I was observing a game of SWM on Vassal tonight between two players named empirejeff and newbie. Newbie made a few mistakes and was fighting an uphill battle against Jeff, and after a particularily hard hit on one of newbie's main characters, he told jeff that he conceeded. I stepped in and said I would finish it. After I didn't recieve any complaints, me and jeff picked up the match where they had left off.

And then the oddities began. Random units began spawning directly over our battle area, every once and a while everything on the map would dissapear, and HP and FP would randomly change. It was annoying. I asked for whoever it was to stop, and newbie replied back that he would not. I told him that I was going to ask the vassal admin to ipban him (mind you, this was the first game on vassal that I started playing, up until then I had only observed, and even then, it was my fourth time total being online) and all hell broke lose.

He begins private messaging me (mind you again that I didn't know I could save all of these until after the fact) that he knows Rodney Kinney personally from this site, and that he knows that both jeff and I were hacking the dice-bot (although why he accused me of doing it before I even used them is beyond me), so I rolled the dice about 10 times to try to  prove to him that we wern't cheating and to get him to leave us alone.

Naturally, that didn't quite work. After a few more minutes of trying to finish the game against jeff, putting up with annoying messages from newbie and the randomly appearing and dissapearing pieces on the game board, jeff and I moved to a new room and reset the gameestate. Well, after a couple minutes of un-interupted gameplay, newbie must have gotten bored and came over to ruin our nights a little more.

We endured as much as we could before trying once again to change rooms, this time locking the room. However, this newbie character at least had one thing going for him: he was immune to locked channels. After re-joining the channel once again, jeff gave up and logged off.

Now, all of this started at about 0300 this morning. It is now 0554, and newbie is stil messaging me as I type this. This is a plea to anyone who holds any sort of power over the Vassal system to stop abusive players like newbie from ruining the game for others. Among his messages were threats to have the SWM mod support pulled. I personally wouldn't care, since I don't have any experience with it, but I know there are quite a few people who would be upset if the mod's support did get pulled.