all the achievements, I gotta say I loved it overall. There were some bugs with crashing on loading scenes, but a recent patch fixed that all up for me. Additionally, I thought it was a bit unbelievable about some of the side quests and gathering stuff where other people were basically like "I can't figure out the puzzle!" when it's blatantly simple. Outside of that though, I thought the visuals, story, gameplay, etc., were all fairly well done. It was a bit repetitive with some of the side stuff, but I wouldn't say it was too bad. I think they overhyped the whole 'will you be good or evil' thing, as there's extremely minimal difference with anything outside of an RP aspect, ie no choices really have any outcome on the overall story. While I probably wouldn't repeat it with the intention of doing 100% of the things, I would definitely replay it in the near future, probably in a year or two.

What's going on man, how have you been? As far as the community goes, we're doing a lot of 'simplifying'. As the community was growing, so were all the rules, the features, the structure, etc. While we're trying to check out some other avenues like fivem and CS2, we are also looking at our current situation and figuring out what can be fixed (and how) and what can't. With the Board having 5 people that are actually pretty actively engaged in the community at this point, there have been good discussions occurring with a lot of ideas floating around. Sort of generic answers here, but we're doing a lot of fine-tuning: making sure everyone is pulling their weight with the ranks they're at, removing managers from servers where it's just not working (or axing the server entirely), and taking in a lot of community feedback. I wouldn't say we have a lot of tricks hidden up our sleeves we're waiting to bust out, it's mostly self-inventory of what we have and who we have, and whether we want to add or subtract. We have some new server ideas we're tossing back and forth, such as surf rpg or zriot. Overall, it's an extremely hard time to be a gaming community. CSGO really pointed people towards competitive play, and that has been taking a toll on existing gaming communities where the focus is modded casual play. It's almost like just being able to come onto the forums is a huge accomplishment compared to other places. I can only think of one other community in the Counter Strike realm that is older than 10 years and still kicking. Not saying others don't exist or can't come back (I think I heard Hells Gamers is back~ish), but there's not a lot...and places are shutting down regularly. Us being able to confidently say we have zero intention of shutting down and it not even being a remote thought is big, imo. We are actively monitoring the interactions in the community and making sure that we are providing an environment that makes people want to come back. A big part of this is trying to limit negative interactions within the community. I want to be clear here and emphasize that I absolutely do not mean people that have different opinions or give negative feedback (tactfully~ish), I mean people that hop on the discord and troll random people that they don't know, type 'no' constantly when others are trying to seed servers, or in general just have awful attitudes towards SG. We just don't have the time nor the desire to deal with it. We hate punishing people, but I think we're starting to hold more accountability towards people that are "habitual line-steppers", which we are hopeful will have a positive outcome. We are also getting a bit better about holding higher ups accountable for the things listed above. We're going back to that 'small community' mindset, and so far have been liking the results. We still have a long way to go, but we'll get there.

I joined the forums when I was 15 but was playing on the servers @ 13-14

CSS

hogwarts legacy

I learned a lot about Islam in my time in the Middle East (at least compared to what Americans just see on Fox News and regurgitate). I actually found them to be the most accepting in general of other cultures and ways of life when compared to the other Abrahamic religions. Some of the stricter Muslim-majority countries still have a long way to go, but there are plenty of Christian examples, mainly throughout Africa, that could be used too (Uganda). Saudi didn’t fuck around with terrorism at all, in any form. Plenty of Muslim terrorists were taken to chop chop square and beheaded publicly…there was like 90 done in one day last year. someone mentioned something about gambling…95% of the Muslims I know gamble, drink, smoke hash, or do something haram. They just accept it as not being a perfect person and doing what they can in other ways to live the best they can. I really enjoyed my time around Muslims, tbh (just obviously not the taliban in Afghanistan lol). They also really take care of each other, from what I’ve seen. Extremely low interest rates, easy to lend money, giving their people vehicles, actually doing shit to end poverty and homelessness, etc. The GCC is a great example of Muslim countries that really take care of their people. Obviously there are still areas to improve, but it’s a lot better than the ‘thoughts and prayers’ dumb bullshit we do in America and then move on lol.

I was adding @Determined2Winon Facebook and there was a guy with the same name as him, and this was his profile pic. I then made a Facebook account and reversed the image of the old guy then added him with his own pic lol

nah i said aRtistic

hahaha this is my favorite

lmaoooo it’s Modgers with a 1. That was such another crazy story when that dude AWACS filed an admin complaint against like 15 of us for all having Modgers1 as our name and then threatened to “russle up the sheriff” when we found a pic of him online. I’ll have to comb photobucket and find it. Modgers got married, had a kid, flew in the marine corps, and is a pilot for United right now. Such a solid guy and is still a great friend.

I think that this has been a long time coming and most people have probably seen this on the horizon. With life keeping me so busy over the last few years being in the Middle East, I should have taken a step back a while ago, but I just never really got around to it. As you have noticed, a lot of rearranging has been going on in the higher up ranks - but I want to emphasize that this is for the best. Everyone who has stepped down recently has made it apparent that they just can't be around the way the community needs, and I applaud them for coming to this realization sooner than me. We have started to have a much better grasp on staff accountability at the higher level, and that's what it is. No one is abandoning ship or giving up hope: in fact, just the opposite. We are holding ourselves accountable and attempting to do what is best for the community, even if it means walking away entirely or just taking a few steps back. In my case, I will be taking a few steps back, for now. I am in the middle of doing a career change into government contracting (think War Dogs), and I just won't be able to provide SG with that leadership that it needs for the time being. With that being said, I won't be stepping away entirely just yet. I will retain ownership of SG and continue to pay for SG expenses, so there is still no worry or fear of SG being shut down or anything of the sort. That will probably never change, as it never needs to. My 'front end' capacity will change to Director, as I still do want to weigh in on SG issues and decisions. I'm going to reevaluate this sometime around the end of the first quarter / beginning of the second quarter of 2023 and see how it's going. In the event where I'm just not providing the input / value that there needs to be, I will more than likely just walk away entirely (minus ownership). I'm not sure how that will all play out, but we'll see. If I'm able to switch careers up and get established decently, I'll just assume the role of President again. I won't, however, do this if I don't truly think I can come back the way the community needs. With Gator stepping down, Revenga will be taking his role as the new permanent Vice President. With me being gone, he is going to assume the role of President, and during that reevaluation time we'll figure out in what direction to go in. Revenga is a great guy with a good head on his shoulders and a lot of eagerness to get the ball rolling on implementing some changes at SG that will hopefully steer us in the right direction. Revenga was part of the three-man BD team when I first assumed the role of President, and we were in worse shape then than we are in now. He was a huge help in turning that around back then, and I trust that he will be able to do so now. A captain is nothing without their first mate, so while I am away, Dominic will be assuming the role of Vice President while Revenga is the acting President. Again, we will figure out where to go if I do come back. Dominic is a prior BD with a good amount of ideas and experience under his belt, so he will be a great #2 to Revenga. In the event that I do not return to SG and slip sort of quietly away...I just want to say how crazy it's been. I started playing zm_lila panic on the Zombie Murder server back in 2007 when I was 13 years old. I became an admin back in 2008, when it was $9.99 a month to even be an admin. I became a CA in 2009~ish, an AO in 2010, a BD in 2013, and finally the President in 2014/2015 (I forget when we made it official). I've had so many friends come and go at this place, and just some amazing times. Over the past almost 16 years I've been here, there are so many memories that just stick out in my head...being fleshlight sales representatives on christian ventrilo servers, getting a strike for making fun of a mentally challenged kid (I know, I know...I was 13 - but I've still got the 40 minute recording and it comes on shuffle every once in awhile and makes me laugh so hard) who was rich as shit cause his mom was a VP for Pepperidge Farm, being a total fucking troll of an admin until I went in the Marine Corps and wised up a little, doing BD meetings as we were getting hit with artillery when I was in Afghanistan, all the countless sleepless nights building a server from scratch or when we integrated all the banned users manually from our old Mani Admin system onto the current Source Bans system, actually matching with a chick on Tinder who was already a part of SG after I had assumed ownership, movie nights, OMGPOP, Stickam nights, or the few summers where we just played pick-up games on the scrim server all day every day, with people just lining up to come in. I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours on the forums, on the servers, having BD meetings, and playing games with fellow SG members over the years. Playing PayDay2 with Roux and arguing with him about fucking colors of certain items, just to be reminded that he was color-blind and had no idea what he was talking about. I miss Roux a lot. I love going through my old photobucket account and just getting blasted with super old screenshots I took from back in the day. The majority of my life has had SG involved in it. The list of shoutouts and thanks I could do to people here would take so long, and a lot of names most of you would not recognize anymore. All of the friends I've made throughout the years...even the ones I don't talk to anymore. I love getting random messages from old names on here and just shooting the shit to see how you guys are doing...maybe even playing a game or two. I appreciate all the VP's as being a close right-hand and being able to bounce ideas off of, all the BD's for doing that thankless job where you just get shit on, a huge thanks to all the TA's who truly do and have done a thankless job...this place would be so fucked without the TA's. All the AO's and versions of AO that we have had, busting your butt managing servers until all hours of the night...all the CA's having meetings upon meetings to bring forward positive change to the community...the admins who are in the thick of it handling servers so they're not full of dipshits...the supporters who have paid money from their own wallet to make sure this place still has the lights on...and, of course, all of the players. All of the people who just log into the servers or post on the forums. This community truly exists for all of you. It's not physically possible for SG to die, because these memories will never go away, nor the will to make new ones. If I could go back in time and get to experience all of these memories again, I would. Especially experiencing Prison Break for the first time...I've never had more fun playing a game than playing CSS Prison Break with the maybe 10-15 OG maps that the server ran. As I said, this is just going to be in case I do not end up coming back. In that event, I am leaving you all in capable and trustworthy hands. I feel so lucky to have been a part of this place for so long and have made so many memories and experiences. If there was ever a major event in my life, there's a good chance that someone at SG was one of the first people to know or for me to talk about it with. A huge part of who I am today is because of my time here at SG throughout the years. I remember the absolute joy I had when I became an admin for the first time, and how I never ever would have thought that one day I would have owned this place. I haven't always made the right decision, but I have always had SG's best interest at the forefront of my mind when making any decision. And while this time around it took me a little longer to recognize that and act, it's never too late to do the right thing. I have also worked out a special deal with Revenga where we will still promote people for playing PayDay2 with me. I love this place, and truly think that this is the best decision possible in the current situation. And, in the event I do come back, this can just be used as a reminder of all of the appreciation I have for you all. If I do end up stepping down entirely, maybe I will create a personalized shoutout list. For now, hopefully this will do. Again, thank all of you for contributing to SG's success, and thank you to those willing to step up and steer the ship during rough times. I have full confidence that the new team will do right by everyone and get SG back on track. Thanks everyone, I wish you all nothing but the best.