Yes you were winning the siege, it may not have been "close" but considering you had already started with a significant advantage in troops and equipment, I'd say we were doing pretty good. But when the servers came back up, half the defenders did not return to the battle. You took significantly less losses in both equipment and troops the second time around, in addition to being able to perfect your strategy.
The ideal thing to have done would have just moved the battle to the next day, to allow the defenders to rejoin the battle, since they were not on teamspeak and did not know to rejoin the battle.
The most important issue, is that the defenders were not notified to rejoin the battle, and instead of the original 60 players fighting against you, there were maybe 30, if that. That is why this is such a big issue, not that we were "winning" or anything like that.
Is this the best defence you can come up with? Okay, I really shouldn't even be replying to this as the facts are evident, but here goes...
A) Only chadz can change battle times, which he does rarely for any reason. Usually he effectively says "lulz deal with it."
B) People have brains: if they want to keep playing, they should rejoin on their own. It is the individual's fault if he doesn't come back, ATS has no blame in that. I always rejoin battles that crash as a merc. And I recall a lot more than 30 rejoining, more like 40-50.
C) We had no idea what would happen when the server crashed. personally I thought the battle would get bugged and ATS would lose everything (soldiers/equip). Fortunately that didn't happen and it went back to the start of the battle.
D) We did get a better strategy the second time around, simply because we had more experience attacking the castle. Throughout the battle we were getting more experience and getting better. The defenders should have done the same. Not our fault if they didn't take advantage of the opportunity.
Okay, and so it doesn't seem like I am derailing the thread, the point is this: ATS never did abuse the strat server, and does not abuse the siege or battle servers. ATS let lots of admin in from other clans and clan-less people, including myself who just recently joined the clan. Abusive admins have been weeded out as best as possible. LLJK on the other hand has a reputation so large that I need not say any more. Trolling, greifing, spamming, banning half the server for the lulz, and the like. The ONLY way you will prevent this is to keep LLJK away from the server box. If Classical will simply forward the money to chadz and not control the box, I will respect him greatly. However, I still see no reason to shut down a perfectly good server that we used for months. Keep both servers up if you are set on getting an official strat server, and fraps the entire battle on the ATS Strategus so you can report abuse. You won't find any.