I think all the evidence we have has already been shown. The only missing piece is Opal's logs and we will probably never get those. Its pretty much the only thing that would prove it beyond a doubt, but then again id be sad if he got banned. I wouldn't be able to be entertained by his posts anymore.
this was insufficient evidence at one point in time here. some of the clips in there shouldn't have been a part of the video because they arent aim assist you guys member???
I know I am late to the party but I think this viewpoint is a tad bit flawed. DO not doubt the influence of donators. Make no mistake, I am not arguing in favor of what rice is saying, because he is obviously using this to cover his own ass. Fuck that guy, I've got no sympathy for him. Whether he hacked or not is beyond me, but to say that he was only banned because of donator influence is wildly inaccurate. That being said, this influence does exist. Whether you like or not, there are people who definitely hold the power to cause considerable damage to Highwon's ability to pay for the servers. If not totally shut this place down, at least enough to seriously fuck things up. Let me explain. In the early days it didn't matter so much because most donators only contributed a small amount of money. If you take that and couple it with the fact that there were tons of revenue sources, nobody could easily create influence. Imagine you have three people who all donate $10. If one of them charges back, it isn't too big of a deal. Sure, the server loses $10, but it still gained $20, and the risk of a perma ban was enough to keep people from trying to get their money back. Even if you consider gifted ranks you would still be in a position where the influence you had was stifled. The same person then would have to gift VIP+ every month to upwards of a hundred people to have a decent influence. Rarely did anyone bother to attempt this. Nobody is that rich. However, let's adjust our earlier situation to account for this. Let's say we have four people, and one person donates to the other three. That is $40 of revenue the server makes. Now say that person charges back all those donations. $40 is lost, and the person is banned. This is minor in the grand scheme of things and probably didn't cost too much. I understand that it would cost more in both scenarios because of the charge back fee. I will get to that later. In the beginning this worked out perfectly. However, when the donation amounts were increased (when legendary was added to the store) this began to change. Now you had donators that could contribute lots of money really fast. If a person had the money they could easily drop thousands of dollars on their friends in a few button presses. Let's take our example from earlier and modify it. Now lets take that example from earlier and apply it to legendary. Say one person donates $200 to three others on top of his donation of $200. This person has dropped $800 on the servers. If he charges back at this point, the server loses $800 and has to pay the charge back fee. This can be a heavy blow to suffer, but isn't shattering. What if that person starts dropping more and more money. It becomes a simple equation: The more money someone donates = the increased risk to the server. Normally the benefit will outweigh this negative, but not always. On the small scale the benefits are insane, but the larger and larger these donations become... the risk begins to increase. All of my examples ignore the charge back fee that Highwon has to pay whenever one of these goofy fucks decides they want to charge back. This fee, while I don't know it off the top of my head, can be devastating. Depending on what service you use it can range from $20 to $100. This is non-negotiable. Even if Highwon challenges the charge back in court he will likely never get the fee returned to him. This fee is used to process the charge back, but can be damaging on top of the revenue lost. This shows an even worse problem when you consider that the window to charge back is usually pretty large. Meaning Highwon can't touch the money until that window is closed. So on top of owing $800 he would then owe something like $820 or even $900. This is something that can't be avoided if you run the system that these servers run. No alternatives exist, unless you want to take cash or check donations. Most people wont try to charge back. They think about the perma ban and they recognize that it isn't worth it to attempt a charge back. This changes when the situation changes. How can you ensure that someone who donated today wont get pissed off and charge back tomorrow? You can't, and in the same way you can't ensure that a person donating money today wont expect something tomorrow. If the sole motivation behind donating tons of money is to gain influence over the servers, you really have to stop and think about that rationale. Most of us care about our money, and would never do something so silly, but what about those who have money to spare? Do we have to pretend they are benevolent and wont try to dick over the servers by threatening a charge back? I think in many ways we ignore this problem BECAUSE it exists. How do you come up with rational solutions to deal with irrational people? I think you overestimate the revenue streams that come into the server. While we still probably see a lot of randoms donating money, we have started to see trends where specific individuals are donating more and more of their own personal money. If these donations are not applied to themselves, they are applied to others. Like it or not, this in itself lends to possible influence. IF you donated $200 to me I would at least listen to what you have to say. Even though many would say they would never be that easily corrupted, it isn't unbelievable to think that everyone is this way. The servers cost a considerable amount of money to run, and I don't think there is much diversity in the donation stream (at least anymore). I can't say for sure of course, and i'm only speculating. Clearly I don't get to see the back end. Ask yourself this: If a donator threatened to charge back all $2000 of their donation, wouldn't you at least listen to what they have to say? Even giving them an ear is enough to solidify their influence. I do not envy anyone who is caught in such a position. If it means the shutdown of the server, you would bend over backwards to make them happy. (I'm not talking about anyone in specific. Draw whatever parallels you like idgaf) Spoiler: tl;dr Donator influence definitely exists. Read the post for more details you fucking bitch.
Very good point Pacifist, however im not so sure this line of thought applies in this case. The real question in this case would have Opalium lied about someone hacking because of donations? I don't know since I don't know Opal at all.
No. I prefaced that in my post. It is unlikely that Opal would have lied because of donation money. Especially in this case. It was always rumored that Opalium had some backend way of catching hackers. I always just believed this to be true because there was no sense in believing otherwise. Occam's razor kind of thing. Whether or not that is the actual case is beyond me and probably just speculation at this point. I wont comment too much on that because i'm pretty biased. I mostly just had an issue with Zane dismissing donator influence altogether. In this specific case, as someone who was around for the staff discussions on whether or not Rice was hacking, I would say that it is unlikely donator influence played a part.
yo opal hates the fuck outta me cause I call him out on his BS all the time, donations don't have anything to do w/ being banned or not psure if I pissed off highwon, I'd be banned regardless cause highwon is a no BS man
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SggZP14O_IwTt0BQUkPPObukOZYXu6b made a playlist awhile back on an old youtube acc of every video I could find showing me "cheating". the hidden video is my favorite though, trying to use that as evidence of me cheating = they have full knowledge of source engine
