It all started out with a simple article. This article was one I wrote for a tiny site that was hosted on Planet Unreal called the Redeemer. This article was my own private section, and as a journalistic editor, I ran a simple article. In my article, I denounced the mod then known as SWAT. I didn't like it. To me it felt like a poor clone of Counter-Strike. Then one day, I came to find the site I worked for had been 404'd. Disappeared. We had received no warning.
I began to investigate in the way only my curiosity can lead me too do. I had to set right what I had felt had been an injustice to free speech and free expression. I contacted Stallion at the direction of the site's webmaster, Gringle.
Stallion, not surprisingly, gave me alot of horse shit. He claimed that people were supposed to have emailed us, blah-blah-blah. He claimed that the content was questionable. When I came up with hard fact at every turn, his arguement degraded until he simply spoke no more.
When the Redeemer did return a day or two later, I discovered that my review, which I had just posted, had mysteriously disappeared with no warning to remove the objectionable content. No warning, no asking us to do it. Because my piece of .htm code contained a few instances of the word fuck, it had disappeared. I will now take the time to point out that QAPete, who is (obviously) in charge of the QA at PU, gave me permission, in his own words, that so long as the main sections of the site (that said, the reviews and the index.htm) didn't contain swearing, every else was fine. IE: Forums, editorials, etc. Upon later questioning of the PU admins, I discovered that my portion of the site wasn't even "in question"... that is to say, it disappeared because somebody wanted it to disappear, and not because the content itself was questionable, but because the content was potentially damaging. Do read on, I believe it will become clear.
As anybody knows, I am the firmest believer in personal freedom. I believe you should be allowed to say what you want. I believe that you should be allowed to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't jeapordize anybody else's survival. That is to say, if you want to call somebody a cracker, a nigger, a fag, or any other inflammatory personal remark, you should have that right. If you choose to act physically on that hate, however, you are crossing the line. If you choose to poison yourself with cocaine, or heroin, or alcohol, you have that right. If you, however, under the influence of those intoxicants, harm somebody else, you have crossed the line. You should have the right to view pornography, or participate in whatever form of sex act you choose. If you go out and rape a girl, you have most definitely crossed the line. The primary right, superceding all other rights, its the right to physical well-being. Say and do what you will to yourself, but when the time comes to keep from doing it to others, you must keep from doing it, or your rights have voided themselves. I think everybody can relate to this.
That said, having my voice removed, without warning, really angered me. I resigned from my post. As I saw it, I was an editor -- I dictated whether or not the content crossed the line. I had done nothing inflammatory. Rather, I had vocalized (As well as one can vocalize anything over an electronic medium) a negative view, given a humourous satire, and then offered constructive criticism. And to suddenly find, without even being asked to cooperate, that my basic freedoms had been denied, I was infuriated. It had indeed turned out that admins had "taken a vote" and superceded QAPete's authority while he was on vacation.
I never thought that the removal of my section had anything to do with the aforementioned review of SWAT.
Time passed and slowly the wounds healed. I felt as if I had been whipped, but the pain dulled and faded away.
Suddenly the rage, the pain was rekindle as, as if in a torrent of lies and injustice, things began to happen.
First the newly renamed TacticalOps won the Make Something Unreal best conversion category as the first SWAT release. This was bad. A conversion based on another mod, in fact, a CLONE of another mod had won a prize. I do believe that these were supposed to be judged on originality, too? So how were they judged on originality when nothing in TacticalOps (or SWAT, if you prefer) was original? I began to get curious.
I began poking my nose around, as I tend to do. Its a habit of mine, I get curious, and I investigate things -- I like to know the truth, before I begin making allegations. JoLTeD, it turns out, had often quoted my review of SWAT on the Tactical Ops forum, offering nothing more than negative criticism. Stallion banned him, and the TacticalOps team deleted his posts. When later confronted with this, Stallion claimed the old patsy fall back -- "I was just doing my job". I replied with the fact that other people just did their job too. The Gestapo. Hitmen. Pontius Pilate. He was the one that told me that my portion of the site was never meant to go down. I still harbored ill will, because he had participated in censoring me, though I now knew that larger, more sinister forces were now at work. Trite and corny? Perhaps. But you can't dismiss everybody who says larger and more sinister as a crackpot. Its simply to easy... so continue, dear reader...
I came back to JoLTeD, who expressed very colourfully the outrage he felt towards TacOps in general, and Stallion. But TacOps is the focus of this. He claimed (and I admit that as of this writing, these allegations are nothing but accusations, though I am currently investigating) that Tactical Ops stole other mods/games sound effects (namely Firearms HL and Rainbow 6.) I have not played Firearms HL, and I have only played the demo of R6 a couple years past. So I dismissed this at the time, though the impact of further investigating these allegations has become important to me, so I will do so. Nonetheless, this got me to thinking -- I found the guns behaved very pronouncedly like guns from other mods for Unreal Tournament. Almost like some of their coding had been lifted directly from other mods. This, too, I am looking into. More on this later.
Then it happened, the pinnacle of my anger. BloodKnight, lead beta tester for TacticalOps, was sitting around, making a fool of himself in the TacticalOps channel, because for whatever reason he saw fit, he began openly making fun of Infiltration, a mod that people have been working hard on ever since Catalyst discovered Warren asking questions about modelling an AK-47 and signed him on to a project known as Force Recon. I decided that I would handle it myself. I showed up in the TacticalOps channel and began mocking BloodKnight. He complained that he had been kicked and banned from #infiltration for whatever reason. In an insanely high amount of hypocrisy, he kicked and banned me. I sent him a private message, and he returned the favour -- effectively opening a DCC chat session in ircN. He openly mocked Infiltration. I returned the favour in kind. The transcript of our conversation was posted publicly. He accused me of making it up, even though a) I wasn't the one who posted it, and b) he had previously shown up at a Strike Force release party, openly mocking them. Nothing was done in either case. Any other team member, whether for a mod or a commercial game, would have been fired. For a long time I debated with him on both IRC and the message boards. He didn't budge from his position.
This was, however, the beginning of something completely different. For some time, people in the Infiltration room were throwing around rumours of a reason why TacticalOps could be disqualified from the Make Something Unreal contest. They refused to tell me what, and I hate not knowing. It drives me berserk not knowing something, especially something so profoundly important. I did, however, have a trick up my sleeve. A gentleman at Epic (who will obviously remain nameless) that I have contacted before (originally for help on setting up my Voodoo II for Unreal -- I was to damn lazy to find the tech support email so I fired off a mail message to the first email address I could find, and it sorta grew from there) was kind enough to let me pester him into telling me what was going on. It turns out Infogrames was funding Tactical Ops. Had been for some time. Suddenly everything became crystal clear.
Infogrames was slated to release a Game of the Year edition of Unreal Tournament. They wanted a mod that could be shrink-wrapped and sold along with UT to directly compete against Counter-Strike. It makes perfect sense, really. Counter-Strike alone has sold copies of Half-Life. It is more played online than Unreal Tournament and Quake 3: Arena combined. A direct competitor (read: clone) of Counter-Strike is genius marketting strategy. If a kid picks up Half-Life to buy just to download Counter-Strike, and then sees a copy of Unreal Tournament with a copy of what looks to be something exactly like Counter-Strike on it, which is he going to buy? Will he buy Half-Life, only to clog up his 56k pipeline downloading a huge 50+ meg file, or will he buy Unreal Tournament instead, and get a prepackaged clone of Counter-Strike?
However, this in and of itself wouldn't be so bad (as if profitting from other people's ideas that they're making for free, for fun, for the people isn't bad enough) it is capped off by the "Make Something Unreal" contest.
<center>ELIGIBILITY The Contest is open to legal residents of the United States. Void in Puerto Rico, Vermont, Maryland, North Dakota, Minnesota and where prohibited by law. Employees of HearMe, 3D FX, Epic Games, GT Interactive, Aureal, their respective affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising and promotion agencies and the immediate family members of each are not eligible to participate.</center>
That is a quote taken directly from the MSU contest rules page. First off, Shag is from France, and he has admitted to it here, so he cannot deny that. That means that he is not in one of the States/Territories of the United States that the contest is open to. Yet he has already won money for his entry of SWAT into the Best Total/Partial Conversion category. The best P/TC category also stipulates that no conversion may win if it contains any sort of copyrighted material. The guns aside (which may very well void that stipulation, though I believe they're protected under the United States fair-use laws) I am currently examining whether or not SWAT contains any intellectual property from other mods. I am also in the process of contacting both contest and government officials to let them know how the contest rules were voided. Secondly, there is the stipulation that employees, affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising, and promotional agencies cannot participate. By receiving funds, SWAT/TO DOES fall into that category.
Furthermore, suddenly the community judges have been pulled, and have been replaced with industry insiders. Industry insiders that could easily be pursuaded by Infogrames to... help TacOps receive additional funding, above and beyond the sums of money they are receiving for producing the mod, as well as the money they've already won. All in all, through community manipulation (by censoring any and all negative views [deleting my review, and any others like it, banning JoLTeD and deleting his posts]) and a select panel of persuadable judges, Tactical Ops stands to receive a total of $30,000 US Dollars on top of what they're already making.
In case you've been having trouble following an admittedly very long post, I will sum it up. Rojazz, who "coincidentally" works as an admin at PlanetUnreal as well as webmastering TacticalOps, effectively ran a censoring campaign with the help of Stallion to curtail any negative reviews (wouldn't you for a cut of $30,000 plus the production money?) and negative posts. Infogrames knowingly funded and aided and abetted breaking the rules governing contests, lotteries, and games of chance in the United States, and funded a "free, community mod" with the intention of using it as a marketting and distribution tool.
If you think I am just making this up because TacticalOps was put on the Game of the Year edition, think again. Here you will find a post , dated before the announcement of the Game of the Year edition, in which I hint at a conspiracy which I cannot reveal to protect my "friend" at Epic. Though I said I had proof, and here you read it. There are other such posts on that board, and I offer you to look for yourself. I told you that laws were being broken, and here, again, before your eyes is the proof.
Reread it. Look over every nuance. This is truth.
I'm sure they'll come along, and offer some sort of rancid explanation full of holes, and call me a liar like they always have, and its up to you who you choose to believe. All I asked for was an admission of guilt from BloodKnight, and I never got it. I promised things wouldn't be pretty if it didn't happen, and here you have it. I wanted the admission of guilt from BloodKnight just so that somebody, anybody on the TacticalOps team, could prove to me that they were mature and somehow deserved what they were getting. Who better but whom I believe to be the most immature? And yet all the proved was that they were using, conniving, selfish people who only wanted to turn a profit, and cared about nobody but themselves -- and saving their reputation so they could keep making money. I hope the crisp dollar bills in your back pocket are worth this, my friends.
You used people like corporate tools. You manipulated words, told lies, and censored free-thinking voices to turn a profit and help turn a bigger profit in the bigger picture. You manipulated laws and people's minds and emotions for your own petty material gains. And you sheep that try to rationalize this, and who will undoubtedly villify me, I hope you love being corporate tools.
Truth, justice, and freedom for all.
-Bad.Mojo
<img src="http://badmojojacket.homestead.com/files/bmj.gif" alt="Bad.Mojo: Born to Kill">
I began to investigate in the way only my curiosity can lead me too do. I had to set right what I had felt had been an injustice to free speech and free expression. I contacted Stallion at the direction of the site's webmaster, Gringle.
Stallion, not surprisingly, gave me alot of horse shit. He claimed that people were supposed to have emailed us, blah-blah-blah. He claimed that the content was questionable. When I came up with hard fact at every turn, his arguement degraded until he simply spoke no more.
When the Redeemer did return a day or two later, I discovered that my review, which I had just posted, had mysteriously disappeared with no warning to remove the objectionable content. No warning, no asking us to do it. Because my piece of .htm code contained a few instances of the word fuck, it had disappeared. I will now take the time to point out that QAPete, who is (obviously) in charge of the QA at PU, gave me permission, in his own words, that so long as the main sections of the site (that said, the reviews and the index.htm) didn't contain swearing, every else was fine. IE: Forums, editorials, etc. Upon later questioning of the PU admins, I discovered that my portion of the site wasn't even "in question"... that is to say, it disappeared because somebody wanted it to disappear, and not because the content itself was questionable, but because the content was potentially damaging. Do read on, I believe it will become clear.
As anybody knows, I am the firmest believer in personal freedom. I believe you should be allowed to say what you want. I believe that you should be allowed to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't jeapordize anybody else's survival. That is to say, if you want to call somebody a cracker, a nigger, a fag, or any other inflammatory personal remark, you should have that right. If you choose to act physically on that hate, however, you are crossing the line. If you choose to poison yourself with cocaine, or heroin, or alcohol, you have that right. If you, however, under the influence of those intoxicants, harm somebody else, you have crossed the line. You should have the right to view pornography, or participate in whatever form of sex act you choose. If you go out and rape a girl, you have most definitely crossed the line. The primary right, superceding all other rights, its the right to physical well-being. Say and do what you will to yourself, but when the time comes to keep from doing it to others, you must keep from doing it, or your rights have voided themselves. I think everybody can relate to this.
That said, having my voice removed, without warning, really angered me. I resigned from my post. As I saw it, I was an editor -- I dictated whether or not the content crossed the line. I had done nothing inflammatory. Rather, I had vocalized (As well as one can vocalize anything over an electronic medium) a negative view, given a humourous satire, and then offered constructive criticism. And to suddenly find, without even being asked to cooperate, that my basic freedoms had been denied, I was infuriated. It had indeed turned out that admins had "taken a vote" and superceded QAPete's authority while he was on vacation.
I never thought that the removal of my section had anything to do with the aforementioned review of SWAT.
Time passed and slowly the wounds healed. I felt as if I had been whipped, but the pain dulled and faded away.
Suddenly the rage, the pain was rekindle as, as if in a torrent of lies and injustice, things began to happen.
First the newly renamed TacticalOps won the Make Something Unreal best conversion category as the first SWAT release. This was bad. A conversion based on another mod, in fact, a CLONE of another mod had won a prize. I do believe that these were supposed to be judged on originality, too? So how were they judged on originality when nothing in TacticalOps (or SWAT, if you prefer) was original? I began to get curious.
I began poking my nose around, as I tend to do. Its a habit of mine, I get curious, and I investigate things -- I like to know the truth, before I begin making allegations. JoLTeD, it turns out, had often quoted my review of SWAT on the Tactical Ops forum, offering nothing more than negative criticism. Stallion banned him, and the TacticalOps team deleted his posts. When later confronted with this, Stallion claimed the old patsy fall back -- "I was just doing my job". I replied with the fact that other people just did their job too. The Gestapo. Hitmen. Pontius Pilate. He was the one that told me that my portion of the site was never meant to go down. I still harbored ill will, because he had participated in censoring me, though I now knew that larger, more sinister forces were now at work. Trite and corny? Perhaps. But you can't dismiss everybody who says larger and more sinister as a crackpot. Its simply to easy... so continue, dear reader...
I came back to JoLTeD, who expressed very colourfully the outrage he felt towards TacOps in general, and Stallion. But TacOps is the focus of this. He claimed (and I admit that as of this writing, these allegations are nothing but accusations, though I am currently investigating) that Tactical Ops stole other mods/games sound effects (namely Firearms HL and Rainbow 6.) I have not played Firearms HL, and I have only played the demo of R6 a couple years past. So I dismissed this at the time, though the impact of further investigating these allegations has become important to me, so I will do so. Nonetheless, this got me to thinking -- I found the guns behaved very pronouncedly like guns from other mods for Unreal Tournament. Almost like some of their coding had been lifted directly from other mods. This, too, I am looking into. More on this later.
Then it happened, the pinnacle of my anger. BloodKnight, lead beta tester for TacticalOps, was sitting around, making a fool of himself in the TacticalOps channel, because for whatever reason he saw fit, he began openly making fun of Infiltration, a mod that people have been working hard on ever since Catalyst discovered Warren asking questions about modelling an AK-47 and signed him on to a project known as Force Recon. I decided that I would handle it myself. I showed up in the TacticalOps channel and began mocking BloodKnight. He complained that he had been kicked and banned from #infiltration for whatever reason. In an insanely high amount of hypocrisy, he kicked and banned me. I sent him a private message, and he returned the favour -- effectively opening a DCC chat session in ircN. He openly mocked Infiltration. I returned the favour in kind. The transcript of our conversation was posted publicly. He accused me of making it up, even though a) I wasn't the one who posted it, and b) he had previously shown up at a Strike Force release party, openly mocking them. Nothing was done in either case. Any other team member, whether for a mod or a commercial game, would have been fired. For a long time I debated with him on both IRC and the message boards. He didn't budge from his position.
This was, however, the beginning of something completely different. For some time, people in the Infiltration room were throwing around rumours of a reason why TacticalOps could be disqualified from the Make Something Unreal contest. They refused to tell me what, and I hate not knowing. It drives me berserk not knowing something, especially something so profoundly important. I did, however, have a trick up my sleeve. A gentleman at Epic (who will obviously remain nameless) that I have contacted before (originally for help on setting up my Voodoo II for Unreal -- I was to damn lazy to find the tech support email so I fired off a mail message to the first email address I could find, and it sorta grew from there) was kind enough to let me pester him into telling me what was going on. It turns out Infogrames was funding Tactical Ops. Had been for some time. Suddenly everything became crystal clear.
Infogrames was slated to release a Game of the Year edition of Unreal Tournament. They wanted a mod that could be shrink-wrapped and sold along with UT to directly compete against Counter-Strike. It makes perfect sense, really. Counter-Strike alone has sold copies of Half-Life. It is more played online than Unreal Tournament and Quake 3: Arena combined. A direct competitor (read: clone) of Counter-Strike is genius marketting strategy. If a kid picks up Half-Life to buy just to download Counter-Strike, and then sees a copy of Unreal Tournament with a copy of what looks to be something exactly like Counter-Strike on it, which is he going to buy? Will he buy Half-Life, only to clog up his 56k pipeline downloading a huge 50+ meg file, or will he buy Unreal Tournament instead, and get a prepackaged clone of Counter-Strike?
However, this in and of itself wouldn't be so bad (as if profitting from other people's ideas that they're making for free, for fun, for the people isn't bad enough) it is capped off by the "Make Something Unreal" contest.
<center>ELIGIBILITY The Contest is open to legal residents of the United States. Void in Puerto Rico, Vermont, Maryland, North Dakota, Minnesota and where prohibited by law. Employees of HearMe, 3D FX, Epic Games, GT Interactive, Aureal, their respective affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising and promotion agencies and the immediate family members of each are not eligible to participate.</center>
That is a quote taken directly from the MSU contest rules page. First off, Shag is from France, and he has admitted to it here, so he cannot deny that. That means that he is not in one of the States/Territories of the United States that the contest is open to. Yet he has already won money for his entry of SWAT into the Best Total/Partial Conversion category. The best P/TC category also stipulates that no conversion may win if it contains any sort of copyrighted material. The guns aside (which may very well void that stipulation, though I believe they're protected under the United States fair-use laws) I am currently examining whether or not SWAT contains any intellectual property from other mods. I am also in the process of contacting both contest and government officials to let them know how the contest rules were voided. Secondly, there is the stipulation that employees, affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising, and promotional agencies cannot participate. By receiving funds, SWAT/TO DOES fall into that category.
Furthermore, suddenly the community judges have been pulled, and have been replaced with industry insiders. Industry insiders that could easily be pursuaded by Infogrames to... help TacOps receive additional funding, above and beyond the sums of money they are receiving for producing the mod, as well as the money they've already won. All in all, through community manipulation (by censoring any and all negative views [deleting my review, and any others like it, banning JoLTeD and deleting his posts]) and a select panel of persuadable judges, Tactical Ops stands to receive a total of $30,000 US Dollars on top of what they're already making.
In case you've been having trouble following an admittedly very long post, I will sum it up. Rojazz, who "coincidentally" works as an admin at PlanetUnreal as well as webmastering TacticalOps, effectively ran a censoring campaign with the help of Stallion to curtail any negative reviews (wouldn't you for a cut of $30,000 plus the production money?) and negative posts. Infogrames knowingly funded and aided and abetted breaking the rules governing contests, lotteries, and games of chance in the United States, and funded a "free, community mod" with the intention of using it as a marketting and distribution tool.
If you think I am just making this up because TacticalOps was put on the Game of the Year edition, think again. Here you will find a post , dated before the announcement of the Game of the Year edition, in which I hint at a conspiracy which I cannot reveal to protect my "friend" at Epic. Though I said I had proof, and here you read it. There are other such posts on that board, and I offer you to look for yourself. I told you that laws were being broken, and here, again, before your eyes is the proof.
Reread it. Look over every nuance. This is truth.
I'm sure they'll come along, and offer some sort of rancid explanation full of holes, and call me a liar like they always have, and its up to you who you choose to believe. All I asked for was an admission of guilt from BloodKnight, and I never got it. I promised things wouldn't be pretty if it didn't happen, and here you have it. I wanted the admission of guilt from BloodKnight just so that somebody, anybody on the TacticalOps team, could prove to me that they were mature and somehow deserved what they were getting. Who better but whom I believe to be the most immature? And yet all the proved was that they were using, conniving, selfish people who only wanted to turn a profit, and cared about nobody but themselves -- and saving their reputation so they could keep making money. I hope the crisp dollar bills in your back pocket are worth this, my friends.
You used people like corporate tools. You manipulated words, told lies, and censored free-thinking voices to turn a profit and help turn a bigger profit in the bigger picture. You manipulated laws and people's minds and emotions for your own petty material gains. And you sheep that try to rationalize this, and who will undoubtedly villify me, I hope you love being corporate tools.
Truth, justice, and freedom for all.
-Bad.Mojo
<img src="http://badmojojacket.homestead.com/files/bmj.gif" alt="Bad.Mojo: Born to Kill">
![/\l!eN[RIP]](/data/avatars/s/14/14494.jpg?1424422855){kind=avatar}
