Ah, cool. I actually came on this morning to deal with this one, Vlad (and got sidetracked by your other pings and pokes to me! LOL)
I think on balance, I'm going to give Brentolento one more chance... but with conditions.
Firstly, in RL, ignorance is usually no defence against the law - you do a crime, you do the time, whether you know it was criminal or not. However, I have heard an amount of evidence (offline) from two of the parties involved, and am reasonably confident that Brentolento was conned into purchasing a rifle that he didn't realise was hacked in. For that reason alone, I am prepared - just this one time - to give him a second chance.
However, the incident raises some questions. Alminoo's relationship with the gang (despite him claiming that Brentolento is his only friend), is slightly worrying, because that gang contained at least one known, self-confessed hacker (Marshall L) who was hacking in weapons for Remo Kushner (who may also have been partly duped, but is nowhere near as innocent as Brentolento was, and that's by Remo's own confession of awareness that Marshall L was at least 'dodgy' with his rifle handovers and some other activities on the server).
So... the question raised is whether Alminoo knew what this gang was up to - was he offered any rifles, or did he take part in any of Marshall L's retribution hacks (exploding people who crossed him). If he was, why didn't he mention this to admin or report them on the forum? I'd like to hear more from Alminoo - currently he is on my list of people to be watched closely, simply by association with this gang.
The moral of this story is, if you see something unusual on the server, or become aware that someone - even someone in your own gang - is hacking or exploiting, you *must* notify the admins or make a forum report, or you run the risk of being deemed to be involved yourself. The punishment may well be a ban - sometimes an irreversible one. It's not just about the letter of the server-law, here; finding you in the logs with hacked weapons is one thing, and will normally get you banned on the spot (as was the case with Brentolento), but sometimes just being a silent partner to wrong-doings on the server is enough to get a perma-ban too. We run a community based upon trust here; people play this game for pleasure, roleplay, excitement, and work against rules that make the game hard enough already. People who are untrustworthy or who harbour cheaters, simply make life more difficult for everyone, and ruin the enjoyment, so we try our level best to terminate them all with extreme prejudice. Not because we are badmins, but because we are trying to protect the genuinely, totally innocent players in this community who play wholly by the rules.
Brentolento can be unbanned, when Alminoo has spilled a little more about this gang - Who else was in it? How many times did they pull this rifle-selling stunt? Was he aware of Marshall L, and did he see anything 'unusual' he'd like to tell us about? Time for you to sing, for your friend's life... and quite possibly, your own...
