Boxelware's Avorion and Why Christians Should Avoid it
This, being an opener, I guess I should start with a little about me and how this topic title really should send chills down everyone's spine.
WHO I AM & WHAT I STAND FOR ( AND WHY ☺ )
First, I'm a Cuban-American adult male with 4 kids over 18 years old, a wife of 23 years. How I got there is an interesting story as well, the short version is simply I grew up in a small town on a large farm owned by my adopted father where I regularly attended the scouting program and Church. I became an Eagle Scout and was tapped into the OA. My adopted father and I didn't get along well, so when I graduated high school I 'fled' to the US Army.
I spent about 6 years in the US Army and after becoming injured in combat and being rated "non-deployable" a MEB was inevitable and it did come to pass. But in the Army, before 9-11, before the Afghanistan invasion, I met my wife who was also serving. So when I left the Army, I had children.
Today, I'm going back to school to get my Juris Doctor in Civil Law (graduate in 2024), my wife just graduated two years ago and now has a master's in accounting (she also has a bachelor's and associates degree in accounting as well), and I currently own/run a small business while my wife works as the controller for a rather large Christian (and giving-funded) non-profit.
I thank the US Army for making me into the man I am today. I consider myself deeply patriotic and a stoic defender of human rights for all people regardless of any demographic other than those who had their rights revoked by due process (felons).
I am a regular church attendee and broke away from my family's denomination of Presbyterian and became a full-on, born-again, saved-by-the-blood, Bible-thumping, Baptist.
The only other thing I would add is what you could likely already infer, that is, not only am I a very stubborn person, but I will stand up for what I believe even if the consequence is death. That leads me to "after the Army" which is simple, I led a simple life raising 4 toddlers in a double-wide struggling to get by and being unable to bend much at the hip, but I did attend physical rehabilitation, which is where I met what would lead me to the next chapter of my life, a guy who was heavily involved in militias.
This man, an honorably discharged US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel introduced me to the III%'ers. I went to a meeting but was very hesitant considering there was no way I would be able to run or dodge gunfire anymore by leaping behind cover. But after showing up, the members of the local group reassured me that the knowledge that I could impart to other civilians was far more valuable than being able to dodge gunfire. For someone like me who was discharged way too early after seeking out retirement or death in the US Army, this was a very close-second chance.
After about 3 years of training countless people on how to deal with active shooter situations (MOUT training and such), as well as basic rifle marksmanship (standardized as the US Army does) and other oddities I picked up in combat and training, I was quickly made a zone-leader. After that and about 3 more years, I moved up to being the leader of the organization for my state and being in charge of nearly 92,000 volunteers. It wasn't all about pew-pews and the larping you might be thinking of either, under my leadership I guided the organization to be more proactive in their communities, adopting highways, volunteering and homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and when disaster struck (ie hurricane Matthew), we were there shuttling and ferrying food and water in bass boats to people who were flooded and unable to get to a grocery store.
Trump was then elected and then COVID-19. This began to galvanize the organization into something that was unrecognizable to me something I didn't stand for. They became very radical and while I, being libertarian and happy with minimal government involvement, wanted to completely reinstall the government into something 'more' tyrannical especially for those of us that might look different.
I and many others left the organization and created a new organization that was more focused on community service and preparation for disasters (yes, man-made disasters as well but less 'this is how you break into a hummer with an 11mm socket').
Then January 6, the "attack on the Capitol". Because my organization had now nearly dwarfed the other militias around the US, had military-like command and control, and by all appearances could have been a very formidable force if we were invaded, I was suspect #1 and I didn't even go to the US Capitol - in fact, I had never been until I was subpoenaed by Congress to testify.
Needless to say, I didn't let them forget that fact or that I had given a written and signed order that if anyone in my organization attended the protest, they would be removed from the organization. It is my firm opinion that protesting with firearms is not "peacefully protesting" when they are designed these days to be quite intimidating. I was never charged for anything and I had quite a fun time in front of Congress making fun of their lack of knowledge of basic human rights law in the US and I very eloquently pointed this out in several instances during my 6-hour deposition.
That's where this story really begins. When the stress of all of this is bearing down on me and the 4 teenagers in my house are just 'bahhhh', I escape to video games. I'm a firm believer that games which promote magic, witchcraft, and other things are "worldly" and at this point, I had recently (within a couple of years prior) stopped playing them all together in an attempt to bring myself closer to Jesus Christ and that is to be obedient to His commandment to be more like Him.
MY BACKGROUND WITH BOXELWARE
One of those games was Avorion, by Boxelware. Essentially it is a game where you get to very intricately build your own spaceships and explore a fictional galaxy that suffered some kind of cosmic disaster that had created un-traversable rifts. As the name implies, to be able to traverse these rifts, you needed a new element called "Avorion" which was extremely hard to get ahold of because it was usually only found in the core of that galaxy which was locked off by the rifts. So you would follow a storyline that would lead you to portal generators that would create a bridge for you to enter the core, farm the new elements, create bigger and better ships, and then beat the boss at the center of the galaxy which was one of the most epic fights I've ever fought in a video game. It's truly a remarkable experience.
The one thing my company has is a lot of its servers. I got into the game server hosting industry during this time specifically to host much-needed servers for the game. I was outright asked by the owner "Koonshi" if I could host several servers for the game because the one thing they didn't have is a server beefy enough to host more than about 5-6 players.
I created one, with 48 cores (was a quad e5 Xeon at the time) with, I think 144GB of ram. Back in 2016, this was a beast. I bear metaled the server with Windows and kicked off 2 Avorion servers. One of which was a test bed specifically for Koonshi.
But a few years later, Boxelware got bigger, started hiring, got their own servers, and I was pretty much left hosting the largest server in the community, with some 50-90 players online at any given time having a blast!
I was approached in about 2019 when I was in the middle of my whole "Leader" of my state in the III'ers to become a moderator. I didn't have time and turned down the offer. After that, I never received another message or reply from Koonshi. His staff changed, they got bigger.
HOW IT STARTED
In 2022, a player joined the server known as "Joker" and as the name might imply he role-played a very gaudy, outspoken, no-cares kind of player. I had spoken with him in private and did not agree with some of his views (mostly not Christian) but I never found him to be racist even after revealing that I was not entirely, white. This came after another new player accused Joker of making racist and transphobic remarks to her and come to find out, because she made some comment that she likes teaching children about her lifestyle and transition without the consent of parents and how it "gets her off". Her name was Chara, a biological male transitioning to appear to be a female. She was called a groomer by Joker and thus accused him of being transphobic.
Full stop. I have 4 kids as I mentioned, so let me say that this struck me in a big way - you don't teach my kids anything unless I give you that permission. To say I sided with Joker in this particular claim is a severe understatement. If you're going to tell me this behavior is okay, pray you don't tell me to my face without being prepared to meet Jesus. If you want to see me backslide as a Christian and become overwhelmed with rage, this is exactly how you do it. I will become a criminal and I don't care.
After finding out that they had a heated back-and-forth argument where they both threw insults at each other in private DM's on Discord, I dismissed this as it is not my policy to police people's DM's not to mention screenshots can be easily faked - so if there is something abusive in DM's, Discord has a trust and safety team just for that and a little "report" button which either was never used or Discord didn't exactly see it as abusive.
Additionally, if someone doesn't want to hear from someone, they can block them. I'm also not a babysitter, I had raised 4 kids to teenagers (and beyond) at this point and I simply was not about to involve myself in this mess.
OVERSTEPPING THEIR AUTHORITY
I was then contacted by the head community relations manager, Sue by Boxelware who wanted to know why I am allowing a bigot, white-supremacist, and transphobic individual to play on my server. My reply was abrasive but direct, "What evidence do you have to support the claims you just made?"
Just to be very clear here, Sue is not the kind of person to start something, but she does follow orders. The demeanor that I read from her during these interactions felt as if she was doing something she didn't want to do. Usually, when she did get a response from me about this it was a brief interaction or she didn't acknowledge my answer at all. I quickly realized she was a proxy and began speaking to the person she was answering to, Koonshi.
To which she replied, "We don't need evidence. [REDACTED PLAYER NAME] is a trans person and does not feel comfortable with a conversation she had with Joker and therefore you need to ban him from your server."... That should have told me everything I needed to know about how this story was going to end but you better bet your bottom dollar I was furious and replied, "You don't run my server. Stay in your lane."
My policy is simply this: Until a player does something that is rule-breaking on the server or in our discord channel, I couldn't care less. I don't care what their politics are, I don't care what they believe (I'll try to change it if I can sometimes), what I care about is how they conduct themselves on my server and in our community and how much stress they are adding to my life and, to be honest, that trans-player and Boxelware at this point were exceeding that standard of stress being as I had just gotten over covid (which I broke a rib from coughing so I was high as a kite at the time on hydrocodone to stop the coughing so I didn't worsen an already dangerous situation)
Let me just make one big note right here, every moderator in Discord, everyone was a regular player on my server, and I even made one of the moderators an administration on my server, Stufine. If this was as bad as the community manager said it was and if it violated the rules I had set forth on my server, Stufine, an administrator on my server and a senior moderator with Boxelware could have very easily banned the player, as it turns out, even he believed that if this had all happened inside the server that it wouldn't have violated any rules other than both of them flaming each other which would beget warnings, not bans on the first offense.
THE FIGHT
I believe this is an important context to keep in mind before moving forward here because the next part here is where things start to get a bit weird. After the community relations manager, all but cut all communications with me at this point there was an ongoing discussion that started within 1 hour after this conversation with the CRM. This discussion that started was one of the trans mods posting a video on 'How to spot a Nazi', which I watched and the more I watched the more infuriated I became.
Let me just sum up the video in a few words: "If you don't trust everyone who makes a claim against an accused Nazi, you are a Nazi".
If you're an astute reader, you might recognize that this is emphatically related to the conversation I just had with the CRM so I replied, "Believing that you can simply accuse someone of being a bad person and everyone should just accept it or else they are a bad person is a totalitarianism and a specific kind we call Stalinism which is right out of the playbook of Akyensky's 'Rules for Radicals'."
Oh, an argument ensued right there but I made 2 things very clear, 1) I do not accept non-evidence as evidence and 2) I'm a Christian.
This sparked a conversation with another senior moderator Weaver in Discord DM's and another moderator who had a long conversation about how he disliked trans people. To that moderator, I pretty much told him it's not the person I have a problem with it's the act or intent to act. As the saying goes, "Love the sinner, Hate the sin."
As the conversation carried on I basically told the guy that trans folks do not have a monopoly on identities and said, for example, I identify as a helicopter; so as long as you don't care how I identify, I don't care what you identify as - meaning if you aren't going to call me by my tail number, then don't expect to call you by whatever it is you feel that you are - as in, I will call you by how you present your actions - if that's feminine you'll be she, masculine, you'll be he. I have no time for the silliness of following the 1,000+ pronouns we invent on an hourly basis that all came from liberal arts professors in "gender theory" classes - and let's be clear about that last word, "theory".
At this very moment, Weaver was going on a rampage on how all Christians should be murdered all around the world and how we're so horrible and have never contributed anything to society. Too bad he doesn't know the history of hospitals (a Christian invention).
As intuition might lead you to surmise, things are devolving fast. I stop, shut down my computer, and go to bed. I'm also realizing at this point that someone in Boxelware began organizing a campaign against me after I told the CRM that I was not taking any actions against Joker until he committed an infraction on my server. I knew I was in unchartered waters at this point and had never been treated in this way by any game company staff on any Discord server, ever.
VAC BAN, DISCORD BAN, LOSS OF BLUE CHECK-MARK
The next morning I woke up to see an email.
Dear Mr. *******,
We hereby inform you that we are removing the Verified Server checkmark for your server "Divine Reapers" after a thorough review. The "Verified Server" checkmark is an official support and endorsement from Boxelware for special servers, and an invitation from us to the community to play on those servers. Negative behavior on the part of the server's administrators or community will thus fall back on Boxelware as well. Unfortunately, you have attracted negative attention due to your endorsement and/or membership in a right-wing extremist group, as well as due to sexist and transphobic statements, and we therefore no longer wish to cooperate with you. We do not want such world views and behavior to be associated with Boxelware.
This decision has been made unanimously by Boxelware and is final. Of course you can continue to use and operate your server, removing the "Verified Server" checkmark will not affect this.
This English translation is for understanding purposes only, in case of any ambiguity or discrepancy in the translation, the German notice is valid.
Yours sincerely,
Boxelware Management
However, I had been banned from Discord and I had received a "developer VAC ban". The "developer VAC ban" was something I had no knowledge of - apparently, developers can issue a VAC ban on any player who owns their game but the ban only applies to their game and not any other game. Being as Avorion runs in VAC mode all the time, even when you play a single-player game (which creates a server on 127.0.0.1 (localhost), I was unable to play the game or even administer my server.
This was a very clear, "we don't want you playing the game" message.
From this point, before I could even tell anyone what happened, I was inundated with messages from others - while this happened at approximately 2am for me and I woke up at about 6am (as I do most mornings running my own company and all) I was entirely shocked to see all the messages from at least 50 different people expressing solidarity, concern over my well-being, or "where did the server go" concerns. But why? This is because the Boxelware staff started a smear campaign in their own Discord channel in which they began to paint me as the boogieman of all things woke (I'm actually happy with this title, though). They began by pulling conversations from 2017 in their discord out of context - advice to the owner of the company when it was just him, me and a dozen others in a very personal setting was "telling the owner how to do his job" when in fact he took that advice and made a killing on it.
There was already a campaign on Twitter that I wasn't banned because I was Christian but because I was a "III%'er". I'll let you let that settle right quick and tell me what it is you might think if you wake up to this.
I was also accused during the debt of night somehow organizing "Discord Raids" against the company. At this point, I'm just done. But I do have friends who jump in and do what they can to help - not organize Discord raids though, what does this achieve?
Those friends however did create new discord accounts or recycled some old ones to contact some of the moderators to take their temperature on the topic. The main moderator, who insisted that I supported Naziism because I tore apart that video they had all prided themselves on in one-upping me telling the CRM that they don't run my server, was contacted by one of those friends after a conversation that these moderators couldn't even recognize a Nazi if they saw one, so this friend created a discord account named "Iron Cross" - you literally cannot get any more Nazi than that, and then proceeding to have a very long conversation with the main moderator, Tengu Knight. From here there was a very stately revelation made after I dumped all of my discord logs to text and uploaded it for everyone to see, "What our staff does on their own time is irrelevant and should not be used to judge us", but of course, what Chip did 5 years ago with every intention of bettering his community, rake him over the coals. This is almost word-for-word, but I'll post all the logs so you can go and see for yourself.
I did later find out that this "Raid" they claimed to have had were other Christians who posted in their Discord, "Hey, I'm a Christian, though!" (or something similar) to be immediately banned - and the later excuse was "They are Chip's alts who raided the server at 4am". Again, keep in mind, I'm still getting over COVID and there was no way in hell I had the energy to stay up until 4am, I was taking naps every 2-3 hours because I was so drained of energy and loopy from the meds.
Up until this point I have given you the play-by-play of what "happened". Here comes my opinion and what I believe to be true.
In spite of all of the claims made, it is irrefutable that things got ugly the moment I mentioned I was a Christian. Things got tense when I told the CRM that it was my server, not theirs, but was a roaring boil the moment I mentioned my faith with the moderator (who has now been fired) speaking out and saying we should all be killed (this is in the attached logs).
So, it is my opinion, that I was both politically and religiously persecuted with a primary emphasis on religious persecution being it determines my politics.
I do not believe that there is any question to the contrary, everything that I was accused of after this point was mere damage control and excuses to attempt to shed away the negative optics for doing exactly what Hitler did - dehumanizing people based on religion. I believe the shock from this was enough that they had to backpedal but not to the extent of allowing me to play the game or continue to run a server. In fact, after I updated my review letting people know what happened, the admins and moderators of Boxelware couldn't make up their own minds of what actually happened, who did what, or what was going on. It was like everyone hit some kind of ban button all at once and no one was responsible for anything.
Let me summarize a conversation on the comments of that review:
Mod: "I don't know why you're making such a big deal out of just losing your blue checkmark!"
Me: "I didn't just lose a blue checkmark, as I stated, I lost the checkmark, access to administer my server and play on it because I lost access to the game and I can't even say anything about it because I'm also banned from your discord and from the forums in Steam, and from your website."
Mod: "You're a liar, you're not banned from...[all the stuff I said I was banned from]"
Me: (posts links to images of receipts)
Mod: (stops posting)
Mod: "I had nothing to do with that!"
You'll also see from the logs that one mod makes the claim I was banned from "proselytizing Weaver" in DM's, and you're about to see those DM's of him attacking my faith and me defending it - there was no proselytizing it was correcting a falsehood he was making about Scripture and that's what he was doing.
It was clear, with the anti-Christian rhetoric that was put on blast at me, the entire staff was in total disarray and no hand had no idea what the other hand was doing - zero. This happens when a team is both panicked and trying to perform major damage control.
I do now have a pending lawsuit in my state under the superior court for the moment Boxelware opens a US-based office - the lawsuit cannot continue until it can be serviced and the subpena, effectuated. The current complaint lists libel, defamation of character, and civil rights violations and was made under oath by myself being the petitioner. My lawyer's name for this matter is available upon request (msg me on Steam or email me through Blogger).
Let me end this very long brief with just this: If I can be persecuted by a corporation in the way that I have, believing what I believe, and being as this is becoming the new normal even in the video game industry, which is supposed to be an escape from politics, you better be prepared if you are a believer; He comes like a thief in the night.
The community has gone downhill in a bad way, to the point of repugnancy.
WEAVER vs "Chip Patton" (Boxelware Staff that said Christians should be killed)
TENGUKNIGHT vs "Iron Cross" (Head Boxelware Customer Service)
Iron Cross is the subject mentioned in this post, "Joker" and has offered to testify before a court under oath on his conversations with Tenguknight.
SATHERZ (Senior Boxelware Moderator)
Other logs are available from Stufine, Sue, and others including Konoshi.
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