Ste
Executive member
Warriors!
As well as friendly rivalry between Cricket 2002 Online and Vineets site, EAs Cricket 2002 also brought to the forefront a nastier aspect of the cricket gaming community. Cricket 2002 originally had an official forum run by EA Sports Australia but due to abuse of the forums by some members, EA took the decision to close the forums.
Some of the members and moderators got together and decided to add Cricket 2002 forums to their previously rugby league only site NZWarriors.com in December 2002. This site was instantly popular with many of the people who used to post on the official forums moving to post at the NZWarriors forums.
One of the big draws to the NZwarriors forum was the connection its owner Dave Johnson had with EA Sports. Dave Johnson, who studied law realised that many of the features listed on the box were not actually in the game and meant that EA was breaking product description laws by selling the game claiming it had features it didnt. After contact with New Zealand government agencies, Dave was contacted by EA about how EA could avoid having to go to court over the game. The proposal given to Dave was that EA would produce a patch for the game which would fix bugs and put the features listed on the box into the game. Dave agreed that he would stop talking to the NZ authorities about it and a patch would be developed with Dave working as a beta tester for the patch.
Zimrahil was very much in the forefront of Cricket 2002 editing with his gameplay patches and had been talking to Dave about this patch. However Zim sensibly wasnt too sure about Dave Johnson but was sent a beta version of the Cricket 2002 patch which Dave had been sent by EAs Andrew Wilson. Zimrahil, seeing that Dave had given it to him also gave it to 3 more people on a private forum that he used for testing his gameplay patches.
However at the same time as this was happening, Dave had also been in contact with me about the possibly merger of BLC Online and NZwarriors into a big Cricket 2002 site and forum to compete with cricket2002.tk. This seemed a good idea at the time, although Dave didnt tell me about his EA contacts, his forum was very good and he seemed dedicated to it while I was very busy with university and therefore couldnt give much time to the forum. A merger seemed an ideal solution. However a dispute started over the Cricket 2002 forums from NZwarriors being merged into BLC Online/Planetcricket or the other way round, this meant that myself and Dave ended up arguing and the merger was scrapped. However in order to try and achieve the merger, I had tried to pursued Dave who told me he was also in discussions with Vineet about a merger with cricket2002.tk, that BLC Online had lots to offer as a Cricket 2002 site. One of the things to show this was Zimrahils patches and I let Dave see some of the testing of new versions of the patches and other discussions on the private forum, not realising that the patch Zimrahil had posted was given to him by Dave.
Dave Johnson wasnt really too pleased about this and also some criticism on the private forum about Dave from Zimrahil. He responded by sending an insulting and offensive email to Zimrahil who replied:
"you have stated that Andrew Wilson sent you the patches in good faith and I have emails from you stating you shouldn't be giving the patch to me or anybody else. However, you broke his trust by sending it to me (and possibly others). Similarly, you trusted me not to give the link of your patch out to anybody. I didn't , but gave the patch to 3 people I have known for years & trust implicitly. (who trust has been exemplified by no mention of this patch on any public forum)"
" How are my actions any different to your own?."
and significantly "...send all your emails to me (including the patch) to Andrew Wilson advising him of what you are doing behind his back"
Zimrahil has since said he had no intention of sending information to Andrew Wilson from EA Sports but he was annoyed at the language used in Daves email to him.
Worried that Zimrahil would do something like this and ruin Daves relationship with EA, Dave decided to construct a story that Zimrahil and myself had hacked into his site to receive the patch. This would mean that he was in the clear with EA about giving the patch to people. He posted on the NZwarriors forums stating that myself and Zimrahil where hackers and now EA Sports were considering not releasing the patch at all.
Part 9.2:
As proof of this hacking, he posted IP addresses that myself and Zimrahil had supposedly used when hacking the forums but where in fact just Freeseve ISP IP addresses which could have been used by anyone in the UK to normally access the forums not hack it and steel a patch!
This doubtful proof caused Dave to go further by releasing a supposed screenshot of the private forums Zimrahil had posted in. This can be seen at http://blc.sports-gaming.com/untitled.JPG and shows Zimrahil supposedly admitting to hacking NZwarriors. However the screenshot was obviously edited by Dave by the fact that the font on the edited top post is completely different to the font used on the other post and the rest of the forum. Bill Lawry is Warrior/Dave.
Although myself and Zim made this clear on the 22nd January 2003 with this post http://www.planetcricket.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1498&highlight=hacking+alligations with plenty of evidence that we did not hack nzwarriors.com, Dave persisted with his story. This persistence included trying everything possible to cause the end of BLC Online. This included pretending to be myself and email my hosts saying I wanted to turn the site into an adult site, pretending to be Andrew Wilson email me and accusing me of hacking, sending me fake screenshots of the patch, pretending to be on MSN and insulting people with the email address [email protected], pretending to be a firm of private investigators who would be taking myself and Zim to court, not allowing any members on NZwarriors/now called Sports Pavilion to post on BLC Online, not allowing moderators at nzwarriors/SP to even look at BLC Online (which around this time changed its name to Planetcricket) forums unless they where posting abuse, hacking peoples MSN accounts and then blaming it on me (although the accounts hacked where strangely always fixed for the members by Dave Johnson himself), sending private messages to all Planetcricket forum members telling them to join SP/NZWthe list is endless! All carried out by Dave or some of his friends at NZwarriors.com/Sports Pavilion such as MH.
MH is also likely to be the person who set up an Anti-Planetcricket site full of insults to Planetcricket and members of the staff at the site. The site was closed down by its hosts. It is also suspected he obtained my forum password for Planetcricket by telling me I had admin access at NZwarriors and tricking me to entering the same password into a form which sent it to him. Luckly the only damage that was done to Planetcricket was myself being locked out of the forums for a while.
Part 9.3:
The dispute even spread to cricket2002.tk with Dave trying to hack the site after vineet turned down his offer of a merger and after Vineet mentioned the hacking attempts but didnt name who did it, NZwarriors tried to accuse Planetcricket/BLC of being the perpetrators. Several days later Vineet told the full story: I've just about had enough with the juvenile rantings of some pricks at NZWarriors. BLC never "hacked" or "attempted to hack" my site. I DO have issues with some imbeciles at NZwarriors.I try to do the civilised and decent thing and don't mention the site but you take advantage of that. Well f*** NZWarriors and if you dont like it f*** you too. Take your pathetic trashy mindless-slave-drone selves out of MY site.I don't need you and I sure as hell won't take any s*** from you.
As for the rest of you good people please ignore this and pardon my french
This all continued with basically no Planetcricket staff talking or any NZwarriors staff while the insults continued about hacking and anyone mentioning anything good about Planetcricket banned (as myself and most PC staff were). The problems where exasperated by the NZwarriors policy of making members who had a certain number of posts moderators or admins and it was made known that anyone who posted at Planetcricket as well had no chance of ever getting this promotion.
Although Andrew from EA Sports was informed of the matter and had proof that Dave had given out the patch and therefore no hacking took place he seems reluctant to do anything or be seen to be supporting either forum.
In late Spring/Summer (European) 2003 things calmed down with both forums just existing separately with few incidents happening (one that did involved some members of SP/NZwarriors staff copying and pasting exact posts from Planetcricket into SP/NZW forums to create forum activity and the exact copying of an online Cricket World Cup 2003 tournament Planetcricket were running).
Part 9.4:
The lack of incidents it now seems was due to disruptions within NZwarriors/Sports Pavilion and arguments between the large amounts of staff that the forums had gained. This lead to reports of Dave quitting the Sports Pavilion forums and the forums closing regularly reaching members of Planetcricket staff, although for a long time this never happened. Some of this news did strangely bring around spamming attacks by certain staff from NZwarriors at around the same time. Perhaps the staff members of NZwarriors involved in their own infighting were trying to improve there standing with the nzwarriors/SP hierarchy. While this happened on the inside some interesting things had been occurring on the outside, managing to avoid the banning of Planetcricket staff from NZwarriors Zimrahil suggested the name Complete Resource Advanced Patchmakers as the name for the Sports Pavilion Patch Team which was accepted by NZWarriors staff as the name for there patch team. The C.R.A.P. team was created!
As the infighting continued within Sports Pavilion, some admins decided that an agreement and possible linking arrangement was possible with Scribbler approaching Planetcricket about the matter in September 2003. However even though Scribbler apologised for the hacking allegations admitting they where false, Planetcricket admins and staff decided that it could not agree to be associated with Sports Pavilion/NZWarriors after everything that had happened. The inevitable implosion of Daves forum came in October 2003 when the admins of the forum Dave had engineered a merger with refused to put up with his lies and scheming. Dave reneged on a promise to change the name, removed himself from admin and then hacked the site. NXSports was created as a dedicated sports forum, minus Dave Johnson and his cronies, by Scribbller from SP and Wolverine from thesportforum.net (the site SP had merged with)
The closing of Sports Pavilion singled the end of very unpleasant time for Planetcricket with the main people losing out forum members who were denied the chance of just being able to talk about cricket and cricket games without having to read about fighting and insults. Since the closure there has not been much activity from Dave in in the area of cricket and cricket gaming although rumours persist of plans for a re-opening of the Sports Pavilion forums and agreements with other cricket games sites.
As well as friendly rivalry between Cricket 2002 Online and Vineets site, EAs Cricket 2002 also brought to the forefront a nastier aspect of the cricket gaming community. Cricket 2002 originally had an official forum run by EA Sports Australia but due to abuse of the forums by some members, EA took the decision to close the forums.
Some of the members and moderators got together and decided to add Cricket 2002 forums to their previously rugby league only site NZWarriors.com in December 2002. This site was instantly popular with many of the people who used to post on the official forums moving to post at the NZWarriors forums.
One of the big draws to the NZwarriors forum was the connection its owner Dave Johnson had with EA Sports. Dave Johnson, who studied law realised that many of the features listed on the box were not actually in the game and meant that EA was breaking product description laws by selling the game claiming it had features it didnt. After contact with New Zealand government agencies, Dave was contacted by EA about how EA could avoid having to go to court over the game. The proposal given to Dave was that EA would produce a patch for the game which would fix bugs and put the features listed on the box into the game. Dave agreed that he would stop talking to the NZ authorities about it and a patch would be developed with Dave working as a beta tester for the patch.
Zimrahil was very much in the forefront of Cricket 2002 editing with his gameplay patches and had been talking to Dave about this patch. However Zim sensibly wasnt too sure about Dave Johnson but was sent a beta version of the Cricket 2002 patch which Dave had been sent by EAs Andrew Wilson. Zimrahil, seeing that Dave had given it to him also gave it to 3 more people on a private forum that he used for testing his gameplay patches.
However at the same time as this was happening, Dave had also been in contact with me about the possibly merger of BLC Online and NZwarriors into a big Cricket 2002 site and forum to compete with cricket2002.tk. This seemed a good idea at the time, although Dave didnt tell me about his EA contacts, his forum was very good and he seemed dedicated to it while I was very busy with university and therefore couldnt give much time to the forum. A merger seemed an ideal solution. However a dispute started over the Cricket 2002 forums from NZwarriors being merged into BLC Online/Planetcricket or the other way round, this meant that myself and Dave ended up arguing and the merger was scrapped. However in order to try and achieve the merger, I had tried to pursued Dave who told me he was also in discussions with Vineet about a merger with cricket2002.tk, that BLC Online had lots to offer as a Cricket 2002 site. One of the things to show this was Zimrahils patches and I let Dave see some of the testing of new versions of the patches and other discussions on the private forum, not realising that the patch Zimrahil had posted was given to him by Dave.
Dave Johnson wasnt really too pleased about this and also some criticism on the private forum about Dave from Zimrahil. He responded by sending an insulting and offensive email to Zimrahil who replied:
"you have stated that Andrew Wilson sent you the patches in good faith and I have emails from you stating you shouldn't be giving the patch to me or anybody else. However, you broke his trust by sending it to me (and possibly others). Similarly, you trusted me not to give the link of your patch out to anybody. I didn't , but gave the patch to 3 people I have known for years & trust implicitly. (who trust has been exemplified by no mention of this patch on any public forum)"
" How are my actions any different to your own?."
and significantly "...send all your emails to me (including the patch) to Andrew Wilson advising him of what you are doing behind his back"
Zimrahil has since said he had no intention of sending information to Andrew Wilson from EA Sports but he was annoyed at the language used in Daves email to him.
Worried that Zimrahil would do something like this and ruin Daves relationship with EA, Dave decided to construct a story that Zimrahil and myself had hacked into his site to receive the patch. This would mean that he was in the clear with EA about giving the patch to people. He posted on the NZwarriors forums stating that myself and Zimrahil where hackers and now EA Sports were considering not releasing the patch at all.
Part 9.2:
As proof of this hacking, he posted IP addresses that myself and Zimrahil had supposedly used when hacking the forums but where in fact just Freeseve ISP IP addresses which could have been used by anyone in the UK to normally access the forums not hack it and steel a patch!
This doubtful proof caused Dave to go further by releasing a supposed screenshot of the private forums Zimrahil had posted in. This can be seen at http://blc.sports-gaming.com/untitled.JPG and shows Zimrahil supposedly admitting to hacking NZwarriors. However the screenshot was obviously edited by Dave by the fact that the font on the edited top post is completely different to the font used on the other post and the rest of the forum. Bill Lawry is Warrior/Dave.
Although myself and Zim made this clear on the 22nd January 2003 with this post http://www.planetcricket.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1498&highlight=hacking+alligations with plenty of evidence that we did not hack nzwarriors.com, Dave persisted with his story. This persistence included trying everything possible to cause the end of BLC Online. This included pretending to be myself and email my hosts saying I wanted to turn the site into an adult site, pretending to be Andrew Wilson email me and accusing me of hacking, sending me fake screenshots of the patch, pretending to be on MSN and insulting people with the email address [email protected], pretending to be a firm of private investigators who would be taking myself and Zim to court, not allowing any members on NZwarriors/now called Sports Pavilion to post on BLC Online, not allowing moderators at nzwarriors/SP to even look at BLC Online (which around this time changed its name to Planetcricket) forums unless they where posting abuse, hacking peoples MSN accounts and then blaming it on me (although the accounts hacked where strangely always fixed for the members by Dave Johnson himself), sending private messages to all Planetcricket forum members telling them to join SP/NZWthe list is endless! All carried out by Dave or some of his friends at NZwarriors.com/Sports Pavilion such as MH.
MH is also likely to be the person who set up an Anti-Planetcricket site full of insults to Planetcricket and members of the staff at the site. The site was closed down by its hosts. It is also suspected he obtained my forum password for Planetcricket by telling me I had admin access at NZwarriors and tricking me to entering the same password into a form which sent it to him. Luckly the only damage that was done to Planetcricket was myself being locked out of the forums for a while.
Part 9.3:
The dispute even spread to cricket2002.tk with Dave trying to hack the site after vineet turned down his offer of a merger and after Vineet mentioned the hacking attempts but didnt name who did it, NZwarriors tried to accuse Planetcricket/BLC of being the perpetrators. Several days later Vineet told the full story: I've just about had enough with the juvenile rantings of some pricks at NZWarriors. BLC never "hacked" or "attempted to hack" my site. I DO have issues with some imbeciles at NZwarriors.I try to do the civilised and decent thing and don't mention the site but you take advantage of that. Well f*** NZWarriors and if you dont like it f*** you too. Take your pathetic trashy mindless-slave-drone selves out of MY site.I don't need you and I sure as hell won't take any s*** from you.
As for the rest of you good people please ignore this and pardon my french
This all continued with basically no Planetcricket staff talking or any NZwarriors staff while the insults continued about hacking and anyone mentioning anything good about Planetcricket banned (as myself and most PC staff were). The problems where exasperated by the NZwarriors policy of making members who had a certain number of posts moderators or admins and it was made known that anyone who posted at Planetcricket as well had no chance of ever getting this promotion.
Although Andrew from EA Sports was informed of the matter and had proof that Dave had given out the patch and therefore no hacking took place he seems reluctant to do anything or be seen to be supporting either forum.
In late Spring/Summer (European) 2003 things calmed down with both forums just existing separately with few incidents happening (one that did involved some members of SP/NZwarriors staff copying and pasting exact posts from Planetcricket into SP/NZW forums to create forum activity and the exact copying of an online Cricket World Cup 2003 tournament Planetcricket were running).
Part 9.4:
The lack of incidents it now seems was due to disruptions within NZwarriors/Sports Pavilion and arguments between the large amounts of staff that the forums had gained. This lead to reports of Dave quitting the Sports Pavilion forums and the forums closing regularly reaching members of Planetcricket staff, although for a long time this never happened. Some of this news did strangely bring around spamming attacks by certain staff from NZwarriors at around the same time. Perhaps the staff members of NZwarriors involved in their own infighting were trying to improve there standing with the nzwarriors/SP hierarchy. While this happened on the inside some interesting things had been occurring on the outside, managing to avoid the banning of Planetcricket staff from NZwarriors Zimrahil suggested the name Complete Resource Advanced Patchmakers as the name for the Sports Pavilion Patch Team which was accepted by NZWarriors staff as the name for there patch team. The C.R.A.P. team was created!
As the infighting continued within Sports Pavilion, some admins decided that an agreement and possible linking arrangement was possible with Scribbler approaching Planetcricket about the matter in September 2003. However even though Scribbler apologised for the hacking allegations admitting they where false, Planetcricket admins and staff decided that it could not agree to be associated with Sports Pavilion/NZWarriors after everything that had happened. The inevitable implosion of Daves forum came in October 2003 when the admins of the forum Dave had engineered a merger with refused to put up with his lies and scheming. Dave reneged on a promise to change the name, removed himself from admin and then hacked the site. NXSports was created as a dedicated sports forum, minus Dave Johnson and his cronies, by Scribbller from SP and Wolverine from thesportforum.net (the site SP had merged with)
The closing of Sports Pavilion singled the end of very unpleasant time for Planetcricket with the main people losing out forum members who were denied the chance of just being able to talk about cricket and cricket games without having to read about fighting and insults. Since the closure there has not been much activity from Dave in in the area of cricket and cricket gaming although rumours persist of plans for a re-opening of the Sports Pavilion forums and agreements with other cricket games sites.
: 
