Both locals and globals screwed up by allowing this to happen, and I think it's pretty irresponsible that a PWA is in this thread crediting another player with "speeding up the inevitable." When Graal allows someone as unintelligent as MidNight Chill to run rampant for 5+ years, when all he does is harass the community and cause problems, you don't go and credit him for bringing down the server. You're just feeding into that creepy superiority complex of his. He isn't responsible for this. The staff are.
Admittedly, I didn't play much from 2009 onwards. During the brief periods I did, it seemed like the only loyal UN players that met the qualifications of Manager were probably Manta, Hoyt, Rage, Ph8, and a few others. Many didn't want to step up, so people who had no business being Manager were put in that position (Malinko, Spryte, Okilian, Stowen, HK, and so on). Globals aren't at fault for that. It's a consequence of how poor the UN community has been for a long time. Many of them had zero developmental capability or experience. I'm sure the majority who took the position saw it as something that could benefit them and their friends rather than an opportunity for them to improve the server.
The sad part is how UN went out of its way to try and integrate toxic players like MidNight into their community. When someone is attacking your server, you don't give them NPCs around the map. You don't let them sit in mass messages harassing players all day long. All of you, except Carlito, seemed afraid of MidNight. It's as if UN was so desperate for players, or not to be bothered, that you'd let him do anything he wanted. While Carlito probably handled it arrogantly at times, at least he didn't allow MidNight to walk all over UN like local staff did. Then, when Carlito would log off after handling janitorial duties, the entire server would talk badly about him and claim that he's the one responsible for UN's problems.
Go look at the visitor message that OP left in Carlito's profile, it's a prime example of what I mean. I mean, that's probably because OP himself is MidNight and he posted this thread specifically to get attention, but yeah.
That being said, I will admit that Carlito probably should not be in the position he is if he's going to get hacked every other week. It's pretty embarrassing to see a community so fearful of someone when the extent of what he can do is resolve IP through a Skype username (can't even do that anymore) and paste it into a UDP flooder that he probably pays $5/month for. I'm sure most of what has happened recently was the doing of Fogles, anyway. MidNight is in no way a "hacker" or someone to be afraid of. If you knew what his real life was like, you'd be anything but intimidated.
Back to UN's collapse being inevitable though: I disagree. It was avoidable. I'm glad it did happen though, because it's the UN community that brought it upon themselves. Globals could have done a lot more, but it's that awful lineage of management and players that acted as insiders for cancerous players, got hacked, continued to embrace said "hacker" in full Stockholm syndrome style, and inevitably allowed the entire situation to ruin the server.
So, congratulations, after more than a decade of pretending to be people he isn't and causing problems for the game, the trash-era UN community has finally given MidNight the reputation that he has craved for so long. The true loser here is iClassic though, because that's where the UN community will migrate to next. |