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It would be good if this just went away but it is clear the trolls are still at it despite me not going anywhere near their communities since Dec 2008. So I think it is a good idea to put my version of events online so there is something to counter their none sense if people care to know and understand

I'll give you the full account, this is the long version. But will not be including every incident, there are thousands of those.

I am sure you are aware that anybody that keeps that up for 6 years after a guy quit a community and last did or said anything in that community is an internet preditor and the law does have something to say about them, their supporters,. those who put them up to it and sites that allow it.

Keep that in mind when see that none sense.

When it started.

Back in 2006 when I first got Oblivion and started playing it I had been modding for 26 years but nobody inside the Elder Scrolls community knew that at the time. The very first post I made in that community was a review of Oblivion, it was part of my attempt to get a handle on my dylexia problem head on. As is running this website and all websites before it since 2000. It is part of my personality to confront problems head on and try and over come them.

I was instantly flamed for posting it because a few gramma nazis didn't like some of my spelling and gramma mistakes and the moderators called it fair comment. Which may explain why gramma nazis or one skill wonders as I call them tend not to last around here.

I should have taken that as a hint of things to come and left, never staying to mod that game but I ignored it. So what follows is my own stupid fault for ignoring the early signs of what the TES community was like.

I eventually started modding Oblivion a few months after its release. Having waited and waited for Kvatch Rebuilt to be finished I decided to make my own Kvatch mod called Kvatch Aftermath and was immediately flamed by the forum lore crowd and those waiting for Kvatch Rebuilt over Kvatch Aftermath not being lore friendly and Kvatch Rebuilt being way better even though it had not actually been made yet and would not be finished for another 2 years. At the time I did not know any TES lore so I was definitely not making lore mods for TES games.

I actually offered to help get Kvatch Rebuilt finished btw but the trolls on the KR site made it impossible for me to help them get it out the door. Stupid people trolls.

So I took a break to mod Supreme commander but that community considered it self elite RTSG players, or rushers as I like to call them and the moment my AIs beat them without cheating, I was flamed for that too. I took it as a compliment that my AIs were so good they caused rushers to kick off. Truth is, AIs have always been my speciality, but like the Oblivion crowd, the Subcom people didnt know that.

Since Surpreme commander was not the immensely tactical affair of Total Annihilation and never would be despite its claims, I went back to modding Oblivion.

This was 2007 and so far I had gone unnoticed by the ruling Trolls on the Elder Scrolls official forums. But by the end of 2007 I was planning to make Origin of the mages guild and after my experience with the TES lore trolls, I did my home work. I went to the imperial library for advice which started me on the path to becoming a keen lore mod maker. They have my thanks for that. One of the few shining lights in the TES community in my experience.

I started researching the lore and did a pretty good job of it too. I learned pretty quickly that most lore on a forum was wishful thinking and not lore at all. Those who had previously attacked me over the lack of lore in Kvatch Aftermath, really did not know what they where talking about and I made a note to make a real Kvatch Lore mod one day.

I started to correct the the lore trolls and demanded they show me the official source for their claims and they just fell silent. When faced with a brand new lore expert, they had nothing to say anymore. Especially when their wiki links would not cut it, I wanted official proof only and they simply didnt have it.

I made a number of enemies back then due to that, lore trolls do not like being corrected by a noobie who did his home work.

The TES community has always been a very brave community when targeting noobs with in mass. Even back then, that was clear to me. Trolling really was the only allowed game in town even in 2007.

Origin of the mages guild gets targeted.

By Dec 2007 I released Origin of the mages guild and came to the attention of the Head Trolls in the TES community on Beths website. The makers of Fcom, TES4EDIT and Bettercities specifically. Those where the groups/individuals that went out of their way to pick a fight with me originally. Everybody else you hear moaning about me, invited them selves to somebody elses fight.

First a Bettercities guy asked if he could make a patch for my mods and I said sure providing you test my mod works with it properly afterwards. He said no need for that, which stunned me, so I refused him permission to make the patch. That guy was to become a real problem for me after that and turned up over and over again to cause trouble because I said no to him that day.

Now you know why I do not support third party patches.
I know most are totally untested and that has been proven so many times now that I now assume all players know it use them anyway or avoid the patches completely.

Then the creator of Fcom turned up in my Origin of the mages guild thread and did what I later realised was  his hall mark "scare the crap out of my mod users and leave the modder with a riot on his hands" tactic and just started raging about how the mod was breaking the universe and we were all going to die. Lots of trolls came in to tell me how bad I was in support of Fcoms creator, all standard tactics I had seen them use on other modders before it became my turn.

The difference was, I didnt back down like the other modders did.
I hate bullies, so I stood up to them.

Turned out I had fixed a respawning cupboard bug in the Archmages quarters in OMG and OOO (which fcom needed) used that same broken cupboard as a quest item.  All the rage, hate and rioting was over a cupboard. I pointed out that all that noise and bulster was not appreciated, especially over a cupboard for god sake and he left claiming he had never been so insulted in his life.

I learned that day that the TES community experts knew less than I did about modding.

So there was nothing actually wrong with the mod and speaking as a quest maker, I know not to use default items for quest items because other mods can and do edit them and break any mod that used them. That was just modding 101 to me, but something he just did not understand which. Which revealed the huge gulf between his EXPERT opinion and my "NOOBIE" opinion. I am of course being sarcastic in case you missed it.

He was just trying to bully me in to removing an edit so his precious Fcom did not need to change anything.
Basically he was being lazy.

Eventually I did remove the fix for a period of 12 months, and told him he had that long to fix OOO before I put the fix back because I was sick of losing items in that cupboard when it respawned. He never did fix that issue, and I did reapply the fix. So the conflict is back and still there even to this day as far as I know.

He too was to spend most of 2008 attacking me for pretty much everything I made. Turning up in my threads to cause trouble even though I never once did such a low trollish thing to him.

This all happened in Jan 2008 roughly. About a month after Origin of the mages guilds release.

As 2008 dawned I made The Necromancer and Fighters Guilt Contracts before April that year and was now well and truly on the radar of the Lead Trolls.

I actually adopted a shoot first policy as the trouble got worse, prefering to come out fast and hard against trolls who turned up and tried causing riots in my mod threads. Probably not the smartest idea but I was sick of it by then. All of that on top of the fact TES fans would ask a question right below the answer to that question because none of them read previous replies. At one point there was 6 answers to the same question on 1 page of my threads. That was very annoying, It made forum threads feel like private messages. But I am getting off topic.

The Kvatch Aftermath incident.

Since I was a rising star, it was important for the Lead Trolls to get me on side or destroy me reputation, but instead of approaching me and asking me nicely.  They did the same thing they always do, the same thing the Fcom guy did and try using the scare monger tactics in my Kvatch Aftermath thread. Claiming the mod was dirty, broken, was harmful to everybodies game and left me to clean up their mess their raging had caused.

More rioting in my thread as mod users paniced for no reason.

A mod that worked great the day before, was suddenly almost blacklisted by most TES fans because of that.

Talk about mod bashing, these guys where experts at doing it.

That was what I refer too as the Kvatch Incident, involving the maker of TES4Edit (later BOSS), Fcom and Better Cities people, the 3 groups responsible for all the crap that happened in the flame war thats been going on since then. Everybody else that flamed me later invited them selves to the party. They had absolutely no reason to do it, but did it anyway. Which spoke volumes about the TES community to me.

When I asked if the tool maker has tried playing Kvatch Aftermath, read its docs or the forums to check for current issues before posting such a clearly trollish and rude message in my thread. I got the reply "I am an Expert".... meaning no he had not checked those things. So I asked him to leave and he did for 1 day, then his supporter trolls came back and got my thread got locked.

That was the start of the flame war, up until then it was merely fore play for them.

The moderator got what happened explained too him because he had not been paying attention (common problem with Beth moderators) and offered to reopen the thread and I said what is the point, they have been flaming me in it for the best part of the week and he had done nothing to stop it. So there is nothing there to save now.

Out of the entire Bethesda forum, Only Elite and Nakia spoke out in my defence.. 2 people out of an entire forum. That told me how bad that community was and changed my opinion of the TES community for good. So when I talk about the entire TES community, I am not generalizing. I am speaking from experience.

The issues the tool maker had listed where all official fixes done the official way using the official editor and his tool could not tell the difference. His Expertship did not know that.  Nor had he bother checking for him self before he came raging in to my thread. Again, the pattern of not doing any research or testing was emerging from these 3. It was the way they did things, and all those who supported them operated the same way.

Threats was how they got their way, promoting their own tools and mods as being light years better than anything else that was available so they got their egos stroked whilst causing those who did make better mods to quit so they remained the Kings of the hill. It was a great way to censor a communities mods. It worked very well for them for years. Until I came alone and refused to be pushed around.

The attacks got so bad I was forced to close Respawn in April 2008, and later Mechstorm at the end of November 2008. 

These tactics where common on Beths forum back then and I have seen them used several times since I quit to target other modders. Many modders quit over this and many TES fan sites closed after being targeted by these trolls in that way.

Everything I did that year was targeted by them. So I did better, I made several better mods that year, won the Nexus mod of the month competition several times. I won so often they could not deny my skills, so they changed what the flaming was about, made it personal.

I made The Elder Council Mod as a thank you to the players that started to support me. And said thank you for your support in the read me. All the mods I made where all on nexus for free. But that did not stop a Nexus moderator and other trolls accusing of selling the mods I was giving away for free. They got me investigated by Bethesda and I was forced to remove a thank you message because of it.

Which shows how bad it is when you cannot even say thank you to your own mods fans.

I learned not to be so naive when making mods after that, today unless a developer has legal recourse, they can kiss me ass or ask nicely.

I tried to have my say but was totally drowned out by the trolls, so I left me mods to speak for me.  Which ironically was the best tactic to deal with them.

They branded them bad, everybody that tried them knew they good so over time the those bad mouthing them branded them selves trolls and liars. The back lash to that mod bashing is why I was able to win the Nexus mod of the month every month for most of 2008. It was loyality from my fans who in many cases only tried them to collect ammo to flame me and realised they where on the wrong side.

Many of my mod fans are former trolls who flamed me before they had tried any of my mods.

That year the cyber stalking started, around the same time open cities creator took an interest in me and joined the party. 

Every victory I had on nexus generated a whole new wave of hate, they could not beat me on nexus in the mod of the month votes so they did what ever else they could to target me. The stories about me changed on a weekly basis, at one point there was 12 threads on Bethesdas forums that did nothing but attack me. But Beth staff considered personal attacks like that to be okay despite Bethesdas own rules saying it was not.

One particular moderator and his friend, a fellow moderator did more than any others to keep those flames going and those threads open that year. Breaking Bethesdsa own rules to encourage them then moderate those who complained about it.

Over on Nexus people where accusing me of editing leveled lists and really destroying my mods reputation for doing so. Yet all other similar mods made the same edits, mods like Fcom, nobody mentioned those, only my mods where bad for doing it, everybody elses work was fine. Nexus moderators considered it fair comment to flame my work for that and allowed it. 

So TES moderators earned a reputation with me for being little better than trolls them selves.

Each time we destroyed a particular trolls case, he would vanish for as day and came back to do it all again. Nexus never did a thing to stop it but allowed him to only flame and cause trouble on Nexus without interference. It was like the troll was being sponsored by Nexus moderator team. Nobody elses mods would get that sort of treatment but nobody else had stood up to the trolls like I had done.

One poster considered it his holy duty to kill me for the good of the community and announced a crusade against me, a Jahad against a modder. One of many threats I got because of the shit storm those 3 groups stirred up for me that year.

Truthfully though, I prayed he would try something, I am not a small guy, I would have beat him to a pulp.

The Nexus incident

By the end of 2008 Moderators and site admins on Beth and Nexus where openly supporting those attacking me so I quit making mods for the TES community at the end of November 2009 a few days after CUO won the Nexus mod of the month. Literally quitting at the height of my success (at the time).

CUO being an Overhaul just like Fcom but did what Fcom claimed to do without all the messing around with tomes of tutorials explaining how to get fcom working. It just worked because it was designed to be simple. It even stablized fcom when run with fcom which really pissed off the fcom folk.

I did not look at anything in the TES community for the next week but when I did, on the 6th Dec 2008. I went to Nexus to check on my mods and found they had all disappeared from my account. The Nexus Staff had decided on their own to give all my work to a group that had formed with the sole purpose of taking over all my mods because I had quit. None one of them had asked me for permission first and but the group it self that contained a couple of people I did know, people who made a very clear attempt to hide what they where doing from me from the start.

This was the Nexus Incident.

I naturally complained but then thought perhaps it was a mistake so I asked for an apology from Nexus and my mods to be put back in my account where they belonged. Nexus responded by moderating me and banning my mods. Using a second account rule to justify it and hide what they had done to a modder that trusted them with his work.

I had seen modders argue with Nexus before, heard stories, they were common place. There was always stories of bad behavior on the part of Nexus staff and none of the modders ever got an apology out of Nexus. The modders who Nexus had wronged, all had to apologuise to Nexus to use the site again.

Nexus was the biggest TES modding site and knew it, so in their book, they did not have to apologuise.

As for the dup accounts, the first account was from TES Source and was corrupted when Darkone imported the database when founding Nexus. He told me he had deleted it in 2007 and I was to make a new account and upload all my mods to that all over again, no small feat when your upload bandwidth is capped as mine is.

Now they used that initial account as an excuse to do what they did.

Which confirmed to me everything I had heard about Nexus up to that point was true and is the reason I will not use nexus anymore regardless of what is on that site.

1000s of my mod users watched Nexus do it.... they are still out there playing TES today.

Modding 4 Fun

Over the next 5 months I ran a forum on my Modding 4 fun site, a name that was intended to be message to the trolls about what modding was supposed to be about. The one thing they never let modder do was enjoy modding or enjoy sharing his work.

But they came after me even on that site after I quit and stopped using any of the TES sites responsible for what happened.

It was pure cyberstalking as the USA State Law calls it. Harassment in the UK. The Uk prefers to adapt normal laws for the net rather than create new ones specifically for the net. I collected massive amounts of data on those who involved and where they came from. I still have it on my drive today.

Anon accounts, fake names, proxies and fake email address, attacks streaming directly from personal attack threads on Beths forum. The logs proved it all.

Dozens of school kids got in to trouble because they would put up to it by adults on TES sites who encouraged them to attack my property. The Oblivion Open cities/Skyrim Alternative start mod guy turned up in my logs time and time again, even emails and other things and did more than anybody else to keep this going. He was one of those who invited them selves to somebody elses fight. A real troll.

Ironically after Skyrim got released other users did to him, what he had done to me. I have not stopped laughing about that since then, no better example of universal karma exists anywhere on the planet in my opinion :)

The slow disappearance of my work from the net.

I spent Jan to march 2000 uploading my mods to mod hosting sites after Nexus banned them and the trolls spent that time getting them removed from all the sites by any means they could. They eventually all vanished from the net completely by mid march 2009 after I gave in and stopped replacing the ones that disappeared. I just let the trolls win.

I did not know it at the time but an apparently innocent email I got asking how to remove mods from Filefront, came from a guy I later caught red handed uploading cleaned versions of my mods to one website (the Oblivion Open cities/Skyrim Alternative guy). He used a fake name of course so I was not able to trace who it was until he complained about me reporting him on his own website and I accidently stumbled across it when I googled one of my own mods. 

He denies it all now of course, never believing he and his proxies would ever allow him to be caught, he even has dozens of pages proving he has slandered and cyberstalked me on his website right now and does not even know I can convict him using his own forum alone. Lol.... stupid people.... He even announced the creation of this very document. So he still reads this site.

99% of the Beth and Nexus player base considered the disappearance of my bad dirty mods to be a good thing and celebrated... they had all been brain washed in to believing the mods where dirty and bad by the 3 people that started the trouble. Whilst I worked my ass off in the editor making mods, those 3 worked at getting their egos stroked on the forums.

But the thing about mods is, mods do not lie, people do. If you say a mod is nasty and dangerous and somebody tries it and its anything but that, then you basically brand your self a liar and is exactly what had happened during the summer of 2008 onwards.

My fan base grew because of that. They trolls all went looking for my mods to collect ammo to use against me and once they tried them, they became fans and switched sides.  A point that was about to become important as we approach the founding of The TEG website.

A forum of fools.

Whilst most of the TES user base on Bethesdas forum celebrated their brave attack by 1000s of their elite Jahadi trolls against a single hard working modder. The the cleaned versions of my mods started to appear, made without my permission and against my advice. They where made using the same tools made by the same tool maker that had gotten it so badly wrong in the Kvatch Incident. The guy who started it all, was now telling players to go a head and clean my mods and ignore me.

His Dirty mod cries were the rallying cry for it all.

They all made a big show of ripping me off publicly..... Nobody, no moderator, no player tried to stop them. A community branded it selves as ungrateful trolls in my eyes that day.

I had warned them all year that mod cleaning was dangerous and could break my quests and mods, and had been ignored. I was the ignorant noobie after all with dozens of mods to my name that made me the hardest working modder in their community but hay, that didnt count when your flaming a modder right.

When the first bug reports started to roll in from the cleaned mod users, the very first thing the tool maker and his troll friends did was blame my mods for being buggy. That was how they deflected the blame for all bugs caused by the advice they give out. They blame the mod and the modder. It is always somebody elses fault.

A perfectly believable theory for the sheep that followed them and celebrated the attacks on my work except for 1 tiny detail.

My work had disappeared, nobody using my original versions had those problems. His trolls had gotten all my mods removed from the net. Nobody was using an original version of my work except my long term fans. They where all using the Clean and Safe versions he and his friends had made.

Which I pointed out happily and watched their entire case against me collapse within a week when I pointed out it was the cleaned versions with the bug that I had spent years warning them would happen.

Oh happy days :)

Suddenly I was being accused of removing the mods my self but that bit of slander was crushed by the fact the trolls had even managed up get filefront to put a cleaned version of my mods in my own account and it was still there because nobody on the mod hosting sites was replying to my concerned emails after all that. The proof that somebody else had been messing with my uploads and getting them removed was so easy to see, I really did not need to try too hard when i explained this to folk.

They end result of this was the tool maker and his pals had effectively been censoring your available mods for years and had done it by bullshitting players with scarey fictional stories about other peoples work. Normally the modder either gave in or quit.

Me being me, came out fighting because I hate bullies.

The argument shifted away from mod cleaning after that, and they have not attempted to persue that dirty mod argument with me since that incident. 

They had attacked a hard working modder because he refused to give in to bullying and do things their way and had built it all up in to a nice big public show, then fucked up their own argument badly.

I loved it.... I was laughing my tits off.

Players had lost all my work for good because they gave their support to people that didnt want my work to be available at all. I could not upload them anywhere because most servers thought my work had viruses or was copyrighted or some other bullshit story they where told to remove them.

This was the very definition of cyberstalking being played out by the TES community against a modder and not for the first time either. This too was common practice had happened to many modders who dared mod TES games over the years. Modding the Elder Scrolls is to be blunt, fucking dangerous.

Anyway, the mods where gone... TES fans had to suffer the buggy versions after that. There was no way I could share the mods even if I wanted too. Which I did not... when they asked me to reupload my mods, I told them to go and fuck them selves. A reply that the TES community well and truly deserved.

An interesting story from around the same time was this.

During 2009, others got them selves involved with the original 3 trolls flaming and joined in. I heard one of the original 3 trolls had joined the DC team who I entrusted with my mods after quitting. They joined so they could get their hands on my work by stealth when directly ripping it off did not work.

He did not use a name I recognised so I did not know who it was or what he was doing until the Dracon Caption leadership told what two of their members were doing to my Kvatch Aftermath and Elder council mods, cleaning them. They had learned absolutely nothing, which shows how stupid these idiots where.

I then found out the guys other name and realised it was one of the same 3 bastards that caused all the trouble in the first place.  One of the bettercities guys responsible for all the untested patches.

They made Dracon captions version of TEC and bloated the CURP back with tons of useless items. No skill, no fore sight, and definitely no lore experience.

So imagine my surprise when the result of their work was they broke several dialog options in TEC. Options that worked fine in my version and could only get broken if they cleaned the mod lol. As I had warned the TES community about time and time again and been flamed for daring to say it.

Needless to say I charged in to deal with them both and both disappeared rather than explain them selves to me. Real brave they where like all of all TES folk I had dealt with so far during this bad time.

I had to suffer lots of that short of none sense. Dragon Captions where perhaps not the best team to look after my work because they where pretty young but I trusted them and respected their work. Unfortunately they where easy pickings for the more adult trolls who basically resorted to a forum of child abuse to get their way.  The kids at DC where not up to fighting them off as I was. That was my mistake. I have not made that mistake again but continue to support DC indirectly. They are good bunch.

Me and the DC leaders are still friends to this day.

All of this happened in 2009... but the opening of TEG was a game changer.

The founding of The Engineering Guild.

Around April 2009 my plans for a new modding site, one that did not operate on trust and player friendship like the Respawn and Mechstorm has done, one that worked on the basis players would be assholes if I gave them free mods was complete. The Engineering Guild was to be my fortress against all the above shit and deal with those attacking me in an official manner.

An island of independance that didnt need Nexus or Bethesdas forums and would survive on its own merits and the fact that your reading this now, proves it has survived all this time on its own.

I even sent Beth a message saying I was holding them responsible for all attacks on me and my site that originated from their forums and all damage done. All of which they denied right before suspending my account on their site. No biggie, I stopped using the site the year before because of the trolls and told them as much.

Still thats the first time I have ever been suspended from a site for insisting then enforce the law.

Months later the moderator that had been instrumental in supporting the 3 Lead Trolls that had made the Bethesda forums so bad, left for personal reasons. All mention of me changed to "he who shall not be named" and the trouble slowly ended.

Only the worst trolls kept it up after that, trolls like the Oblivion Open Cities/Skyrim Alternative start mod. I logged their activities extensively because they still read the site of a guy thats not visited their communities for over 6 years. And still cause me trouble even today.

Typically they would make random email accounts and use proxies and fake names in order to tell me how bad I am.... it is the bravest they ever get with me. 

The TEG website system was designed to catch people that did this and stop them getting near anything I made here. I just turn on the full security of this site and the door remains closed to them. 

Whilst the trolls keep up their none sense I have resisted making posts like this but this year they seem to be at it again so I felt a more permanent record of my side of the story needed to be put some where online and the one place it and my mods are safe, is on my own site where nobody and nothing can get them removed without my agreement.

So here it is... the events that led to me quitting the TES scene and opening TEG.
Minus 10,000s of side stories on this which whilst extreme, just say the same thing the above story says.... So I left them out.

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