User:JoshuaGraham1
 JoshuaGraham1
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| About | |
|---|---|
| Known as | Joshua |
| Gender | Male |
| In Freedonia | |
| First joined | April 29, 2026 |
| Support level | **** Supporter IV |
| View profile and statistics | |
April-June 2026
I joined the server in April and it seemed okay. Not very active, the map was kind of small, but I stayed because it seemed better than most. And the admin team seemed highly professional at first, banning griefers left and right all day.
June-July 2026
Rulebreakers; Admins Complicit
On 21st June, I killed a random player because he went to the afk room at the Newport xp farm and stayed there for a very long time. So I took him down to kill the lag that he created.
Initially, I hit him once and asked him not to stay up there for so long, but the player Matbot didn't respond, so I killed him.
What happened later that day is Matbot's friend, Eleanorsilly, vowed on Discord and in-game chat that he will make my life hell on MCO, things are gonna end up bad for me, and some blather about violence being "the solution" and not just an option.
Eleanorsilly took his bullying very, very far. He personally enlisted numerous players to camp outside my base and kill me in turn. He would show up and try to kill me day after day, and I think he continued even as of July. It's evident he is a malicious and unstable individual, although he isn't anything special on the Internet.
He would follow me across the map, set up a teleport right outside my base and camp there, spam the whole base with boats, empty all furnaces, place withers outside, etc etc. And he would do this Every. Day. Not to mention enlisting other players to do that with him -- so that chat logs wouldn't implicate only him for repeated PvP.
And it almost felt like he camped in front of his computer 24/7 just for the chance to kill me. For instance, if he and his friends attacked me outside my base while I was busy building stuff, I would just log out and do other things. I could drive to the grocery store, read a book, run some errands, etc, then return a few hours later, and Eleanorsilly would still be there waiting for me to log back in for the chance to PvP me. -- That's some serious dedication, or something else entirely.
Another thing? -- The stories he told himself about why I deserve to be bullied like that. Every day, he would spam the chat and try to bait me with some stories about me being a transophobe or some other political nonsense. The details elude me, but he kept coming up with daily justifications for why I am a garbage human being and deserve to be driven out of MCO. He would try everything to bait me -- even making snide comments about me wasting $45 supporting the server, because he wouldn't let me play here ever again.
(Basically, his idea was that by inventing reasons why I provoked him every day, his actions will not count as rule breaking)
And the way he avoided triggering admins was... interesting.
I recall that everyone agreed that repeated PvP is not allowed. Even the villiain himself.
One way to circumvent the rule was to enlist others to help him -- which I've already mentioned.
Another way was killing me once, then telling me that he will be back in a few days. Or just staying at my base and following me everywhere with his sword, even if he didn't strike.
Another one? He turned up to my base while I was busy building a farm. He tried to bait me in chat, but I ignored him. He would then keep positioning himself in front of me to stop me from placing my dirt and completing my build -- and if I tried to resume building the farm from the opposite side, he would go there and obstruct me there too. I tried to ignore his trolling, but at one point I placed a dirt block in the wrong place because of him. I wanted to break the dirt block with my fist, but Eleanorsilly positioned himself right in front of it at the exact moment I was trying to break it, meaning that I hit him and not the dirt block, and the chat recorded me initiating PvP with him (and not the other way round), and then he would spent the rest of the day following me around the map and camping at my base to kill me.
On the whole, he's just another one of those unstable people who inhabit the Internet and enjoy being assholes. Nothing unremarkable so far.
What surprised me the most was the response I got from the administration.
Eleanorsilly was confident that admins wouldn't punish him. He said they will never respond to e-mails and... he was right.
Admins I met in-game weren't very interested either. They dismissed me saying, "If someone is breaking our rules, we will speak with them", and that was the extent of it.
Eleanorsilly sometimes communicated with me using signs when I ignored him in-chat. On one such occasion, he told me that I am finished on MCO, that admins are his friends, that he has a heal command, etc.
I can't know if it's true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Online admins often become friends with active community members, even as unstable as eleanorsilly. If what he said is true, and the admin layer considers him "one of us", then he would never be punished unless he did something as blatant as griefing spawn.
From my experience, tolerating unstable people like him always corrodes communities. Letting malicious individuals get away with rule-breaking simply because the community is "dying", or because an admin likes him, typically destroys trust in the community, attracts more unstable individuals, and the community becomes known for being toxic. Player exodus follows and the server closes down.
It's a textbook pattern.
Not that any of this is my business. The server owners and admins can do whatever they want. But then I don't really want to stay in a community like that. If I ever want to play on a server ran by unstable and depressed individuals, I have millions of other communities to choose from. No particular reason to stick in this one.
If a player can, quote: "make it my life mission to make your life on MCO miserable", and the admin layer says it's fine? -- Then that is not a very healthy community, even if it pretends to be great on their website.
From my experience, players like that depopulate servers, attract more toxic individuals, and when almost no normal players remain, they all move on to a different community and leave a ghost server behind them. -- I am no prophet and toxic communities can limp along for a very, very long time, but I won't stake my time on a toxic server that may not even last for much longer. I just don't see a future for this server; if this is how this server is run, then it's on its way out.
(The hardware and upkeep costs are no joke, and a dying community doesn't generate donations. Toxic individuals rarely donate unless they are part of the admin layer -- by which point the community is as good as dead anyway, what with admin abuse and the like)
Ultimately, it is individual players that make a community worth being a part of.
If people are toilet, and the executive power holders tolerate them, the community is just... ordinary. Like millions of online communities out there.
Disposable and replaceable.
Why write about it
I don't really care about this server and what happens to it. Whether it shuts down tomorrow or lasts for eternity, none of that interests me very much.
I talked about this server with a different player from another community because the topic of MCO came up. I decided to briefly describe my experience on this server but that's just because of how popular it is. If I got a $ for every single bad thing that has ever happened to me online, I would be Elon Musk right now. There's just no sense in writing it all up.
But I always find it insanely interesting to witness how administrative decisions drive communities into extinction and how things develop from there. It just never gets old.
If I was just upset about the server being bad, I would leave and forget about it. Like dozens of servers I have already forgotten about.
If it was just about the player Eleanorsilly, I would find a way to deal with him on the server.
If it was just about the $45 that I donated to a server I think is undeserving, I would move on; $45 means nothing to me. (I considered doing a chargeback not because I care about the money, but because it's the principle that matters. Then I reconsidered and decided not to bother. Easy come easy go. $45 is a paltry sum of money, it means nothing to the admin layer, and it's not worth the bother with my bank)
What moved me is the popular response -- how quickly everyone sided with Eleanorsilly and excused him (what with a female name and a largely male player base), but especially the response I got from the administration. The least bad response about his actions I received from an administrator was "smh" when they learned about the things I described here. Everyone else just told me to "fuck off" or "start a base somewhere else" or "it sounds like a you-problem, buddy" -- plain old dismissal.
This isn't just a story of one bad player. This player is just a microcosm of a larger problem on this server -- a problem I cannot deal with because it's cultural and the only people with the power to fix it don't see it as a problem.
This gets worse, not better. I've seen it too many times to expect differently.
(Though I still wrote it up. Even if it gets taken down from here)