New Town Grief

*The Forgotten Period*Please note that the following content may contain assumptions as some of the information has been lost or forgotten.
The **New Town Grief** was an incident of griefing that occurred on the 18th of November, 2014. It is named after the New Town Boom as it was the only griefing event to occur in this period. It is likely that some of the griefing also occurred in the area of New Town (now Sunflower Town).

Uniquely, it was the only griefing incident where a full investigation was launched, involving interviews with the players online at the time.

## Grief and investigation

### Prior to the grief

It was Tuesday. zac5 was on the server with Hungrybear05 and asasinateddoctor. Hungrybear05 asked zac5 if he could be an operator. zac5 said no, and then had to leave.

### Damage

zac5 went on a couple of hours later to find the whole of Spawn blown up as well the lighthouse at Sunflower Island and likely some structures in New Town. It's possible more damage was done but such information has been lost to time.

### Investigation

zac5 immediately hopped on the server's control panel and downloaded the log of that time. He then searched through and found all of the people who were on. He found edward\_seychelles, TobesP, asasinateddoctor, Hungrybear05 and Lrook242.

#### Questioning

The next day, these people were all questioned. Hungrybear05 was unavailable that day, so he was questioned the next day.
Some important observations were made during the questioning:

* TobesP claimed to be completely unable to place or destroy blocks
* asasinateddoctor made a recommendation to replace the Warp Rooms with less valuable blocks, since they could be targets for griefers

#### Server investigations

zac5 then went to asasinateddoctor's and Hungrybear05's house. He discovered that there was a lot of prismarine; the only likely place where this could've come from was Spawn. zac5 then banned Hungrybear05 for the time, but would ban asasinateddoctor if he had more evidence.

### Aftershock

That Saturday, a second incident occurred, seeing damage at the Warp Rooms. zac5 immediately checked the server's log files to find that players asasinateddoctor and RugbyDiamonds had been online. Additionally, zac5 had remembered asasinateddoctor's comment about the Warp Rooms, and therefore banned him, unbanning HungryBear05. asasinateddoctor was never unbanned after this incident.

## Consequences

Shortly following the events of the New Town Grief, a new TNT disabler was released as part of Seacraft 2.2.10 in order to prevent future griefing incidents. Down the line, this would cause the renaming and repurposing of the Bombing Range, becoming the Bombing Mines instead. The system was upgraded in Seacraft 2.3.13 alongside the introduction of the End Crystal disabler, which functioned similarly. These systems would remain active on the server until the end of Version 2.

Another thing that followed the incident is that samdogboy2 further griefed a "sponge cafe" structure in New Town that had been damaged by the incident, citing a rule at the time that allowed players to destroy ruined structures. zac5 was displeased by this since the structure had only recently been griefed, and it was plausible that its owner, Zossimov2000, had simply not been on to repair it. This ultimately lost samdogboy2 the position of operator, and was replaced by edwardseychelles. The rule samdogboy2 had cited was also removed, since many of the structures the rule was originally created for had been long destroyed. Additionally, the property of this sponge cafe would eventually be home to the Seacraft court house.