[FoF] We close Fistful of Frags servers due to devs censorship

26/May/2023 | FoF

We regret that our community is not to the liking of the game development team, after many years selflessly offering quality servers, specifically prepared to offer the best performance, fair and transparent moderation following the internal protocols of our community and carefully complying with the conditions and standards defined by the developer. Our servers doesn’t appear anymore in the master list.

We are totally unaware of the reasons why this situation has come to be and we are surprised that a developer has taken this action against our community. These types of actions represent a dangerous precedent and an irresponsible action since it represents a significant loss of players who trust exclusively in our community and the values it represents.

However, this is not something exclusive, as other communities have denounced on social networks (since the Steam forums cannot comment without being censored by the game team) having suffered censorship from their servers in the game, despite to comply with current legislation. All communities have in common some type of conflict with members of the game team who, well, were expelled from the community for breaking the rules while others left the community when they lost their powers as administrators due to lack of loyalty, malpractice and abuse between others.

These measures clearly do not comply with Valve’s Global Rules and Guidelines, nor the instructions that all developers (and the team of moderators) must follow to use the Steam services. In addition, Steam has a guide called Steam Best Practices in which it is based on its own experience and that of other important companies that use Steam as a platform where it performs a series of recommendations to manage the spaces that Steam offers for games on the platform and where (in the words of Steam staff) «developers are encouraged to be very careful when moderating their communities, especially when considering bans, as breaking them will lead to anger, diminished confidence in the product, and may ultimately be detrimental to the success of the game.»

As a solution to this situation we have decided to permanently close our Fistful of Frags servers and take advantage of the servers for other more profitable games, more in line with the demands of our community and above all more respectful and open to players. We have also decided to communicate this to Valve staff so that they can take action and enforce the law.