Hello,

I am Anzu, owner and founder of Anzu's War Games (AWG). We are an ArmA community which has been around for several years, formed shortly after ArmA 2 came out. We've run ArmA and DayZ-type servers for years and at one point we had 4 of the most popular DayZ mod servers online which ran flawlessly for the duration they were up. While we have shrunk in size in terms of our DayZ community, and do not host as many DayZ-type servers now, we still do host some servers running ArmA 2, ArmA 3, and ExileMod. We have used the "[AWG]" tag in our server names for several years now and players have come to recognize this as a symbol of a well-run server with professional admins who are polite, effective, and well-respected in the community. We have developed many missions and scripts for ArmA 2 and ArmA 3, some of which have been quite popular. We have worked long and hard to establish ourselves as a well-respected ArmA community which does not seek drama nor is overly strict with rules. We also have many members who are affiliated with other large, well-respected ArmA communities such as ShackTac, 7th Cav, 15th MEU, and many others.

As you've probably figured out by now, I am contacting you because your clan "AWGaming" seems to have sprung up in the last few months of the DayZ-craze and you guys are using the same clan tag as us on your servers, and the titles of your servers are very similar to ours, almost exactly the same in some cases. This has become an increasingly frustrating issue for us due to the fact that we are getting a constant stream of players who join our sites and chatrooms complaining about issues on an "AWG" server, only to find out that the server in question is not run by us. Needless to say this causes players to be confused and frustrated themselves when they realize that the server they've been playing on is not run by us. What is more concerning to me is the fact that several of these players have told me that they found my contact info directly from your servers, either in a mission help file, or something similar. Given that our group is responsible for developing a lot of custom scripts and missions, a lot of which contain our contact info, I can only assume that your group is not only using our clan tag, but also using some of our scripts and files as well.

Now I understand that you may not be aware of this and maybe this whole thing is just an honest mistake, but the issue remains nevertheless. I am not seeking you out to start some kind of fight or to berate your leaders about using someone else's tag. I am aware of how much copying goes on in gaming communities, and I know that people impersonate other groups all the time, it happens from time to time. We have dealt with other servers using our name in the past and hosting servers, and they have not lasted long. I waited some time before contacting you guys because I figured the servers would go away after a while. It appears to me that you guys are really trying to establish yourselves as a community in the ArmA world, and I have no problem with that, in fact I fully support it and would be the first one to help you guys out if you ever asked. But as long as there are two groups out there using "[AWG]" as the tag in their servers, players will be frustrated and confused bouncing back and forth between the two. We don't plan on retiring our servers anytime soon, and we will continue to host ArmA servers well into the future, as we have been doing for several years. If you guys plan on doing the same, then I would highly suggest using a different tag, other than "AWG".

I am respectfully requesting that you relay this message to the leaders of your group and I would ask that they please change the tag on their servers so it does not match ours exactly. I have no ill-will towards you or your group, but I do have my doubts as to whether someone decided to use the AWG tag on purpose just to jumpstart their group by making players think it's hosted by us. Many players see the AWG tag and recognize it as a respected clan in ArmA, and that's because we've been doing this for almost a decade now and have worked hard at it. I host servers and do IT security for my career, and I pay for all our servers out of pocket, rarely even asking players for donations. So you can understand my frustration when I come across another group using the same tag, getting a large number of players, and then also getting donations from some of those players.

I hope that you and your leadership can understand where I'm coming from and recognize that I'm trying to resolve this in an amicable way. If you or anyone from your group would like to discuss things further, you can contact me by replying to this message, or through Steam, Discord, TS3, or anything else. You can find our contact info below.

Thank you and I hope to hear back soon.

-Anzu (Owner and founder of Anzu's War Games/AWG)

Methods of contact: * Discord: http://discord.awg.io * TS3: TS3.awg.io * https://www.facebook.com/groups/AnzusWarGames * http://steamcommunity.com/groups/anzuswargames * https://gaming.youtube.com/user/AnzusWarGames * https://twitter.com/AnzuAWG * https://www.twitch.tv/anzu_awg

Our websites: * http://AnzusWarGames.info * http://AnzusWargames.com * http://AWGames.net * http://AWG.io