Atlanta 24 Admin abuse

[ghostdad 0]

So, myself and my friend were just banned from Atlanta 24. Why? Because we found Aim2wingaming's base for a second time. Two days ago, using their PUBLIC forum posts, we figured out where their base was and raided it. Here's the link:

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/forums/f77/dayz-convoy-2481/

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/forums/f77/rawr-rawr-rawr-video-2482/

Between those pictures and the video they took, and approx 18 hours of searching, we found their base, stole everything, and wrecked it in glorious fashion.

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/forums/f77/we-will-rebuild-2493/

And again, these gentleman decided to post pics of their new spot.

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/forums/f77/camp-goldenleaf-2496/

We found this camp by sheer chance while we were heading north to the NW Airfield. Before we could steal all the vehicles, one of their players (Mayor's Bodyguard 1) logged in, shot me (which is fine) and my friend DeathRambo shot and killed him. Then 3 more logged in and shot him (also fine by me). We run back to where we found their base from the coastline hoping to be able to grab at least one of their vehicles, I found one van, but before i could get in, the server goes down with 0 warning. I quickly try and rejoin only to find out that I've been banned, as has my friend DeathRambo.

This happened on June 24 at approx 1:00am EST. Earlier, which can probably be proved with the server logs, they had been restarting the server and setting it to night so they could raid the NW airfield with NVG's to make up for what they had lost. Please, for the love of god, blacklist this server. We will get others to retrieve our items. This kind of shit cannot be allowed to continue to happen.

[imanoobcs 0]

I am his friend and can confirm this story and add some abuse to it. The admins have for a while been resetting the server when they log in. This is not a big deal, but they change the time to the middle of night and use night vision to raid the airfield. This proves to be an unfair advantage to other players who are in the middle of doing something in the daytime, and the server suddenly shifts to night. They reset multiple times a night in order to respawn loot and fill up their vehicles full of guns.

[-ozzy- 0]

We have had many camps raided, and lost everything before. We have always had an optimistic attitude about losing everything and enjoyed the challenge of finding everything once again. We had a camp for several days that no one raided, and suddenly the same night we get vehicles there, it's discovered and raided.

THE ORIGINAL BASE WE HAD RAIDED was NOT THE ONE FEATURED IN THE SCREEN SHOTS. Not even within 20Km of the one featured in the screen shots. So those screen shots you posted couldn't have possibly led you to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BASE.

We still had no problem with this base being raided suddenly within a few hours of bringing vehicles to it. Easy come, easy go.

Shocked at how someone found our base, for the hell of it, one of our members ran straight west from our old camp til he ran out of food and water and found someone's camp.

LAUGHING we realized that someone must have just stumbled upon our camp, all thoughts of being followed or discovered through the forums went away. This new camp we found was filled with vehicles. We had a few members jump on and after some time found and relocated the vehicles to somewhere completely random and nearly off the map (understandably debatable). Within a few more hours the same people were raiding this camp, over 60km (grid squares please correct me if I'm wrong) in a random direction from their camp.

We found this:

http://www.***.me/forum/arma-arma2/76564-crappy-vehicle-locator-script-2.html

Just a note: the players we killed did not have GPS. After reading the above link do you think they are somehow locating exact pinpoints that you can't see from trees within 2km and within a few hours with no reason to look in that radius other than a screenshot that is BEYOND VAGUE. Please explain to me how that screen shot led you without a GPS to that grid point down to the Km.

I have sent GhostDad a personal private message inviting him to talk to us in voice before he made this post. We don't at all care to ban people for feeling they bested us. We are a mature gaming community and have had a high reputation for years. We have loved all the patches making the game more difficult, we've lost everything (the screenshots you linked, ghostdad, were from our old camp that disappeared well before you raided it due to the vehicle reset patch, and then the tent reset patch. I can't stress enough how those screenshots DO NOT SHOW REMOTELY THE BASE THEY CLAIMED TO HAVE FOUND BY SCREENSHOTS.).

You can have as many people post in the DayZ forums as you'd like, and I wouldn't at all mind to speak to anyone from DayZ (though they have better things to do) staff or the proclaimed "victims" via ventrilo to reach a resolution.

It has been our experience in YEARS of hosting servers that where there is smoke, there is fire. We can talk to anyone mature and look forward to them adding insight and clarity to a confused situation.

---

I am his friend and can confirm this story and add some abuse to it. The admins have for a while been resetting the server when they log in. This is not a big deal' date=' but they change the time to the middle of night and use night vision to raid the airfield. This proves to be an unfair advantage to other players who are in the middle of doing something in the daytime, and the server suddenly shifts to night. They reset multiple times a night in order to respawn loot and fill up their vehicles full of guns.

[/quote']

You lose credibility when you claim things we don't have control of. We have no way of setting the server to night. We have reset the server in order to RESTORE OTHER PEOPLE'S vehicles upon request when all chat was available. We have reset the server in attempt to troubleshoot game glitches. We can't reset the server to a certain time. We can't. In no way have we ever been able to change the server from day to night time, that is a fact I will swear by. We haven't even had someone with NVG's run around at night until today when we found your vehicles.

This has turned to immature bickering. We offer you a forum in our community to talk via voice chat. We want to hear your story, we WANT to know that someone isn't locating 30 METER square locations on a 225 KILOmeter square map within an hour or two of being moved. It's not like they were moved even 20 grid squares away, but over 50, probably more (not going to measure right now).

You guys claim you used screen shots. Explain how any of the screen shots hinted towards the locations they resided and how you found them without GPS.

Again your screen shots don't show the location you first raided.

People will naturally be quick to jump to the "sore loser" comments, and I can't blame them. I can only produce the facts and reasons leading to suspicion, and hope you understand that we've been raiding plenty of times, and not knee-jerked.

The "first" camp they raided, there were NO screenshots, no videos of that camp anywhere. And it is NOT in any of their links. After the "petrovka" camp was raided, today, as of posting this, a video of us north of petrovka is still processing, so they couldn't have used that either. Look at the single screenshot of "Camp Goldenleaf" and tell me how that lead them to the exact grid with vehicles masked until within less than 1km.

TL:DR;

Read or please refrain from input.

[ghostdad 0]

Yes, keep me banned while you raid our base, GJ bro.

[-ozzy- 0]

FYI, we just had someone join our ventrilo with the name "Feedmetothegods".

He joined our ventrilo channel, I asked who it was, he asked what we were up to, I asked who he was. He said "Anyone in Cherno."

I responded "So trolling is the best way to make your case for being banned?"

He left vent.

Again, if someone wanted to be mature about this it would be resolved quickly. And I just feel the need to log the events.

Someone is in our Vent server right now trolling us...

[TigerKarl 0]

retarded children everywhere

[Aardvark 0]

I was the guy on there trying to recover our stuff from the camp. Guys with flashlights were there at the camp while I was gathering guns and killed me soon after ghostdad posted this. First time anyone has found our camp the entire time. Not that it matters much, we will start fresh in another server as we were not planning on playing in Atlanta 24 after this bullshit.

I don't know what Mayor of Cherno is rambling about up above. We saw their videos and forums posts that you can all see. We knew the general topography of their Petrovka base from the multiple pictures they posted from different angles. We thought the base might also been west of Lopatino or Vybor as one pic clearly showed them driving in Kabanino.

My friends and I spent the whole day and night searching every clearing in the north west and slowly made our way east along the northern part of the map. You are trying to insinuate we hacked? Why don't Dayz admins go and check out the server logs. I challenge anyone to provide a single shred of evidence that we were hacking. You put your base in a clearing near a town and you think it's hard to find (especially given the pictures)? All we had to do was travel along the western and northern edge of the map hitting every clearing.

We had no idea were your second base was at. 2 of my friends stumbled across it while traveling from our base (west of Zelenogorst) directly north to the NW airfield for a raid. Now that you know where our base is you should understand how easy it was to find you guys (even when we weren't trying to).

Basically, you are trying to excuse clearly abusing your admin powers to reset the server multiple times, set the time to dark so your buddies with NVG would have an advantage, and banning my friends just to get stuff in this game. Very pathetic. And we have no interest in going on Vent with you guys. We want this conversation to be done in front of witnesses and we aren't interested in cutting deals. We don't even care about our stuff. We just want everyone to see the shit you guys did and see justice be done.

I love how you think your bases are impossible to find without hacking when you put them in obvious base locations. Again, DayZ admins please check the server logs. They will pretty much confirm everything we just said and show that we were not hacking.

---

retarded children everywhere

LOL there are three of us and none of us are even interested in speaking to any of you. Stop trying to excuse your cheating by blaming random stuff on us without any proof.

The only place we will speak to you is in front of witnesses, as I said above. And I agree, it is very childish to abuse your admin powers to get an advantage in a video game and then try to deflect blame by lying.

[-ozzy- 0]

Apparently your friends aren't afraid of confrontation.

This is the raw recording of people failing at harassing us in ventrilo while we try to remain mature and just get to the point.

Taken only minutes ago:

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/downloads/All%20the%20evidence%20you%20need.wav

[ghostdad 0]

Yes' date=' keep me banned while you raid our base, GJ bro.

[/quote']

Ok, so you are accusing us of hacking? Wanna know how we found it? Ok, let's play a game. If anyone wants to, read the forums, look at the pics and video and make a guess as to where their base is. When you're done, continue reading to find out if you were right!

Well, from this post

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/forums/f77/dayz-convoy-2481/

we noticed that the bases in the pictures were actually two different ones, judging by the topography and the different tree types. We assumed, correctly, that the last three pictures which showed a different base was their most recent spot. noobcs sketched out a vague topographical map, we noted the hills around this clearing, as well as the trees in the middle of the clearing. Also, there were ONLY pine trees in those last few pictures which suggested to us that they were somewhere in the NW. Using a little psychology, we reckoned that these fellas would probably post up somewhere near the NW airfield to make raiding it easier.

In this video:

At around the 1:12 mark, your boy f00d4tehg0dzz, glances out the front window, where we can see a couple of buildings. Because you can see tents at the beginning of the video, we realized they must be close to some form of town, or at the very least a few buildings. We narrowed our search down to two potential areas. The clearing north by northwest of Petrovka, and another clearing which is marked on the following picture. The circled one is where we found their base.

No hacks, no bullshit, just good ol' fashioned detective work. We don't need gps, because we're fucking good.

Now that that is out of the way. How about how you banned us, used our report of your bullshit to find OUR base and presumably took everything. I cant check, I'm banned. I still insist that your server be blacklisted. GG

[Aardvark 0]

Apparently your friends aren't afraid of confrontation.

This is the raw recording of people failing at harassing us in ventrilo while we try to remain mature and just get to the point.

Taken only minutes ago:

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/downloads/All%20the%20evidence%20you%20need.wav

Like I said, I have 2 friends and all of us are only contacting you through this thread. None of us have any interest in speaking with you and your kind in private. I thought this whole thing might have been a mistake on your part but now your actions and accusations show me that you 100% cheated.

The people trolling you are not my friends and have nothing to do with us. The more you try to lie and blame us for things we clearly are not responsible for, the more you show your lack of character. None of us are interested in trolling you. All we have to do to punish you is tell what happened in front of everyone here. If someone contacts you somewhere else, it will not be us.

[LongShot (DayZ) 0]

Bump for great justice. These guys have been restarting their server nightly and changing the time. (I seen it!)

[linkinx 9]

So I was in the ventrilo channel, without saying anything, and just now after a server restart, I am banned from Atlanta 24(for no reason), and if you hear the .wmv at minute 13:00 you can hear he was about to ban me from their ventrilo as well, for no reason, I am sorry that your lack of common sense, got your camp raided a couple of times. +1 for Blacklisted

[ghostdad 0]

Apparently your friends aren't afraid of confrontation.

This is the raw recording of people failing at harassing us in ventrilo while we try to remain mature and just get to the point.

Taken only minutes ago:

http://www.aim2wingaming.com/downloads/All%20the%20evidence%20you%20need.wav

Listened to the whole thing, and can confirm that I do not know the person who went into your vent, nor do they know me. I have no interest in downloading ventrilo and talking to you. The internet and these forums are public. This person clearly read this post, and took it upon themselves to troll you.

This explains why this person was unable to answer any of your questions, because they didn't know anything. I will reiterate aardvark's comments that we have no interest in communication with you outside of this forum. We do not.

[DarkEnergy 4]

I just want to jump into this tread with a statement and some observations.

Firstly,

I am involved with the raiding party but i did not participate in this raid.

The post i am making now is based on the information posted in this thread. At the moment I have no additional knowledge of this incident.

Now I want to say something about the players characters and say they

are no cheaters. Making such a claim without tangible evidence is very insulting.

As far as i understand the situation lets lay it out.

One of our group sees an opportunity to steal your stuff, and gets the rest of the team on the bandwagon.

They search the map and used any information they could find to narrow the search grid.

By chance or bad ass detective work they find your camp and start raiding it.

One of your guys spots this and in the resulting firefight people die but the raid is still ongoing, or there has been loss of in game items.

Being unable to stop the raid with conventional means and/or with the belief that the raiding group is cheating, you shutdown the server and ban the players that where on the scene.

This is quite a pickle isn't it ?

What we can confirm at this point is the following.

You used administrative powers to resolve a in game situation in your favor.

There is no actual proof only a belief that the other party involved was cheating.

If this situation would be applied to a group witch has no administrative powers over the server, and the raided group would present their case to the administrator.

There would be insufficient evidence to act on.

Conclusion

The only reason you made those administrative choices was to revert or minimize the damage for yourself and your group.

Bottom line is.

You used your position as administrator to protect your in game property.

This incident should be looked into by a dev.

[Cee (DayZ) 0]

It is funny that I come here looking for information on server admin abuse and I find this thread. I have no knowledge of the above event but I have played on multiple servers that suddenly switched to night and other suspicious events that I thought was server side abuse with loot or vehicles being respawned or restarted. I guess this is a rampant problem when admins invest time, feeling, and have power over a server.

This thread is a very intersting read for multiple reasons

First you have admins, who felt they where banning a group of hackers and serving the community (supposedly)

2nd you have an ambitious group of players that used public information to find and loot the hard work of a group of players that happen to be admins (or they cheated and deserved the ban)

I would like to know how the admin group was feeling when they issued the ban. Anger or frustration had to influence the decision to ban at least a little. That to me is the core problem, since neither group can prove anything beyond he said she said( actually I believe the players here didn't cheat they have a solid defense). so this is clearly an abuse of power that any legal system worth a damn would laugh at and dismiss any charges brought up against them.

Do you think that the group of players would be banned if they did this to any other group but the admin group ? I highly doubt any action would be taken against them. This is more of a growing problem than any other alpha bug out there. Hackers will be caught and banned, eventually, server admins can hide behind the power they have and manipulate their server to give unfair advantages over all other players.

TLDR version: admins acted out of frustration and banned players without proof, black list and disallow them from hosting any other servers. They will only abuse power again and kill the growth of this community over time. Who wants to play a sandbox type game when you are only allowed a bucket of sand while others have a mountain and will not allow you to steal some of their sand?

[Ghandi 0]

You lose credibility when you claim things we don't have control of. We have no way of setting the server to night. We have reset the server in order to RESTORE OTHER PEOPLE'S vehicles upon request when all chat was available.

Firstly its quite possible for servers to switch between day and night cycles, how else do you think its possible for places like the UK to have daytime (in-game) servers running during the evening (irl).

Secondly you just admitted to restarting the server to help others get back lost/destroyed vehicles, so case closed, that's an exploit and an abuse of admin power.

[-ozzy- 0]

Everyone in here is just jumping to conclusions and only digesting the facts THEY want to hear.

I'm debating if there is a point to this post because every player WANTS to crusade as victims of admin abuse, people are too willing to jump to that conclusion. Look how many hollow admin abuse threads there are.

All I can do is say we didn't act out of frustration. I've told you in this thread (the part you read and chose to ignore) we've lost everything many times and it doesn't bother us nearly bad enough to start banning people. We learned from the beginning not to get attached in this game. Again, I can just say it, can't prove that we didn't act out of frustration.

This game does not offer any way to truly tell if someone is cheating so what are we to do when we suspect it?

We truly believed someone was running around rapidly locating vehicles using the cheat I posted, we banned the two players and went immediately to the forum to message them and did (again, before he even posted). I just wanted anything close to a reasonable explanation so that I could lift the ban, within minutes.

Instead everything has been handled immaturely, assumptions have been jumped to. People are attacking our Ventrilo (while I type this even). Like I said everyone WANTS to cry ADMIN ABUSE, so they'll chose the things they want to hear in order to say it.

I've read things in this thread that don't even pertain to our situation, such using a post to locate their camp (back in time?), bases being raided with flashlights (was never night or flashlights involved when we found the base), people saying we can TELL THE SERVER what time of day to be (again, we don't have control over that). And there was a glitch several patches ago that sometimes vehicles wouldn't show up, and restarting the server would resolve it. Someone asked for a server restart in all-chat, we notified everyone, restarted and it resolved the glitch for them. The vehicles were not "lost" or "destroyed" but people chose to make those facts up;

They just hear what they want to hear.

I actually remember laughing about our other base being raided while we had the new vehicles saying "Well we can't be sad if these get stolen since we stole them ourselves."

So again, we didn't do anything because we wanted to defend the vehicles we found an hour ago.

I'll give them all the credit and say it's as simple as a misunderstanding at best, bans are not permanent, within a few minutes and one private message they would have been unbanned and should be proud about how clever they were. I would have apologized for the SLIGHT INCONVENIENCE (not exactly cutting toes off here) and given them all the credit in the world knowing it now! Instead our servers have been attacked and people refuse to cooperate. They keep confusing the situation.

As this thread has turned to bickering, inaccurate accusations, when it could have just been a simple explanation and resolution, there really is no point to posting and explaining ourselves any more. Sorry for the mess, couldn't predict people would handle a situation so poorly.

[Cee (DayZ) 0]

You talk about ignoring things said in this thread, I did not. I am arguing the fact that you say you have no invested emotion into your hours and hours of time to setup a camp and lose it all. I call that into question unless you have no emotion at all, which is impossible. Will you snap your fingers and shrug your shoulders about being outplayed or will you ban a group of players that outsmarted you ? (this isn't a question anymore since your action are bringing more and more into light)

It seems like baning the group was an emotional decision and one that you jumped to with haste. Saying that you would take away the ban and give them credit has nothing to do with the end result that you banned without justification, your own words say you cannot prove a "hack". You want to be a good admin do not fear the public forum, do not ban without proof.

Stop acting like this is a witch hunt and take some responsibility and maybe realize that you made the mistake and are now paying for it, by losing credibility to this community. Defending yourself is part of what any person with power must do. It looks even worse when you make a post saying this is what happened, I call anyone else childish that disagrees and I am taking my ball and going home(not going to reply here anymore).

[ghostdad 0]

Please explain to me why I am still banned. Do you still think I was hacking? Was my explanation of how we found your camps insufficient? Why should I PM you and explain our methodology? If you hadn't banned us, you probably would've just kept posting your camp on your forums and we would have continued to raid it. The way I see it, you abused your admin powers to force us to reveal your security leak. You held every vehicle, weapon, tent and goddamn can of beans that we had spent days collecting HOSTAGE until we explained to you how you were outplayed. If some other group came to you and started throwing out hackusations with no proof, you would have probably said "sorry dude, tough luck, they probably outplayed you."

But since it was your group, you banned with 0 cause.

And to ice the abuse-cake, after you banned us, you raided our base. We had no way to defend ourselves, and as of now we cannot counterattack. Why would you raid our base when you banned us for, at best, dubious reasons? Because you knew that the base would be lightly defended, if at all. Not because you found out when we wouldn't be on, or saw us somewhere else on the map, but because you barred us from playing. That is a clear abuse of your power as admins of Atlanta 24, and should not be tolerated.

Right now, I want my ban lifted.

ASAP, I want your server blacklisted.

The facts as I see them:

1. Mayor of Cherno shut down his server while we were in the process of stealing one of his clan's vehicles.

2. Mayor of Cherno banned us from his server, preventing us from logging back in and finishing our properly earned vehicle theft.

3. Mayor of Cherno PM's me wanting for an explanation of how we found his vehicles. Literally forcing us to reveal our tactics to him, making them useless in the future.

4. ghostdad returns his message with a link to this forum.

5. Mayor of Cherno gets butthurt and uses information from the post to locate and raid our base, while we were still banned, after we had provided a detailed and valid methodology for how we found his base.

6. Mayor of Cherno cannot understand how posting pictures and videos of a campsite can be used by other players to locate their positions.

7. A even more detailed, step by step explanation is offered to Mayor of Cherno.

8. Mayor of Cherno goes on and on about how immature we are for some reason, and to my reading of his post, admits that we did not hack in any way, shape or form.

9. As of right now, I am still banned from his server.

[Rough89 1]

Sounds like another case of admins abusing their power. Taking servers down without warning and the players that raided their camp getting banned. So tired of crap admins.

[weaser31 0]

raiding a camp is a dick move but it happens but im sick of seeing all the narcs on these forums for the dumbest things , go pay for your own server and quit crying

[Ghandi 0]

Right now' date=' I want my ban lifted.

ASAP, I want your server blacklisted.

[/quote']

Why would you want both of those things? What good would being unbanned from the server be if its blacklisted?

---

raiding a camp is a dick move

Why is raiding a camp a "dick move"?

[ghostdad 0]

Right now' date=' I want my ban lifted.

ASAP, I want your server blacklisted.

[/quote']

Why would you want both of those things? What good would being unbanned from the server be if its blacklisted?

---

raiding a camp is a dick move

Why is raiding a camp a "dick move"?

To answer your question, I want the ban lifted partly as a matter of principle, and the other half is I want a fair chance to retrieve my items, since I doubt a blacklist will happen in a timely fashion. Mayor of Cherno is currently reading this thread, and I am currently still banned.

[linkinx 9]

Right now' date=' I want my ban lifted.

ASAP, I want your server blacklisted.

[/quote']

Why would you want both of those things? What good would being unbanned from the server be if its blacklisted?

---

raiding a camp is a dick move

Why is raiding a camp a "dick move"?

To answer your question' date=' I want the ban lifted partly as a matter of principle, and the other half is I want a fair chance to retrieve my items, since I doubt a blacklist will happen in a timely fashion. Mayor of Cherno is currently reading this thread, and I am currently still banned.

[/quote']

Yes, same thing here, I am banned, and I had nothing to do with you guys who raided them(we were also looking for the camp).

[Ghandi 0]

Right now' date=' I want my ban lifted.

ASAP, I want your server blacklisted.

[/quote']

Why would you want both of those things? What good would being unbanned from the server be if its blacklisted?

---

raiding a camp is a dick move

Why is raiding a camp a "dick move"?

To answer your question' date=' I want the ban lifted partly as a matter of principle, and the other half is I want a fair chance to retrieve my items, since I doubt a blacklist will happen in a timely fashion. Mayor of Cherno is currently reading this thread, and I am currently still banned.

[/quote']

Yes, same thing here, I am banned, and I had nothing to do with you guys who raided them(we were also looking for the camp).

Well I must admit I have yet to see him provide a good reason why you were banned, I assume he thinks your hacking because you were unable/unwilling to tell him how you located his hidden base. That alone is not basis for providing a ban to a player unless he can present conclusive proof of hacks being used. Hopefully a mod or dev can talk to you both and resolve the issue.

I heard the Vent conversation and it was rather bizarre imo. The guy they were questioning did seem evasive and not wanting to discuss the issue directly to which they attributed as a sign of guilt. However its quite possible that he is a person who has some kind of social/emotion issue and tends to shy away from confrontation or hostility or simply has low confidence. this is all speculation on my part however. My main issue with this whole affair is that no evidence has been put forward that would legitimize the bans handed out.

I'm not saying the chaps involved did or did not hack to find the base, that's a separate issue. The issue of bans being handed down without presenting sufficient reasoning and evidence is something the community should not accept as it can possible affect each and everyone of us at some point in the future. There has to be a structured process for dealing with the banning process or it will quickly get out of hand as the game expands.

To the guy they questioned on vent, you are not obliged to answer questions about your in-game/meta-game tactics anyway, If he is in a position where he feels it necessary to ban you then he is in essence making an accusation about your behavior and as such should provide sufficient evidence to back his claim up.

P.S If they did hack then all power to the admins for dealing with them, but you must have evidence ready to present to the forums in the event issues like this arise and they attempt to appeal the ban. I do not support hacking and exploiting in anyway way shape or form but in an effort to curb its effects the admins must take care to not become over zealous and adhere to a proper and fair system of dealing with it so that innocent players are not labeled as hackers and cheats.