Avalon Community Servers has been a community that cares about its members, always reaching out to all players, and we have offered our infrastructure to players to launch a new game. Our servers have offered quality from the beginning, carefully prepared and specifically configured to offer the best performance to all players, within the technical feasibility and following the recommendations of the developers and official partners (when possible), in addition to committing to fair and transparent moderation based on properly developed and approved criteria and protocols, without bias.
AvalonCS welcomed several players who were very happy with our community and the way we worked, and we made an interesting offer: opening servers for Fistful of Frags, an unconventional and not very popular game. Although the game didn’t have a significant community, we accepted the request to create servers to please our community and other players looking for new experiences. For many years, it has been one of the best servers in terms of performance and quality, something appreciated by many players, including those outside our community.
To this end, the current communications manager (or whatever his position is called) and a member of the development team for the game “Judge” was appointed as Administrator. He was a member of the community until a few weeks ago, when he was expelled from the community for his incompetence and negligence in server management (as he worked for an external community).
A few weeks ago, our regular players urgently contacted the administrators to inform us that our servers were not appearing in the game’s server list and could only be accessed manually through the game console and by knowing the IP address.
After a thorough review of the matter and several contacts with Steam and Valve, we discovered that they were working perfectly and communicating with the Steam servers without issue, but that we had been included in the blocked server file, along with IP addresses from other communities. This file is included in all Half-Life-based games that use the Source engine and should always be empty, as the decision to block servers or not is solely at the discretion of the player, never the developers.
This situation arose as a personal revenge by the aforementioned former administrator for having been justifiably expelled from the community. This type of action sets a dangerous precedent and represents irresponsible behavior, resulting in a significant loss of players who rely exclusively on our community and the values it represents, as well as an indirect warning to all players.
However, this is not an isolated case, as other communities have reported on their social media (since comments on the Steam forums are not allowed without being censored by the game team) having experienced this type of situation with their servers. This demonstrates that the FoF team has fallen into a spiral of hatred and witch hunts that has resulted in the loss of the few remaining communities, leaving barely 100 players in this game compared to just over 500 when we started.
We attempted to resolve the issue amicably with both players (the developer and the former administrator), but received no response after months. To prevent further escalation of attacks and continue with our strategy, and for the benefit of our community, the administrative team decided to permanently shut down our servers for that game and dedicate them to other games requested by our community that are more respectful and open to players.
Several months ago, we issued a severe warning about the danger to communities that continued to operate in the game at their discretion. Although our community never engages in tabloids, sensationalism, or persecuting individuals or communities, we are exceptionally editing this article, not to point fingers, but to warn about the individuals behind a situation that has never occurred in any game.
We have recently discovered that the development team has done something unprecedented: they have publicly made false accusations against a community, using the Steam ad system. Furthermore, not just once, adding to another topic as can be seen in this backup copy, but they have issued an exclusive statement with the corresponding defamation.
The matter is even more serious when the owner of a community is a friend; hate crimes are fully justified. Here’s an article where a player denounces the administrator’s antisemitism, and all he receives from the official team is a lame justification for not taking action and a mild justification for this owner, who promotes hatred based on religious and ethnic grounds.
This type of action confirms the failure of a very good and fun game idea, serving to satisfy the imperative need for power of mediocre characters who behave like dictators and are only looking for a false way to give meaning to their empty lives, while expelling those who only seek peace, fun, and camaraderie.