The Rise and Fall of the Last Emperor of TWC

[HorseArcher]

Publishers weren't switched from SEGA to Activision, SEGA bought CA and now own the company.

For that to happen, CA had to make and sign the agreement, since they aren't just slaves to throw around between publishers, and also SEGA had to offer a good money to have CA to leave Activision. Remember, primarly it is the software company, who chooses publishers, not the other way around.

[MCM]

This reminds me of my AAR style of writing

stay tuned for more......

Great read HA

[Simetrical]

For that to happen, CA had to make and sign the agreement, since they aren't just slaves to throw around between publishers, and also SEGA had to offer a good money to have CA to leave Activision.

Just to nitpick: Activision didn't ever own CA. It was owned by its founder, Tim Ansell. He then made the decision to sell the company to SEGA, which was his legal right as its owner, and he didn't have to involve anyone else in the company (although he might have, I don't know). SEGA also paid Activision, of course, to buy off any contracts it had with CA.

[Garbarsardar]

For Garb only : After all the crap I typed..one day I have risen as the emperor, and then fallen. End of story.

Parsimony and accuracy are abundant here. Could you please expand now?

Ah, the petition days, I made one my first posts in that thread...however it has now disapeared and only few traces remain...

(while some other petitions are left untouched-alas for the selective scythe of time..)

[HorseArcher]

I have forgotten about this thread. ...I will continue soon !

[jimkatalanos]

I have forgotten about this thread. ...I will continue soon !

What a shame.
You have forgotten all of us.

[Harry Lime]

Ahh yes, the infamous siege bug. How we laughed when they said it was a 'feature', how we seethed when they said they wouldn't fix it, how we waited & waited & waited.....

Excellent read! You joined only 3 months earlier than myself so I can remember much of what you've written, although I lurked all the way through it..except for the petition, I signed that.

[Freddie]

I have forgotten about this thread. ...I will continue soon !

I hope you don't drive buses for a living.

[Simetrical]

Well, it would be better than working on nuclear secrets.

[removeduser_426582376423734]

I'm going to say what we're all thinking... Crandar is your fault?

[Marshal Qin]

Also, just about that time I have learned about the anti-CA problem we had and it really gave its setbacks, since no CA member visited the board. TWC was an outlaw, due to some actions and decisions coming from the top, for which I will not go into, because I don't know too much about it, beside the whole deal with CA suing Paul (the original owner) due to some copyright violation and piracy of certain videos. (don't worry I have read those threads in the staff forum locker). But again, I'm not going to discuss who is right or wrong, all I know, that the damage was done and it was definitely a
dark stain on TWC.

hehe totalwarcenter.com and the dreaded videos lol. British TV produced a series called Time commanders using the RTW engine. People saved and uploaded the videos so everyone could see them and CA had a dummy spit. Dunno why, considering it was public TV AND free advertising.. I though it was Sib that was sued, and it pretty much turned him, and a fair percentage of TW fans against CA, it was actually a plus for the TWC and atracted a lot of forumites from the official forums. I think Sibs comment was something along the lines of "3 years promoting the TW franchise and the biggest fansite on the net and they sue me for advertising their product - **** them", and I agreed completely.

There was also the Borispavlovgrosny and the old guard issues. I think there was even a breakaway forum started which died stillborn.

Yeah HA, I didnt' understand the acrimony directed at you when the crandar stuff happened and the forum was hacked. you did what you did to save it and stop the rot afaik, and it worked. It was a time when drastic measures were called for and you took the steps you thought necessary to save TWC. Testimony to your success is the fact that it is still here and stronger than ever.

[Simetrical]

I'm going to say what we're all thinking... Crandar is your fault?

Crandar was Siblesz's fault. And maybe Mithras', later, since Spartan once said Crandar was given shell access during the hacker attacks (above Sulla's and Spartan's heads).

Yeah HA, I didnt' understand the acrimony directed at you when the crandar stuff happened and the forum was hacked. you did what you did to save it and stop the rot afaik, and it worked. It was a time when drastic measures were called for and you took the steps you thought necessary to save TWC. Testimony to your success is the fact that it is still here and stronger than ever.

HA didn't do much during the hacker stuff that I recall. Did he? All the acrimony was directed at Spartan, and rightfully so. He randomly banned people for annoying him, basically, as though he couldn't ignore people just because there was a hacker lurking about and so some kind of "martial law" was necessary. Not to mention his previous involvement in the RTR chat log fiasco. TWC survived in spite of that kind of thing, not because of it. If you think we did just fine, look at people like GEN who left permanently because of their maltreatment, and Boris who left for months, and others as well whose names escape me.

[Marshal Qin]

I'm pretty sure HA was in there somewhere, maybe just before Spartan? Its all a bit fuzzy now. I definately remember HA getting a hard time for some reason.

TWC had already reached critical mass and there was an underlying structure that was still solid, so even with all the random stuff going on, the simple fact that we still had the basics and that they were maintained, meant that it kept going. Someone could easily have jumped in and changed the way the whole thing operated, and that probably would have been the death knell.

[Garbarsardar]

I'm pretty sure HA was in there somewhere, maybe just before Spartan? Its all a bit fuzzy now. I definately remember HA getting a hard time for some reason.

TWC had already reached critical mass and there was an underlying structure that was still solid, so even with all the random stuff going on, the simple fact that we still had the basics and that they were maintained, meant that it kept going. Someone could easily have jumped in and changed the way the whole thing operated, and that probably would have been the death knell.

Your recollections are fuzzy, indeed...

HA at the time of the hacker+"hacker"+dictatorship events was still low in the food chain, below Spartan, Sulla and (the unfortunately lost) Smack. He did his job in "pacifying" TWC as every other moderator at the time (Carousel, Cunobelin etc) and did not get any slack for this (and why should he). As Sim said Spartan got most of the blame and rightfully so.

We have to move a year ahead in time to reach the period where Archer starts getting some "pressure". The first instance was Sim's ill fated attempt to remove him (tBP attempted to ostracise Sim for this one-lol). More would follow later.

[Marshal Qin]

Damn. I blame the drugs, or living on another planet (China)

[HorseArcher]

HA didn't do much during the hacker stuff that I recall. Did he? All the acrimony was directed at Spartan, and rightfully so. He randomly banned people for annoying him, basically, as though he couldn't ignore people just because there was a hacker lurking about and so some kind of "martial law" was necessary. Not to mention his previous involvement in the RTR chat log fiasco. TWC survived in spite of that kind of thing, not because of it. If you think we did just fine, look at people like GEN who left permanently because of their maltreatment, and Boris who left for months, and others as well whose names escape me.

I have completely forgotten about this thread...I'll try to catch up from where I left off.

About the quoting..it's correct. I had no idea about the hacker attack and neither about the RTR stuff, I actually got to know about these after several hours of the incident and even though i was a moderator at the time, I knew about the happening as much as a regular member. Later I was told to crack down on those who flame and spam the threads and the only incident I remember was clashing with tBP and Manji in a thread, which was eventually closed after.

Honestly, I still have no idea now who was behind the hacker attack, and the RTR stuff is a complicated issue and I had no part in it, beside asking the RTR crew to stay aboard regardless of the incident.

edit: alright alright..I got some time, (i'm lazy, didn't go to work today) so back at continuation of the first post..


So let's jump back at the time when I was applying for a civitate.

It started, with me helping around in the TWC center help section with members having problems with the RTW game and I figured if I keep doing it, eventually someone will notice my actions.

It was indeed noticed by Marenostrum , who was lurking around with some serious badges and reputation, he sent me a pm, if I would be willing to join the civitate class.

So I did and shortly after I was awarded with the civitate badge and I have begun to work more seriously with the RTW game.

The dreaded "blood mod" (it is still somewhere in the modding forums) for RTW that made start digging around in the RTW folders to mod around, and since I hate failure and I don't quit too easily I just kept working on it, and it still haunts me that I couldn't crack the code to make a realistic blood mod for RTW.

Later on, I started to be more involved with other mods, since I started to understand the structure and coding of RTW and the ease of being a modifiable game, I looked into several projects.

My second project (after the blood mod) was the hidden faction specific walls in RTW (they are there still, unused) and the lost units (thrown out half-done units by CA), for both I got ideas by just reading various threads and poking around in the files.
Burebista - close friend of Spartan at the time - noticed me , I can't remember what it was exactly , (one of my modding threads) and asked for a help with a modding problem.

When all these things were going on, the forum was still in its baby-shoes with approximately 3-4000 members and CA still despised TWC as a renegade forum and favored the .org over us.

Meanwhile something serious happened, specifically about Burebista and his attempt to gather modders into a group, and his propaganda expanded beyond TWC forum's limits into the .org territory and the .org admins didn't like what they saw (having .org modders leaving and going under one banner) and there was a serious discussion here within TWC , between the admin of TWC (siblesz) and the admins of the org.

Burebista was found guilty of pulling various members around to join a group (which eventually became the Europe Barbarorum ), making them abandon their previous work (someone can fill me in more in this, because I might be only partially right here) and Bureb became emotional about having his friend - Spartan- "betraying him" over this issue and voting against him.

At this point today , I am safe to say, that Siblesz was sharing his account with Spartan for a certain amount of time and sometimes it was Spartan who posted under Siblesz' account (and made decisions) so anyway, it's hard to determine today of how much influence Spartan or Siblesz had individually on the TWC forum, because we just don't really know which post ( or decision) came from either Spartan or Siblesz.

Somewhere here, it's worth to mention, that I was put up as a "Help Center Manager" here in TWC with some moderation capabilities given in the help section and I was doing my business and mostly staying out of politics of TWC and civitate stuff in the Curia.
Down the line, I have noticed a fellow "helper" during my reign in the help center, namely Crandar, who made his grand entrance by doing exactly what I was doing , and have no doubt about this, he wasn't the monster (at the time) he was made out to be at a later point of time.

I must have made some impression on the staff at the time, because I was asked to join the moderator's crew called "Quaestors" - which were local moderators in assigned areas on TWC. So I did and I liked my new badge and all.. but other things started to happen of which I mostly (or completely) had no part of it whatsoever and my role on TWC was still limited to moderation and almost no participation in Curia business and no desire to entangle myself with internal affairs of the Staff and other members.

Just a week or 2 later, one day I logged onto TWC and found something surprising, and that was my new shiny Praetor badge, for which I found no clearl explanation why (and how) I was awarded so quickly and - to tell you the truth- I didn't really look for any reason, besides, that they needed some serious global moderators to keep the forum in line.

At this time, Spartan was almost in full-control of TWC, if not by the badge, but by influence within the staff forums and he favored me for having my unbiased way of doing things and keeping out the sensitive stuff about the Staff vs Curia.
Of couse, my sudden promotions and quick rise brought on some hars critiques from the Curia, namely tBP and some others, who were labeling me as a lapdog of Spartan or more correctly quoted "bootlicker" , for which I really made no comment whatsoever, didn't even notice the smears until someone brought it to my attention by an email , about threads and posts within the Curia (which I have hardly visited at the time).

It is also worth to mention of the rise of a formal admin at the time who has caused me (and the forum) a lot of trouble by his untimely abandoning "no show" for months, Namely Sulla the first "Emperor" of TWC.


more about him and me later..

[Garbarsardar]

Honestly, I still have no idea now who was behind the hacker attack, and the RTR stuff is a complicated issue and I had no part in it, beside asking the RTR crew to stay aboard regardless of the incident.

At this point today , I am safe to say, that Siblesz was sharing his account with Spartan for a certain amount of time and sometimes it was Spartan who posted under Siblesz' account (and made decisions) so anyway, it's hard to determine today of how much influence Spartan or Siblesz had individually on the TWC forum, because we just don't really know which post ( or decision) came from either Spartan or Siblesz.

Since it's been a while since all those happened let's put some things straight.

1.Spartan makes public the logs of the RTR chat where they're badmouthing EB (then part of Spartan's Trivium.

2. The forum is hacked. The hacker hacks into the account of Sibs and starts deleting EB and later RTR stuff.

3. The only official information comes by Mithras: he was contacted by a hacker who told him he was taking part in a hacker competition (yes, Mithras was that clever)

4. "Because" of the hack Spartan takes over TWC.

Until now I had some doubts about the hack. I tended to believe that Tyr was behind it.

See, I did not know that Spartan did not need to "hack" Sib's account...

Who would believe that I was right all along???

Marshal Qin, I'm happy that you do your best to provide some information about what happened. Permit me to offer my account, (which was lost during the attacks) in order to keep the information flow about these sad events.

This is an attempt to record the events of the past two weeks which led to the present state of affairs. The author is well aware that there is no such thing as objective history; however he did his best to present mostly facts with a minimal subjectivity, which inevitably, is part of his point of view.

Two weeks ago the administration of this site, posted under the Hexagon form (an administrative user account) the IIRC logs of a conversation between members of the RTR mod. In this conversation that took part outside the TWC forums, the said members were commenting (*****innn being a more appropriate term) about EB another mod hosted by TWC. At the time, many thought of the logs publication as a questionable act that only inflamed tensions and that as such could be avoided, or that dealing with the issue in private would be wiser, since apart from the gossip nobody gained anything and nothing was solved.

Before anyone had the chance to put these questions in the Cvria (the administrative forum) a hacking attack was launched against TWC. The hacker initially deleted the EB mod's forums and some hours later proceeded to delete the RTR and SPQR forums. We all probably have some idea about hack attacks. Why the perpetrator chose the specific mods and the specific timing remains unknown.

As a result two members of the Forum, acted immediately, blocking the administrative accounts, (since the perpetrator hacked using the account of Sib, member of the triumvirate and absent at the time) and later the forum was restored.

Sib made aware of the situation enabled the members with absolute power, in order to restore and safeguard the function of the forum, while Mithras the site owners’ administrator stepped in to assist. At the same time the community offered unanimous support to the actions of the two members, Sulla and Spartan.

(You are all probably aware of this joke: A man is falling from the
20th floor of a building and on his way down while he passes in front of successive floors he keeps repeating to himself:" Until now all is
well, until now all is well… ")

Until then all was well.
Unfortunately after this point the accounts of the events multiply.
Apparently during the efforts to contain the threat, and old member of the staff, Crandar, was brought on board to help. This member was a former moderator demoted for "abuse of power" and part of the pact related to the resignation of the Triumvirate member BPG,referred to him:
"I am happy to announce that with my resignation comes the demotion of Crandar to senatorii, a rank he will receive for his duties to the site, and a demotion for he will receive for his misuse of power. I will take a place amongst the civitates and not the senatorii, so as to not share ranks with him. I am leaving on a warranty that he, Crandar, will never again be put in any position of power, staff or otherwise (UL, etc). I call on you to make sure this is realized."

Crandar, using the hex account was responsible for numerous moderation actions, not least of which were the alterations to BPG account. It should be noted,that it was Crandar that did this, not Spartan. Crandar’s own account was that of a senatorii, with no power. However, brought back by Spartan and Mithras due to his profession (network security) he was given admin powers. Spartan later confirmed that Crandar had changed the hexagon passwords, and that Crandar had sole use of the hexagon account, except for Mithras.

Among Crandars other, behind the scenes actions was the removal of GEN. Several people have tried to avoid responsibility for this. Spartan claimed mithras ordered him to do it, mithras said he had nothing to do with it. It is my personal belief crandar was settling old scores.

Spartan, confronted with this fact stated that:

"The boris deal does not affect me or my current assignment."

Which leads to the legitimate question: Why then Crandar was not using his personal account and was hiding behind the anonymity of Hexagon ?

Spartan, originally wished to keep crandars involvement a secret, however, more and more evidence of the fact became apprent to members and staff alike, until spartan was confronted over the issue, and confirmed to tBp and Profler.

It should be noted Sulla was, at the time completely unaware of all this. He was at a family business Friday evening until Monday night, and would have returned today.

Anyway what followed was a wave of resignations, banning and suspensions of many members of TWC, and also demotions and resignations from staff members. At the same time Mithras informed us that he has been contacted by a hacker who told him that he is taking part in a hacking competition. Why the hacker decided to establish contact and why he operated outside the modus operandum of most hackers (selective deletions, no defacing …) is still unknown.

Two days ago the attack was resumed targeting again the RTR mod but also the Symposium which was lately full of threads accusing the present administration, Again there is no answer on why the hacker was interested in deleting those specific posts.

After the recovery of the site and the partial restoration of the posts what remains to be answered is if TWC will be again a democracy or it will take a shape similar to the other forums owned by Ogre's Net.

The use of the "old" titles like civitates, praetors and triumvirate which at this point represent nothing, only adds to the confusion about the state and future of the cite.
thank you.


(to be continued?)http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showp...0&postcount=54

[Simetrical]

Burebista was found guilty of pulling various members around to join a group (which eventually became the Europe Barbarorum ), making them abandon their previous work (someone can fill me in more in this, because I might be only partially right here) and Bureb became emotional about having his friend - Spartan- "betraying him" over this issue and voting against him.

I remember the drama but not exactly its causes. However, the organization was the Trivium Organization, not EB. EB was a part of Trivium, although I never really saw it as being that in anything but name, personally. It didn't do too much sharing of its work, which was what Trivium was all about. Vercingetorix's PAK extractor and other vital tools were shared, and he was certainly an EB member, but that's about it AFAIR. Mostly they shared nothing until their release, which was much later, and even then I definitely remember (as an EB member) that all sharing requests were discussed and voted on by the team, and not uncommonly rejected.

At this point today , I am safe to say, that Siblesz was sharing his account with Spartan for a certain amount of time and sometimes it was Spartan who posted under Siblesz' account (and made decisions) so anyway, it's hard to determine today of how much influence Spartan or Siblesz had individually on the TWC forum, because we just don't really know which post ( or decision) came from either Spartan or Siblesz.

Really? Why do you think this? I had never heard of that before. Doing an IP search, I can say that at least for the posts that are still around, there's no overlap in IP addresses used. IP addresses from before the board switch seem to be preserved accurately, so if there was any overlap, either Spartan was deliberately hiding his tracks or the posts have been pruned.

Since it's been a while since all those happened let's put some things straight.

1.Spartan makes public the logs of the RTR chat where they're badmouthing EB (then part of Spartan's Trivium.

2. The forum is hacked. The hacker hacks into the account of Sibs and starts deleting EB and later RTR stuff.

3. The only official information comes by Mithras: he was contacted by a hacker who told him he was taking part in a hacker competition (yes, Mithras was that clever)

4. "Because" of the hack Spartan takes over TWC.

Until now I had some doubts about the hack. I tended to believe that Tyr was behind it.

See, I did not know that Spartan did not need to "hack" Sib's account...

Who would believe that I was right all along???

Hmm. I don't agree with that analysis, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the initial deletions were done using Paul's account, not Siblesz's. That's why Sulla spotted that they were weird and knew to take action: Paul had been inactive for ages. Sulla then de-adminned everyone but himself, including Siblesz (and GEN, etc.), so there would be no use having access to Sibs' account at any stage, if memory serves.

Second of all, IP addresses for all admin actions are logged, and there were no obvious matches on the IP address. As I recall, we were told it was a Spanish IP address, so whoever did it probably used a proxy, which I don't know if Spartan would have known enough to do.

Third of all, Spartan was not given control, Sulla was. Sulla only delegated control to Spartan temporarily for a week or two while he was away on a business trip. When he returned, Spartan stepped down to second, and very shortly afterward fell inactive, then retired entirely. (I recall the reason for his retirement, which he told to staff, but I don't know if he ever made it public and don't know if he would want it to be made public.)

If your recollection differs from mine here, we can do a little digging to confirm or disconfirm.

Anyway, the obvious culprit here of the known quantities would be Crandar. This is not long after he was fired; he was a network technician who would definitely know how to hack the forum, or could easily find out; and in the wake of the hacker, he appeared and offered his assistance, upon which he was evidently given shell access by Mithras (at least administrator access), which he then abused by using the Hexagon account to give instructions to moderators, and ban or deface the accounts of members who had disliked him. We have motive and we have capability, which is more than can be said for probably anyone else involved except maybe Sulla (which is a real stretch).

Tyr, on the other hand, I knew pretty well, and I'll be damned if he could hack his way out of a wet paper bag. Someone like bouis could have figured out how to do it, probably, and he was certainly pissed off at TWC, but again, I knew him fairly well, and he would not have even considered doing something so underhanded. (Tyr certainly would have.) Maybe Deimos, who was not the most scrupulous fellow that I could see, and for all I know knew about hacking (he was always very secretive); or someone else from the RTR team. But I doubt it.

It could have just been a random malicious hacker. They do exist, certainly. But the first forum he deleted, I think, was the EB forum, and this within hours of the RTR log crisis, so that indicates he was likely an insider aware of the issue. I'm putting my money on either Crandar or a random disgruntled RTR fan. Crandar was an ass, but I don't know if he was that amoral or opportunistic. He mostly did seem to want to improve the forum, as far as I could tell.

Honestly, though, we'll never know.

[Garbarsardar]

I never said that Spartan did the hack; however I think he was at least aware of Crandar's actions (obviously Crandar was the one to physically do it) and I think he used Paul's account either because using Sib's would be a dead giveaway (since Sibs was aware that Spartan used his account) or simply because Crandar (or Spartan) had access to it too. Later he used the Hex account to post (and re-configure various accounts).

Spartan stepped down indeed, but we will never know if a) it was part of the plan b) it was for the reason you know c) it was the fallout from the BGreman incident

The timing of the initial deletions by Crandar cannot be pure coincidence; it has to be a response to the RTR incident.

The Spanish IP, I heard of too and it points to a someone with technical knowledge. The story that certain people circulated was that Tyr used some "hacker", but I never really believed that; I think it was part of the cover-up.

[MCM]

Dont mention hacking...lol

That was a royal pain in the *** that destroyed the old RTR forums as well