So I've properly left now. I didn't (and don't) intend on making a song and dance about things, because TF is a dead server and I'm really not that important.
Now, I'm going to speak honestly about my time and the person I became while on TF, in the context of the birthday event and what it's really opened my eyes to.
Background
Once upon a time, TF was created as a free-op anarchy server by markbyron. I'm not too familiar with the extended history, but it grew over time as a community server. Things weren't nice, but there was certainly a community feel around it. People to this day still remember things fondly, and for a while it boomed. TF was popular, by the time I joined at least there were 30+ players on daily, and an extensive admin team consisting of 4 main ranks (Super, Telnet, Telnet Clan, Senior). Things were simply better, there wasn't such a huge divide back then. Yeah, there were issues (i.e. marco, savnith, scutix) but ultimately that was just meaningless drama that (from what I could tell) had no long term effect on anybody. markbyron then ultimately resigned from day-to-day owner, and I'm guessing it had to do with scutix's revolution. This was the first sign of things to come, in hindsight. Please somebody correct me if there's any inaccuracies.
On the last day of July in 2018, I joined TotalFreedom after being introduced it by at the time admins LightWarp and Lionnco. Immediately, the server was.. interesting. I joined at the end of Windows' time, while markbyron was still basically running things behind the scenes. Later that year, markbyron resigned. The staff also decided they'd had enough of the EAO at the time Infamas, and elected to get him removed, which also sparked Windows to go MIA because, simply, the community got too much for him. Granted he had some personal struggles as well financially speaking, but he left.
In his wake, Seth took over the server. And that was, in my view, the final nail in the coffin for TF. I wasn't there long by that point admittedly, but in hindsight I think by that point TF had died, something else had taken its place. Seth was a good man, but he was a pushover. His friend group (named smartnt) then eventually just made the server into their private little playground, and people who used to enjoy what used to be TotalFreedom left. Some came back, but the server was a changed place - the community discovered the power of peer pressure, but for a while Seth seemed to be on top of things.
This was, until a member of the community made a vote-off post for Seth. Seth then subsequently snapped and attempted to delete everything. Seth left because he couldn't handle the community anymore. The member of the community has bragged god knows how many times of his actions there since, for whatever reason, but I'll touch on that later.
Then, Ryan Wild took over.
There's a lot of things you could say about Ryan, but my view (as it has been) is that that man cared. And he did his best, despite everything. This latest birthday event really opened my eyes here, Ryan made choices that he felt was best, whether it was for safeguarding or any other reason. Yeah, I don't agree with every single decision, but I'm struggling to find any decision that I think was made out of malice, or because he simply wanted to abuse.
Ryan ultimately inherited a corpse, a zombified version of a community that had been long dead, devoid of decent people. And throughout his time, he had to deal with so much shit that I'm not entirely sure was publicised, all because he was owner of a fucking minecraft server. And it was around this time that I rose to become a quasi-executive myself, and I saw firsthand just the amount of shit that had to be dealt with. I had to deal with a horrible amount of shit myself, and being honest it took it's toll on me.
Around then, a group from a spinoff server, filled with some of the most disgusting people I've ever been unfortunate enough to encounter, decided they'd fuck everything up. I'm not sorry to directly call out the likes of decyj145, most of you know them as "Declan", although their chosen name is now Aurora and I will refer to them as such for the rest of this thread. Aurora is just one example, of everything wrong with the server, it was somebody with an extreme victim complex who blamed everybody else for their horrific actions, always wanting more but never trying to be a half decent person. This group, from IPTFreedom, then effectively DDOS'd the forum, took down the Discord that I had spent years working on, and fucked up the actual server beyond repair. You also had LOSERS like the granite castle but they are irrelevant.
So Ryan, seeing how he'd have to spend like weeks unfucking everything, decided to end things there. I don't think that's unfair. People seem to forget that Ryan (and anybody else) have real lives, and they seem to forget that TF was meant to be a hobby, something done for fun, but what fun was moderating and managing something that actively hated you for existing?
Think about it, everybody was quick to criticise me, Ryan, even recently Taahanis and Telesphoreo for wanting to end things, but why would we go out of our way and spend money and disgusting amounts of time for a community that actively witchhunts, doxes, and abuses you?
So Ryan shut down TF, and again in it's wake came Telepshoreo and Taahanis to try and resuscitate the broken and decayed corpse of something that once was. And the issues just came right back. An ungrateful community, with a weird superiority complex returned, and you couldn't make a single decision without it being scrutinized to fuck. The server was then shut down for good, once and for all.
Again, I can't blame Taah or Teles for a single decision they've made. Yeah, we weren't perfect, but we tried our best.
The Birthday event
Telesphoreo and Taahanis decided to re-open TF for it's birthday. The idea was simply to have a good time, and to enjoy something that used to be here that isn't anymore. Except, the issues came straight back. Within four hours, I was being hounded about bans. People rejoined just to cause problems. I had to ban a user because I deemed them a threat to the safety of the community, and I'm not on about they'll make some sus comments and move off, I mean I have seen evidence that their behaviour has lead to direct harm to others. The community was almost hit by a nuke because of this individual, with consequences far worse than I can even describe. And yes, I have heard the defences, but I do not believe the defences, I believe the evidence I saw right before me. And if I did not ban this user, I would have risked the personal lives of so many people who would have been targetted in subsequent attacks.
So I banned the user, as was my right to do. And I didn't expect compliance and blind trust, nor did I expect people to even be happy about it. But instead, my DMs were flooded by people who didn't even know why the user was banned, but were arguing that we were wrong anyway. As in, people were arguing and telling me that I was wrong, but couldn't even tell me what I was wrong about. And don't be mistaken, I could be wrong. But I made a decision, a decision that I stand by, a decision to protect people's personal lives, and the very people I had in mind who would be a target of the attacks were the very people accusing me of being wrong.
And it drained me. Imagine trying your hardest, putting yourself in a firing line, to try and help people who just abused you. I put myself in a lot of danger (or it seemed so at the time), trying to ensure nothing happened, and I'm not even asking for a thank you, I only ask for patience. Again, I'm not asking anybody to be a yes man, but I'm asking that they just respect my decision.
But that wasn't going to happen, and it'd never happen. In the background I discussed the various owners of TF, and there's only one common factor, the community. TF is a community full of people who think they know better, who ask and ask but never give. You'd have admins like quack, who tell me my actions could lead to someone committing suicide. Funnily enough, for some reason he's been trusted with a phoenix server of his own, although he'll crack (quack?) at the first sign of trouble. You'd have users who demand everything goes their way and would never be happy with anything we did, and you'd have people who abuse and abuse, and expect you to take it smiling.
The final straw for me was having someone I considered a friend accuse me of backstabbing them. Erin, someone who I used to have a lot of respect for, decided she'd make friends with Aurora a while back. And that's okay, I don't care who is friends with who, except Erin then started openly siding with Aurora over things that happened. I'm less okay with that, but I still respect her decision to do so. Although, I find it incredibly ironic that she'd accuse me of backstabbing whilst stabbing people in the community in the back.
So anyway I removed the Discord mod team, as they were redundant and served no purpose; the server was dead, there was no need. Erin decided to take this personally, and went apeshit in general chat accusing me of whatever. And it hurt quite frankly, to see someone I respected and somebody I thought wouldn't do something like that did that anyway. It was the final straw in a long list of bullshit things to happen on TF.
--------
I'm making this thread as what I can only hope to be a detailed account of what happened to TF, as somebody who has been just about every rank so far. In short, it's got a horrible community, combined with a bunch of degenerates on the outside who find it funny to fuck with people at a personal level. Nowadays it's just an amalgamation of all the worst parts of what used to be there, most people with any shred of decency has dropped off and gone onto newer, better things with nicer people who didn't scream and hurl abuse for any decision made.
I'd also like to take the moment to apologise to every single individual I've given unnecessary shit to while on here; I was part of the problem myself at times. In particular, @videogamesm12 and @Alco_Rs11 for being part of their removal, I didn't seem to understand just how much everyone put into it. But also towards Taah, Telepshoreo, Ryan, and Seth because I know I gave you guys a lot of shit in my time. That being said, there are some of you (in particular aurora and ivan) who I have zero regrets towards, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck you. People like you are what ruined this place, and I don't regret the shit i gave you.
I truly hope this thread makes people reconsider starting anew, because it truly isn't worth it. It'll grind you down, and you'll soon regret doing it. Although, knowing the people of TF this thread won't serve as a warning, it'll likely be picked apart and "debunked", before being ignored or whatever.
Hasta la vista TF
- Luke
Now, I'm going to speak honestly about my time and the person I became while on TF, in the context of the birthday event and what it's really opened my eyes to.
Background
Once upon a time, TF was created as a free-op anarchy server by markbyron. I'm not too familiar with the extended history, but it grew over time as a community server. Things weren't nice, but there was certainly a community feel around it. People to this day still remember things fondly, and for a while it boomed. TF was popular, by the time I joined at least there were 30+ players on daily, and an extensive admin team consisting of 4 main ranks (Super, Telnet, Telnet Clan, Senior). Things were simply better, there wasn't such a huge divide back then. Yeah, there were issues (i.e. marco, savnith, scutix) but ultimately that was just meaningless drama that (from what I could tell) had no long term effect on anybody. markbyron then ultimately resigned from day-to-day owner, and I'm guessing it had to do with scutix's revolution. This was the first sign of things to come, in hindsight. Please somebody correct me if there's any inaccuracies.
On the last day of July in 2018, I joined TotalFreedom after being introduced it by at the time admins LightWarp and Lionnco. Immediately, the server was.. interesting. I joined at the end of Windows' time, while markbyron was still basically running things behind the scenes. Later that year, markbyron resigned. The staff also decided they'd had enough of the EAO at the time Infamas, and elected to get him removed, which also sparked Windows to go MIA because, simply, the community got too much for him. Granted he had some personal struggles as well financially speaking, but he left.
In his wake, Seth took over the server. And that was, in my view, the final nail in the coffin for TF. I wasn't there long by that point admittedly, but in hindsight I think by that point TF had died, something else had taken its place. Seth was a good man, but he was a pushover. His friend group (named smartnt) then eventually just made the server into their private little playground, and people who used to enjoy what used to be TotalFreedom left. Some came back, but the server was a changed place - the community discovered the power of peer pressure, but for a while Seth seemed to be on top of things.
This was, until a member of the community made a vote-off post for Seth. Seth then subsequently snapped and attempted to delete everything. Seth left because he couldn't handle the community anymore. The member of the community has bragged god knows how many times of his actions there since, for whatever reason, but I'll touch on that later.
Then, Ryan Wild took over.
There's a lot of things you could say about Ryan, but my view (as it has been) is that that man cared. And he did his best, despite everything. This latest birthday event really opened my eyes here, Ryan made choices that he felt was best, whether it was for safeguarding or any other reason. Yeah, I don't agree with every single decision, but I'm struggling to find any decision that I think was made out of malice, or because he simply wanted to abuse.
Ryan ultimately inherited a corpse, a zombified version of a community that had been long dead, devoid of decent people. And throughout his time, he had to deal with so much shit that I'm not entirely sure was publicised, all because he was owner of a fucking minecraft server. And it was around this time that I rose to become a quasi-executive myself, and I saw firsthand just the amount of shit that had to be dealt with. I had to deal with a horrible amount of shit myself, and being honest it took it's toll on me.
Around then, a group from a spinoff server, filled with some of the most disgusting people I've ever been unfortunate enough to encounter, decided they'd fuck everything up. I'm not sorry to directly call out the likes of decyj145, most of you know them as "Declan", although their chosen name is now Aurora and I will refer to them as such for the rest of this thread. Aurora is just one example, of everything wrong with the server, it was somebody with an extreme victim complex who blamed everybody else for their horrific actions, always wanting more but never trying to be a half decent person. This group, from IPTFreedom, then effectively DDOS'd the forum, took down the Discord that I had spent years working on, and fucked up the actual server beyond repair. You also had LOSERS like the granite castle but they are irrelevant.
So Ryan, seeing how he'd have to spend like weeks unfucking everything, decided to end things there. I don't think that's unfair. People seem to forget that Ryan (and anybody else) have real lives, and they seem to forget that TF was meant to be a hobby, something done for fun, but what fun was moderating and managing something that actively hated you for existing?
Think about it, everybody was quick to criticise me, Ryan, even recently Taahanis and Telesphoreo for wanting to end things, but why would we go out of our way and spend money and disgusting amounts of time for a community that actively witchhunts, doxes, and abuses you?
So Ryan shut down TF, and again in it's wake came Telepshoreo and Taahanis to try and resuscitate the broken and decayed corpse of something that once was. And the issues just came right back. An ungrateful community, with a weird superiority complex returned, and you couldn't make a single decision without it being scrutinized to fuck. The server was then shut down for good, once and for all.
Again, I can't blame Taah or Teles for a single decision they've made. Yeah, we weren't perfect, but we tried our best.
The Birthday event
Telesphoreo and Taahanis decided to re-open TF for it's birthday. The idea was simply to have a good time, and to enjoy something that used to be here that isn't anymore. Except, the issues came straight back. Within four hours, I was being hounded about bans. People rejoined just to cause problems. I had to ban a user because I deemed them a threat to the safety of the community, and I'm not on about they'll make some sus comments and move off, I mean I have seen evidence that their behaviour has lead to direct harm to others. The community was almost hit by a nuke because of this individual, with consequences far worse than I can even describe. And yes, I have heard the defences, but I do not believe the defences, I believe the evidence I saw right before me. And if I did not ban this user, I would have risked the personal lives of so many people who would have been targetted in subsequent attacks.
So I banned the user, as was my right to do. And I didn't expect compliance and blind trust, nor did I expect people to even be happy about it. But instead, my DMs were flooded by people who didn't even know why the user was banned, but were arguing that we were wrong anyway. As in, people were arguing and telling me that I was wrong, but couldn't even tell me what I was wrong about. And don't be mistaken, I could be wrong. But I made a decision, a decision that I stand by, a decision to protect people's personal lives, and the very people I had in mind who would be a target of the attacks were the very people accusing me of being wrong.
And it drained me. Imagine trying your hardest, putting yourself in a firing line, to try and help people who just abused you. I put myself in a lot of danger (or it seemed so at the time), trying to ensure nothing happened, and I'm not even asking for a thank you, I only ask for patience. Again, I'm not asking anybody to be a yes man, but I'm asking that they just respect my decision.
But that wasn't going to happen, and it'd never happen. In the background I discussed the various owners of TF, and there's only one common factor, the community. TF is a community full of people who think they know better, who ask and ask but never give. You'd have admins like quack, who tell me my actions could lead to someone committing suicide. Funnily enough, for some reason he's been trusted with a phoenix server of his own, although he'll crack (quack?) at the first sign of trouble. You'd have users who demand everything goes their way and would never be happy with anything we did, and you'd have people who abuse and abuse, and expect you to take it smiling.
The final straw for me was having someone I considered a friend accuse me of backstabbing them. Erin, someone who I used to have a lot of respect for, decided she'd make friends with Aurora a while back. And that's okay, I don't care who is friends with who, except Erin then started openly siding with Aurora over things that happened. I'm less okay with that, but I still respect her decision to do so. Although, I find it incredibly ironic that she'd accuse me of backstabbing whilst stabbing people in the community in the back.
So anyway I removed the Discord mod team, as they were redundant and served no purpose; the server was dead, there was no need. Erin decided to take this personally, and went apeshit in general chat accusing me of whatever. And it hurt quite frankly, to see someone I respected and somebody I thought wouldn't do something like that did that anyway. It was the final straw in a long list of bullshit things to happen on TF.
--------
I'm making this thread as what I can only hope to be a detailed account of what happened to TF, as somebody who has been just about every rank so far. In short, it's got a horrible community, combined with a bunch of degenerates on the outside who find it funny to fuck with people at a personal level. Nowadays it's just an amalgamation of all the worst parts of what used to be there, most people with any shred of decency has dropped off and gone onto newer, better things with nicer people who didn't scream and hurl abuse for any decision made.
I'd also like to take the moment to apologise to every single individual I've given unnecessary shit to while on here; I was part of the problem myself at times. In particular, @videogamesm12 and @Alco_Rs11 for being part of their removal, I didn't seem to understand just how much everyone put into it. But also towards Taah, Telepshoreo, Ryan, and Seth because I know I gave you guys a lot of shit in my time. That being said, there are some of you (in particular aurora and ivan) who I have zero regrets towards, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck you. People like you are what ruined this place, and I don't regret the shit i gave you.
I truly hope this thread makes people reconsider starting anew, because it truly isn't worth it. It'll grind you down, and you'll soon regret doing it. Although, knowing the people of TF this thread won't serve as a warning, it'll likely be picked apart and "debunked", before being ignored or whatever.
Hasta la vista TF
- Luke
Last edited:
