Diary of a Sad Man (not me, I'm mad)

If there is one thing I have always been good at, it’s putting rumors to bed.  This requires having the facts, and I think I do that well-enough.  You don’t get to work at Massively by being a fear-mongering rumor whore, and I routinely critiqued games and communities based on the facts at hand.  Sure, there’s always some tinting in your position, because an opinion is always there, but overall I do a good job of being rather objective, even if I color my pieces with some profanity.  That’s why I do what I do: I want people to learn, be it from games, or drama.

This drama is not of my own design, and in fact I have found myself engulfed because I hate people who lie.  I do.  Part of it is also my own silly belief in loyalty to friends, even those you don’t know.

Ark has many servers, and like EVE Online Ark admins can do what they want to meet their goals.  Most of these people want a highly popular server, which is all well and good.  No one wants to play as king of nothing, right?  But you have some that go too far, and this is the story of one of them.

Meet Novahaze.  He’s a rambunctious, angsty pre-teen whose sole solace in life is maintaining an Ark server.  That’s fine, it’s okay to run a server, and I encourage good people to do so.  However, Novahaze is a classiv example of “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.  He was known to the admin of the server I play on since the game came out, when said admin played on Novahaze’s server, and since leaving said server, Novahaze has been upset.  Angry.  Pissed.

You see, Novahaze was caught doing something that a good admin will never do, even in the toughest of circumstances: cheating.  Because Novahaze is a terrible player, he relies on admin commands to bolster his chances of winning, and even with such an advantage he can’t seem to do it.  This was discovered early in the game’s life, when he raided a tribe on his server, that recorded him using commands to escape their highly-successful defense.

The admin of Skull Island is Unk, or Ertosi on Steam.  His friends Denium and DayMan played with him on the server, alongside another player named Keith.  During the attack on their base, Keith recorded the adventure, complete with teleporting and no-clipping on the part of Novahaze.  Of course, Novahaze claims it is doctored, but that’s a pretty incredible doctoring, I have to say.  The video can be found here.  As you can see, Novahaze falls from the bird, taking no damage and the rider is killed by the fall.  The discrepancy could be HP, but it’s doubtful.  You’ll then watch him run to a wall with Plant Species X shooting at him, then disappear.  Keith is able to crouch and get a look through the ground to see Nova on the other side of their wall, running away.  This is referred to as “no clipping”.  Later, you’ll see him running along a mountain edge to escape a pursuer and “fall”, looking as if he’s fallen off a cliff.  However, Keith quickly shows he’s actually teleported, not fallen.

The defense wasn’t successful.  There’s no real way to defend against an admin who is abusing admin commands to get an advantage during an attack he instigates.  Unk and friends left the server, and Unk started Skull Island.  I will say that this has been the best server I have been on: Unk prefers to build, and while Skull Island is a PvPvE server, he does not get involved in PvP.  There’s no worries about the possibility of admin abuse.  Unk runs his tribe, The Wild Hunt.  Denium created his own tribe, The Starks.  DayMan created The Forgotten Tribe.  That leaves me, joining several months later, and creating the tribe Happy Pappy Puppy Pals after several forays on official servers, and one on a non-official EU server.

The harassment from Novahaze has been extensive, mainly located on the forums for Steam and Reddit.  It usually consists of a copy-pasted message, detailing how Denium tried to extort him for real money when he played on Skull Island, and used admin commands to spawn dinosaurs into the middle of his base to wipe him when he didn’t pay.  The problem is, the only admin is Unk.  He refuses to allow people to have server admin rights to prevent specifically that type of activity.

Novahaze has also had a habit of harassing other people on Reddit, to the point that no fewer than five accounts have been banned, and he continues to make new ones to continue the harassment.  In classic sociopathic fashion, he regales you with tales of harassment from Unk, of cheating on Unk’s part, and how his time spent on Skull Island was terrible.  The problem being, all of that should be reversed: all of that has been Novahaze’s actions, and he’s never played on Skull Island.  In fact, he’d be allowed to, even after all of that, because Unk is that kind of a guy.

In November of 2015, Novahaze began spamming the Skull Island forums with a copy-pasted message. That is when I found out about him, and was made aware of the video.  Unk and I were then made aware 08 December that Novahaze had created a Steam thread with the exact same message, and we refuted it, providing evidence.  At that point, I created a character on his server, and intended to view his server settings, as well as how long it took him to ban me.  Arkservers.net said Novahaze was on the entire time I was, and for over 90 minutes I played the game, bullshitting with Unk and DayMan on Teamspeak while just observing.  There wasn’t much chatter, I said nothing and didn’t interact with anyone.  After 90 minutes, while AFK to take care of the dog needing to go outside, I came back to having been banned from his server.  Not for hacking, not for talking smack, not for breaking any rules.  I was simply booted without any reason, though I assume it’s because I stood up for Unk as a neutral party.

That video can be found here.

So here we are, with a deranged child running a server, creating drama to make himself look more important than he is.  Comments were disabled on the arkservers.net board to stop him from continuing the libel.  You now need to be a certain rank on the Skull Island forums to see many of our posts for the server.  Novahaze continues to run his mouth on the forums.  No one on Skull Island has attempted to be antagonistic, but we haven’t laid down to be kicked, either.  We refute him every chance we can, because that is what we do: you don’t allow someone to lie and get away with it.  And being a Marine, I don’t allow some no-name scrub to dictate such libelous claims without a vigorous defense being put up.

You see those videos.  Those videos alone are far more proof than Novahaze has ever given to substantiate his claims.  He won’t both to do so, because he has none.  He has no recordings of Unk hacking, or breaking any rules.  All he has is a hurt ego, and the need to be validated.  That’s why he changes his name on Steam, often enough to the names of women.  He even took the name Ertosi once to try to fuck with people and claimed he was Unk.

But he wasn’t done.  As the harassment continued, Unk and I continued to report his posts until, last week he received a nice suspension from the Steam forums.  While it wasn’t permanent, we hoped it would shut him up.  After getting off of it on Sunday, he immediately added me to his friends list, and started a nice little conversation, the text of which can be found here, unedited.

And it continues.  The spam on advertisement and recruitment threads, the claims of hacking where none existed on our part.  Outright lies about admin abuse, and not even knowing who the admins are or, more than likely, embellishing the admins.

Novahaze’s threads for his server are even full of lies.  There’s no admin logging to keep him honest.  He’s never had it on.  His coliseum is a direct rip-off of Unk’s coliseum, complete with a skull in the middle as a blatant “fuck you”.  His “legendary server events” are non-existant, the “most recent” being three months ago.  His community is nothing.  Skull Island may have fewer players on it than his server, but the chatter in global and on Teamspeak is constant.  We love chatting with one another.

But Novahaze is a small man, not sure if he’ll be remembered.  And he won’t.  He knows he won’t.  And no one will care that he’s absolutely nothing after all is said and done.

This is being put up, because every time he starts his bullshit I want to link to this instead of typing out new posts to counter his claims.  I will always provide evidence, even when the enemy refuses to do so.  The truth is an absolute defense, and when it is on your side you’ll eventually win.

Novahaze is more than welcome to show the proof he constantly claims to have, but it’s been over four months and he hasn’t shown a thing.  I’ll let you figure out why.

Edit: I guess it was inevitable, but 31 December saw me get a suspension from the Steam forums over the issue.  This isn't so bad, I barely use it to begin with, but it looks like Novahaze receieved a similar penalty for his shenanigans.  While I hope he does learn, history says he probably won't, and more to the point Ertosi gets a one-week reprieve from dealing with this narcissistic personality and compulsive liar.  His server advertisement thread can continue unhurt, and not an issue any longer is Novahaze.