The thread title was my misunderstanding. Fixed. A number of replies have also gained some infraction points for trolling replies.
We have actioned this and informed the community. It was done to be transparent in the reasons why. Quite frankly, if you do not like it as a server admin, then you are welcome to shut down your server and give PR a wide birth. We are protecting our creation, you each have a license to run that creation. Fuck us and we WILL fuck you back, a lot harder.
We were approached by c0ca with this attitude out of the blue. We did not seek it. The server administrator for a server's community is automatically seen as a figurehead. They are the registered licensees. Hence, we would expect a level of maturity that would come with running a well run server.
If, as a community, you allow someone to become that licensee, you put your community's reputation in that person. This is not the first issue c0ca himself has raised with the team. Seeing as everyone wants to be a barrack room lawyer, please note that we did not feel we needed to post the fact that the licensee himself said multiple times, in an almost 200 line conversation (not 2 quoted lines...), that he WAS running the map. We do not care if he actually wasn't. The motives behind it warrented the removal, and that doesn't even touch on the abuse received towards both the Dev and towards the whole Dev team.
When c0ca received his forum ban as a result, I placed the ban, and I posted the ban notice:
"Remove the Op Snow Strom restricted map and then email me [email address] if you want your license and account back."
A member of the 10th Community posted and quite rightly noticed the fact that there's a distinct lack of mention in my original post of the words 'permanent'. There was never any view to a perm removal; but thanks for your concern, and I'm glad there are a few switched on members still out there
I have received a short email reply from c0ca, and it has been communicated to the team. Personally I'd like to think that he's mature enough to use his own initiative and apologise to the Dev he had a go at as well. We are currently looking at doing what we were planning on doing, re-issuing the license and unbanning his account after the attitude had subsided and we were sure he was not running Op Snow Storm, as he himself had seemed to enjoy boasting about directly to a senior dev as a taunt.
Quite frankly, why on earth some of you people think we enjoy bearing the brunt of malicious comments against hundreds of thousands of man hours over nearly 7 years work, is completely beyond me. As a manager, I will not allow any team member to take shit like that from ungrateful forum members. I would also suggest that communities take a second look at who respresents their communities and licenses to the team.
We will not suffer fools gladly.