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Red Alert: A Path Beyond Latest Dev Blog

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"We simply didn't anticipate the level of hostility we've seen from BHP."

 

I think you did...

9rZRMXl.jpg

 

 

(and if you are wondering I have only shown three people these, two of them CNCNZ staff (Sonic & Banshee) when they were inquiring about the ethical nature of the database theft during the debate on these forums last week, OWA or yourself can talk to me if you wish to discuss releasing these to the community to clear things up)

 

Regardless, what's done is done and it's time to move on and develop our respective games.

 

Sounds like a plan.

Edited by drunkill

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Indeed, we fully expected to have access to BHP resources removed, that much was obvious. We expected such hostility from the server hosting provider (one of the primary reasons for us leaving the community) but not from the actual APB development team itself.

 

Also, posting random stuff from private forums without the associated context from the teamspeak discussions etc doesn't really do anyone any favours. If you really want to go about airing dirty laundry I'm sure we could accomodate you and reciprocate, but I really don't think it's in anyones best interests.

Edited by danpaul88

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It's not unethical to leave communities that you may consider toxic. What Chronojam is complaining is about how his community and his project was propositally sabotaged during this process. The way things happened was not ethical at all or it doesn't look like ethical at all..

 

His project? LOL, okay. I'm sure I had vested several years of my life into that project and there's still plenty of my stuff in there nothing to do with it at all.

 

I'm pretty sure CCNZ can do better with forum moderation than to allow us to post this kind of stupidity here. This community is essentially dead. Almost all of the talent has moved on to other games and makes far better mods than anything this community has ever seen. If you guys want to participate in trivial debates about the "ethics" (Whose ethics? Who gets to defines them, and why?) of moving projects away from a community based on how SomethingAwful.com they can be, go ahead. I'm also sure that won't make CCNZ look like they're being used as tools in some kind of hilarious propaganda war with one mod pitted against another mod in a dead community.

 

TL;DR: Consider moderating the forum to remove this petty crap before CCNZ becomes a battleground in the renewed APB vs Reborn war.

Edited by Aircraftkiller
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two of them CNCNZ staff (Sonic & Banshee)

 

In a very short note: I am not staff from CNCNZ.com. I do have my own site. And, I'm keeping all this feud away from it, since this kind of thing is not beneficial to anyone to feed these things.

 

 

His project? LOL, okay.

 

I meant the project that he participates from its development. Of course I'm aware that many people has vested several hours, days, months or years into APB.

Edited by Banshee

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If it's not beneficial to feed it, why are you buying the "ethical" red herring? It's an obvious distraction from the real issue here: the reason why they left.

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I don't care about the reason why they have left it. Communities splitting happens. I've taken part of events like that, playing roles on both sides of the coin (the part who splitted and the part who was splitted).

 

As I wrote in another topic, what bothers me in this episode as webmaster was the dirty way that it was executed. I would be very pissed off if somebody cloned the database of the forums of my site to use it somewhere else and sabotaged part of the system behind it because they wanted to use it as well. No, that's not legitimate or ethic. BHP's database belongs to them, not to individuals (even if they contributed to buiild it) and it can't be ripped by that. If you share a launcher with another community, make sure that you release a new version once the split happens that does not make other projects go offline.

 

The whole operation was not just designed retain most of the content of the new place (which would be expected), but it was also designed by some of the people there to clearly harm BHP. When you are part of a community, it is not beneficial to you to harm other parts of the community even if you think that the evil lies in the other side. And it is clear that most of people behind it think it is totally legitimate, natural and ethical to sabotage other places (as they are claiming in posts above) in that dirty way.

 

If you are splitting form another place, it is your obligation to reduce all damages caused by this operation and act in good faith for a better community. Otherwise, you don't simply harm the other community or the whole community... but also the reputation of your newly created community.

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You should care about why they left if you're not just here to shill for a certain side of this subject. People don't up and leave partnerships like the "BHP" thing without good reasoning - especially people like OWA who isn't known for being anything but calm and reasonable as an objective viewpoint. The database cloning is a result of their reasoning for leaving, not the primary issue here. This is me writing as someone who isn't a webmaster for anything but my dinky little portfolio, so I don't understand the attachment to an obscure database of posts. It feels like a big red herring that's distracting from the obvious problem here: "BHP" and their history.

"but it was also designed by some of the people there to clearly harm BHP."

[citation needed]

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You should care about why they left if you're not just here to shill for a certain side of this subject.

 

No, I don't need to care about things that I do not care, unless I have a good reason to change my mind. And you are not the person who will tell me what to do or not.

 

As far as I know, these people had some sort of problem with the person who was responsible for hosting BHP and they wanted to get rid of him. There were other problems, but the primary problem that they claim was a person called Catalyst, who I do not know and I don't have problems with this person. Many splits happens because a huge group wants to get rid of a minority. That's common and that happens.

 

So, I'm just to shill for one certain part of this subject, which is the execution of the split, that should not be taken as an example for the rest of the community. That's all that matters for me. And if that bothers you, I'm sorry, but I don't care for it either.

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Consider moderating the forum to remove this petty crap before CCNZ becomes a battleground in the renewed APB vs Reborn war.

It's CNCNZ.com, not CCNZ. News topics don't usually get closed without extraordinary circumstances, we just delete offending posts and possibly hand out warning points if necessary. It may yet come to that, but as long as the discussion remains on topic and its participates remember to be civil, I don't see any reason to close it.

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I never told you what to do. I said you should care, not that you have to care. Please stop arguing against strawmen and address what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote, Banshee.

 

It doesn't bother me that you don't care enough to actually try and have a bit of understanding of this issue before you make public posts regarding "ethics", which you have yet to define for us - so once again, who gets to determine the "ethics" here and why? Because right now you're buying completely into a one-sided story, and that's not particularly fair to the opposing side. This isn't a case of news journalism presenting an obvious lunatic as an opposing view to reasonable propositions - it's a schism in Renegade's largest (and basically only) community and your reasoning so far is that one side is bad because you're a webmaster, so therefore you're against having databases cloned and you consider that to be unethical. Which, of course, is still a nebulous term in this discussion as both sides of this issue aren't shining examples of great behavior. You say you don't care but what I'm seeing is that you only care because one side is saying "they stole our database" and that resonates with you, but you don't care about the reasoning behind it. So you're commenting without enough information to make a conclusion that isn't heavily biased toward one side.

 

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

@Nmenth: Hey, whatever. It's your site. Have people duke it out on here if you want to

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I don't know what's happening with BHP lately, but I do know why neither of those indie C&C games get nominated last year in Moddb/IndieDB because neither of them are finished, not to mention the loss of love and passion of those old SAGE games.

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I'd be surprised if APB won anything because it's still incredibly dated looking. That's a big problem for new players. They're still using my old buildings from 11 years ago.

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Here's your definition of Ethics, are you happy now?

 

Of course that's it's not the answer that you are expecting. I'm not gonna bother to write a complete definition of ethics, since I have better things to do in my life. Also, I'm not happy to repeat countless times in my posts, what I mean, in this context, with ethics. So, let's recap for one very the last time:

 

 

What Chronojam is complaining is about how his community and his project was propositally sabotaged during this process. The way things happened was not ethical at all or it doesn't look like ethical at all.

 

Excuse my bad english (it's not my native language), but yea, to deliberately sabotage a project is not something ethical, but of course it is not the only thing I meant with that. So, I have elaborated it a bit further:

 

 

what bothers me in this episode as webmaster was the dirty way that it was executed. I would be very pissed off if somebody cloned the database of the forums of my site to use it somewhere else and sabotaged part of the system behind it because they wanted to use it as well.

 

And that was followed with samples, in this same context, of things that should have been done in order to not harm the other community:

 

 

BHP's database belongs to them, not to individuals (even if they contributed to build it) and it can't be ripped by that. If you share a launcher with another community, make sure that you release a new version once the split happens that does not make other projects go offline.

 

The database issue is explained in this post. Read it, although the part of the forum license is wrong, since W3D Hub has their own IPB license (which I've acknowledged some time after that post). Regarding the launcher, APB's online experience suffered problems with the move. Although the launcher was no coded by the current APB staff, as I read in few posts above, the right to use that launcher was obtained at some moment (when all mods were part of BHP) and they were not given a chance to do anything before their 'right to use it' was revoked with no warning whatsoever, suddenly breaking their online gameplay.

 

Finally, I've explained why I think that it was not ethical:

 

 

The whole operation was not just designed retain most of the content of the new place (which would be expected), but it was also designed by some of the people there to clearly harm BHP.

 

And how community splits should be done.

 

 

If you are splitting form another place, it is your obligation to reduce all damages caused by this operation and act in good faith for a better community.

 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

You say you don't care but what I'm seeing is that you only care because one side is saying "they stole our database" and that resonates with you, but you don't care about the reasoning behind it

 

The reasoning behind it was already discussed at this topic. It makes sense, but it is wrong because the end never justifies the means and some of the people there still setup the whole thing to harm the existing community.

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I asked who defines ethics as applied to this situation. I didn't ask for a Wikipedia article, but I appreciate the read. I'll get around to it when I have some time.

 

I'm not aware of any sabotage. From my access to the staff forums, I see several statements from the leadership saying "we don't want to hurt APB because we like it" and whatnot. There's no deliberate malice that I'm aware of, and I came onboard after the situation happened because I saw an opportunity to work with a community that isn't full of toxic people.

 

Don't worry about your English. I can understand you perfectly. English isn't my only language, either. Jeg er tosproget men jeg generelt at skrive på engelsk. ;-)

 

If the rights to use the launcher were given by the person who developed it but then something screwed up, it isn't permanent. They can fix it themselves. If I owned a business where someone who developed a program I needed (but wouldn't give me the code) and left for another competitor, I'm not going to throw a fit about it. I'd find someone else who can do it. Therein lies another problem here: APB doesn't have people who can do it because Renegade's community shinks year-after-year. It's a big issue for them because their lack of focus on developing a better mod lead to a dying community for their mod. You can't draw talent from a pool that has none.

I understand that you have your perspective of how things should go - so try and understand their perspective. If Catalyst were able to access their database of staff discussions before they had a chance to back up everything they worked on, there's no doubt he would've deleted all of it. Years of work would've been lost, and it wouldn't be discussed here on this site because nobody would care. The only reason this is becoming a big problem is because certain individuals are posting about their indignation here and in other forums. Had they not done what they did, they'd lose out and "BHP" would've faced no repercussions. I can't say that I'll speak for you, but I really doubt anyone who's taking their side right now would care if years of staff discussions were lost - and some of these discussions are "lol ack is teh azhoel" which even I don't want to see lost to the ether because someone got mad enough to screw them over.

As far as the ends never justifying the means? There's no universal agreement on that. What you meant was "I don't feel that the ends justify the means", but you have the luxury of not worrying about any consequences for a decision you never had to make.

Edited by Aircraftkiller
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Its safe to say that both sides have made choices that could have been handled better. Maybe instead of being a bunch of little kids and fighting over what can't be changed, each side should state what it desires to move forward; unless it is actually BHP's goal to run W3DHub into the ground right off the bat to extract vengeance on them.

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Funny how only these kinds of situations liven up whats left of the active C&C community these days. That needs to change. Soon.
What needs are not being met to get everyone moving forward again (W3D Hub and BHP situation included)? Except EA trying to kill us all off in their usual corporate ways.


From what I've seen, TSR has recieved a productivity boom. Let's apply that to other projects as well!

Edited by AZ-Stalker

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Funny how only these kinds of situations liven up whats left of the active C&C community these days.

The community, or rather its pitiful excuse for remnants, is apparently sick enough to only feed on the negativity. The official forum closure and this BHP vs. W3D Hub issue are more proof than you'll ever need.

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Let's not kid ourselves. C&C's never been a particularly healthy community to begin with.

 

Pfff, I think it was pretty great 10-15 years ago. :P (Well, original Reborn vs RenAlert wars aside. ;) )

Edited by Mighty BOB!
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I think it's good for a neutral place like cncnz to host these sort of 'discussions'... within reason.

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Some facts of the situation:

  1. There were cycles of internal drama reaching a breaking point, it would break and CJ would basically calm the parties down and then disappear.
  2. Attempts where made by OWA to resolve the issues that ultimately caused the break up, but the parties would either meet briefly and curtly or refuse to meet at all.
  3. In the last two years it was hard to involve CJ in any kind of mediation, he would either out right refuse, or send people with obvious biases in to "resolve" the situation.

Now some of it was just simply one group refusing to talk to another, but most of it was CJ and other high ups refusing to listen to the issues and concerns of others, including other staff and admins.

 

So in short, this split was a long time in coming, but something far from preventable.

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Lol boohoo.

 

I suggest you stop crying and start working on your mod. Because it sucks.

This is an example of what not to do here; insulting for the sake of insulting. If you can't keep it civil, you don't get to partake in the discussion. I will not hesitate to remove any posts that forget this.

 

(The offending post was removed)

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The community, or rather its pitiful excuse for remnants,

A number of groups in the C&C community have come together to form a new IRC network. I don't personally think it's pitiful by any means.

is apparently sick enough to only feed on the negativity.

I'm going to point out here that both APB and TSR had patches that were being worked on before W3D Hub happened, and both teams continue to mod because they enjoy modding. I don't agree with the actions that occurred, but to imply that either party only feeds on negativity is a clear departure from reality.

The official forum closure and this BHP vs. W3D Hub issue are more proof than you'll ever need.

Confirmation bias. The thread was locked because you and another user in the thread were hopping between denial and trying to deflect the evidence being presented to you to the point at which the content of the thread was nearly entirely inflammatory. I was hoping for some civil discussion, or at least some concerning facts, especially with news staff from another C&C website. I don't want to speculate why you personally were doing it, I can only imagine you had made your mind up before the discussion began, or just do it for entertainment, like ACK is here.

 

As for you ACK, being completely outshined in the area of Internet drama and shame in the community must have been a blow, but with all the progress you've made with the skills you honed in part back here in the C&C community, it can't be so bad.

 

 

What Lord Kane just posted above is indeed factual, but it left out a great deal, I'll try to be brief;

  • the first point leaves out power grabs by a third party, and that practically every instance of what could be described as drama intimately involving said third party.
  • in regards to the second point, whilst OWA did call for meetings, it was long after alientating a a lot of the BHP team by performing a number of unannounced changes, including adding people from said 3rd party into positions in BHP, and revealing he wanted other people in BHP fired.
  • I'm really not sure what to make of the third point, as whilst I agree that CJ was absent for some rather long periods, and it would have helped if he hadn't been, I don't recall him sending people to "resolve" situations.
All in all, my sentiment from here is the same as that some other people from inside and outside it have echoed, that we should move on from this. Additionally the history of it is so long complex and contested that a full picture of it would fill volumes. So I'll just quote ACK;

Work on your ****ing projects and get your mods finished.

Edited by Souljack
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A number of groups in the C&C community have come together to form a new IRC network. I don't personally think it's pitiful by any means.

It's pitiful in numbers and ability to do things compared to years ago.

 

I don't agree with the actions that occurred, but to imply that either party only feeds on negativity is a clear departure from reality.

I was mainly referring to the C&C community as a whole, though both parties involved in this aren't far from that either. It took this catastrophe to get you all posting like mad.

 

 

Confirmation bias. The thread was locked because you and another user in the thread were hopping between denial and trying to deflect the evidence being presented to you to the point at which the content of the thread was nearly entirely inflammatory.

 

I was hoping for some civil discussion, or at least some concerning facts, especially with news staff from another C&C website. I don't want to speculate why you personally were doing it, I can only imagine you had made your mind up before the discussion began, or just do it for entertainment, like ACK is here.

You did not need me at all to have that thread closed for flaming. It was created as clear bait, you cannot deny that. As for your claim for "evidence", since when is taking snapshots and making your own interpretation of them defined as evidence? I'd like it if everyone involved (EVERYONE!!!) would stop hiding behind vague comments containing merely fragments of "evidence" and let it ALL out AND/OR start working on their respective abandonware before they forget what they were fighting over in all of this mess.

 

And for the love of everything that is sane, do not try to inject guilt on me just because I have a badge here. I represent my own interests unless otherwise stated. I work actively for three sites and two are momentarily on hold and I will tell you when I speak for any of them.

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  • in regards to the second point, whilst OWA did call for meetings, it was long after alientating a a lot of the BHP team by performing a number of unannounced changes, including adding people from said 3rd party into positions in BHP, and revealing he wanted other people in BHP fired.
  • I'm really not sure what to make of the third point, as whilst I agree that CJ was absent for some rather long periods, and it would have helped if he hadn't been, I don't recall him sending people to "resolve" situations.

 

I alienated a lot of the BHP Team? I'm sorry but what? If I supposedly did what you say, then how come a sizable chunk of the BHP Team left with me to form W3D Hub? Your argument makes no logical sense.

 

You can't really say that you and Catalyst are now "a lot" of the BHP Team can you? For one, neither of you really create any content for the W3D Engine. So in effect your statement about me alienating "a lot" of the BHP Team is completely fabricated. But I guess it can be expected from someone who enjoys to assume what people's motivations are as well as psychoanalyse BHP and it's members with your buddies on a separate forum entirely.

 

Chronojam employed you to "resolve" situations such as these. You didn't and now diplomacy has failed. To be honest, all we can do now is settle down and work on our respective projects. No amount of debate on this forum or any other forums will change the events that have transpired.

Edited by One Winged Angel
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