Xerxes

Your answer shows your weakness. I have confronted you with a situation in which I have clearly laid out every single scenario that could reasonably take place, and instead of answering a simple multiple-choice question on which one is the right one and why, you instead weasel out of the conversation with a scenario which did not happen. You clearly do not want to have a logical discussion about this problem and instead want to attack Alex as a person for motives which you assume with no proof, after he's done multiple donation streams in the past with no issue before this fiasco with gold sellers and bot developers arised. I don't have anything further to say to you, and I hope that you'll see now why I refused to continue this conversation before you brought me back to it. This is more of an argument and I can respect this standpoint but I think that it's naive. Suppose for example that we found out that one of the members of Elysium staff was actually doing something a lot more sinister than just manipulating a video game. What if we found out that a member of the staff was a bank robber? Or was currently on bail for a rape charge? Would you still make him enforce that promise? There's danger to this level of black and white thinking. And, once again, there would not be a problem here if Elysium did not do what they did to begin with, the promise of the donation would've gone through.

"He would be in court" ahahahahahah. That would require Elysium being considered a charity, first of all, and second of all the legal argument here is entirely pointless because we're already playing on an illegal version of a 14 year old video game. I'm making an argument from a moral standpoint. Do you actually want me to sit here and go through every single possible thing that Alex could have done in this situation? A) The nuclear option. He could fully chargeback, and then refund, every single dollar he got from that stream. This would be easy to do from a technical standpoint but it would rob him of his own earned money which he uses to pay the bills. No money goes to Elysium, Alex also loses his cut to pay his own bills, the viewers are fully reimbursed to spend their money however they wish. The viewers are happy, Elysium and Alex are not, and Alex had to hurt himself due to Elysium's mistakes. B) Middle ground. Alex does the chargeback, and instead of losing his own personal income from the stream, he allows the viewers by their discretion to decide where the money goes: to him, or to Elysium. This is where we are now. C) Accounting nightmare. Alex does the chargeback, and then sits down with a calculator and refunds every single person who donated to the stream 75% of their donation. The only way that he could guarantee keeping 100% of the money that he rightfully made, but not practical in the slightest. Think of all the $1-$5 donations streamers get, and think of the shit interface paypal has. This would be days of work to actually do for him, once again because of Elysium's mistakes. D) He goes through with the donation. Alex started the stream under the pretense that Elysium was working in the best interest in the community. After placing the donation on paypal, he then realizes that Elysium is hiring complete scum of the vanilla wow community and that's where the donations are going. He has to suck it up in this scenario, and let the money go through anyways, which may not even be what all of his viewers wanted. Here Alex is ALSO serving as an arbitrator anyways, just like he would be if he did the chargeback, just in the opposite direction. Who's to say most of his viewers didn't want the refund? Did you ask them? Now, explain to me why you think D is the correct choice here, from a moral standpoint, or if you don't, explain what other option would've been a better choice.

Hilarious accusation. No, quite frankly, I type much more coherently than he does. You can have a picture of my realmlist and characters if you'd like. I play Xenik on both Darrowshire and Zeth'kur, and Xenivus and Pressbuttons on Zeth'kur. I have no other characters that I actively play other than alts logged out in inns for rested xp. I don't really have anything else to say on the matter of the donations, I feel like I've made my point. I think Alex was perfectly in the right with what he did, and the OP does indeed lie about his involvement and delves into pointless name-and-shaming over someone who didn't even do any digging or "dox"ing and was concerned for the server that he enjoys. (If Alex dox'd a single person, post proof of the dox and his involvement. I have not seen any and I will continue to assume that it is a complete fabrication.) As somewhat of a fan of Alex (only seen one of his streams and his class guides really), I watched the video that this started over, and I thought that this entire thread was an idiotic, shameless knee-jerk scapegoating effort to distract from the real issue at hand, which is the shady characters that the video brings up. Notice that very few people are talking about that at all. 80% of the comments in this thread are baseless bashing on Alex with no actual substance. I had more to say to Ellipsea but I find her arguments completely irrational and not taking into account the situation Alex was put into and the options that he actually had at his disposal, both technically and morally. Given the circumstances, he made the correct choice, and if he went ahead with the donation as planned he would be going against his conscience considering the information that he had available to him at the time.

This was before the full story was known. The money was given under a false pretense. The funding that, once again, was donated to him and entrusted to his judgement by people who like him and agree with him, and not to the server itself. Then why whine incessantly about it and call for the guy's virtual beheading if it wasn't a big deal? You have conflicting ideas. Idea A is that the server would be fine without the donations (which only totalled to $1000, a pitiful amount honestly relative to even the smallest indiegogo or kickstarter campaign). Idea B is that this cash is somehow the linchpin of everything and Alex should be hanged for doing what he had the full right to do. Need I remind you once again that people are free to take the money and put it back into the server if they so choose (at a higher rate, 75% -> 100%), or will you continue to dodge that point as if it's irrelevant?

If people wanted to donate directly to the server, they were free to do so. If people want to take back their donations to Alex's stream and then put that money right into the server, they are still free to do so as he has offered a service for refunds after this. Alex has no other way to donate to him during streaming other than through the system where he chooses to give a ~75% cut to Elysium. There is not two separate, Alex-money, and Elysium-money channels for donations. The money people put in is FOR HIM, and then he CHOOSES to give it to Elysium. Imagine a separate scenario. Imagine that I gave $20 to my friend to buy something nice for his girlfriend, because he's short on cash. Imagine then that that friend buys a present, but on his way to deliver it, he gets a text from his girlfriend saying "I'm breaking up with you." He's mad as shit so on his own initiative he takes the present back to the store and gets a cash refund, and offers the money back to me. I could still take that money back from him and buy her a present on my own if I had a good relationship with his girlfriend separate to his, but expecting him after being fucked with to then give her the present is naive. That's the exact situation that Alex was in.

This is an idiotic meme. He's stated that he would give a refund to anyone who asked for one.

This thread is hilarious on a lot of different levels. I don't even know where exactly to start with this because no matter where I start it's like wading through a crock of shit. First of all, these are not just people who have "troubled pasts" or however you put it. It's one thing if you found out, oh one of these guys once sold an account 7 years ago. That's acceptable. It's another thing entirely to have 1000 posts on a gold selling forum and personally set up a gold selling shop. Do you honestly think that people should not be concerned that you're giving a person with this kind of PUBLIC, VIEWABLE history the title of "system administrator" might cause some red flags? As someone who plays the server and has to experience all of the gold sellers spam on a daily basis, do you really expect me to be totally cool that you're inviting the same people who would willingly do this for money onto the team? Or what about zzuk; it appeared to anyone interested enough to look into the hire that you were putting a known vanilla botter into contact with your code base. Now, after the fact, you say "but he's totally trustworthy and he didn't see any code, we promise"; why didn't you say this immediately? Was it really this unexpected that people would be upset? On the side of Alex, should he have opened a dialogue? Probably, but he did not have any obligation to do so. He does not answer to you. He is a youtuber who plays vanilla wow. Show me one place where he called to "dox" these people, as in release their actual real life information. The most he did was a video in which he brought up these valid concerns and stated where he wasn't sure of the information. Threatening to ban him and name-and-shaming him seems awfully ironic when what you're accusing him of is "stirring up drama" and "witch-hunting". Do you really claim to have the moral high ground here? What has he actually done, in-game, to warrant a ban at all? Should I also be afraid of every dumb video I post on youtube in case it might get me banned from Elysium? (And as a side note, to those who continually bring up his "20%" of donations: the donations are to his stream. He also had no obligation to give money to Elysium at all. If he took 100% as many other streamers do, you would not complain. If he donated 100%, you would not complain. People complain because his 80/20 split appears to them to be 20% "lost" to Elysium when it's really 80% gained. Though, I do think that doing the chargeback after people donated to him under the pretense that a cut would go to Elysium, was the wrong move.) I don't have a conclusion to this. There is no conclusion. This entire situation is idiotic. If you thought that this forum post explaining that these gold sellers and botters "dindu nuffin, they was good boyz" would alleviate concerns, then you are wrong. They shouldn't have been hired in the first place, in ANY capacity. Playing it off like it's no big deal just hurts your credibility.