MDC

I'm cashing out. I've been working with the Arma engine for over a decade at this point (if I remember rightly, I started in 2011, so roughly ~13 years now). For that entire time I've been vehemently against monetization of any kind, due to feeling that the playerbase and server owners have been constantly abused by the choices that Bohemia (more specifically the DayZ team) have made. Longstanding bugs remain unfixed, ideas and in some cases entire codebases are straight up lifted from mods with a bit of tweaking to avoid lawsuits, and the modded community is treated like an unwanted stepchild. Arma, by contrast, has a culture of supporting mods, to the point where new functionality was constantly opened up for modding, modders were consulted by the developers before any changes were pushed to release builds, and bugs and exploits were actively investigated by Dwarden and other members of the team. Those days, however, seem to be coming to a close as the DayZ team exerts more and more toxic control over the rest of BI. Now you have non-technical people making decisions which affect millions of players (DayZ has a concurrent playerbase of 50,000, but at LEAST three of the mods taken down today have a million subscriptions or more), with zero care, all because they either misunderstood, or understood and deliberately misrepresented something they read and took offence at. Here are the sub numbers for my mods, at time of removal: KOTH- 1,013,359 AFixForScopes - 49,527 EvenMoreDoors - 467,025 BuildEverywhere - 382,972 ClaimVehicles - 47,958 AutoTransmissions - 21,317 DayZThermals - 16,823 My hours in DayZ jumped massively after the end of 2019; I've put more than 20,000 hours in, which works out at around 11 hours a day on average, 7 days a week. The majority of that was working on the game, trying to fix issues, learning the architecture through experimentation and analysis, bruteforce testing, etc. I had a TIA (mini stroke) a couple of years back due to the stress, and I've neglected family, friends, and the woman I love. I had to investigate and personally beg a member of the Arma team to assist with closing an exploit that had been reported to the DayZ developers consistently for an entire year which allowed a hacker to execute any arbitrary operation and spoof legitimate player identities on any server, which was denied and swept under the rug by the DayZ team. The issue was *still* not going to be allowed to be fixed until I straight up blackmailed them with divulging details of the situation to Kotaku prior to the launch of Arma Reforger, as the issue was still present in that, and would've shaken faith in the product and tanked sales. This situation has later been rewritten by current DayZ developers, specifically Arkensor and Jacob Mango, to claim that I "betrayed Bohemia's trust" by leaking a copy of the fixed server executable to server owners, after they tried to seize control of the situation they'd help suppress in the first place by trying to move the discussion to the Modders Discord. As my involvement pre-dated theirs, I was dealing with it outside of their little channel. Throughout all of that, I have accepted money on four occasions. A donation from 3RNO for assistance with migration and backend administration work on StalkerZ, as well as some bugfixes and exploit mitigation. I accepted donations for KOTH when it was first released, and got a few from some of you in the first week, I did a commission (the Hacked Crates) on the Loaded server, and I was recently given another tip by Moroz for further assistance with StalkerZ. I've DEFINITELY received less than $1000 in that entire time, so that's less than 5 cents as an hourly wage, for what has essentially amounted to a full time job for the past 5 years, and a serious hobby for the previous 8 years. And in all that time, I have not even received so much as a *thank you* from Bohemia. No mention in the Community Spotlight, no heads up before introducing gamebreaking changes; I've even been specifically excluded from both modding discussions and early access programmes due to my criticism. What started this? When DayZ standalone was announced in... 2012? 2013 maybe? Myself and a bunch of other well-established DayZ Modders offered to work, free of charge, on DayZ Standalone. This was years ago, and we didn't know half of what we probably all do now, but we were all passionate and loved the game. All we wanted to do was to make it better. And they told us to fuck off. Some people did, of course, because why the hell wouldn't you. Except I'm autistic, and I couldn't let it go; so I just kept working on it, and attempting to hold them to account. Through my latter half of 20s, into my 30s, and now here I am approaching my 40s, and still waiting for just a "thank you" and maybe an apology to the other members of the community who give a shit about empty ones. So, I'm done. They want me to fuck off? That's fine by me, it's taken me over a decade to learn my lesson but here we go. Anyone who wants to repack my mods can send me a reasonable donation to paypal.me/michaeldcullen if you can afford it. You know who you are. I don't know how much, I don't know your financial situation or how much you care about my work. People caught taking the piss though, and raking in tons of donations, I will come after you. I have 12+ hours a day free now and literally nothing better to do with my time, and the IP is still mine ultimately. Valve will honor any DMCA takedowns regardless of what Bohemia says I can do regarding access to their workshop. I'm done protecting the "integrity" of the DayZ community; if the developers themselves are going to utterly destroy someone because they can't bring themselves to say thanks, then I'm going to take a severance package. All I want to do going forward is make up for the poor choices I've made over the past 10 years and do something nice for my family and my fiancee. I'm going to get in my car now, and drive the 4 hours to visit my family. I'm sorry for the inconvenience today and I honestly hope you all find a way out of this cycle of abuse so this never happens to anyone else again.

Another new track, once again inspired by @battlesquatch's #Anastara.

Well, @ScheduleOneGame is pretty fire.

What, exactly, is the point of @JustEatUK Premium if it's going to do this when you actually order?

It is absolutely ridiculous that I've had to introduce my fiancée to The Handmaid's Tale, a book by @MargaretAtwood that I studied for English Lit literally 20+ years ago when it was already 20 years old, in order to explain current-day politics in a "first world" country.

The irony. Neither of which I can play thanks to BI 🤦‍♂️

Someone complaining about, and accusing others of being in, "ideological extreme territories" while that very person is a raging transphobe and homophobe who downplays it as "just being old fashioned" is fucking comical. Give your head a wobble you absolute clown🤣

Well, the @scottyb150 fuck ups just keep coming. Someone asked me if "this was related" to my situation, which didn't make any sense to me whatsoever... until I checked the guy's username. My first name is "Michael", genius. His, I'm assuming, might very well be "Martin". 🤦‍♂️

Also, @RockstarGames, @PUBG, @FortniteGame, @DestinyTheGame apparently I won't be able to play any of your titles either thanks to this, so unless you're able to get through to @maruksp I apologise for not being able to give you my money or my time.

And now, apparently, Bohemia has manually issued a *Global BattlEye ban*, which - for those who aren't aware - is a CHEATING ban, when I've never cheated on an online game in my entire life.

So, here's the official "reasons" I've been banned from using the Steam Workshop, impacting millions of players, both of which are invalid. None of the content on the workshop is in breach of the Steam Subscriber Agreement, and there was no violation of the EULA since the EULA doesn't say "you're not allowed to criticise Bohemia". Can you please step in here @maruksp? I'm a paying customer who's been supporting your product - for free - for over a decade since it was an Arma 2 mod, and calling out shitty behaviour like this from a problematic team that you've had no end of issues with since the product's inception.

The sheer fucking irony of someone posting about mental health and saying "reach out" on the same day they attempted to threaten and intimidate someone 🤣

Curious if this is permitted in the chamber @HoCStandards?

Just out of interest @TeamYouTube, when you give someone a contract, does it come back as a signed PDF file?

New single just dropped, available on all major platforms later this week. Tag a friend who likes Mangos.