What really happened.

I saw a certain blog, and as hypocritical as it might be, I thought it was pretentious and just generally full of crap. This is what I saw and experienced from the beginning of V3 until its final breath. I've been called deceptive, untrustworthy, etc, but what do you call the person who has stolen your money on multiple occasions, left the server in the hands of unqualified people, and has posted things like "I'm learning the first steps to money laundering"? There's more than that, but that's enough for these purposes.

I don't want any pity or whatever, but an important part of everything that has happened is my health. It has not been good for many years, and has been declining. I was in a lot of pain every day, and anyone with chronic pain will tell you that it gets difficult to handle it and keep things like anger under control. Its not an excuse, it was simply a factor in everything. Karei was made aware of it, since it could affect my job.


In November 2009, I joined Eternity with my guild and offered my palette set directly to Karei, then Kargha and Griffin. As we waited for the server to open, I chatted on IRC with a number of people including the staff and several major guildleaders. Because of bad experiences with past servers, I was scared to join - I didn't want to be harassed on a daily basis again. After a little while, I had a running joke with Karei about him wanting a "green card wife", and it made me feel somewhat more relaxed. This unfortunately led directly to the beginning of the harassment from SteveMcAwesome and his partner Vilya. With no other conceivable catalyst, he started insulting me with comments like "you're full of AIDs" and "STD-riddled whore". This did not stop until he left the server later on.

Around January or so, I applied to be a Support GM. I had experience at a server many times the size of Eternity, and I honestly loved to help people. I've always been one of the people who enjoys playing the game instead of living it like WoE-oriented players, so chatting with players and exploring new places was great fun for me. Around this time I had been harassed by some of the people who hated me from the past, and there was a lot of drama. Somehow I was still hired, and I decided to do my best to keep the GM face separate from everything to keep as much of the drama at bay. This was right before the big screw-up from Karei that lead to many guilds leaving, and I was still trying to get my bearings as a GM. I demanded that Karei tell me exactly what happened afterwards ( 2 days after, I believe ), and decided to stay while most of the remaining staff left. Eternity had already been blinded to the inactivity of many of the team through clever posts and carefully-worded answers from the GMs, and I still wanted to stay for the community. Even though I was being harassed, as a short-lived GM and several other people outed my identity, and the unhappy people who did not like that rules were actually being enforced.

This was when SteveMcAwesome left, March-ish. He was the one who checked the logs and made it public what he found - Karei making items that were not completely legitimate, such as Cold Medicine. I was relieved that the only other active Administrator besides Karei was leaving, because of his actions towards me. While he was there, I was not even good enough to be dirt on the bottom of his shoes no matter what I did. He refused to help me or listen to anything I asked of him - a player would need an Admin to do something, such as a name change or fix a bug, and he would ignore it every time it came from me. He admitted in public to disliking me, and would ban me from the GM's IRC channel just because he felt like it. He encouraged many other people to treat me in the same way, which just made the drama snowball. As much as I respected his coding and scripting ability and how vital they were to Eternity, I was happy to see him leave.

Eternity was with just one administrator and a small handful of GMs - Karei, Katsuragi, Colossus, Somniphobia... my memory fails here, but it wasn't many. There was still enough population that the GMs were not enough, and that stress made more go inactive and leave. I believe this was when I pressured Karei to hire Vermillion to script ( could be wrong about the timing ), as none of the rest of the team was capable and Kargha, Blue, and Jitsu were basically inactive. The remaining team called for an Admin to be appointed, and they seemed to want Katsuragi. Around May, Karei gave me more responsibilities including access to the logs - he was the only other person with access, and this essentially made me an Administrator without the title. He specifically said that he did not trust the rest of the team, and that they were all utterly incompetent. Since I was the closest thing to competent and potentially capable of administrative duties and responsibilities, I was trusted with it. I was scared as fuck. I know myself, and I never once felt like I was the right choice - but I'll be damned if I wasn't the best choice out of the rest of the team. Vermillion showed eagerness and enough ability to be helpful to the team and the server, and after we fought out our differences we worked together well enough. Somni was helpful but busy IRL, I really have nothing bad to say there. Katsuragi and the rest of the team disappeared except for a few visits every other month or longer. A GM was fired and banned for being irresponsible with his GM account ( important later ) - it was used to summon monsters and kill everyone on the map and let all the loot drop. My job consumed nearly every waking hour of every day, as well as keeping me up until odd hours to take care of things in the various timezones. I've seen the posts saying that a staff member should not be paid real money to do their job, but it was as stressful and challenging as a regular job. I took a break for a while even before the added responsibilities, but found that the server was not functioning in my absence. I came back and decided to fully embrace my role as Administrator, since Karei was still MIA. I made decisions that I felt were in the best interest of the server, even though I was scared to do it. The most frightening part of being in charge is that what you decide will affect hundreds of people, and I've never been the kind of person who enjoys doing that. I will add my opinion, but I never wanted to be the person who has to say what will finally happen. I cried a few times when something I said to do ended up not being right, because of that intense fear of disappointing people and doing the wrong thing. I put on the face I showed to everyone as soon as I logged in, so that my fear wouldn't show. It was obviously not the right thing to do, since I ended up looking like a know-it-all bitch, but I would rather come off aggressive than indecisive or scared.

Karei hired Playtester to help script, and that started a new wave of problems within the team. Playtester wanted all-original, and Vermillion loved customs, and I was stuck trying to balance the two extremes and come up with the best options for the server. There were several instances where one or the other would do something, and it would start a massive argument that would have to be stopped and then talked through before it could be worked out. I had to be super aggressive and state "this is what will happen, that is final" a few times, and I hated that. The stress of the server was made worse by my personal relationship [ as I found out after leaving him, he was the reason I was so overly emotional and stressed the last handful of months. Nothing he specifically did, but his personality clashed with mine in a way that made me feel like I was going completely insane on my own, and he tried to help in ways that made it worse with every word. It may have worked for other people, but it was not right for me. ]. I threw myself more and more into the work, thinking that if I was busy enough then I wouldn't have time to lose my shit.

I tried to quit at Halloween, and I made a massive bunch of events as a last goodbye. I was unhappy with that too, since I never wanted to leave. My ex and some friends convinced me that it was the best thing for me to take a break, no matter that I was still fully committed to making Eternity the best it could be with the severe limitations and lack of population. Of course, I returned after a short time. There was no way I could leave and just continue to play, especially since I was still the only active administrator and I felt it was my responsibility to stay and do my job, despite it not being what I signed up to do.

After the new year, I was starting to feel like nothing would ever change. I started the hiring process with public applications, trying to get both some help and some fresh opinions. At that point, it was just me, Vermillion, and Playtester as the active team. I planned more events to get people interested, I looked into getting Eternity unbanned from RMS, and started looking into an official FB page, all to get more players and hopefully invigorate the team a little. I was looking forward to everything, and then I had a serious medical incident. I passed out for 18 hours, waking up on the floor of my bedroom with no idea how I got there. I was scared as hell, because I knew it was from the stress of everything. That was when I informed Karei for the last time that I was absolutely leaving, and not returning under any circumstances. He did not seem to take me seriously, since I had tried or did quit a few times before, and it made me quite angry.

This is what went on during everything. I saw the amount of money that was being taken in from donations, and knew approximately how much was being spent on the server itself... and how much was not. I asked Karei directly if he was spending the money on himself, and he denied it. I found out later from a source I will not name that he was of course lying, he spent it on himself. That's really where your money went, though that's no surprise to many people. This was one of the factors that my ex brought up and used to manipulate me into the end action. He also convinced me that Karei was just going to keep doing it, and that he did not care at all about the community. I stood up for Karei in the past, blindly believing that he was being truthful with me about the finances, and the betrayal of that trust made my anger much worse and lead to the end action.
I was also forced to vastly lighten or not punish people who had done things that were permaban-worthy, simply because they were in the WoE guilds. At that point, those were the only things keeping most of the population at Eternity. I was thoroughly disgusted and angered at having to betray my own sense of justice and pander to these people, the ones I saw as being festering worms in the server I loved so much. These people also were harassing me at the end, making life harder than it needed to be because they were being slapped on the wrist for doing things they knew were wrong.
A final insult was looking carefully through the command logs and finding that Karei was making items to give to players and sell on a "legit" to somehow manipulate the market. I felt like this was completely wrong, and it was really the last straw combined with everything else.

Finally, the end. I logged in and kicked everyone then turned off the map server so that nobody could log in ( @mapexit ). I did not know how to reverse that, but I knew it wasn't permanent. I went to bed, and the next day it was back up - it made me upset, to be honest. At that point, under the insane influence of my ex, I was angry for all the above reasons and wanted to just end it and stop the theft and corruption, and the unhappiness from both the staff and community. I was convinced that my next step was the best choice - of course looking at it now, it was the wrong way to go about it and I do apologise. So what did I do? I went into the log files and deleted the login table and account table. The login table shows the account name, email, encrypted password, creation date, last login and IP, for each account. The account table shows the account name, registering email, number, date created, IP that registered it. None of the tables show the passwords, they are all encrypted ( important later ). This ensured that nobody's items or characters were permanently lost, it would simply be a tedious process to recover the account numbers and IDs from the character table. It showed the account numbers for each character, so they technically were not lost.

After everything was discovered and Karei was called, some things were blamed on me that were not my fault. One of the biggest was that the backups were not done, so that meant that when the server was rolled back it was to a very early time. I did not know that he did not do any backups. I was also blamed for deleting characters before the rollback and after - the original assumption was that I deleted characters and items, which is not true. Everything was there. Afterwards, people simply did not understand that everything was rolled back quite far.
Here's where the banned GM's account comes in. I was banned by IP after the rollback, but my GM account was not - and I had installed another server's stuff over my Eternity folder, and made it completely impossible to run. The person who abused the other GM's account got on after the rollback, since then it was technically not banned. That person sat around banning everyone they could, but could only do so because they were using @user which shows the names of everyone logged on. A certain staff member later said that I was blamed within the GM team for "stealing the accounts and passwords of the other GMs" to do this. It is not true, since I was on cam with my ex when he was suddenly banned on RO. I literally had my hands behind my head, reclining in my chair, while it was going on. I had to ( the first and only time I have ever done this.. ) give my ex the account information for my GM account and show him how to catch and ban the guy. So, you're all welcome for that.
I was blamed for stealing accounts and passwords, which is where the encryption part comes in. All of the passwords are encrypted, and the only way to get them is to bruteforce it. I simply don't care enough to do it. I had to get onto some people's accounts on only a few occasions, and they were not GM accounts - to do this, I had to change the encrypted password string to a new one with an encoder and copy/paste ( you can do this online ). The only things done on those accounts were administrative in nature, due to breaches or bending of the rules done by the account holders.
There was an amusing rumour going around that I had been paid off by Karei to take the fall for v3, that he wanted to bring it down and needed a scapegoat. This is not the case. I really don't have anything else to say about it, though I am flattered that someone would believe in me still.
A major problem that happened immediately was that Karei gave out my mobile number over Ventrilo, and then threatened to give out my real name and physical address when I called him about giving out my number. That was changed right away though, and I'm still quite upset about that. I never gave out anyone's personal information like that, and my real life is not my online one - it should never have happened, and I should never have been threatened. The donation logs include the first name, surname, physical address including country, and email of every donator, just to let you know what very personal information I had access to.
After I quit, a donator wanted their last donation returned, as it was made the day of or day before I did what I did. Karei told this person to ask me for the money - I had no actual access to the server's finances, only to the records of who donated and how much, and that access was removed several days before.

I'll explain now what my transgressions were during my GMing and later Admin-ship.
The major and obvious things were controlling my temper and emotions. I explained some circumstances that added to the difficulty, but I still chose to stay and not just give Eternity the finger and leave when it got tough. I'm fully to blame for some problems in the server directly related to actions made while I was angry, and I apologised on several occasions to players and the server, as well as in private to the team members.
I was given accounts from many people who had quit, and I used my database access to find the rest of their accounts ( with their permission! ) and recovered them for myself. Many of those accounts had a lot of equipment and zeny on them, which is where a good part of my final equipment and zeny came from.
I also removed cards from my own items - for example, I removed a verit card from shoes by giving my GM the item, making the card and shoes ( with its upgrade ), giving those to my legit, and destroying the carded shoes.
I did both of the above things for a few players on special request, provided they had proof of ownership. I asked for a lot of information to recover the accounts, and I don't feel like that was wrong to do in any way. Removing cards from items was done on only a few occasions, if someone came to me immediately after compounding something by mistake or something. Not many people asked me for things like this, so I was more inclined to do it.
I publicly compounded headgears into others, as long as the headgear covering the other one did not have any stats of any kind. Privately I compounded or enchanted a few headgears ( +1 at most ) in special circumstances.
I accidentally killed some people in WoE, which I apologised for immediately. And speaking of WoE, I did buff my legit on a few occasions to go poke people for a couple minutes in the middle of WoE. This was not done while I was in a guild.
I warped myself and parties to certain places, also under special circumstances. For example, a broken NPC would not allow some people to go into a dungeon, so I recalled them to the rest of the party. I also recalled party members back up into the higher levels of Endless Tower if they had been disconnected. I also gave free warps to the EXP event locations if it was particularly hard to get to, that was done in public.
I treated a few people unfairly in my own eyes, and there were a good number that the public claimed I was biased against, but I don't feel like I was. Some of these people were ones that broke the rules in some way and then made their punishment worse by harassment.
Some things I never did - I did not favour anyone during any event. Nobody was ever given an advantage or disadvantage, except for timezones which was beyond my control. I did not ban people who did not deserve to be banned according to the rules ( save a few temporary bans ). I never banned someone just to steal their account, I know that rumour has been around quite a bit too. I never made items and gave them to myself, except for the above de-carding situations, and I never made zeny for my legits.


The only thing I have to say about all of this is that I'm sorry that it turned out like this, and I'm very sorry for how I handled a lot of things. Since leaving RO and my ex, I am much more calm. I still have a lot of old and new medical problems and pain to deal with, but its almost back to the level it was when I was simply playing and not administrating. I hurt a lot of people, and I know I betrayed some trust. That stays with me. I left a number of friends behind as well, deleting and blocking many people that I was friends with ( or knew almost that well ). I went offline as much as possible, and took a nice sunny vacation for a month, and it has helped a lot.

If there's anything I've missed, I'll add it later.