Tamari’s servers: the petty tyranny

“I typically like to keep these type of ordeals private”

– Tamari on how he bans players

This is the 2nd part of the biggest drama of all times in the KF2 community history that covers the bans on Tamari’s servers as well as his community building principles and practice. Although arguably these bans aren’t as ridiculous as the code theft situation and aren’t as explosive as what will be uncovered soon in part 3, I still felt that it’s worth documenting this for completeness of the story. Besides, it’s an interesting case study from the social psychology perspective, how the power dynamics play out in a group and how the history of person’s commitment to a certain cause affects their ability to rationally analyze said cause. If you haven’t read it yet, please read the 1st part which covers the code theft situation here.

Hello again, I’m Carl, I’m a player in the “Killing Floor 2” game, a “Controlled Difficulty” mod player, a KF2 modder, and a KF2 server hoster. Here I’m going to expose what the quoted individual prefers to keep private. Specifically, I’ll share the previously hidden history of bans on Tamari’s KF2 servers, explore the reasons behind it, establish it as the main reason why the stolen code profiteering by Tamari and FMX went unchallenged for years, question Tamari’s authority to permaban KF2 community members, explore elitism in gaming and how it affects the community building principles as applied to CD/HoE+ teams, and show how inherently inconsistent Tamari’s servers de facto rules are. I say that Tamari is a petty tyrant at how he manages that part of KF2 community that were unlucky enough to land on his servers and I’ll do my best to prove it.

A quick rundown of the petty tyranny longread

• Tamari has a long history of banning KF2 CD players from his KF2 servers for no good reasons, examples are documented;
• The suppression of dissent to Tamari’s narrative is the main reason the code theft situation lasted for that long, moreover, absence of checks in power has led to Tamari and FMX engaging in more and more harmful and borderline criminal behavior as time progressed;
• Considering that Tamari’s operation relies on so much community produced code, it makes it unfair to ban the community members from playing it;
• Freedom of expression is critical for both personal and team skill development, but it is suppressed on Tamari’s servers and free speakers get banned, even when they exercise it outside of Tamari’s servers;
• “Donator” designations on his servers are likely power level indicators and donating essentially constitutes a way to buy power on Tamari’s servers;
• Tamari himself has a “petty tyrant” type of personality prone to arbitrary punishments, self-aggrandizing behavior, inconsistency in enforced rules, tyrannical management. I show how this leads to stifling healthy competition, shadow queues and double standards;
• Parallels can be drawn in Tamari’s players and Tamari’s own behavior to those of various “Doomsday Cult” phenomenon followers.

Carl ban status: unwarranted

Yeah, Carl is me, and Tamari banned me from his servers in early 2020, about 3 years ago. Here’s the story, sharing it for the first time, I hope you’ll find it as ridiculous as I do. This story is an interesting example not only from the perspective of documenting the questionable bans on Tamari’s servers, but because a lot of what’s wrong with Tamari’s operation manifested itself in just this one single case. My steam profile:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/conradcarl/

Early 2020, a game on KF-Spillway map, one of the US-based Tamari’s “Turbo Survival” servers. Please note that at the time it was considered okay to play on Tamari’s servers, the stolen code situation either wasn’t widely known and to a large degree didn’t exist yet, and Tamari himself was considered to be at the very least an okay KF2 community member and a veteran of the game.

I was playing as a gunslinger and was doing usual gunslinger stuff. Shooty-shooty, bang-bang. A couple of players joined and one of them chose to play as a gunslinger. By now I can’t recall the player’s name, but probably it was some random join, who not only doesn’t remember any of that by now, but moved on with life long time ago and wouldn’t even recall that such a game as KF2 ever existed. Immediately this player proceeded to buy a hemoclobber weapon and started fronting on the platform, healing himself and putting everything on stumble and poison panic. That was a hemoclobber before the nerf. Later on that player added an RPG-7 to his arsenal to deal slowly and painfully with scrakes and fleshpounds.

Needless to say, such an unorthodox build is widely considered rather toxic, both literally and figuratively, and selfish. Such a player doesn’t contribute anything to the team, because a precision oriented team relies on headshots to dispose of zeds, while both the weapons of choice here dispose of monsters primarily through body damage. Instead, such a player makes the game less fun for said precision oriented players, mainly because of absorbing bullets with its pawn’s body and setting everything on poison panic and stumbling the monsters. As a gunslinger such a player also doesn’t get any perk bonuses, because the hemoclobber is a medic/zerk weapon and the RPG-7 is a demolitionist weapon.

Moreover, that player proceeded to buy spare hemoclobbers and litter all the map with them. Right on the main paths, not in some corner, as a considerate player would. Generally, it’s not always a problem, because Tamari’s servers already relied on the “Unofficial Mod’s” functionality that allowed to disable the pickups of one’s spares by other players by issuing a chat “!dp” command. Some players though don’t always get the memo, especially the random joins, so after I learned that the player didn’t do that, I suggested he does in the chat, as hemoclobber weighs just 4 kg and is easy to pick up by mistake if one runs less than a full build or when picking up own spares. The player proceeded to ignore my requests.

I went through a regular conflict escalation scenario up to the toughest measures available online, from suggesting, to repeatedly insisting, to mocking and ridiculing such a behavior and initiating the kick vote. All failed. So, I told him that if I picked up any of his littered clobbers by mistake I was going to sell (he bought quite a few of the spare clobbers) whatever I picked up which I did. Generally, selling a fallen teammate’s weapon or a spare is a huge no-no and a bannable offense on most KF2 servers, but considering the borderline trolling situation to which I responded arguably rather adequately, considering the functionality that existed exactly to disable pickups, and also considering the later waves of the game and the amount of spare clobbers that player bought which kept getting in my way, in addition to everything else he did to make my experience miserable, I decided to do it and only after several repeated suggestions and warnings.

Little did I know that Tamari either had a discord and server chat syndication or was reading the server chat (he himself didn’t play that game). Whatever he learned from that chat he found to be sufficient to issue a permaban, which he did, after delivering a condescending remark about how poor my world view had to be and how sorry he feels for my miserable state of mind. The ban note he supplied with it was alleging that I was being an asshole to people and thus was permabanned from his servers. No attempt to establish what happened whatsoever.

Let’s dissect this in detail as so many things are wrong here.

Firstly, why would one ever ban a veteran of the game? I had been playing CD by then whenever I could and wasn’t unknown to Tamari either. The circle of CD players is rather small and everyone knows each other, more or less. I had definitely played with Tamari before that and even after that, e.g. on Mike’s “Doomsday Party” server, before he finally retired, or on Leg-End’s servers in queues made in the “Safe Space” discord server, before it pretty much died from the KF2 perspective (they keep maintaining some small talk on unrelated topics last time I checked). By now I have 5.5K hours in this game, back then I had maybe 2-2.5K and was going strong. I’ve had AFAIR 70%+ headshot accuracy and was in the tops of the global stats on his servers. Why would he ban a veteran to accommodate some ridiculous gameplay of some random casual who was probably trolling and was getting in the face of everyone in that game? This was so ridiculous that this leads me to think that there were some other factors at play here and Tamari didn’t like me for some other unrelated reason. As we’ll see later, it may very well be the case.

Secondly, why no even superficial attempt to establish the situation? Why ban based on some incomplete assumptions one can get based off reading the chat history alone? Or maybe that random join was his little brother or something? Why no explicit statement on what exactly did I do wrong? Why do I go out of my way to befriend on Steam even alleged cheaters (compare to banning KF2 veterans!), so they can have an opportunity to share their side of the story and ban only if this brings no results? If it’s a ban for “stealing” a spare then it’s hilarious and ironical, considering how inconsequential it was, as compared to the other modders code theft Tamari himself has been engaging for years. The stolen spare doesn’t matter outside of one game, the code theft matters for the whole appropriate game and mods lifecycle, it’s years. In this case the stolen spare didn’t even matter because its owner went way overboard with littering the map with spares. In this case the stolen spare was justified because its owner engaged in toxic gameplay. In this case the the spare owner could use the “disable pickup” Unofficial Mod (stolen by Tamari, BTW) functionality which he chose not to, even after being suggested to. The code theft significance is huge, but Tamari isn’t permabanning himself from his servers for the crime of virtual property theft, is he? While of course he’s trigger happy to ban CD players!

Thirdly, why permaban? I’m still banned up to this day. 3 years later, thousands of hours in-game put since. Imagine permabanning a veteran from a very small community of CD players in North America, which, due to the network effects was pretty much contained to Tamari’s servers for a long time until recently, as Mike had retired around that time and “Safe Space” queues moved almost entirely to Tamari’s discord server? For reference, on my own servers I haven’t issued a single permaban even for the worst offenders, because people improve over time. It’s not just something about which one can say that “I believe that people improve” — no, it’s a fact, everyone starts as a noob and it’s no shame in being wrongo, it becomes a shame only if you stubbornly keep insisting on being wrong, like Tamari currently does with the stolen code situation. Moreover, I have a “jubilee” day 4 times a year when I unban even cheaters, as a share of people who start as cheaters sometimes get into the game and start playing fairly. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I did something wrong (I didn’t), wouldn’t it be more prudent to unban after a while and see if the alleged offender improved?

And lastly, which is a big factor that is still there on Tamari’s servers up to this day, is his weird definition of toxicity, which I suspect may have contributed to the ban rationale in my case. As Tamari himself likes to say, he prefers his community to be more of a “small family” rather than a group of friends playing together. He’s very sensitive to any verbal confrontation and considers it “toxicity” and “drama”. Note, how in this case extremely gross and toxic ACTIONS of a player were considered as just “having fun”, which is another big thing on Tamari’s servers. As long as one has fun, it’s okay to play however they want, no matter how detrimental and annoying it is for other players. While pointing out that some playstyles may be detrimental verbally, which are just WORDS, as opposed to actions, is toxicity.

This weird definition of toxicity is something that is turned on its head in my opinion and I’ll expand more on this later in this post. Words, in general, are largely inconsequential. No match in this game is lost or won just because of harsh words. Words are means of communication which can be used to adjust others behaviors, whether they agreed on receiving this communication or not. If I call for help — I request others to adjust their behavior and come to help, but it’s up to them if they do that. Ultimately, it pays off in terms of win likelihood to adjust behavior according to what’s communicated. If I criticize some other player’s behavior as detrimental for success — it’s also communication that calls for behavior adjustment. One may disagree, which is fine, as this hopefully gives a start to a discussion which may reveal the game details and mechanics that prove who’s right and how exactly, but it is rarely a good cause to claim toxicity. Actions, on the other hand, are very consequential. Actions is what leads to wins and wipes. Actions can be detrimental not only for one’s success, but for a team’s success and it’s a team oriented game. One should always strive to be useful for the team and not get in the way of others while playing this game. Actions matter and thus, toxicity, as manifested in actions, is miles and bounds much more consequential than toxicity, as manifested in words.

Any offense with words is also always bilateral. Literally nothing bad happens with people who can choose or choose not to be offended by words. It’s easy to argue that words don’t hurt anyone and instead of taking offense one should reflect on their behavior to check if it was behavior that brought those words as a response. Words don’t even cause wipes in totally virtual games. Actions affect people, on the other hand. Although computer games are virtual, they are important for us nevertheless, we spend countless hours playing them and invest a lot of money in hardware and software to be able to play them. Detrimental actions in games cause wipes and this is much more important type of toxicity than mere words. Bans are even worse, as they completely deny access to the networks of people one is used to play with, deny access to CD queues under the pretense of denying access to just game servers. That’s what real toxicity is.

But amazingly enough on Tamari’s servers the toxicity, as manifested in actions detrimental for the team and gameplay, is “having fun”. While calling out such a behavior is “toxicity” and is a bannable offense. In the result of this case a player who engaged in absolutely gross extreme levels of toxicity in their actions is spared. A player who called out said toxicity gets permabanned just for mere words. Now tell me how exactly is this not having the things upside down and not turning them on their heads? As we’ll see further this approach to bans was used more than once. Not only such an approach to moderation is detrimental, it’s also very prone to arbitrary decisions not based on any clear set of rules. Which, again, has happened on Tamari’s servers more than once and which we will discuss later.

Importance of feedback in games

This is basics that should have been known without saying, but. For higher levels of play the feedback is of utmost importance. A quote from Anders Ericsson, one of the leading experts in top performance:

the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.
When these conditions are met, practice improves accuracy and speed of performance on cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks (Fitts & Posner, 1967; Gibson, 1969; Welford, 1968).

https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

This guy spent his whole career in academia researching how to become an expert in anything, from top world violinists to chess grandmasters. Wrote several books. Computer games, when played on a higher, borderline impossible levels, are no different. It’s very easy to stagnate for years and thousands of hours and we all know plenty of examples demonstrating that even after thousands of hours people may not improve, unless they specifically strive to.

He has identified a number of key requirements, which, if followed, allow for improvement. These are:

• There absolutely has to be a teacher figure. Humans are slow to arrive to valid conclusions about what is true. Therefore, if someone mastered some craft and can be trusted to know the truth about this craft, they are in a better position to transfer this knowledge to those who haven’t mastered it yet. If no such a figure is available, one should learn from the best. Specifically for KF2, these are players who manage to deal the most damage over time with the most headshot percentage over all shots in a controlled environment;
• One should practice outside of their comfort zone. Thus, the difficulty parameters, such as MaxMonsters, the difficulty of the cycles, etc. should always be on the path forward, once the previous difficulty settings can be reliably beaten. Example: regular drivers do not grow much in their car driving skills past roughly 1-2 years of driving, because they never practice car driving outside of their comfort zones;
• Immediate feedback on performance in all sessions. One who wants to excel in anything should seek and solicit any feedback available to learn what they could have done wrong and how to avoid playing less than perfect in the future;
• One should practice a lot, every day. There are no shortcuts. One has to practice outside of their comfort zone, which means failures, or wipes, every day. If you didn’t wipe you probably haven’t learnt anything that day;
• Results should be measurable. If the results cannot be measured, this impedes the improvement by a lot, e.g. one doesn’t improve much outside of solomode practice sessions with measurable results, the most important of which are the monster spawn rate, damage dealt, headshot accuracy and the difficulty of the cycle.

But it’s easy to see how feedback may feel offensive. Feedback means that the subject isn’t perfect and makes mistakes, which need addressing, which requires feedback for optimum improvement. Surprisingly, even at higher levels of play, we have players who struggle with the concept of being imperfect and feel offended when constructive feedback is offered, to the point when proverbial “git gud” is considered as toxicity.

It’s not, especially when followed by a piece of practical advice. One who strives to be among the best should never let their ego to get in the way of their self improvement. The ego insist that every one of us is the one and only and there are no others like that. This is ludicrously false and irrational, the sooner one learns it the better it is for their self improvement. All feedback should be welcomed, even if unspecific (e.g. “git gud”), even if derogatory (e.g. “you caused the wipe, retard”) in which case it makes sense to thank for the feedback, if it comes from a good player, and ask to provide specific advice. What exactly did I do wrong so I can improve by practicing to avoid such a mistake going forward should be the question for all those who suggest to “git gud”.

If the feedback is suppressed in any way, as it is on Tamari, whether it’s through the explicit rules, or just an expectation of getting banned for BS reasons and having to walk on eggshells at all times, self improvement stops. It also stops the ladder. In any small group its members intuitively measure each others performance and have a pretty good grasp on who outperforms and who underperforms and at any given point in time can produce a pretty good rating of each other forming a ladder from best to worst performers. If such a survey is conducted anonymously and the ratings are aggregated they usually match objective performance measurements. While in KF2 it’s not as easy, in other games it’s rather straight forward. Note that typically such surveys are collected anonymously, this is done because most people have enormous ego in a sense that it’s bigger than their actual ability. It hurts when they learn that their place on a ladder is lower than their ego expected them to find themselves on. If they never measured their results in an objective way (e.g. solomode, wave 10, basic_heavy, 6 wsf, 6p HP, true solo and then the skill is measured by the maxmonsters one can survive without dying) learning this can hurt the ego pretty seriously.

Here’s a good example how they react over there to an in-game feedback such as “make a habit to immediately switch the fire mode when picking up FN FAL from the ground” or “please heal me when I request”:

Notice how this unknown Tamari acolyte uses italic font effect to emphasize some words. It will be important later.

Now imagine that the feedback is suppressed, but the continuous mutual assessment of each others skill level never stops. Because players just can’t tell some other players who wish to play that they can’t admit them because of the low skill, they have to resort to alternative communication channels and form shadow queues, because by doing it they cut off lower skilled players without having to inform them about it directly. That’s, I believe, is the main reason shadow queues exist on Tamari. This also interplays with mutual allegiance and overall likeability, as players who are more upbeat and have higher charisma can compensate for their lack of skill, just like in a real world, but only by that much, that’s a lower power factor in my opinion.

This brings us to the question of drama.

Drama and life

Skip this and a few next paragraphs if you don’t care about the dry conflict theory.

Unlike what Tamari claims, drama is what brings life to any community. Let’s hear Tamari himself on this:

I rely here on the classic widely agreed on definition of drama as reenacting a notable conflict on a stage. Drama is an ancient Greek word for “action”. Say, a stage can be a forum or a discord chat, a conflict can be a clash of two visions on how a game should be played, and a reenacting can be discussing of who did what that caused a wipe or what could the team have changed in order to play better. If a team wants to improve, it must always engage in the “lessons learned” phase of the project management to discuss their actions in order to identify what could have been played imperfectly and thus needs to be addressed in the future attempts. This is one of the ways the feedback principle mentioned previously can be applied.

Drama is what brings life to a community. Without drama there is no recognition of latent community conflicts and no resolution of said conflicts. Each and every community has a purpose, e.g. a KF2 gaming community has a purpose of playing a KF2 game together. Nobody enrolls in such a community in order to fail and wipe. In my 5.5K hours in this game I’ve never seen a single player who would be willing to wipe and would refuse to attack monsters and would run at them head first in order to die as soon as possible. No, even the most backwards players want to win and do their best to kill as many monsters as quickly as possible. Players play this game to get a win.

Drama is the difference between the two player or team states: the imperfect state that the team is currently in and a perfect state the team wishes to achieve. It’s a difference between two potential states. The steps to achieve the perfect state are identifying the imperfections in the gameplay, developing approaches to mitigate them, practicing these approaches and using them in games. The energy comes from the fact that there’s a difference between the potentials, between the current state and the future perfect state. No difference between the potentials = no energy = no progress. It is paramount for the team success to engage in establishing what went wrong, which inevitably means discussing players behaviors, which inevitably means that some players must be provided with feedback which they may or may not find offensive. It’s critical to establish once and for all that any such feedback is critical for the team success and one should do their best to suppress their ego as detrimental for the team success and welcome the feedback instead.

Amazingly enough, some players can’t stand the feedback and consider it “toxicity” and “drama” in a negative meaning. Needless to say, such teams inevitably struggle to improve, inevitably underperform, and instead of improving are busy witch hunting those who might have offended someone by saying something belittling and threatening. This is what happens on Tamari’s.

If there is a community where the drama is suppressed, there is inevitably less feedback. The “lessons learned” step of the project management is abandoned, there is an endless witch hunting, a long list of banned players, whose only fault was SAYING WORDS which someone somewhere found offensive, belittling and threatening. Such a community is dead or dying from the self improvement standpoint. And I think I was convincing enough at describing my experience of never, not a single time, witnessing a player in this game who would be consciously seeking to die in this game. Everyone, instead, wants to win and wants to improve. Thus, a community with no drama is a dead community and drama avoidance is inconsistent with the declared purpose of a community to play “Controlled Difficulty” games. There could be all right small talk or a lovely small or big family unit or a nice circle jerk, but this has nothing to do with playing the borderline impossible difficulty and improving at it. Just a reminder about the promise of Tamari’s servers:

I could continue this hypocritical statement with a true statement like this: “… but we have to insist that self improvement is prohibited, because it relies on feedback, which can offend someone, who is already perfect and thus doesn’t need to improve, so it makes it toxic and turns it into a drama. Needless to say, a person critical of what’s going on here may even discover that we rely on code theft and bring it up, which is a drama level that is totally unacceptable.”

They say that George Bernard Shaw once said “No conflict, no drama”. He was absolutely right, as conflict is the root of every drama. This brings me to the nature of conflict.

The nature of conflict

It seems that there’s a proof exists now that proves our universe is not real and not local, for which three physicists received a Nobel Prize in physics in 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOLVcNMjqgg

Turns out that it’s at least not always the case that the moon is there when nobody is there to observe it. Also, it’s not always the case that objects can interact only when in vicinity from each other. But for our purposes, the principle of locality, which is the root cause of all the conflict in this world, holds. The principle of locality states that objects can interact only with immediate surroundings.

This is something that determines the locality of human senses. One cannot feel or perceive on behalf of others and is limited to the senses directly attached to their mortal shell. Which means that physical pain is not transferable. Any feelings are not transferable. Any local experience, environment and genetic combo, that determine the behavior of a specific specimen, are not transferable and are contained to only this specific specimen. This is the root cause of all the wars and suffering, but I’m not going to stretch that far, haha, it’s an essay about Tamari’s KF2 servers. But just imagine how the world looked like if we could share our cognition and our senses with all the sentience in the world. For one, it wouldn’t be possible to have large scale wars as typically live organisms do not engage in hurting themselves and we would be all one single organism.

Fundamentally, the conflict is a situation where two or more specimens bound by their local senses have different readings from their senses and different ways to digest and process these readings while interacting with each other. As you can easily see, conflict is fundamental to our Universe. There’s literally nothing we can do about it, even if we wanted to eliminate all conflict, unless we are in position to transcend the human nature, which we currently are not. Conflict is everywhere you look. Two different human beings produce a conflict. One human being is in conflict with itself, as different brain parts compete with each other for whole body behavior and produce conflicting motivational factors at all times. One human being is in conflict with themselves because different ideas compete with each other for their behavior.

Every human being is in conflict with the nature based on the “eat or be eaten” principle. Our bodies keep killing harmful bacteria, microorganisms and parasites every second in order to survive. I haven’t met a single environmentalist/vegan in my life who would go as far as engaging in breeding tapeworms in their intestines for “not hurting any life” purpose or in other similar activities. Our blood white cells, leukocytes, engage in phagocytosis at all times, which is to say they kill foreign life in our bodies, that’s how the immune system works. By just mere existing you kill other life. You can’t opt out, it’s a question of where you draw the line between the life forms you kill and the life forms you don’t and which ones you do unconditionally and which ones you may think about.

There’s a number of species that consider humans their prey; as well as humans in their eating habits resemble the predators/facultative scavengers the most and have to eat various animal products in order to survive. Human digestive system can’t maintain human bodies based on consuming herbs only for a number of reasons. These animals necessarily have to be killed in order to be consumed. Humans and different human groups have evolved to compete with each other up to the levels on which they are killing each other. Killings have been throughout the whole human history, up to the levels when only a small percentage of males reached the old age and got to reproduce, these killings continue right now as we speak and there are no good reasons to believe they will stop happening in the future.

Even such simple things as goal making, planning and achieving the goals generates conflict between the current state and the future state of self, without which self improvement would not be possible.

It’s extremely idealistic and detached from reality to think that one can avoid the conflict and drama in life altogether. We haven’t chosen to be born, we were dealt these cards by the nature and have to play them to the best of our ability, which implies dealing with conflicts and drama, resolving a share of them by physically destroying the source of such conflict if warranted, and killing other life forms, including our own species, when necessary for survival.

Conflict is natural, absolutely inevitable, we can’t be just all a small family, not to mention that where there’s a family there’s a conflict between the family members, there will inevitably be competition, conflict and resulting drama and fights. We just have to deal with it. One cannot avoid the conflict at all times, eventually one has to fight and more so if the one is a male. The only productive way to deal with conflicts is learning how to resolve some of them and at least not produce unnecessary conflicts, by, say, stealing other people’s property, such as code. This brings me to the conflict phases.

Escalation of conflict

Not only the conflict is natural, the escalation of conflict is also natural. As I’ve just described, our life is full of latent conflict waiting to manifest itself. Here’s how a conflict escalates in a small group.

There are multiple charts available for that from various institutions that have been busy studying war and peace for a long time, I’d like to bring up this one because it emphasizes that there’s no point in time where there is no conflict:

Ignoring the conflict oftentimes leads to being dispossessed, rights and liberties taken away, being robbed of property and killed. It is natural and ethically right to defend one’s life, property and freedom from being taken away. If we can agree on that, which is a big step towards the “dispute settlement”, we can proceed to arguing on whose rights, what rights and how exactly get violated in-game in KF2 and how such a conflict may escalate.

Consider the following. The humans have evolved and adapted to survive on this planet in small hunter-gatherer tribes. For 3 million years homo genus was doing just that, except for the last few thousands years or so, since when the agricultural civilization took off. This means that all the adaptations, such as general human behavior, sexual dimorphism, body composition, human senses and how advanced some of them are as well as their overall composition are a result of the evolutionary forces shaping through the means of natural selection the human nature to be suited for a certain lifestyle, which humans have evolved to love, enjoy and pursue. This force that determines the way we think, live, operate, is largely outside of our control, we can’t successfully fight our own nature. Among other things, human evolutionary history determines how the small group dynamics and conflicts in general unfold.

Imagine a group of 5-7 hunters heading out of their camp to hunt down big game. Their group’s survival, including women and children left in the camp, depends on their success. Imagine a group member or two underperform (“bottomfrag”, so to speak) to a point that the group loses their prey. Say, a critical spear throw is missed, repeatedly. Or a group member who was supposed to ambush the fleeing prey falls asleep or isn’t otherwise in position to kill it when it passes by. Groups that don’t discipline underperformers are doomed to perish, don’t leave offspring and get replaced by those who do discipline. It’s a life and death situation and they better find a solution and this solution better be right. Because all human traits are heritable, propensity to discipline underperformers gets reinforced through the offspring of those who engage in it, as compared to average of their time in next generations.

How do they discipline underperformers? Through the aforementioned feedback, the “lessons learned” session, which is held after each, especially unsuccessful, hunt. That’s why the “blame game” typically starts after a failure and rarely happens after a success. What if the underperformer ignores the feedback and keeps at it? Depending on various factors, such as human resources availability, prior reputation of the underperformer and all other group dynamics, the underperformer can be reprimanded in various ways, such as decreasing their social status, frowning upon, ridiculing them, calling bad names and even beating. If this doesn’t help, such a member gets either killed or expelled from the group, which is typically almost certain death. In a situation of scarcity, nobody is going to tolerate someone who consumes, but doesn’t give back to the community anything of value.

Now imagine that this iterative and self refining process went non stop for 3 million years, generation after generation. This breeds such behavioral composition that can’t just be wiped out by, say, society, or upbringing, or even the recent agricultural civilization evolved in the last few thousand years. It’s still here with us. This is the main reason why KF2 players are >95% males. This is the main reason why the optimal number of the small hunters group is about 5-7 hunters. This is the main reason why people enjoy playing such games in the first place. In our modern lives we can’t otherwise find situations that would have satisfied that primal urge to get together in small groups and go on hunting expeditions. That’s why we are willing to waste a lot of time and money on our PCs and games, so we can play such games. Humans are natural elitists and are naturally inclined to reprimand underperformers in the areas they master well. They evolved to do so. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Of course, in online games, that allow us to experience to a degree the life we’ve evolved to live, but are deprived from by the way of modern industrial civilization, we can’t just kill the reluctant underperformers or straight up trolls whose hunting/gaming style doesn’t improve the group’s chances to successfully kill the big game, I mean, survive through the hunt and kill the boss. But the escalation of conflict unfolds through the same phases:

• humble suggestion;
• verbal confrontation in stronger words, such as name calling or mocking or naming & shaming, bullying;
• vote kicking;
• banning.

The well-known “good cop & bad cop” approach to negotiation exists for a good reason — it is effective. It covers both bases: 1) communicating potential benefits from acting in a certain encouraged way (=incentivizing) 2) communicating potential problems that may stem from acting in a certain discouraged way (=threatening).

Thus, all these conflict phases are natural and effective ways that are understood by everyone on an intuitive primal preverbal level and practiced to a degree in any successful gaming community. If the underperformers don’t comply and don’t improve, calling them names is natural. Mocking them is natural. Bullying is natural. These methods just work. Denying any of these is denying reality and is doomed to failure. No matter if someone deems them “toxic” or threatening or whatever else. This means that the reasons Tamari typically gives when banning players are hypocritical and counterproductive at least. Plain stupid. Either he promotes the “Controlled Difficulty” gameplay as he says he does and thus has to engage in feedback/lessons learned and conflict escalation, or he abandons feedback and embraces a small family like conflict avoidance paradise, which then can’t have anything to do with self and teamplay improvement that has to rely on feedback, criticisms and lessons learned sessions, which are adversarial and conflicting by their nature.

Of course, as any other useful tool, all that can be easily abused, e.g. the bullying or killing. But it’s always worth keeping in mind that they exist for a good reason, they are natural, they work for a reason, and can be used in a good way, just like any other tool out there. For example, we typically assume that all sorts of bullying by the government or killing by the government are benign, so we tolerate it and use euphemisms to rename them to, say, “indicted” or “arraigned” or “placed into a corrections facility” or even worse. But for mere mutual citizen-to-citizen relations these are a no-no for whatever reason.

Hudson ban status: unwarranted

Hudson is a well known KF2 player from England. Thousands of hours put. He can be frequently found in higher level KF2 games and until Summer 2021 he was a player on Tamari’s servers. One of the most prolific SWAT mains and probably even the best SWAT in the whole world. I’ve played hundreds of hours together with Hudson and I can readily admit that some of his chats may come off as confrontational sometimes (which I have nothing against, just FYI, freedom of speech, baby, not to mention that harsh words are oftentimes necessary as shown above for proper feedback). And I can’t recall even a single intentional action by Hudson that would be detrimental for the team play. But then:

According to Hudson, his crime was saying the word “negr” during the in-game banter towards Aeipathy, which is some kind of inside joke from the Stalker game series, where, I assume, the Russian word “негр” (which isn’t at large perceived as derogatory, FYI) wasn’t properly translated to English. Inevitably, a petty hall monitor, some pathetic admin on Tamari’s, whose name is probably even not worth knowing, similarly to my own ban, was witch hunting in the chat history and issued a permanent ban.

Why on Earth should it matter in a community supposedly centered around “Controlled Difficulty” mod if people call each other names or engage in mutual banter, regardless of how seriously they mean it? Why it’s a permaban instead of a temp ban or instead of a suggestion or instead of a warning? There are maybe around 50 CD worthy players total in the world, why do they have to be split and isolated even more because someone said some word that someone else found to be offensive or threatening? Why mere words, which are mostly inconsequential by their nature, result in extreme adverse actions? Especially considering that this petty hall monitor probably moved on with life long time ago, while Hudson still plays the game and still, each time we play together I find his in-game behavior to be highly professional and team oriented? He lands his headshots, he doesn’t engage in kill whoring, doesn’t steal ZT (but if he does he readily apologizes), plays his perk role, doesn’t run stupid builds detrimental for the team play?

Yet, permabanned on Tamari’s.

Policing gamers communications

It’s worth noting that we are currently experiencing a trend in the whole gaming industry to police player communications.

Until recently the gamers comms were free for all, both text and voice chats. But this freedom is coming to an end. As far as I can tell, the major factor contributing to this is the influence of woke DEI capital financial firms, such as BlackRock or Vanguard.

Gamers are still free to say whatever both in the text and voice chats in KF2, but not on Tamari’s. He has designed a text chat syndication system between all his servers and his discord, so all the text chats are preserved on his discord. These chats are then inspected by Tamari and his moderators for presence of slurs or insults they find inappropriate and then they decide if this crosses the line and a player ban ensues.

Lawrence ban status: probably unwarranted

Lawrence is a well known KF2 player who claims to be playing from North Africa, Egypt, AFAIR. He has at least 2 accounts, but is rather easy to recognize as he almost always has the “Lawrence” word in the name and can be frequently found in higher level KF2 games.

Here’s one of his profiles:

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198305529504/

Good teammate, I’ve never seen him engaging in any sort of selfish or detrimental play, the only issue is he has poor internet connection and sometimes can disconnect because of it. Extremely polite.

Permabanned on Tamari’s. Here’s the reason for his ban:

There are a couple of things that seem to be wrong here.

First off, Lawrence denies using the aim-bot (on a different discord outside of Tamari’s control), which would be a serious offense, if not used purely for research purposes, which is sort of easy to establish by the way it was used. Why, with bans on Tamari, we never get to hear the other side of the story? Tamari may be right about it, I don’t know, but, given that we may not always trust his word because of the code theft situation and him lying about it, why there’s no evidence shared with the public? Why do we have to blindly trust his words which we know are proven to not always be true? Pretty much any more or less serious cheat reporting in any game requires proof, typically a video. Why Tamari feels himself exempt from this standard, while at the same time hypocritically insisting that I prove every accusation against him with a very high evidence quality bar (which I still do)? Why, moreover, he denies any further discussion of this incident and potential valuable feedback? Every conflict is over when it’s really over, not when someone declared it is. Why can’t we, and more importantly Lawrence, provide further feedback aimed at clarifying the situation?

Then, the infinite ammo question. While technically it’s either a cheat or a hack, but it has long been acceptable to use it for practice or otherwise inconsequential sessions. From the vanilla “uberammo” functionality to CDCP’s “Solo Mode”. Serious runs should be on a level field and relying on meta, less serious sessions always allowed for a little leeway in terms of how they are played, including the infinite or borderline infinite ammo. Out of all “Hell on Earth Plus” KF2 experiences that are currently around, only my HoE+ servers stick to the vanilla ammo capacity values, but both fanta’s HoE+ and Hunter’s Biohazard increase the ammo capacity way above the vanilla levels. Is this a cheat? Is this a hack? Technically yes, but it is considered to be a game mode of sorts. While yes, not having to manage spares makes the game a bit easier, but many don’t want to bother with it during the sessions which they consider to be practice ones. Moreover, Tamari and FMX themselves are currently working on ripping off the fanta’s implementation of “Solo Mode Plus” in his “Controlled Difficulty ChokePoints” build (without asking for permission, of course) and implementing it on their own in what they call “Practice Mode”, the evidence of which currently can be found in their ZEDModifications.u mod. Is the “infinite ammo” hack, provided that it can be argued that the session was a practice one, an offense that is worth a permaban?

Then, Tamari admits that it was an EGS (Epic Games Store) account with EGS version of KF2. According to Tamari himself, as far as I remember, per his statement self-promoting his servers on the official KF2 discord, EGS players can’t play on his servers. Most likely this is because of his mods reliance on the Steam KF2 Content Hub Workshop. In any case, is this something that was happening OUTSIDE of his servers and yet warranted a ban on his servers, something he claims is not his intention?

Pay attention to his claim on his personal transparency and honesty. I think it’s pretty clear by now that, let’s put it mildly, he lacks these and if not completely, I’d say his honesty and transparency are below the average CD player. I hope the reader already learned and was convinced that Tamari runs his operation on the code stolen from other modders and lies about it, but please remember this as more is yet to be uncovered below and in the upcoming 3rd part of this exposé.

And at last pay attention how he frames his ban of Lawrence as actually a reaction on aggression against him and his community. “Abhorrent lack of respect”. This is another pattern to notice as he likes to play victim a lot, which I’ll expand on later. In reality, given the lack of proof of Lawrence’s wrongdoings, Tamari is an aggressor through the fact that he bans Lawrence from his servers. It’s a big deal to deprive a player who is eager to play higher level KF2 CD games from the network of other KF2 CD players and there’s no doubt that Tamari did this. There’s upfront evidence for the ban and nobody even disputes that Tamari did, in fact, ban Lawrence. There’s some doubt that Lawrence did what Tamari claims he did, but there’s no doubt that Tamari banned him. Yet, according to Tamari, it’s him and his community who are the victims here of the “abhorrent lack of respect” from Lawrence. See, he put hard work building and maintaining it along with FMX (notice as well that he actually stole a good share of mods, but tacitly omits this as he understandably doesn’t want you to know about it), but Lawrence abhorrently disrespected it. Doesn’t, just a thought, Tamari himself show an abhorrent lack of respect towards those modders, whose code and ideas he steals? How about the severity and impact of this type of disrespect, as compared to a single alleged use of cheats by Lawrence? For Tamari’s disrespect there’s a lot of proof, multiple mods, multiple authors whose code was stolen, this disrespect stays there for years. And for which there’s no good way to correct it exists, we can’t ban Tamari from the game as easily, can we? All we can do is threat the legal action where it’s applicable and name & shame his wrongdoings in hopes to win the court of public opinion. On the other hand, did this Lawrence’s alleged single and and very short lived disrespect exist in Tamari’s mind only, because no proof was ever produced?

Keiki Haniyasushin ban status: unwarranted

Keiki Haniyasushin is a KF2 CD player from somewhere on the East Coast of the US of A. 1.3K hours put, currently very active, sharpshooter main. He can be frequently found in higher level KF2 games and until 2022 he was a player on Tamari’s servers. I’ve played quite a few games together with Keiki and can’t recall even a single intentional action by Keiki that would be detrimental for the team play. Yet, banned on Tamari’s.

According to Keiki, his crime was saying the word “groomer” during the in-game banter towards ZeElmo. Notice the pattern already, no? Then, some petty hall monitor Tamari admin magic and Keiki is banned. As usual, despite assurances in transparency, no evidence was ever produced. Moreover, by now ZeElmo claims that the evidence doesn’t exist anymore:

gkoopz: So why did you censor the evidence? Saying someone doesn’t deserve to be shown the evidence you have makes you very guilty.
ZeElmo: What exactly are you looking for evidence of?
gkoopz: The evidence of you accusing someone of accusing you of being a groomer
ZeElmo: Like I’ve told Captain on several occasions now too; that evidence doesn’t exist anymore
gkoopz: Conviniently you censor the link to the evidence and only the admins are allowed to see it? Very fucking convinient
gkoopz: You burn evidence?

Once again. Why on Earth should it matter in a community supposedly centered around “Controlled Difficulty” mod if people call each other names or engage in mutual banter, regardless of how seriously they mean it? Why it’s a permaban instead of a temp ban or instead of a suggestion or instead of a warning? There are maybe around 50 CD worthy players total in the world, why do they have to be split and isolated even more because someone said some word that someone else found to be offensive or threatening? Why mere words, which are mostly inconsequential by their nature, result in extreme adverse actions? Especially considering that this petty hall monitor probably moved on with life long time ago, while Keiki plays the game and still, each time we play together I find his in-game behavior to be highly professional and team oriented? He lands his headshots, he doesn’t engage in kill whoring, doesn’t steal ZT (but if he does he readily apologizes), plays his perk role, doesn’t run stupid builds detrimental for the team play?

Yet, permabanned on Tamari’s.

And again, no evidence of the “crime” was ever produced and shared publicly, so we don’t even know for sure if the offense even took place. But we know for sure, that Tamari went ahead and banned Keiki. An adverse action of very high impact and high importance.

The network effects

It’s a big deal to ban a CD player from being able to coordinate and play CD games with other CD players.

Any ban of a CD worthy player is a major aggression and offense. This action deprives the banned player from coordinating and playing together with other CD worthy players. Given that for a very long time (years) until recently, almost all CD queues in NA had been happening only on Tamari’s, this effectively deprived an American player from playing CD games with low latency. This is a very major offense. Don’t fool yourself — most of us have thousands of hours put in this game. We spend dozens of hours of our finite lives a week playing it. Instead of doing anything else. We spend tons of money investing in good hardware and software that allows for it. It’s truly belittling and shortsighted to say that it’s not a big deal to not be able to play a team-oriented game with a team of mates who also take and play this game seriously. No wonder that some players go as far as they create clone accounts of theirs to circumvent the bans.

As one player put it:

its just a case of monopoly
question him and then what
quit the game because theres no alternative?
starting an alternative means you need to incur server hosting costs, form a community and ask people around any time you want to get a game going
same reason people didnt openly oppose totalitarian governments
oppose them and then what
its a losing battle

The value of a platform to users is affected by the number of other participants, which constitutes the “network effect”. Of course, for the platform owner, it’s beneficial to downplay the role of the network effect and emphasize of the platform attractiveness and feature set. That’s why Tamari points out that this or that player betrayed abhorrently the work he and FMX put into building and maintaining (minus stealing, of course) their establishment, but never brings up that a share of his players are there not because of what they build, maintain or steal, but because “everyone else is already there”. It’s crucial to be in a circle where “everyone else is”, in order to be up to speed on all the happenings, have access to higher level game queues and coordinate. However good some platform may be, it wouldn’t worth being in it, if it has less players than it’s necessary to complete the queue. Moreover, over time people build relationships they rarely are willing to break in the face of new evidence proving that their former mates are actually bad people. This happens because of the relationship inertia, which oftentimes leads people to stay in abusive relationships past the point when it reaches the 0 value from the cost-benefit analysis perspective. People are also slow at digesting and processing new information, especially if it contradicts their prior experiences, and are hesitant at changing the course of their lifestyle without very serious reasons. That’s why, for example, people rarely change their habits, not likely to change their bank until it goes bankrupt, stick to buying the same car models for long and typically maintain a career in just single field, despite this field may be more or less lucrative depending on time. This all can be narrowed down to the principle of conserving energy, as learning new habits and ways of life is costly.

Take Facebook as an example. It is easy to argue that regarding some of its functionality we can say that it became worse with time. As an example, long time ago there was a way to permanently configure it to show a chronological feed of events from your network. Not anymore. Oftentimes when you press the back to the feed button you are returned to a completely different feed filled with something else and it’s a struggle to find some entry that was there before you left the feed by clicking on a particular entry in it. Yet, A LOT of competing social networks failed to attract the users because nobody wants to join an empty network where there’s no one to be found. As an example, Google attempted to enter the market with their “Google Plus” social network in 2011. One would think that with their money and brain power they are up for a huge success. Not so. Despite cool features (which are now in use on other networks today) such as “Circles”, it failed to attract any significant number of users, became an endless money pit for Google who eventually shut it down just 7 years later. Luckily (or maybe not), nobody seemed to put their life into it so there were no suicides, like in some other cases, where very smart people were getting together, composing a decent social network product, getting financing from the venture capital, only to fail miserably and facing nothing but growing debts. Why would users not join it, despite sometimes superior features of the platform? Because there was nobody there. Nothing stops Facebook, at least until the current generation dies off along with their Facebook profiles, but even that probably won’t stop it as they will have AI analyzing the profiles and generating new similar garbage. Even knowing for a fact that the Facebook owner considers his users “dumb fucks” doesn’t stop the users from using it. Speaking of which, you know who Tamari thinks his players are?

Another example is the keyboard layouts most of us use. By now it’s a de-facto standard to use QWERTY keyboards. I type using the blind typing approach (that’s why these huge ass essays exist) extremely fast with 300+ characters per minute speed. This is because I’ve spent hundreds of hours mastering the blind typing and this also creates a huge entry barrier if I wanted to switch to an alternative layout, even if it was superior to QWERTY. One could design a keyboard layout superior from the ergonomic perspective, but who would use it, who would spend a lot of time relearning again where the appropriate buttons are?

It is extremely painful for a CD player to be exiled from the only CD community they can play in with low enough latency, which is crucial for performance. We all are very invested into this game, through the time put, through the hardware money spent on, through the connections with other players we’ve built. All that goes down the drain, because someone got offended by your feedback on someone’s play style or because you said truth about the stolen code situation. You did nothing wrong and now there’s nowhere to play now. Just because of Tamari. You need to either quit the game, or play with distant teams with latency that affects your performance and basically denies the use of projectile weapons, or host your own servers and do your best building an alternative community, fighting an uphill battle with the network effect.

Thus, the value of the Tamari’s servers can only partially be explained by the “hard work” Tamari and FMX have put into it. Another part is the stolen code. And yet another part is the network effect of a good share of NA-based CD players already hanging there and making queues. Here’s the question, is it fair that he squats on something he says he built and bans CD players? It would not be a problem if he indeed all built it by himself with FMX. But he didn’t. A good share of their mod is stolen from other modders. Would all the authors of appropriate stolen mods be okay if they knew that he bans people that these mod authors themselves played with back in the day for bogus reasons? Then, are all the players who stay there mainly because of the network effect okay with him banning the CD players for BS reasons? Would be great to have their anonymous opinions (because we know what happens when they do this not anonymously) surveyed.

Higher level gameplay and politics

While I am personally rather political, I understand that the true mastery of any art, whether it’s playing piano or chess or whatever sports ball or playing KF2 is beyond politics. There’s a lot of all sorts of delusions out there adopted by all sorts of people and yet some of them are true masters of their craft. If one ever wanted to get into, say, top 10 in the world in whatever craft, they have to be prepared to deal and communicate with their political adversaries even if they hate each others political views to the point of secretly or even openly wishing to slash each others throats.

While interference caused by different political views is understandable, this just cannot get in the way of playing with the best of the best and determining the ladder status of the best, if such a ladder pretends to have any integrity to it.

It’s absolutely hilarious and hypocritical that Tamari engaged in hosting his KF2/CD tournaments which definitely were a competition, all while having a good share of CD players banned from his servers. Moreover, he specifically stated in the tournament rules that yes, there are banned players out there and they absolutely cannot participate. It’s no different than, say, banning Novak Djokovic or a similar figure and some other top 10 players from playing in a world tennis tournament and then declaring some dude a champion and the best tennis player. What sort of integrity such a tournament could pretend to have? What value such a world champion title would have in the eyes of the impartial beholder?

One cannot claim integrity to a competition that by its design excludes a good share of top players, but this is what Tamari does. Just another hypocritical clownery in a long list of clowneries. Does he not understand this? Or his hypocrisy makes him blind to such type of things? Is he a clown? You decide.

Then again, he runs so-called “records” on his servers. Automated way to maintain global, pertaining to all Tamari’s servers stats, that supposedly are some sort of competitive achievements. E.g. a list of wins on certain maps and certain CD parameters determining the difficulty, such as MaxMonsters, SpawnCycle, CohortSize, SpawnPoll, SpawnMod, ZedType, etc. What value (outside of mocking and ridiculing them as clown world level BS) do these achievements have considering that he permabanned a good share of active CD players from participation? Not that some of the best players in this game would want to participate in his “records”, even if unbanned, because the stolen code situation isn’t new and was known in private for a long time, so players who have some real integrity to them understandably would not want to be associated with Tamari’s operation in a major way that could be perceived as them endorsing it. Some people value their reputation and won’t risk it by associating themselves with a thief. But still, tells you something about Tamari and his claims on “integrity”, haha, doesn’t it?

Please remember this pattern of claiming integrity, but having none, as it will be important for the upcoming part 3.

Brawler, CaptainSAWB5, CaptainDasvi, sunny_bunny (Mixeerse) ban status: unwarranted

Grouping them all together because they were banned by Tamari at once. I don’t know Brawler much. I don’t know CaptainDasvi much. But CaptainSAWB5 is a well known KF2 player somewhere from the US with very respectable 5K+ hours in-game who has been through pretty much everything. Mixeerse, who currently is more known as sunny_bunny, is an old-timer somewhere from the EU, who played with the true elite in this game years ago, then took a long break from the game and now is back to active play, 1,700 hours in-game. All but CaptainDasvi can be frequently found in higher level KF2 games and until February 2023 they all were players on Tamari’s servers. I’ve played a good share of games with CaptainSAWB5 and some with Mixeerse and can’t say anything bad about them. As it is true with vast majority of CD players, they all subscribe to typical CD code of ethics and play it right. I can’t recall even a single intentional action by any of them that would be detrimental for the team play. But then they were banned by Tamari, as usual, with no evidence proving their guilt ever produced.

Here’s a ban essay Tamari published on his discord, which I assume I’m still banned from, but some members at the time were nice enough to share it. Documenting here for historical reasons.

There’s way too many things that are wrong with this largely self-contradictory statement, so I’m not going to waste time in this paragraph trying to expand all of them, I’m going to focus on what’s critical for the ban and the patterns in all the bans I’ve noticed above.

First off, no evidence provided whatsoever. We are directly instructed to trust Tamari’s word on this. There’s absolutely no good reason to that, as I hope it is clear for everyone who read the part 1 and the part 2 up to this moment and even more so for those, who either verified the stolen code situation independently or watched this whole thing unfolding live. Moreover, in a rather rare moment of telling truth, Tamari admits it himself:

This is a pattern throughout the whole series of bans on Tamari’s — no evidence is ever produced. All while, once again, hypocritically claiming transparency.

Secondly, once again, they are banned for saying “toxic” words. Once again, another case of the same pattern, Tamari’s definition of toxicity is mere WORDS, largely inconsequential. Moreover, said somewhere on the Internet outside of his servers, while exercising their rights to express themselves freely. In response to which he engages in adverse ACTIONS which are much more consequential through deprivation of access of banned players to the networks of their former friends and access to CD queues, which hurts a lot, as the world of higher level play in this game is very small and largely contained to Tamari’s servers in NA region. How come the alleged toxicity of words weighs more than the toxicity, not alleged, but very real, of actions?

Why on Earth should it matter if it’s okay to say a racist word or not? How is this not absolutely tangential to the higher level KF2 gameplay? Why would it bother any KF2 player to the point of permabanning a rare breed of a KF2 veteran completely if he chooses to say a racist word? It’s not an essay about this, but races are absolutely real in a sense that they behave differently and have different traits and thus it is rational to act differently in response to people just based solely on their race in absence of all other information. Just check, for example, the sickle cell disease issue — it is absolutely crucial to report the race correctly and act upon this information in hospital admissions. How come then saying something about differentiating between racial traits, even in a derogatory manner, somewhere on the internet outside of Tamari’s control, is a bannable offense on his KF2 servers?

Then, again, why permaban veterans? Why no attempt to establish the situation and go through the details of it like a just court would do, hearing both sides, calling the witnesses to testify and producing and examining the evidence for its authenticity and its implications? Then why no attempt to limit the impact of adverse actions to a call for holding back derogatory remarks (which inevitably is detrimental for self-improvement as I hope I’ve convincingly shown above, but okay) so the veterans can stay and play? Why no warnings? Why, even if a ban, it’s a permaban instead of a temporary ban? This is all an extremely childish immature clownery, all while hypocritically claiming “maturity”!

Then, amazingly, the only reason CaptainDasvi seems to have been banned, according to what Tamari says, is guilt by association with something that happens outside of his servers. I quote: “To be clear, not every member of the above group has partaken in these behaviors to the same degree, but all are being equally punished by the virtue of their association and involvement in the events in question”. This player literally did nothing wrong, even Tamari with all his pettiness couldn’t find anything to ban this player for, so the player was banned just purely for associating with others! Well, remember that when some may frown upon you for just being associated with Tamari through playing on his servers.

And finally let me speculate a bit on what might have been in this “hard evidence” that “does exist”. My guess is all these people did is they discussed the stolen code situation and understandably mocked Tamari’s denial of the situation. The reason why I say that is because of this line: “personalized insults and attacks aimed directly at myself, Forrest and other members of this community”. The question is, why Forrest? I assume Tamari doesn’t lie here, as there’s no good reason to do that. Forrest doesn’t like CD players much and rarely talks to them. He said once that his favorite perk is Firebug. He likes to code in UScript and avoids any talk with KF2 CD players. He is clueless about the high level CD gameplay we all are used to, that’s why he needs Tamari to guide him on balance and gameplay decisions. Why would anyone ever direct any attacks against Forrest? And the answer is because he is the main author of all the code and mods running on Tamari’s servers that aren’t stolen or otherwise borrowed, therefore, he was directly involved in stealing it. Given the stolen code situation it’s absolutely natural to bring up his name and that’s the only good reason to do that in my opinion. But let’s see if Tamari wants to disprove it by sharing the evidence, unlike him, I’m always open for feedback!

Knowledge ban status: unwarranted

Knowledge is a new blood KF2 CD player. I’ve played with him only once and I have no idea if he was even active on Tamari’s servers. He’s somewhat active in the chats, he joins pretty much every KF2 community he finds and he seems to be interested in KF2 and learning how to play it properly. Banned on Tamari’s.

He didn’t commit any crime, barring the thought crimes. One can’t even claim that he “consistently bought into this cult of drama and toxicity” (quoting Tamari), which is, in reality, my efforts to merely expose the Tamari’s stolen code operation. I never seen him supporting my efforts, supplying evidence or arguing for the code theft position.

When Tamari and his acolytes decided to ban him from their servers, one of Tamari’s followers, someone named “IllethP” sent this message to Knowledge:

 

As you can see they were struggling to find what to ban him for. The claim is he was somehow “feeding and aiding” in a bigot’s pathetic vendetta over “stolen code”. No evidence of which was ever produced.

This screencap is full of various small and big lies, I’m going to comment on just one: all reachable stolen mods authors had an issue with their code being abused on Tamari’s. I have plenty of screencaps of DMs with, for example, peelz and GenZmey whose mods were stolen and abused on Tamari’s for years. Fanta obviously has an issue and he’s the author of CDCP whose code was stolen as well. Moreover, FMX and Tamari themselves have an issue with their code, as they’ve since the part 1 of the exposé was published, engaged in various corrective measures to make their mod a bit closer to compliance, although not in full yet, which may not be even viable at this point. I’m not sharing all these DMs just yet. The only exchange that exists in the public space is the one with the Zedternal Reborn maintainers, so I’m again quoting it in full:

All these authors agreed with my arguments, found them authentic and conclusive, I’ve been working with them to make them deliver the “cease and desist” messages to Forrest Mark X. All of them were in communication with FMX and some of them were even willing to concede small steps to make it easier for FMX and Tamari to comply with their licenses, such as switching the licenses of some of their mods from GPL to LGPL, which allows for incorporation, so Forrest could inherit their classes without modifying their mods, which he is still barred from by their licenses. Any modifications to GPL or GPL protected mods effectively make the whole project that incorporates them GPL or LGPL licensed, which, in its turn, has a major requirement of sharing the whole and complete code back with the community. Which, I assume, is something FMX and Tamari want to avoid.

Once again. Why on Earth should it matter in a community supposedly centered around “Controlled Difficulty” mod if people do not actively promote Tamari’s narrative? This player didn’t do or say anything wrong. He was just hanging out on some discords with some players who blame Tamari in code theft, that all his crime there is. Why it’s a permaban instead of a temp ban or instead of a suggestion or instead of a warning? There are maybe around 50 CD worthy players total in the world, why do they have to be split and isolated even more because someone said some word that someone else found to be offensive or threatening? Why a mere neutral position on the code theft question, which is completely inconsequential by its nature, results in extreme adverse actions?

Yet, permabanned on Tamari’s.

And again, no evidence of the “crime” was ever produced and shared publicly, so we don’t even know for sure if the offense even took place. But we know for sure, that Tamari went ahead and banned Knowledge. An adverse action of very high impact and high importance.

Other bans not mentioned

There are a few ban cases on Tamari’s that were arguably even more ridiculous, but they are not included here, because the appropriate details about them weren’t public and the banned players preferred not to be mentioned. Some of them wanted to stay neutral to all that, others moved on with life and didn’t care anymore. There were probably other bans that I’m just simply not aware of as the banned players aren’t on my friend list or never complained about it publicly, but if you are such a player please check with me and your story will be added here. There were also other bans that were probably warranted, such as ban of the “KitanoV PRO” player, so I’m not including them either.

One pic though from some anonymous player I can’t vouch for, but seems more or less plausible given the rest:

I thought it was worth it to bring it up, because it highlights how the donations business may operate here.

Donations as a way to buy power

So we have the above case of that and a general intuition of how these things work. Tamari puts a designation to a player’s name, if he considers them to be a donator. Since we are at it, I can’t help but point out, that he puts this “Donator” designation on the “YAS” scoreboard mod, GenZmey’s intellectual property, the license of which he blatantly violates and which can be deemed intellectual property theft, abusing it to collect donations.

It’s easy to see how a conflict between a donator and non-donator would unfold. One of the products of Tamari’s operation is the collection of donations. Would an operator put more weight to an opinion of a donator as opposed to an opinion of a regular player, if these opinions are in conflict? An impartial human being in vacuum may not, but real world humans are fallible, and I hope I’ve provided enough evidence in this exposé that Tamari is indeed very fallible. This “Donator” label is nothing else, but an indication of a power level of a user. Regulars are regulars, Donators are more privileged, I guess Admins are even more and at the top we have Tamari and FMX themselves to rule them all, so to speak. If there’s a conflict, it’s resolved by taking into account these power levels, as the documented above ban cases I hope show. You can be 100% right and 100% banned, just because your opinion clashed with someone who either bought his way or otherwise earned that power over you. Some animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than the others.

There’s another case of this unequal treatment in the case of bans of Brawler, CaptainSAWB5, CaptainDasvi and Mixeerse (sunny_bunny). Out of all 4 only CaptainSAWB5 had a “Donator” designation and only he received a personal direct message on Discord from Tamari announcing his ban, because Tamari felt that CaptainSAWB5, I quote, “deserved the courtesy of knowing that I’ve permanently banned you”. Why only CaptainSAWB5 and not others? Is the fact that he’s the only “Donator” out of the four is a pure coincidence? I don’t think so.

This thing of buying power with donations isn’t new. It all boils down to an old observation that “money talks”. It was recognized long time ago in various gaming communities, for example, I quote the NexusMods policies on donations:

“Donations in any form are classed as voluntary monetary transactions that yield no gain for the donator. Requesting or offering donations in exchange for any content or service will be considered solicitation and is therefore strictly prohibited.”

https://help.nexusmods.com/article/77-donation-options-guidelines

It seems like in at least two documented cases it did yield some gains for the donators, no? One would expect that a hardcore gamer would know all that or would just rely on their moral compass to not put such designations, but, apparently, something is broken here in the case of Tamari.

Suppression of the freedom to express oneself is the main cause of the stolen code situation

By now Tamari and FMX have either reworked or completely removed all the identified in the previous part of this exposé code snippets. All the parties, including myself, Tamari & FMX and the identified mod authors worked together on the ways to resolve the legal status of the borrowed code. I didn’t work directly with Tamari, of course, because of the existing hostility, but through the third parties my message was sent and received. In some cases a decision was made to remove the GPL protected code (e.g. “Zedternal Reborn”) used in violation of the intellectual property rights or outright theft (e.g. “Nightcore Zeds” from the “Controlled Difficulty ChokePoints” edition) from their mod. At least some borrowed ideas were finally credited to their appropriate authors. In other cases the mod authors (e.g. “peelz” and “GenZmey”) were willing to concede their intellectual property rights they have over their mods, just a little, to change their licenses from GPL to LGPL, which allows for incorporation, but not modification. FMX promised to rework the ZEDModifications.u mod such that it doesn’t modify the LGPL protected mods, but incorporates them instead and uses through class inheritance. There’s evidence that FMX keeps his promise to a degree and works on implementing all these changes. It will definitely take a lot of time to rework everything such that there are no legal issues with their mod, after all the years of abuse. I am and will be monitoring this progress.

All that happened as a result of the first part of the exposé being published. If it wasn’t published, they likely wouldn’t do it and would keep it running as before, relying on the intellectual property stolen from other authors and collecting donations from it. This exposé is nothing else but that feedback I expanded on earlier. I’ve provided the feedback, pointed out the imperfections, they started working on addressing them.

This begs the question, why didn’t it happen earlier? Why there was nobody on their discord who would point out these issues, despite blatant, in-your-face, graphical UI similarities? Why would nobody question the legal status of their mod? Why it had to last for about 3 years? Despite the presence of, I quote, “over 800 members” on their discord? Obviously, it lasted that long because of the lack of feedback. Because all the players capable of providing it were banned from Tamari’s servers. Because pointing out that the code was stolen is so off limits that players get banned from Tamari’s servers even for discussing it somewhere on the internet outside of Tamari’s control. Because the remaining players got the message and decided to keep it to themselves. Nobody questioned Tamari’s authority and demanded any accountability for mass CD player bans. Nobody ever demands that he actually keeps his claim of being transparent and provides evidence, which the players can assess themselves if it warrants these bans or not and does it constitute all the offenses Tamari claims it does. Nobody challenges him on anything. Because they know that if they do — they risk getting permabanned and getting cut off from the only place where CD queues in NA had taken place for a number of years. They all are walking on eggshells, whether they are honest enough with themselves to admit this sad truth or not. That’s how important the freedom to express oneself is. That’s a lesson on how suppressing it always ends up in mass delusions that stretch for too far and for too long.

This also begs another question. They are complying with my requests under a threat of legal action to enforce GPL on their operation. I was right and they were wrong. Have they admitted the wrongdoing to their, I quote, “over 800 members”, especially donators, who maybe unbeknownst to them are sponsoring a code theft operation? Have they thanked me for all the work done to research and provide that feedback? Did Tamari tell his acolytes to hold back the smear campaign against mine and fanta’s names? Of course not.

But just in case, here’s how a professional response would look like, this is the Zedternal Reborn maintainers response to the identified non-compliance with the GPL license, which is the euphemism for code theft:

Why is Tamari like that?

This brings me to the main question, why is Tamari like that? What can explain his behavior? Why he steals the intellectual property of other modders for years and denies it? Why he keeps claiming transparency, but mostly doesn’t produce any evidence supporting him banning KF2 CD players? Why he bans KF2 CD players in the first place? There’s absolutely no excuse for that. Why does he play a victim without any evidence of his victimization ever produced each time he blatantly victimizes the CD players he permabans from his servers? Why he claims integrity and demands it from others, while he seems to be blind to the absence of it in his own actions? Doesn’t he understand that actions, such as bans, are much more toxic and adversarial than any word can ever be? Doesn’t he understand how does it hurt not being able to play harder than HoE games for banned hardcore players? Doesn’t he understand that he weakens the CD community by further splitting and disenfranchising it? Is it just a toy for him to play with, a caprice of his drama queen persona? Why he says that he requests maturity from other players, while acting immaturely himself? Is property theft we can call a mature behavior? Is denying the code theft situation publicly while working behind the scenes with the property owners to settle the dispute a mature behavior? Why he claims that his community is centered around CD, while denying the feedback which is crucial for self-improvement? Why would he write a 500 words essay on how he retires from the game and goes on hiatus only to be found playing one week later? Why would he and FMX steal other modders code in the first place instead of developing it themselves? Let’s look into answering all these uncomfortable questions.

Firstly, I can easily notice short-sightedness and low conscientiousness. In a lot of cases, probably most of the time, any property theft situation becomes known and uncovered. Just like in Tamari’s case. Oftentimes it’s a question of time. If it wasn’t the case there would be not much incentive, say, for big businesses to inspect their internal projects carefully to ensure there’s no GPL code somehow used. If such a situation lasts for long it jeopardizes the whole business. If they aren’t in position to rework their project they will have to release the full source code of it, potentially hurting their own position on the market through their own actions, that’s what happened to Fortinet, for example. Nobody wants to end up like this. So this really shows the lack of strategic planning. Instead, code theft seems very appealing if there’s no long-term planning involved. Because by stealing someone else’s code you can get it working right now, very quickly, without having to go through the pain of developing it yourself.

Secondly, this naturally brings me to the question of greed. Creating any property yourself is hard and takes years. Stealing it, on the other hand, is easy and allows to have it right now, without putting much effort. Greedy. Then, turning it into a donations operation — what could be the goal of it? Then, putting a “donators” designation, so the donators can bask in it and have some bragging rights and add some weight to their opinions? Thus, incentivizing other players to donate more, if they want the same? Then, not sharing the amendments to the mods stolen back with the community, so nobody else can run such a unique modded experience servers, even if they wanted to? Then ban a good share of CD players so they can’t have such an experience at all and can only whine in the comments on some low impact outside platforms? If it’s not greed than what it is?

Thirdly, this brought me to the question of ego. Have you seen how he responds to the poor souls he’s banned for whatever reason, but who don’t have enough dignity to them to abstain from any humiliating conversations with their oppressor? Check out this exchange on Tamari’s YouTube channel with the banned player KitanoV PrO:

This leaves me with an impression that he enjoys the power he has over poor Kitano. Poor Kitano wants to play higher level KF2 games, but he can’t have that, because he’s permabanned on Tamari’s, and is willing to even beg his oppressor and apologize to him. Isn’t this feeling sweet? Doesn’t this power over players feel great? I’m going to repeat it again, we regard this game very highly, don’t fool yourselves — we put countless hours into it, we effectively waste our lives on it. We prefer playing KF2 over overwhelming majority of all other activities one can engage in this world. We play it instead of having sleep. We play it instead of having rest. We pay less attention to our families, so we can play. We procrastinate on our studies. We delay and postpone the work to be done. All that so we can just play a freaking computer game. Have you ever noticed how irritating it is when someone interrupts an intense KF2 run? Why does it irritate so much when it happens? Isn’t it because of our investment in it is so high? This game requires a good teamplay to be enjoyable. Therefore, if one really wants to play, and we do, one DEPENDS on access to higher level KF2 CD queues. That’s the power this game has over us. And that’s the power that is abused by Tamari by cutting us off from playing it on a higher level.

Of course, I readily admit, and probably agree here with Tamari, that Kitano likes to talk trash (but again, don’t forget that these are just mere words), tends to play selfishly and it took quite a while for him to stop doing it at least sometimes, and probably has an enormous ego. But that’s my point, imagine the urge to play is so high, that it overcomes even the enormous ego and causes Kitano, out of all CD players, to say “I’m sorry” and out of all people in this game, to Tamari! Sweet dreams are truly made of these, don’t you think?

It’s as if he wanted the banned players to come to him and beg for forgiveness, so from his highness he may condescend sometimes and consider lifting a ban, so he even puts into his ban messages the URL one can follow to appeal the ban, so the enjoyment of watching someone humiliated and begging for forgiveness is not missed.

Well, if you are one of the banned, don’t be like Kitano. Don’t give Tamari that. Be a man your ancestors can be proud of. Never apologize for something you don’t feel yourself guilty of. Don’t let anything, including some pathetic freaking computer game, to have such power over you. You are a free man and it may worth to bend a knee only to something that is much bigger than your whole life.

There are other signs of the ego issue, such as stealing the code of other mods and not sharing back, seems like a total inability to admit being wrong, insisting on having and talking from the point of having such virtues as integrity, maturity, respect and so on often, etc.

Fourthly, his propensity to often pose himself as a victim. This is a truly fascinating topic. His poses himself as a victim of:

• belittling;
• toxicity;
• insults, including personalized insults;
• abuse of his hospitality;
• racism;
• sexism;
• insensitive comments;
• ridicule;
• attacks;
• threats;
• backstabbing;
• abhorrent lack of respect;
• hateful and threatening comments;
• betrayal.

That’s just a list of some of the alleged offenses he claims others engage against him in his essays he puts forward to justify banning players. Here’s a metascenario of all these essays:

• I, Forrest and these servers we build and maintain and our nice community are under attack from truly evil people who betrayed my trust;
• I have to defend us by banning them all;
• I choose to withhold all the evidence potentially proving all that happened, but trust me, I’m a victim here, not those who I ban.

In reality, the victims are the banned KF2 CD players, who lose ability to play higher level KF2 games on nearby servers. His servers run a good share of community developed code that was stolen or otherwise borrowed, so these aren’t even exactly his servers. The alleged crimes are mere words, but again, the evidence of these alleged crimes is almost never produced. It’s never explained how exactly alleged mean words are worse and more important than actions, such as bans, or in-game behavior detrimental for success. All these banned players are the victims of Tamari’s abuse of power. Tamari plays the victim to gain these benefits through deception. It’s a manipulative trick used to control other people. But this victim reversal situation is almost never challenged, because all capable of challenging players are already banned and those who decided to stay decided to keep it to themselves.

I’d like to quote Cory Clark, PhD, a behavioral scientist with the University of Pennsylvania, describing the evolutionary advantages of playing a victim:

Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings.

https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evolutionary-advantages-of-playing-victim/

I especially like the “justify the seeking of retribution” passage. Isn’t it exactly how playing a victim is used by Tamari at justifying the bans? But then it goes even better:

Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.

I like the passage about exaggerating or even faking the victimhood entirely! Isn’t it the case with Tamari? Then what about “claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports” — haha, it’s almost as if she used Tamari as a case study for her work! But then it gets even better than this:

Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.

Since this Quillette article is behind the paywall, those who wanted to follow up on these quotes may find it difficult to do so, but here’s a helpful free video on YouTube where she does an interview and basically goes over all that:

https://youtu.be/s1Zc5cUW2wI

Now, let me expand a bit on the likelihood to lie and cheat of the victimhood signalers. Why does it happen?

It’s easy to notice that across almost all the animal kingdom strong animals tend to act in the most straight forward fashion. E.g. lions, when they are hungry, just go ahead and straight up kill whatever the prey they want. When they want to move and occupy some space they just do it. The same applies to tigers, elephants, bears and so on. To the contrary, smaller and weaker species tend to develop various sneaky and deceptive life strategies which help them at overcoming the pure strength disadvantage they have as compared to stronger species. They use poison, mimicry, speed and other types of deception to survive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R_B1WdVZrE

Moreover, such life strategies exist not only between species, but within the same species as well, as this video shows on the example of the delayed plumage maturation in black birds. A specimen who would otherwise find themselves at a disadvantage as compared to strong and mature specimens of their own species may engage in various deceptive strategies to compensate for their weakness. For example, an otherwise weak specimen of homo sapiens may find it advantageous to lie and play a victim to compensate for their lack of strength.

According to Cory Clark, victimhood signaling is a stable personality trait:

Consistent with this theory, other recent work indicates that victimhood, or the enduring feeling that the self is a victim, may be a stable personality trait. This personality trait is characterized by a need for others to acknowledge and empathize with one’s victimhood, feelings of moral superiority, and a lack of empathy for others’ suffering. This personality trait was found to be relatively stable across time and relationship contexts, and was associated with higher perceived severity of received offenses, holding grudges, vengefulness, entitlement to behave immorally, rumination, distrust, neuroticism, and attribution of negative qualities to others.

I especially like the passages about the entitlement to behave immorally (e.g. stealing the code, lying, banning players for nothing) and the attribution of negative qualities to others. Is this a way to explain Tamari’s smear campaign against the good names of Carl and fanta, who did absolutely nothing wrong and whose reputation in this game is impeccable? This phenomenon is also known as “moral licensing”. If such a person engages in a lot of virtue signaling about integrity, respect, transparency, decency and such, they feel themselves morally superior and morally right to inflict harm on others (such as engaging in banning sprees), who are perceived as less moral, toxic or outright bad people. But being that morally superior gives such people, in their own eyes, the right to harm others.

Fifthly, I notice a pervasive hypocrisy to a lot of what Tamari ever does and says. Steals the intellectual property of other modders. When I point it out that the code was stolen, instead of admitting the wrongdoing, thanking for the work done, apologizing for the situation and addressing the legal and ethical status of his mod, he engages in a smear campaign against me and fanta. Claims that I do this because I want to steal their code. Obviously, no slightest evidence to support this claim exists. Cries out in pain as he bans the players for some perceived exaggerated and unverifiable damage the banned players supposedly done to him. Claims integrity, has none of it. Purports to have respect and demands respect, but disrespects the KF2 veterans at every step for no good reason whatsoever. Claims no proof exists to support the stolen code accusations against him, despite the amount of evidence proving the code theft is insurmountable to refute. Barely ever provides any proof of what he accuses others. Claims transparency, provides none. Cries out each time people allegedly say mean words about him, yet, it’s okay for him to call me an asshole or a psycho or a mental. How all that isn’t hypocritical? It’s perfectly fine when he or his acolytes engage in pretty harsh critical feedback (but only towards outsiders):

It’s okay when they do it. It’s not okay when we do it. How’s that not hypocritical? Although I agree here with his assessment of Kitano’s maps and I personally rarely play them, he’s factually wrong. These maps are extremely popular among different communities:

Of course all that is hypocritical.

And lastly, I hope I’ve shown convincingly that he’s strongly against any feedback. The feedback is toxic and constitutes personal insults. No doubt, that this exposé, especially the 2nd part, will be deemed as toxicity, as personal insults, as belittling and so on and so forth. Well, what other choice do I have if his personality is such? Are we prohibited not only from, say, discussing the legal and ethical status of their mod, but also from discussing his personality that was the main cause of their mod being the way it is? Of course, we are.

Why is he so against any feedback, especially personal feedback? If people are different one from another, these differences can be identified and quantified. Some people are smarter than others. Some people are more ethical than others. Some people are more skillful than others in this or that area. This is reality, can we talk about what’s real? This reality can be documented and discussed, but not on Tamari’s premises, where it’s toxic.

Well, after this research into their operation I’ve put together, it seems to me that he’s against the feedback because he would immediately be called out on his hypocritical actions and words, on inconsistencies in his words, he would be called out on the legal and ethical status of their mod, called out on bans, but he wants none of it. There’s a lot from what he does is ridiculous, surely someone would point it out. So, no feedback. And it’s not like I’m describing something completely unheard of. I’m a member of at least 4 other high level KF2 gameplay discords (Hunter’s, mine & Alien’s, Mixeerse’s, Scum’s) and everywhere I’ve found I can criticize both the gameplay and particular players. I welcome it when people criticize my actions or personality as well. The harshest in this regard is probably Hunter’s community, banter and personal insults is the language of choice there. Tamari would have probably died from stress on day 1 there. And it’s fine.

In my community we oftentimes engage in various feedback sessions. And it works. The aforementioned Kitano, as an example, has progressed a lot in this game with regards to teamplay, to everyone’s benefit. He plays this game anyway and a lot, so why don’t I or someone else put effort to encourage more teamplay out of him? We regularly mock and ridicule bad gameplay and bad takes on the game, especially those that come from casuals. Here, as an example, we mock a casual KF2 streamer “ReapeeRon” who came up with this tier list of KF2 perks:

Tell me with a straight face that this tier list isn’t retarded and cannot be ridiculed because that would be toxic.

What I don’t want to deal with though is all the consequences of the largest CD community in North America being managed by such a person as Tamari. I get home after a hard day at work. I launch KF2. I want to play a higher level KF2 game with other veterans and CD players. Nope, can’t have that. Because some 30+ years old dude who still acts immature, hypocritically, greedy, plays a victim, has some enormous ego, acts deceptively and short-sighted, inconsistent in his decisions. To the reversal of what he blames others in, it’s him who engages in toxic actions and insults players through bans as well as verbally. He himself says that he lashes out at people who didn’t really deserve it in his retirement message (sorry for it being super small, not my fault):

But, of course, he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t find a way to shift the blame from himself on “this stress”, which was supposedly caused by negativity and drama that he receives from outside of his community. From me and fanta, for example. See, it’s always someone else’s fault. Well, maybe if he didn’t steal other people’s property he wouldn’t have to deal with the outside drama either, don’t you think?

Do I need such a self-proclaimed leader who lashes out at undeserving people and it’s somehow someone else’s fault? No, I don’t.

The state of NA CD

NA KF2 CD is in a poor shape. Obviously, the way Tamari’s community has been managed has implications on the level of CD games played in NA. Not only the shadow queues which I already addressed. It seems pretty obvious to me, if healthy competition and feedback are suppressed, if no lessons learned sessions are ever held, if any suggestion about playstyles is deemed as toxicity, if CD worthy players get banned, this inevitably results in poor team and individual performance. The community is split and fragmented. The modders, whose code was stolen, are demotivated and retire. No wonder that, despite roughly the same potential talent in NA as compared to EU, NA region drags behind. This is a direct consequence of the way Tamari operates his servers.

The following

Now let’s talk about Tamari’s community of “over 800 members”. Who are they and why are they okay with all that described in this exposé, starting from the stolen code profiteering and ending with the petty tyranny?

Let’s start with a good example that demonstrates the problem well. Consider this message from a player who goes by “Smash.Redfield”, an avid Tamari follower:

Not going to waste any time addressing this nonsense for the second time, those who are interested in what’s wrong with it can read the appropriate announcement on my Steam group:

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Huwhyte/announcements/detail/3654144825087618854

Notice how he uses the font effects, such as italic or bold. See the pattern? How about these quotes from our leader Tamari:

And so on, there are probably hundreds of such examples. I wasn’t able to identify a clear pattern to them except for when he wants to emphasize a word, he casts some font spell on it, but is there a difference between when he wants to cast italic and when he wants to cast bold and ALL CAPS remains a mystery.

The same pattern, of course, can be easily identified in the Smash.Redfield damage control message. Now tell me with a straight face that there’s nothing going on here and it doesn’t matter, haha.

Of course it does and it’s a clear case of the following. Tamari, at least for some members of his community, is some kind of cult leader, while at least some players are the followers, or cultists. They just copy and mimic his style as the true followers would do. This perfectly explains this ridiculous denial of reality demonstrated by this Smash.Redfield dude. I would understand if he knew nothing or didn’t read the part 1, but he did read and still denies the reality as I described it, which he could have verified himself down to small details and atomic facts. He denies what both Tamari and FMX have accepted as their actions to remove the identified code speak for themselves.

Keep in mind, that most people are borderline retarded. Their minds are wired such that they almost never in position to independently assess the situation and come up with their own authentic explanation of it. They just follow the leader, like the sheep. There are good evolutionary reasons for such a behavior, because independent thinking is resource intensive, while following is easy, it helps the specimen to conserve the energy on the decision making process, as well as other resources.

If you ever wanted to assess the scale of the problem, go no further than the “National Assessment of Adult Literacy” or NAAL. Basically, it’s a government program that periodically identifies a group of people that represent average Americans well and assesses their cognitive ability by asking super basic literacy questions. One can browse these questions here:

https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample.asp

Consider this extremely basic question:

They don’t even force you to do manual or mental calculations. They give you the calculator. They also give you the unit conversion sheet, according to which 1 square yard equals 9 square feet. It takes just two basic multiplication/division operations typically taught in elementary school to come up with the right answer. Still, amazingly, 82.4% of Americans fail to come to the right answer.

It’s a totally viable life strategy to follow the leader for such people. It’s a way too resource intensive task to plan their lives themselves, establish the basic facts themselves and verify the correctness of their world view themselves. They have to follow someone. So no wonder that Smash.Redfield, I wouldn’t be even surprised if subconsciously, mimics the style of his cult leader.

Another thing that helps Tamari to retain his crown of a cult leader is he’s never wrong in the eyes of his followers. If all negative or critical feedback is suppressed, then it means he does nothing wrong, he’s perfect. It may sound silly for the 17.6% who can solve the task above, but that’s how the followers operate. Only inside feedback is accepted, while the outside world is by definition hostile (the notion Tamari keeps reinforcing at every opportunity) and can’t be trusted.

Browse the NAAL sample questions more per URL above for more revelations about the abyss I have to stare at when trying to convince Tamari’s followers of something. Theoretically, it would be great if they took time to read all that, understood the arguments, thought about all that independently and arrived at the same conclusions. Then became appalled at the amount and the duration of the abuse they had to go through and revolted against him and demanded a more fair treatment and a more perfect union. But it would be too much wishful thinking on my part. On the other hand, sometimes revolutions for the better do happen and the American history is a good example of it. Sometimes even just a tangible chance of such a scenario materializing forces the powers that be to amend the ways they rule over their constituents and address the most blatant problems.

What I’m hopeful for, is that the truth has a certain advantage over lies, as the truth wins with time. Lies inevitably contain inconsistencies and contradict the reality. A dedicated person, no matter their stubbornness and the cognitive capacity, if persists at learning about the reality more, eventually and inevitably is destined to face these inconsistencies and find them inexplicable by the worldview based on lies. Then such a worldview (e.g. “Tamari is a good community leader who does almost everything right, never stole any property, all bans are warranted, we are all here a small happy family who fight against toxic outsiders who insult and attack us”) inevitably collapses. This may take years, but this site doesn’t go down anytime soon and I’m very patient.

Another consideration is a fascinating research into doomsday cults. Check this out, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

What doomsday cult researches have found, is that when a prophecy about the upcoming doomsday inevitably fails to become, the most devoted followers do not abandon the cult. This seems puzzling at first, because these people believe their prophecy so bad, that they oftentimes leave their jobs, sell their property and give that money to the cult leader, so the leader can spend the money on promoting the doomsday cult further and attract new members. And it’s logical in a sense: what’s the worth of the property if we all going to die anyway? And when the prophecy fails they struggle to accept that they were scammed into it.

There are good reasons for that, again, evolutionary psychology comes to rescue. The reasons are the same why big corporations keep maintaining the projects that are failing. Microsoft Bob, Microsoft Internet Explorer, aforementioned Google Plus, countless projects that typically become the endless money pits for their owners. This happens because people tend to protect their investment, not in money only, but any resources: energy, time spent on it, time thought about it, real world actions taken to maintain it or even games played together. That’s a lot of resources. If such a project fails, this necessarily means that they have to accept that most of these resources were wasted in vain, but it’s much harder to do, as compared to acting like nothing happened and moving in the same direction. Moving in the same direction is easy on resources, these are incremental steps, while dealing with the worldview that failed requires a lot of reckoning, or dare I say, even repentance, abandoning the cause and finding themselves again in this unforgiving and cruel world. But another thing that these researchers found, is doomsday cults inevitably shrink and collapse, as the super devoted followers stay, but newcomers and less devoted players inevitably leave. This gives me hope.

A good parallel here can be drawn to what Tamari predicted and what I predicted. I said that the code behind the Tamari’s operation was stolen and they will have to address it. Tamari said that there’s no any proof of it and he never stole any code. Now they are both, Tamari and FMX, busy removing the identified code snippets and reworking their mod. My prediction turned out to be true. Tamari’s prediction turned out to be false. Is there a reckoning? Did someone repent?

Conclusion

I hope that all above was enough to either prove or at least suggest as plausible all the statements made in the quick rundown paragraph. If I’m wrong somewhere — feel free to reach out. Unlike Tamari, I’m open for feedback. I bear no grudge against Tamari. Most of why he behaves as he does is explained by his personality, which is largely genetic. It would be a huge struggle for him to behave like a lion, being a hyena. But who knows, some people change.

All that is nothing more than just a feedback I’m willing to provide for free to Tamari, to FMX and their followers and all third party observers. I hope that it was a good lesson at community building for all. I hope that Tamari takes this feedback into account and improves himself and his community accordingly, similar to how the previous part was taken seriously and caused their mod to be changed for the better from both legal and ethical standpoints.

Again, I’ve stated my conditions multiple times already. Here are them again:

• come out clean in front of the players, the KF2 community at large about the code theft situation;
• promise not to engage in code theft from now and on;
• credit every party whose code was borrowed, even if it’s no longer used — it was for 3 years;
• approach fanta (maybe not directly, but through a messenger, due to the existing hostility) and ask for permission to either recreate his chokepoints & solomode ideas or just straight up share the code and make a public statement before the KF2 community, guaranteeing that the community, as represented by KF2 veterans and similar minded people, will be overseeing the development to ensure that all that implemented right and in good faith, so fanta doesn’t give it to Tamari or FMX, but to the people;
• demand that their server-side code is independently audited by select and respected community members to ensure that there is no code theft situation exists.

Now, after the part 2 was published, I’m in position to add more:

• unban all and every CD player;
• amend the rules to allow for feedback, no matter the shape or form, including the feedback critical of the server owners and admins, such as this post;
• ensure that the freedom of expression is protected and nobody ever gets persecuted for exercising their right to free speech;
• in the face of the previous history, compose a list of negated rules, protecting the rights of players, similar to the US Bill of Rights, e.g. the right of a player to express themselves freely shall not be infringed (I understand if some channels can have stricter rules, while channels with unrestricted rules exist as well, as long it is allowed by the platform ToS, but no bans whatsoever);
• absolutely no yields for donators, including special designations on the scoreboard, to prevent any abuse of power.

But if not, fine with me. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

By that time you are surely wondering: what gets this dude going? Freaking two 15K word essays about some obscure drama around some obscure computer game. He must be either nuts or there was some unknown hidden reason that motivates him. You would be right if you thought so. There is such a reason. See you all in the third part!