The Warcraft 2 Story of BabyShark
Defeat
Swift beat me down. He set a long term scheme in motion to attack my reputation, get me booted me from games by multiple hosts, and turn former friends and fellow gamers against me. It worked. He accomplished his goal. He used his power over the player base and admins to make RU hostile to me for no good reason other than his say-so. Together they dragged a shark out of the water, harpooned me and stranded me for dead on the beach. That was the plan. He knew what he was doing. Swift won.
He turned Joe and Mouse, formerly friends I trusted and enjoyed, against me. He turned the entire server against me. Not every individual of course, but the overall environment of the server and the majority of regular hosts. Harassment continued from van and LeeRoy. They were given free rein to pester me. I logged on one time to both of them instantly spamming things like "f***ing ugly retarded cunt" and things of that nature. Mousey had already renounced me publicly and they had all seen it, so they were having a field day on me. They knew no consequences were coming and got some sick pleasure out of spamming me vulgar and rude messages. I was getting banned from games by a large number of people who previously had no issues with me. Random smurfs would make mean and rude comments to me out of nowhere.
One time 6 of 8 players were happy with me being in the game, including Viruz and y00 and other pro players. Shotgun and KHB made the most noise and fought to get me kicked out. It doesn't matter if 6 of 8 people are happy to play with you when the loudest rudest people are given their way. Shotgun and KHB blamed me for a loss but Viruz said it wasn't my fault. When you've been labelled mentally ill, drug-addicted, crybaby, slut, drama queen, oversensitive lying newb, and it's coming from the top down, with admins on board with it, it's hard to fix. Had there been particular "crimes" to address, that would have been possible, but fighting hateful labels and smears not based on anything other than minor playful trolly stuff combined with Swift's imagination is nearly impossible in an environment like that. Swift knows this. It doesn't even matter if the labels don't make sense. Like I'm "oversensitive" about van's harassment, but at the same time I'm lying about it happening. How can I be both oversensitive to harassment and lying that it ever happened? No oversensitive girl would play W2 in a toxic environment for half a lifetime lol. The claims are both false. Van told Mouse I made it up and she believed van and accused me of lying for reasons I don't understand. Even the "distancing language" van used is a tell of a liar.
"I never harassed this person we call BabyShark."
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Lewinsky."
I never lied to her. She was wrong.
There would be no protection from any spam or abuse. People could hack against me and the admins wouldn't care. My legit SS request with /ping and proper procedure was ignored. D@ta was never banned when DK was. No justice was to be found. The only admin who had stood up for my rights was Mouse and she had now gone over to the dark side, to join the people she'd always expressed how little she trusted and thought so little of.
The RU server just wasn't fun anymore.
Swift had beaten me. He succeeded in taking my favorite game away from me. The emotional impact of all of this was heavy. I loved W2 and had played it since my teen years. And now I couldn't play anymore.
I tried smurfing, but Joe and Jordan would call out my smurf names. As XuRnT revealed, Jordan has a program that lets him see every single aka you ever made, even ones brand new ones you just made and never told anyone. Smurfs in general are often booted, and you have to play for awhile to get one "recognized". People often called me "good" or "very good" while smurfing. But I wanted to play with friends...I'd tell one person it was me and they'd blow my cover sooner or later. It was stupid, having to hide to escape persecution.
Warcraft 2 is in my blood. There's a magic about the game to me. It wasn't a happy place anymore. Losing it was painful.
I decided to quit the game and told one of my best W2 friends, DK, that I was quitting. He almost never posted on RU forum, but now he did, that he and others would miss gaming with me.
It was a sad time in the life of the person who plays as screenname BabyShark.
Sometimes evil wins.
One time I was walking along the beach, and I came upon a sight that made my insides clench. There was a beautiful shark upside down on the beach, motionless. As I approached, I saw it had a large number of tiny hooks embedded in its skin. In its head were 3 large hooks. To see a majestic and enormous creature like this in this state was a sorry sight to behold. I noticed its gill slits moving. It was still alive!
I ran to scoop up ocean water with my hands to pour over its head.
I started shouting to ask for help. A few others ran from a far distance and came to pour water over its head with beach buckets I'd yelled at them to bring.
I looked up and called a marine life emergency number. They came surprisingly soon with a truck with a net lift designed for moving large marine creatures. As they were preparing the net and providing water, I started carefully pulling the tiny hooks out of its skin. The large ones in the head I knew couldn't be touched, not by me without risking further damage.
The creature was raised and then lowered into the vehicle's large portable water tank. I followed the vehicle in my own car to the aquarium sanctuary.
I offered to pay for the vet care and housing costs. They gratefully accepted.
I had real life to attend to, so I was busy for awhile.
A few weeks later, I went back to the rehabilitation center. The shark was swimming freely in a very large aquarium. I couldn't see any hooks now, but there were two marks in its head where they'd managed to remove the big hooks. I noticed a shiny spot of metal where the third hook had been.
One of the staff who recognized me walked up to me.
"We didn't want to risk removing that one. It's actually embedded right through the brain. We just cut off the protruding part."
The animal seemed to be recovering well.
It swam up to the glass.
Was it...smiling?
It was.
"Thanks, Tupac," it said.
A New Beginning
Tupac made me admin of an empty server.
I remember logging in for the first time, still upset, bitter and skeptical that anything would come of this vacant place.
Soon I started visualizing what this emptiness could be.
It had a name. War2USA. I like it.
I thought probably I'd end up being able to play 1s a couple times a month with people like DK.
Tupac gave me an empty website. I had never used Wordpress before so everything had to be learned as I went along. Thankfully, just about any query imaginable can be searched online. I followed the how-to videos and articles and emailed experts and consulted tech support forums and slowly figured things out.
I realized I enjoyed W2-related web design. I had experience with website building but this was completely different. I was able to use my creativity and writing combined with a game I loved, so I found satisfaction and fun in building the website for War2USA. It became a passion project.
The first game session on opening night, Sept. 24, 2018, was four people: BabyShark, disgruntled, ring62, and TOFU. We played 2s on assorted maps and it was great.
The new War2USA Discord was seeing people gradually join.
Van and Warbux joined also. Van followed me to carry on harassing me. He was warned and then banned. Warbux violated the posted code of conduct as well and was talking about my breasts in addition to other violations. He was warned but ignored it. He was given a 1 week ban.
He then chose to attack War2USA with lies and slander, including things like accusing me of creating 30 accounts (false at the time, probably have 30 by now though!) to make the server appear populated, but later admitted he himself made 30 accounts. He accused me of lying and fabricating van's harassment. He accused Tupac of hacking and using War2USA to backdoor people's PCs, total nonsense. He had a bot spamming RU main channel claiming there was Trojan malware at USA. He was angry and going on a fool's rampage of nonsense. He lost all credibility with anyone. His ban was upgraded to permanent. I saw him frequently in RU Discord voice chat with Swift. Swift, you need better quality minions. This illiterate clown just makes you look silly. Joe did a great job for you, though. People listened to him. He had the respect of the people, even me.
Once the cancer was purged from War2USA, people started feeling free to speak and interact without feeling like they'd be attacked with rudeness for no reason.
To be continued.
A New Beginning (continued)
I was able to play the game I loved again. People were coming for games. People made the effort to download the gateway and come to USA at specific times in order to play there.
It became very clear that there were quite a few people dissatisfied with RU's toxicity and power abuse.
War2USA was off to a good start.
Once while I was logged on RU, Swift sent me private messages:
"None of the good players will join. I certainly won't."
"I'm okay with that," I replied. He paused. Not the response he was expecting. He couldn't conceive of a W2 player that didn't worship him.
"You're wasting your time. That server will die. I'll make sure of it. I'm putting $5000 into making sure your server dies."
Swift, XuRnT, and Warbux were spending a lot of time in Discord voice chat together mid 2018 around the time I left RU and War2USA was born.
Then XuRnT told me that Tupac was going to attack RU.
Not long after, someone indeed did attack RU.
People were complaining on RU forum.
I mentioned it to Tupac. He had no idea it was happening.
The blame was assigned to us. People were asking for our heads.
"Ban them!" squawked agitated toxics like Shotgun. Calls for me to be killed were included in RU forum at this time also.
Well, Tupac didn't do it. I didn't do it.
But no one really cared about truth or evidence.
The unthinking, seething hatred of RU's forum's vocal majority emitted plentiful execrable vitriol at the both of us.
I stood up for the truth.
Tupac made recommendations to Mouse on how to prevent this happening in the future. He had many times helped find security holes and alert RU leaders to fix these.
Someone had fed XuRnT the info about the upcoming attack and pre-blamed Tupac before it happened.
He was accused before it happened. That's evidence the accuser had some inside information from the actual culprit. Based on XuRnT's post on RU, I think he is probably telling the truth. He probably believed it and was deceived by whoever was actually the mastermind behind the scheme.
Tupac received a threatening forum PM that included his real name and a threat to take this to the FBI.
Someone (I long believed this to be XuRnT based on the timing, exact same day with real name threat, and that he didn't deny it when accused until recently) called Tupac's real life employer and bad-mouthed him as a cyber criminal. This could cost someone their job that children depend on for food. But that's RU for you.
XuRnT says someone hacked his computer and maybe got that info from him that way. I don't know what all went down but Tupac and I had no part in any of the stuff that went down there
The amount of anger and hostility directed at us over wanting to play W2 in a friendly environment was unreal.
War2USA kept plodding along in spite of the hateful insults, lies, attacks, and mockery.
Anyone who had sense about them could see what was going on.
RU was toxic and abused power. People still liked W2 and wanted to play in a nice environment, hence USA.
War2USA has stood up peacefully allowing players of all skill levels to play the game, defending against malicious lies and attacks. War2USA has remained positive, friendly, fun, and remarkably drama-free.
People come to laugh, chat, play, and otherwise enjoy themselves.
As stated previously, it's by far the most pleasant gaming environment for W2 I've seen in my life, having played W2 on and off for about half of my life.
RU toxic crowd tried their hardest to smear and defame USA.
USA stood calmly and rode out their storms.
And still stands today, stronger than ever.
Those who stand for kindness, fun, laughter, humanity, justice, and who just freakin' love W2 stand with us.
There are tons more people who are part of my story who didn't make it into the published version.
In spite of some scoffers' misguided insistence that screen names are not real people, I've discovered that they absolutely are.
I didn't see them as human myself before the phenomenon that started to change the landscape of the W2 world and community. Voice chat changed everything.
This game, this silly, amazing, magical game, is the meeting place for as eclectic a group as we are. This 20 year old game is the passion we share, the driving force behind the connections we've formed with people scattered across the globe.
The people you encounter in your lifetime leave marks on you, some of which are beautiful and warm, and some of which leave ugly scabs.
The people that fall in the first group are not mentioned here for the most part, not because they don't form my W2 story, but because in most cases, the story deserves to stay just in my memory.
Somehow the reluctance to appear vulnerable and let everyone, even the haters, see what I've shared including the wounds left behind, melted away in favor of being open to humanity.
Life is so many different kinds of things wrapped up into one messy ball. All the things we like to hide, pain, weakness, embarrassment, and failure, are a part of it too. Growing means leaving your comfort zone. Healing requires facing your wounds honestly.
I didn't want to be the person that was broken and bitter from betrayal and abuse.
Today, I'm not.
Today, I'm stronger because of what I went through. I'm happier because of what I went through.
I've had to work hard to be able to play the game I love. That hard work has more than paid off. The community that has grown from under the burned embers of what was destroyed is a thousandfold better than its precursor. Almost every single game session on W2 now is awesome, full of friendly people and laughs and great games. Check the streams and see for yourself if you're skeptical.
I'm now thankful for what I went through because it's made me reflect and grow, sorry for the mistakes I made and the times I wasn't the person I want to be, and I'm thankful for the opportunity I was given to be persecuted for the name of Jesus Christ that I publicly shared.
There were days when I was afraid to talk of it openly for fear of persecution. But now, I recall the comforting Words of God. God uses things for His purposes, in spite of our sinfulness and failings. God's promises are true and He is faithful though I'm not. He is true when I'm not. He is love when I'm not. He has held me in His hand through countless difficult journeys. He has shown me that my weakness lets His strength show. My pain can be for my good. His love never dies, and He loves the unloving, the ungodly, blasphemers, haters, the rude, the liars, the adulterers, abusers, killers and other sinners like me.
It is my prayer that every person mentioned in my story will have their eyes opened to their need for a Savior from sin. I don't hate any of you. You are loved by God, created by God, and are condemned and hopeless without the Savior Jesus Christ who washes away our sin.
2 Corinthians 12:10
For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Matthew 5:11-12
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Matthew 5:44-45
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Romans 10:9-10
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
John 3:16-17
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Romans 3:23-24
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
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