Mongimage
Would have been nice to have asked before sharing part of our private conversation. Especially since you wanted a person invading and disturbing matches banned (thanks for that report though).
I'll try to explain better, because I agree the Russian players deserve that much.
I do try to let serveme.tf be just a platform and let it stay out of politics as much as possible, whether those of real life or TF2 leagues. Which is why serveme.tf doesn't automatically copy league bans for example. Not for people saying bad words in RGL, being toxic or even cheating, that's between you and the league.
It's why for the first 9 years of operation we didn't have a ban list, and now we only have a tiny (and public) ban list consisting of basically DDoSers and match invaders. That specific match invader is already unbanned as well after a talk I had with them, as to not prevent them from playing competitive TF2 after a dumb mistake. (hoping he will behave now ;) )
The current situation with the Russian player base troubles me a lot. I'm extremely pleased with the amount of Russian and eastern european players that have found a cheap home for servers in serveme.tf over the years. Especially with the economic conditions and those with a brutal exchange rate (even more so now).
But with what's happening now I'm left with only poor choices. Serveme.tf is a non-profit, funded by the community and with a small amount of free servers made possible by paying members. These free servers allow players with little money or a terrible exchange rate to play comp tf2 on their own servers and rules. Switching to a fully paid model would screw over these people (e.g. Turks) and lock out Russians completely from making reservations. Keeping the non-profit model while being unable to accept payments from the largest base of "free" users seems unfair to me for those that do pay.
And expecting Russians to evade sanctions on their end, to pay me, a European, who has to evade sanctions on their end to receive payment is not something I'm willing to deal with or ask of them.
So this is the shitty compromise I've ended up with. Russians (excluding those who already had premium), can no longer use the website and make reservations. But they can play on the servers, they can ask a Euro or other non-Russian friend to make a reservation for them. Premium users can make multiple reservations for their friends as well, within reason of course.
crackbabydumpsterI couldn't find anything about the ban, did they actually just IP ban all of russia? That's so insanely stupid I hope there's something else happening? Does serveme think Putin and the Russian oligarchs reserve a tf2 server after planning out the invasion of sovereign nations?
Obviously not the reason for the ban, no. But consider this: Is there a single thing that would fix the problem? And if there's no single thing that would fix everything, should we do no single thing?
UEFA banning Russian clubs won't change anything. FIFA banning the Russian team won't change anything. The IOC banning Russian athletes won't change anything. Banning Russian airplanes won't change anything. What about all of these and more?