Kids, don't do bugs (rant/life update?)
Hey guys. My name is Darian Ely. You've seen me lurking around here as DoctorEly, but the thing is, there's a stifling issue I need to address, clear up, and move on from. This is going to be a long-winded, personal tale that I don't expect a lot to listen to, but I need to get it out there. It's confusing, and I'm sitting here, broken, trying to put it into words.
Prelude
Long, long ago, I started playing Legacy of the Beast at launch, with the account Scone-8461. I made this account to post to the forums when they became available.
Enter my youngest brother, who we'll call Ben, out of respect. He creates an game account under the alias "SwankyPup" and plays along with me. Ben, for all of his life, has had severe, explosive anger issues. He would get violently angry over the littlest of issues. He wiped everything in his account after failing to defeat the Beast on Hard mode Underworld. I suggested he needed counseling for these issues, as it could be something serious. He had an outburst, insiting he was perfectly normal, "not fucked up like the rest of y'all".
Regretting this mistake, he meekly asks if he can play on my account from time to time, promising he won't mess with it. I agree, letting him play under my supervision. I also let him browse and post to the forums, on the account I write this message on right now. Later, I made myself a second forum account, under my current alias of DoctorEly, on a burner email. I did this to try and discern the two of us. Flash forward a bit, Ben stops asking to play on my account, claiming he had quit the game completely, leaving the game and forum accounts back in my hands.
To get a bit personal, mental health issues have plagued my family for generations. I myself struggle with type 2 bipolar disorder, where depressive episodes are severe, and unbearably lengthy compared to the hypomanic episodes. In one of these depressive episodes, I lost my sense of judgement and sacrificed absolutely everything in my account. After that, I wandered back and forth across many different accounts, on several emails, trying to regain what I once had. It was a long cycle of new account, play, get bored, sacrifice, start over, all just to keep me distracted from my mental issues.
Around late February of last year, I had a massive mental breakdown in the middle of class, in which I used my school's "Yellow Ribbon" card, which signals to your guidance counselor that you're in immediate danger of yourself. I, in the middle of class, had decided that I needed serious help. I was admitted to a phsychiatric ward, and stayed for a few weeks to recover. Mid March, I made my return to the forums, posting my story to this account, but never addressing the fact that I now had two forum accounts. I began the game again under the name Sc0n3, however, issues that I thought I had put past me came to haunt me again, and I found myself starting over. Again.
This time, I started over as DoctorEly-4668, my current account. I posted to the forums under my burner email to avoid name confusion.
This is where the story gets confusing... and dramatic
I decided to make a secondary account to play the game on my iPad, not wanting to run the same account on two devices. I named the account "MisterEly" for old time's sake.
Life gets in the way. The COVID-19 pandemic, college stuff, family matters, etc. I don't have time to run both accounts. On a whim, I hand the MisterEly account off to Ben, who gladly takes it up.
This evening, I'm pinged with an email from LOTB Support on not one, but TWO burner email addresses. One is the email tied to my free-to-play, "smurf" Steam account. The other is the email for the MisterEly game account/DoctorEly forum account. Support tells me that game accounts associated to these emails have been marked for suspicious behavior. One is MisterEly, another is named "midnight", a name I didn't recognize. I feared the accounts may have been compromised, so I panicked, and sent a text to my family group chat.
ANOTHER Support email shows up saying that the accounts had taken part in the abuse of a bug. Upon Battlefield Trooper Eddie's release, there was apparently a bug that allowed him to be purchased an infinite amount of times, somehow. MisterEly had been flagged for obtaining Battlefield Trooper Eddie 440-odd times, and "midnight" 212 or so times. My heart sank a bit, so I went to confront Ben. The kid was PROUD of what he had done, showing off his new NOTB Eddie, vast collection of 5-star Eddies, Daedalus, Killer Prime, Magus Lord of Light, multiple tier 3 Icarus cosmics... queue the SECOND account, used to a lesser extent, with both Wasteland Eddie and Hellraiser Eddie...
I told him I knew how he acquired these characters, calling them out as ill-gotten gains. He begins mocking me, something along the lines of "I didn't do anything that would hurt anybody! You're just jealous I have better shit than you!". I tried keeping cool, explaining that this wasn't fair, and that I was really scared that I'd been hacked, to which he responds, red-faced, screaming at me, "THE FUCK YOU WORRIED FOR? NOBODY NEEDS THAT MANY EMAILS! USE A DIFFERENT PASSWORD, AT LEAST!". My parents heard from the other room, and my father came to intervene. I showed him the emails, trying to explain the situation as best I could. It took roughly an hour, but we reached an agreement: I would terminate both of the accounts and their associated emails, Ben would stay away from the game and recieve counseling for his issues.
I'm still shaken from all of this. My brother and I have fought in the past, but never this badly. Our family has been through hell and back, together, but tonight genuinely made me feel like it was going to fall apart. Things will be rocky for a bit, yet it should pass. Everyone's on edge lately, and this fiasco was just a spark that set off the powder keg. We're both at fault. My hubris, my insatisfaction, my self-destructive personality, and Ben's awe at what he had discovered, made a perfect storm, well, shitshow, that I applaud the devs for recognizing.
I know that was awfully confusing to read and understand. I know that frankly, nobody cares about this, nor do I expect anybody to. I just feel better that it gets out there, to the game's community, to the devs...
I think it's best that I go dark for a while. I need to clear my head. To all of you, I'm sorry. For everything. I don't know exactly what that entails, what I'm apologizing for, I just.. feel like I have to. Until next time.
-Darian
