A special news blog about myself and the story behind deadside. Since the day I was removed from the team, i had many DM’s why i “left” or questions about where I was. Well, the simple answer is that the game removed me from their team completely unfairly after standing my ground on game servers that misused the game for their own benefit. This besides many other problems inside the deadside team, from 0 communication to the discord team to lack of respect from the tiny build staff decided to place my work on a low-fire and started to work more on the backend of the game. ( The wiki ). This however was stolen from me as someone had the great idea to get rid of me completely.
Before going into this, I had no hate against Bad Pixel or anyone on their team. I’m going to explain why I left in the first place as a Community Manager, and how tinybuild eventually got rid of me and stole my work. I would say, grab yourself a cup of coffee, it’s going to be a long ride.
sidenote: Even though I have never signed an official NDA paper or digital agreement, some terms and names might be [REDACTED]. Not to hide parts of the story, but names and certain terms that should not be repeated or even posted in the first place.
The game in its state first had much more potential than what it is now. Deadside is now planning to release their game in a basic state, meaning that workshop modding is going to be a fact. While the game in its earlier state had more potential, the developers are working on their own speed. They don’t like to rush things, just as with valheim. However, after the game was bought and taken over by Tinybuild ( for roughly 17.4M ), a shitshow started to form and the place that was once happy and enjoyable, became toxic and macho trash-talking.
Tinybuild randomly started to put their fingers on our discord, making changes without letting us know. Even inviting random staff from their team to become a staff member at deadside. My objective was keeping control of the Discord bots, keeping clutter out of the channels as well for helping and supporting players with their needs, but that role and work were stolen by a tinybuild staff member named [REDACTED] without letting me know about it. it only wanted to help and guide us, but in the meanwhile, it was just about controlling us even more.
If there is something that I really don’t like, it’s pay2win servers where serverowners ask players to pay money to become unbanned. This is not only against the TOS of Valve where the user is limited of a game they already bought due to absurd community rules, but is also a backstab towards the developers that working hard, just to see their game being misused as a way to make hard cash from innocent players.
And, to be fair, if you would be a dick and have to pay 5 bucks to become unbanned again because you went against some serverowner’s rules, i can understand. I mean server costs are crazy expensive these days. But, if a player would have to pay 50 bucks as well for 150 euros worth of a Patreon subscription in order to get the privilege of paying 50 bucks to become unbanned, that just goes too far, especially if most of the bans were not legit and admin abused by server owners.
They refused to do something about it for a long time, but after they removed me from their team, it turns out that they now secretly hiding servers from the server list if the server is known as a bad server.
Last year, I suggested that we should make a solid wiki website for the game. I wanted to do something else instead of looking pretty in Discord and not doing anything much then looking and keeping myself busy as my work was taken over by [REDACTED]. I assembled a team and started to work on it. We even included several other languages to make it even easier for the player to look up the information that they needed.
I ordered a domain name but was unable to find a proper hosting for the wiki website. Tinybuild offered to host the wiki for the game so that we could keep on going with our work. Sadly, I don’t have a big moneytree in my backyard, so the domain was about to expire. I give them the option to take over the domain. Then all I had to do was send them a movement key for the domain and it was done… but no, they took the hard way by lying to their own staff members in a statement that no one was aware of the domain name being expired. That’s bullshit, as I had stated in June to Loaf about the domain situation.
I even applied to work for the tiny build as a Community Manager, yet they rejected me as I had no experience ( doing discord stuff since it opened within its first year, but sure, you do your boo ). However, they did want to ask random users to become a moderator who had 0 experience and they replaced the best Lead CM with A Minecraft player who has 0 experience as a lead CM. Yes, Loaf is/was a hardcore Minecraft player. I said it from the start, we all will be replaced sooner or later and well, you see. I’m gone now as well because I knew too much as it can damage the reputation of tiny build. I at least had the guts to open my mouth to stand my ground and attempt to protect the player base. The number of complaints I got from the player base became larger, as no one was responding to them except me.
A closed Beta Team with players that we could trust on not telling what was being worked on, yet alone every detail was exposed within the hour. Even working on “wolves” could not stay and remain a secret as it had to be leaked first on a VK page. I stated it many Times, do NOT share any content on Discord that should remain a secret at all times as there are bots that can dupe everything towards another Discord server.
I have written about this in an earlier post if you like to read about this.
It’s bad when tiny build staff members don’t trust their own beta players while it’s their own fault of content being leaked all the time.
Having a proper adult discussion is not possible with the team of TinyBuild. They feel offended quickly if they get something that they don’t like to hear. I never ever have trash talked about their staff or said any words that should be seen as unprofessional, yet after they removed me, they claimed in a statement to other staff members ( yet again, lies ) that I
– That I was not working on anything and that I just sat there and enjoyed the drama. ( They prob forgot that I still was spending approximately 6 Hours a day on getting the wiki update ready for the V3 release of wiki.js, let alone that I spent money from myself to get a domain name and custom emoji work for leaflet mapping which was another 250 bucks ) Also, if I dont get the new content, then I’m unable to update the wiki with the updated content in the first place so its not even my fault that the wiki was outdated bigtime.
– That I was trash-talking about the game on other Discord platforms. ( They have no proof as there is none. Also, faking messages can be done within a minute with a bit of altering in the console. It’s a well-known issue in the world of discord. )
– Apparently, I have problems with my own discord which is outrageous and trash-talking about something that has nothing to do with the game at all. The issue we had was a conversation about our rust server and thus had never been used as an excuse to get rid of me.
Eventually, they stole my wiki, locked me out and I had in return a Fyou and goodbye. They did not pay me anything, they didn’t give me anything. Not even a gentle thank you for your time or work.
They removed me and kept silent about it towards the player base and to be fair, I’m a bit done with working for developers/publishers like TinyBuild if they want to have it settled and done in a childish way.
They don’t care about other people’s feelings. An event for gay rights? “nah, why spend time on something useless like that?” is what their response was followed by laughter and terrible gay jokes. The staff chat was once a happy place for everyone to chat and express their feelings about the game and talking about the game is becoming, became a macho chat where every word is turned around and against you if it’s something they don’t like.
For the past 3 years, I have been online every single day for them, helping out the player base and actually taking the time to listen to the player base. While most other staff members didn’t even interact with the player base, I was one of the few who actually listened. I don’t mind spending my time on this, because I think that together with the player base, you could create a game that everyone likes. Something runescape did lately with their new hero pass system. They listened to the player base instead of their own ideas and got rid of it completely instead of reworking it.
So, there you have it. I as a founder, closed Alpha player and tester since 2017 ( playing on a Russian server with mentally high ping back then ) got removed without a gentle thank you for all the time I spent on them. I have never felt so destroyed and empty inside of me. something that you love that’s been taken from you within seconds.
I have all the proof to back up this post, safe and sound on my USB stick. If someone from Tinybuild wants this post removed, then I would be happy to see your DM in my Discord mailbox.
