badgergate

On May 6, Wolvden released the long-awaited badger base, a muted medium III base with a craftable app. This was teased several months earlier in an update poll, so people had farmed plenty of badger trophies, but the recipe was in high demand.

A previously unknown user named White Wiccan claimed to have found the recipe and offered crafting services for 2 gc. Mavric, Don Dueli, and multiple others sent over their badger parts and gc and got…nothing. Mavric was the first to mention it in chat. “Okay, I’m super worried now, I have messaged them again and they just ignored me—does anyone know the user White Wiccan?”

Over the next few hours it became clear that no badger bases were forthcoming. Mav and the other scam victims sent in modbox tickets. Meanwhile, one of the scam victims tried warning people in main chat that White Wiccan was a scammer…and got modded for speaking negatively about another user. Best mods ever.

orderup did some sleuthing and discovered that White Wiccan was an alt, and their main account had multiple badger base wolves. Guess we know where all the parts went. Also, having alts is against the TOS. The mods saw through the badger-laundering scheme and banned both accounts—but they didn’t return the scammed users’ badger parts. They basically said “Sorry, we don’t support promise transactions” and marked the tickets as resolved.

(Technically, they couldn’t return the actual stolen parts, because those were already crafted and applied. But they could have generated replacement parts or escalated the tickets to someone with that power. It wouldn’t cause balance issues because the illicit badgers were all banned, so there would still be the “proper” amount of badgers in the game. But the mods refused to do so.)

Don was sad and upset. Mavric was hopping mad. She works in a jail; she is well-versed in Not Taking Shit from people. She unleashed her inner Karen and demanded to speak to a manager. So her ticket went up to the admins. A day or so later, the admins wrote back, affirming the moderators’ decision not to compensate the scam victims. Ticket closed.

Mav was still hopping mad and, together with [redacted], started organizing a group protest. Everyone was going to stop buying gc, many people were going on indefinite hiatus with protest messages in their bio, and [redacted] taking down all custom decors from the store. (I quickly snagged an extra copy of [redacted] before the embargo hit.) Mav then sent another ticket to the admins, telling them that she and a group of other users were taking their ball and going home unless she got her badger parts back pronto.

A couple more days passed, and then the admins meekly returned Mavric and everyone else’s badger parts. Mav won the war.

The takeaway here is not “oh wow, the Wolvden admins actually did the right thing”; it’s that they’re operating on razor-thin profit margins and are sensitive to getting kicked in the food. But hey, I’ll take it. Glad to have everyone still with us. Now I gotta decide which wolf gets an extra copy of [redacted].