NOTE: BAUER IS A BIT DELUSIONAL; HIS ASSUMPTIONS MAY BE ENTIRELY FALSE.
It is Bauer's opinion that if this is TimtheEnchanter's enraged chinese leecher causing this problem (who I did see the same morning on rageball with Tim for a moment, and they were clearly leeching with 4 characters), then we should capitulate. If there is nothing else we can do about this problem other than give in the the damned chinese leecher's fit throwing, we have to give in.
Here is a list of why I think this is the best course of action:
1) It is killing the NA community's population.
2) It is ruining strat for everyone, not just NA.
3) If one chinese leecher is the cost of having the server up for NA's sake, it is worth it.
4) Although the idea of capitulating to cheaters is unsavory in the extreme, there appears to be no other option we have.
5) If this continues for another few weeks, NA community may very well just die. School is starting. Many of our players are college and high school students about to start the fall semester. They will find something else to do if they can't really play cRPG the way it's necessary to play it (with a working website). People may or may not come back once this guy gives up.
6) This is not going to cause a precedent for other players who get banned. 99.9% (or slightly less than that) are not going to pull this sort of stunt if they get banned. Most aren't even capable of it. If we just let this bastard leech and have admins temp ban him if we see him for no more than 24 hours, the problem may very well go away.
7) How is a chinese leecher going to affect the NA, SA, AU, and EU communities by leeching anyways? We have little to no contact with the chinese players. They don't seem to be involved in strat. They don't come on our servers for more than a few hours a day and only in relatively small numbers, therefore they have little affect on the balance. Unless I am missing something crucial, the only real thing that would happen because of this leecher is extremely limited price inflation of looms, etc. Probably none at all, honestly.
8) Do we really even care about the China community and what it does? They have enough problems of their own with their economy in the shitter.
9) THIS IS UNFAIR TO THE NA COMMUNITY. This is a very limited problem for the EU community because the server is up until like 4ish EST...Which is what, like 10PM in Austria and Germany? That gives most EU players ample time to get their business done, retire, et cetera before the server goes down. If NA dies because of this, it will, most likely, have some sort of negative consequence for the EU community.
Because of all this the only prudent and proper course is to unban this guy and hope that he stops, as I have already stated.
NOTE: This is all assuming that he's the cause of the sever being down during NA primetime.
I'd also like to remind all of you that you can get your business done through the morning and into the afternoon on the website if you're NA. I know a lot of you have lives and don't want to or can't get on during these hours, but that option is available to you.
Bauer
