Biggest Blessing In The Ugliest Disguise

So on the morning of the 31st of December 2022, I woke up to probably one of the most heart-wrenching days I have ever had. Baptizer, my friend and partner at Salty Zombies, betrayed my friendship and trust for money.

Most of you thought we were “two peas in a pod”. But in this article, you will learn how for years, that Baptizer regularly gave me ultimatums, threatened me with sabotage, and spent a lot of time trying to leverage and exploit his position.

I arose that morning to all my servers being sabotaged and my Discord spammed with his new server and Discord info. Besides Bap and the 3 admins, no other staff knew, and all were shocked. They didn’t know what was happening and just followed suit, and as for you, the community? By sabotaging my servers, he gave you an ultimatum, too, “Play on my new server or lose all your progress”.

He then ran a script to delete all his messages in our DMs. Let me say that one more time. Baptizer ran a script to delete every single message he had ever sent to me in our DMs. If he had nothing to hide and was not guilty, why do that? No one deletes evidence unless they have something to hide.

The screenshots below are of the DMs between Bap and me. All you can see are my replies which, to be honest, is more than enough. In them, you can see in our heated, most angered arguments I am still very reasonable with him. And if he tells you, they’re fake. I will be happy to get on Discord and screen share the DMs.

What I was Suppose To Do That Morning

That morning I was getting ready to go on a 45min flight to Bangkok (BKK) with my 6 year old daughter. I had planned a special New Year’s weekend to go to the new Harbor Land, Asia’s biggest kids’ playground. I was going to take her to the special kid’s New Year’s Day event and then fly back on the 2nd.

Whilst I am doing damage control on Discord and trying to fix the sabotaged servers, I hear the crazy loud excited knock of my daughter banging on my patio doors. I opened them, and her mum saw my face and said, “What’s wrong?”. Although we were not together anymore, we were still good friends, and she could tell something was up.

I explained to her what Bap had just done whilst my daughter was running around the house like crazy, excited about the upcoming adventure. I look at her and her mum and say, “I can’t, I can’t go. I have to fix this.” I had to salvage what I could, and I had to do it now. There is no way I could go. 1-hour drive to the airport, plus a flight and getting to the hotel, would be like 4 hours. Then try doing what I must do with the laptop with bad hotel Wi-Fi. How could I even enjoy the weekend knowing this was happening?

Bap knew about my special plans with my daughter as well. That’s why he executed his betrayal on this day, to maximize his success and, evidently, my pain. If you think that was a pretty low and vile move from Bap, then keep reading. It gets worse. So I hug my now crying daughter goodbye as she leaves for BKK with her mum.

The Communities Reaction

As you know, the first Friday of every other month is when the 7 Days To Die PVE Servers are wiped. But since I was supposed to be on a plane to BKK, he launched his servers that day, a week earlier. So I understand why you guys moved over since it was the last week, and most of you are just waiting for a fresh server.

But Bap also didn’t give you a choice. He gave you an ultimatum in disguise. Since he sabotaged my servers and moved all your Salty Coin savings and progress over to his, he was essentially telling you, “Join my server or lose months of work”. Some of you even bought those Salty Coins with money. He effectively stole them and put them on his server with the predisposition of, you either play on my server, or your money is gone.

Does that sound like someone who cares about you or someone out to inflict as much damage as possible, regardless of who it hurts? You guys are just here to play games, have fun, and most of you, like myself, do that to escape real-world drama and politics. Baptizer using you in his greedy plans to maximize damage was unfair to you. He should not have forced your hand, and I am sorry I didn’t do more to protect you.

If any of you want to come back SZ. Just do /wallet on Baps server, screenshot it, and I will apply those Salty Coins to your account.

Bap Sabotage The 7 Days To Die Servers

Baptizer ripped out the Server Manager Bot (CSMM), or what you guys know as J.A.R.V.I.S. (I named him Jarvis since I am a big Marvel fan). He transferred all the data to the new servers, leaving you guys with nothing. The CSMM bot was under Bap’s name, but I paid for it since Bap was reimbursed monthly. It was on the SZ books. So technically, he stole it from me.

All mod files were there as if untouched. However, I knew Bap had sabotaged them, as he did with my RUST servers months before. But more on that later. I replaced what was broken and connected the new Bot, and everything seemed pretty simple. But there were a few features that we had before that I wanted back.

Kraag Sabotaging My RUST Servers

Kraag sabotaged my RUST servers by deleting all the config files. I didn’t know because the RUST servers don’t need rebooting. But sometimes, like most gaming servers, they crash, so when they did a few days later, the plugins didn’t detect the old config files they were running from and generated new default ones. So the 100’s of hours of work I had done to configure the 40+ plugins had all gone. RUST had nothing to do with any of them. I ran the RUST servers by myself, so attacking you RUST players was pure spitefulness, and Kraag was the only one who had access to them.

This shocked me for Kraag to be so malicious, but at the same time, it didn’t. Kraag was Bap’s lackey, he seemed very eager to please him, and I soon noticed him become more devious in nature. For example, If Kraag had ever popped into coms with you and randomly brought up a conversation about a situation or a particular person, he is recording you. He started to record so many private calls and public coms channels I began to think it a little weird.

If you tell Kraag something in confidence, he will tell Bap about it almost immediately.

Whenever we talked in admin chat about a situation that happened a long time ago, he could, within minutes, pull up a screenshot or mention the players involved and what happened. I just thought he had a good memory and was a bit of a screenshot hoarder. But I later discovered he has a personal Discord server with screenshots, notes and voice recordings of players that go back years, all dated and categorised. Does that sound like normal behaviour to you?

Robin and the ARK Sabotage

It was pretty heartbreaking to see Robin involved in this. I paid a guy $20 an hour to teach her and Cechri how to run the ARK servers. The lessons usually started around 1am or 2am my time and lasted 3 hours. I was with them at every session and recorded them so they could reference them later. Once I saw Robin had a firm grip on it all, I started doing the marketing and built up the ARK community.

I was determined not to fail her since she put so much effort into Minecraft. But Minecraft is a tough market to crack. It’s the most bought and played game globally, and a few groups have a monopoly on it. After all her hard work, the MC server had a decent launch but fizzled out. So I busted my ass to ensure that didn’t happen with the ARK Servers.

I fronted nearly $2,000 to make it all happen, and the moment money started coming back. She sabotages the servers and moves all the data over to Bap’s server forcing you ARK players to move unless they want to lose everything as well. Then she gives him a cut of the profits for doing nothing.

What’s ironic is that Baptizer doesn’t even like Robin. She is equally smart and capable as him, if not more, and I told him she would be the next SZ partner, so I guess he saw her as a threat. I used to tease him and say, “She is the female version of you”. I’d rather not repeat how he often referred to her as a “Cunt that thinks she’s better than everyone else”. His hate towards her in our DMs is probably the primary reason he ran that message-deleting script.

Amaries Leaving Message

Amarie wrote up a nice little leaving message which she spammed in every Discord channel. Mentions how I don’t care about you, the community, and it’s all about the money etc. Let’s quickly disprove that with these snippets of conversations between Baptizer and me less the 2 months before their scam. If you could see his replies, you would see it was him who didn’t care about you guys, and since he had been unemployed for 3+ years, he didn’t want to invest back because he was desperate for money. And again, if anyone says these are fake or edited. I will gladly share my screen on Discord.

Amarie is like the definition of “You can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. So many times, I tried to help her over the years, financially and with her streaming career. It was my idea to do the Kickstarter for her to get a new computer, and she was my main motivating factor in giving the Admins a financial kickback and percentage cuts. But Bap didn’t want to at first.

When she told me she was being sued by Captial One credit card company, I wanted to help her. So, I spoke to Bap about increasing her kickback. His reply was, “The bitch barely does anything to deserve what she gets now”. Despite this, I wanted to give her an opportunity. In my mind, Kraag would get a cut of RUST, Robin would get a cut of MC, Coffins would get one from ARK. But that left out Amarie, who has been at SZ longer than all of them. So I approached her with the idea she would organize events or run Hype Squad. She liked it and devised a few plans but never took action.

Not to mention I would get her to stream the events. She usually streams to the same 6 to 8 people. But when she streamed my events, like the Staff V Community and Ladies V Gents death matches. She would be in the 50 to 70 view count. I even arranged a special event with her and Miss Ocean to do Undead Legacy with Mischief Maker, and Amarie earned $1,200+ that week. I arranged, organised and marketed the entire thing and was happy not to take a penny.

I thought she would be thrilled to do something she’s passionate about whilst increasing her kickback, earning a commission, furthering her streaming career and earning more from her Twitch. It would have made me happy to see her succeed. So I was shocked to see her be the face of Baps treachery. What didn’t surprise me was how Bap wasn’t brave enough to put the message out there himself. But then again, he is used to the SZ team doing the bulk of his work for him. I guess that includes putting a knife in my back.

I thought you guys were Friends?

Mine and Baptizer’s relationship has been a delicate one at best. He was the first player I met in real life. When he came to Thailand, he ate dinner with my daughter and me. When he first joined SZ, we were a thriving and up-and-coming community. Before Bap knew we existed, Salty Zombies was always in the world’s top 3 most popular 7D2D servers. We made more than enough money to cover the small shared hosting server. But instead of just pocketing the profit, I upgraded us to fully Dedicated Machines that were 10x the cost.

When I first met Baptizer, he didn’t even know how to access the creative menu. So I taught him how to wipe maps, reset regions, use Debug Menu and use the 7 Days To Die Server Manager we were using at the time (Botman). He was eager to learn and at the computer all day at work. So it was ideal. I noticed straight away he had this very bravado banterious nature.

But after one of the founders of Salty Zombies left and Bap started taking over the new server manager bot (CSMM), he became somewhat sure of himself. I thought it was just part of his persona, but later on, his banterious nature turned into ultimatums and straight-up threats.

He was never an “owner” at Salty Zombies, “partner” would be a more accurate term. But he always wanted a title more than an admin. He didn’t want to be at the same rank/level as the admins. His ego needed something more. He actually said that “I need something more than just admin”. I suggested “Manager”, but he didn’t like that. Then one day, we were testing something in Discord about roles. I put him up as Owner’s role for the test. Unfortunately, I forgot to remove him as I left.

A few days pass, and we are in coms again, and he says, “I noticed you didn’t remove me from the owner’s role”. I was about to say, oh yea, thanks for the reminder. But before I could, he said, “Thank you, I appreciate that”. So, I’m like, “erm… yea, no problem?” I was literally about to remove him, but now I would feel guilty if I did. So, he has stayed there ever since.

From then on, everyone thought Baptizer was one of the owners of Salty Zombies, and since the roles were in Alphabetical order, he always appeared on top, and it just gave everyone the impression he was in charge… Including himself.

Wait a minute, hold up, go back… Threatening you?

Oh yea, not physically. But with the CSMM bot (JARVIS). Whenever we talked about something that got heated, he would always respond with threats like, “You really want to go there?” “You sure you want to go down this path?”

What he meant by that was, unless he got his way, he would rip that Bot out, and you, the community, would lose your Salty Coins and progress. This was the type of relationship we had, I had to tip-toe around his ego, or the threats would come out. He often described our partnership to me and others as “We’re just holding a gun to each other’s head”.

His mentality was so wrong. Can you imagine my position of starting and founding Salty Zombies, working hard and having great success, only for Baptizer to come in years later and begin to threaten me with sabotage if I didn’t do what he wanted? Does Bap sound like a friend or business partner you would want?

As Salty Zombies Grew, Bap couldn’t

Salty Zombies expanded in many ways, not just growing in numbers, like community members, staff, servers, games etc. But as I developed Salty Zombies, my mind was constantly exploding with big ideas that could become a reality. I am talking about full-time employees, building a massive YouTube channel, huge cash prize events, community meet-ups, Salty Zombies booth at Twitch con. I am even learning to make my own game on Unreal Engine.

I was thinking and planning stuff for Salty Zombies 2 to 3 years down the line, and all Bap could do was think about protecting his one little corner, the CSMM bot. He didn’t want to teach anyone how to use it. He didn’t want to delegate any of that. When it came to wiping the maps, he did it all himself despite the admins offering to help. He would go off and do it on his own and then complain no one helped him. He didn’t want them to learn.

I can only assume he did that because he thought if they knew how to do his job, he wasn’t unique and was easily replaceable.

I always encourage him not to clutch on so tightly to the CSMM bot, “Let someone else do that, and you learn C#, run events or make an overhaul mod. Do something that takes you to the next level. Stop anchoring yourself down, protecting your precious CSMM Bot”. I used to give him this speech about becoming Bap 2.0 and Bap 3.0 and start expanding and grow beyond this, but he couldn’t. His attitude towards it reminded me of Gollum from Lord of the Rings. “CSMM… my precious”

The Real Reason For His Betrayal?

Salty Zombies earned a bit of money here and there. Some months were good, and some were ok. It was just a side hustle with great potential and one I enjoyed. But I have always been able to build side hustles, brands etc. I haven’t had a regular job since I was 19, and I live in a foreign country, earning money online.

If I thought of an idea to make money, I am like a one-man band. I can build the brand, design the logo, the website, SEO, copywriting, graphic design, social media marketing, set up payment gateways, automation, and learn technical stuff. I may not be a millionaire, but I have always had the autonomy to be my own boss. They say, “Freedom is oxygen for the soul”, and it’s true. I had a lot of failures and successes, and the journey of it has been incredible.

Bap, on the other hand? Well, he was “let go” of his job 3 years ago and has been dependent on SZ ever since, which compelled me to share with him. So, I gave him 50% commission on 7D2D after expenses.

Then A20.4 came out with its half-assed cross-platform preparations for the console update. That murdered every server’s capacity by more than half. We could get up to 60 or so players on a 7D2D server before the lag made it unplayable, and then all of a sudden, it was unplayable with just 25 players. So, the income from 7D2D dropped, and we had to buy more servers to compensate.

What is the answer to 99 out of 100 questions?… Money.

Bap wasn’t happy about this loss in income and complained to me about how he might have to get a job soon. I felt like he was expecting me to save him. But I have my own work and family to care for, and he always bragged about how “Alpha Male” he was. So perhaps now would be an excellent time to prove it.

Bap did try to get a job. He quit after a week. He said he didn’t like it. But something in me believed it wasn’t the job he didn’t like. Since he was working with his friends, what he really didn’t like was losing his newfound autonomy. Bap never could earn money whilst he slept, get up when he wanted or do what he wanted. For the first time in his life, he was his own boss… besides me.

I also believe Bap loved the fact he woke up to being on the top Discord list with thousands of people, a team of 30 people who practically worshipped him and a community that thought he founded, started and did everything at Salty Zombies. And he never once tried to correct their incorrect assumption.

Who was Atlas For?

Besides the threats, one of the other things that started to make me realise Baps didn’t consider you as the community a priority was with Atlas. The games we decided to open were based on a few factors. If I had a way to market them, were they monetisable? Or fun ones that you guys wanted. Bap wanted to do an Atlas Server since he has been playing it with Katknip. Despite Bap having and living with his girlfriend/partner for the best part of a decade, he certainly liked spending a lot of time in private with a much younger, attractive blonde girl.

I would never judge someone for their lifestyle, married or not. But personally, I would never get romanticly involved with a member of the community and especially not a member of staff. To me, this was highly inappropriate and unprofessional.

When I did the market research about other games you guys played, I told him there were zero votes on Atlas. I also said there are no search terms for it, meaning hardly anyone was looking for Atlas servers on Google. So it really isn’t a popular game, and at the time, the reviews on steam were primarily negative. But despite that, he decided to go ahead and set up 25 instances across all our dedicated servers.

This turned out to be a huge ordeal, for example. One 7 Days To Die server, like the Darkness Falls server, is 1 instance. But to get a single Atlas map up and running, it required 25 instances to be installed, and they had to spread the map across all 5 of our dedicated servers. Including the Asia server. So he put a bulk in Asia, and the rest spread across different parts of the USA.

As a result, the performance drop was felt across all our games, and yet, next to no one ever played it besides him and Katknip. It took him about 2.5 months to set up, and in the meantime, the other staff and I were left to run and learn the other games. So if he wasn’t doing it for you guys or for potential new community members, who was he putting in all this effort for?

Then when he made Katknip an SZ Moderator outside of our standard recruitment protocols and gave her full admin powers, it all started to make sense.

Where is My Minecraft money?

Whilst Bap was busy with Atlas, I started learning Minecraft, and Robin, who had never played it, led the way in creating a Minecraft Java Server. She is a smart cookie and hard-working. People who played Minecraft a lot said she had made one of the best servers they played on. After getting some traction and the first of the 10 newly opened games to start earning income or at least pay for itself. Bap hears about this and starts sniffing around for a cut. He asks, “How much is MC making?” I’m like, “Why?” “Well, it’s on my server, isn’t it?”… Your servers!?!

With my marketing, newly formed communities outside of 7D2D were being created, with additional income revenues starting to merge. He began to realise his CSMM bot threat was getting less and less significant. His perception of “We’re just holding a gun to each other’s head” was changing in his mind. It turned into, “Nam’s gun is getting bigger, and mine turned into a pocket knife.”

His language change reminded me of when Starlord, one of the guys I started SZ with, also felt insignificant and began to use language like “Bap runs MY servers” and “Nams does MY marketing.” Now Bap was using the same language “They’re on MY servers, ain’t they?” He started to act like he owned SZ and its servers just because he got a commission. I am an Amazon associate, one of my incomes is working with Amazon, and I get about 5% commission on what I sell. Does that mean I own 5% of Amazon? I wish, but no!

I denied him what he believed was his cut. I told him it wasn’t fair on Robin or me to be doing this work on Minecraft and him not doing anything, yet demanding 50%. The audacity to even demand that was just insane. He didn’t want Robin or anyone else to get a percentage. He wanted it to be 50/50 between him and me and give her a financial kickback like we did Kraag and Amarie. However, I wanted to spread the wealth at Salty Zombies, but Bap didn’t, and when I started to push back, the friction between us started to escalate.

RUST – THE BIGGEST FALLOUT WE EVER HAD!

My realisation of Bap’s true colours and greed came when we launched RUST. He saw I was expanding SZ very quickly, and his position of what he could threaten me with was getting smaller by the day. I found a niche in the market with RUST PVE Servers, and like the sucker I am, I thought, what if I allowed him to work with me on RUST rather than isolate him further? Perhaps giving him another revenue source might make him feel more comfortable since he was acting out from what seemed to be insecurities.

So I allowed him the opportunity to earn more money by coming in on RUST with me. But I am not doing this 50/50. So I told him I found a niche to enter the RUST market and asked if he wanted to do it with me. His reply was, “Absolutely”. But then I said. “First, we need to negotiate a deal because I am not doing this 50/50”. So he’s like, “Why not?” I said, “Because you have an empty RUST server without me. Do you want 50% of nothing or 30% of something?”

Another Thing To Threaten Me With

We agreed on a split and started working on the RUST servers, but then I began to notice something. I noticed I was doing a lot more work than him and showing him everything I had figured out and learned. But he wasn’t doing the same. Instead, he mainly did the in-game shop, an important feature, and we were already getting players on the server. So when they would ask to have something added to the shop, I remember saying to him, “Show me how to add items to the shop.” He replied, “Naa, I’ll add it later”.

Then it dawned on me after feeling bad for him being financially dependent on Salty Zombies and my innate compulsion to help my friends. He turns around and uses the RUST shop as another CSMM. He used my kindness against me to have another source to threaten and leverage me.

I built everything in the RUST servers besides the shop and kits. I was doing 75% to 80% of the work and giving him 35% of the profit. Fast forward a month later, my marketing was rocking in the players, and RUST started making money. Then his greed came out. Bap mentioned randomly in coms, “I think we need to renegotiation. This is becoming more work than I thought”, which was surprising since RUST was 90% automated.

Let’s Renegotiate

Like clockwork, he mentioned it repeatedly, but I addressed it. He listed a bunch of other concerns, but I debunked them all. The mods I bought worked together perfectly, with no problems. It was a breeze compared to running the 7 Days To Die Servers. He had no leg to stand on with his argument that it was too much work.

We spoke in coms for 4 hours, and he wanted 40%. I was like, no way. His position was that it was a lot of work. My debunk was that that’s exactly what I said it would be at the start, but smooth sailing after. His new argument then was, “It’s never smooth sailing. There will always be problems, and the more servers we have, the more problems”.

I even agreed with him and said, “That’s possible. If that ends up being the case, let’s renegotiate then. But right now, I am doing about 80% of the work and giving you 35% of the profit, and here you are, wanting more.”

He gave me this speech about, “You can’t negotiate later. It has to be now. You don’t negotiate to lower a salary. You always negotiate to increase it.” But, again, there was no logic in that statement. Because someone’s cut is going down whilst the other is going up. So what are you talking about? He sounded desperate, just random statements coming out of his mouth that had no logic or sense.

It was his ego talking now, he couldn’t take no for an answer, and then there it was. The new threat he had been saving up. “The Shop,” He said, “What about it?” “You couldn’t do it”. He replied, “What do you mean I couldn’t do it? There are 53,000+ RUST servers, and most have this shop Mod.” “You just couldn’t figure it out”, he continued, “and without me, there is no shop.”

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I was so fucking angry. I gave this ungrateful piece of shit who spent the last 3 years hovering this CSMM threat over my head an opportunity to feel better about himself and earn more money. Instead, he uses it to threaten me further! “I told him I was hungry and gonna get something to eat” I just had to walk away from my computer.

A few days pass, and I talk to a couple of friends about it. I mentioned the threats and that if we split, he would probably rip out the Bot and all the mods and maybe even sabotage the servers (precisely what he did). And they said, why risk that over 5%? It was true, but Salty Zombies is my passion project, I have a vision for it, and Baps threats are holding it back, and I already caved into his CSMM threats. So now I should yield to the RUST shop threat. What kind of “two peas in a pod” relationship is this?

After taking the time to cool down, I decided to keep the peace and budged. I DM’ed him and said, “I’ll give you your 5%. “He replied, “Ok, on one stipulation, though” “Stipulation?” I replied, “Yea, on the stipulation that later on, we will renegotiate.”

My Mind Just Fucking Explodes!

This fuck wit just spent 4 hours with me the other day on this big speech about people can’t negotiate later on, “People don’t negotiate down, they negotiate up blah blah blah” So, I budge to keep the peace and give him what he wanted. But, now he wants the option to negotiate later… for more!?!

I give him an inch, and he wants to take a mile! This is just some outrageous greed. I am fucking done! “No, we have to decide on the cut now, so we can just move on”, I said. It was so exhausting, but he didn’t want to. He kept trying to convince me he should be allowed to renegotiate later as if I had forgotten the 4 hour speech he had given just 2 days earlier.

So I got annoyed with him and said, “Take the new deal, or we go back to our original agreement of 30/70 but just on 1 RUST PVE Server, all the other RUST servers. I will do it myself and keep 100% of its income.”

He didn’t want that either. So he continues to negotiate with substanceless bullshit. Finally, “I’m done!” I said, “I’m tired of this, you either take the former option, or I force you to do the latter option”. (30/70 on 1 server). It wouldn’t be hard for me to do. I control who gets access to what servers. Nothing he could do about it.

He replied, “I don’t like to be forced to do anything, I’ll step down from RUST, and the shop is coming with me” He then paused, expecting me to change my mind and cave into the threat. “Fine, I’ll give you time to log in and remove it. Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll remove your access”. Remember at the start. I said Bap sabotaged the RUST servers? It was here.

RUST Sabotage

So, to remove his work, all he had to do was click on the files and delete them. Deleting the files would have taken 10 seconds and allowed the plugins to detect missing config files and generate new default ones, resetting all his work. But instead, Bap opened each config file individually and deleted all the content inside them, which probably took him 20 minutes. The plugins would not generate new default config files because it saw the files were there but empty. If you don’t understand what I am saying, he basically tried to trip me up and fuck me over as he left.

The shop took him 3 weeks. I redid the entire thing in 3 days, and 10x better. I added custom skins and items and have been running all the RUST servers myself ever since, and we have 2 of the busiest RUST PVE servers in the world. So his main argument about “it’s going to be a lot of work later on” was BS. He got greedy and wanted more money and, as usual, tried to threaten me to get his way.

Oh, You Forgot? I’m Doing ARK With Katknip

Not even a few days later, we were in a staff meeting with all the mods, and they started enquiring about ARK. We had thought about it but were busy with the other games. Then all of Sudden Baptizer replies, yea, we are looking into servers now, and I’ll be getting into setting up with Kat since it’s so similar to Atlas. I’m thinking, what is he talking about? We never confirmed anything. The moderators start getting excited because Bap confirmed we are getting an ARK PVE server, and Coffins want to lead it. Robin jumped up and begged to get on that too. She clearly had enough of Minecraft.

Now, this was literally 4 days after he threatened me with the RUST shop, ripped it out, and then tried to trip me up by deleting the config content. After everyone cleared out of coms, I spoke with him, and I questioned him about telling them about ARK and that I never agreed to anything. He turns around and says, “Yea, we did, 60/40 your way.” I said, “No, we never even talked about it at all”. He tried to manipulate me by just giving me the majority share, assuming I would say, “Err… Yea ok”.

But even you know now what he was trying to do. He was trying to force himself into ARK as another way to leverage and threaten me. I would have marketed and built up the ARK community, and he would have just turned around and wanted to either “Renegotiate” or just straight up threaten me with it. So later, I told him I didn’t want to do it with him. I gave it to Coffins & Robin, Coffins later bailed, and Robin then took over.

HOW DID HE MANAGE TO TURN THE TEAM AGAINST YOU?

Have you ever been to a car mechanic shop and tried to explain something wrong with your car, and the mechanic looked at you and said, “ooooh yea, sounds like it’s a big job. It will be pricey”. He already sussed that you have no idea about cars and that it will probably take him 10min to fix. We have all been overcharged or ripped off at some point. Well, Bap is that guy, the guy that makes you think he is the best car mechanic in the world and your best friend whilst ripping you off.

So many times, he told the team how he “coded” something in the bot when I knew it was Prisma or Catalysm who showed him. I could see it from a mile away. And now I have been using the CSMM bot personally. It’s incredible what these guys have done, and most of what Bap said he “coded” were inbuilt features. He was always giving the team the perception that he was the Alpha and Omega of Salty Zombies when in reality, his contribution was about 10% of SZ’s entire operation.

I remember Bap spoke in the Admin chat about a new CSMM feature. He mentioned this new feature in the Moderator chat. I recall Robin, who was only a Moderator then, saying, “OMG Bap, you are a coding genius”. I expected Bap to reply that it was CSMM who added the feature. Did he? No! He just replied with a winking emoji.

Baptizer already had Kraag as his loyal puppy. He had been manipulating Amarie for god knows how long, and the only reason he coerced Robin was that he wanted a cut from the ARK money. Butler and Just In Time had been admins longer than Robin, but since they were not in charge of games that made money, he didn’t care about them. So with the Senior admins on his side, it wasn’t hard to pull in Robin, and that was all he needed.

Even though it was devastating to wake up to years of my work stolen, 95% of the community being forced to leave, and all the money/income gone, at the same time, it is also a huge relief. For the first time in years, I didn’t have this looming threat over my head. Bap was a dead weight, a dead weight on my ideas and creativity. He was pulling me down to his fixed mindset mentality.

From what I hear, things are not going well over there. Yet, at Salty Zombies, things have never been better. It truly was one of the biggest blessing in the ugliest disguise.

Final Thoughts

When the threats stopped working, and the strong-arming and manipulation weren’t enough. Baptizer, whose greed and ego burnt the bridges he needed with me to earn more, had no choice. His last resort was to destroy not only the servers and my reputation but you, the community.

I am not even mad that he tried to eradicate 5 years of my work, the loss of income he stole, or the corruption of long-term Admins and Moderators who I considered friends. What hurts the most is the clear betrayal and backstabbing of someone I considered a brother, someone I tried to make a business partner.

But what I will never forgive and what makes me angry the most. No, what was the most despicable part of it was that he did it all for money. And because of those extra dollars, what should have been a memorable loving weekend with my daughter has become an unforgettable moment seeing her cry whilst my life’s work was being stolen from me.

Greed is the lack of confidence in one’s own ability to create

The Aftermath

After Bap and the entire team left, some quit less than a week later. But instead of being players on Bap’s server, or any server for that matter, they decided to return to Salty Zombies. It’s only been 2.5 months since, and Baptizers servers are struggling. His main PVP server is dead. According to BattleMetrics, there are more times on that server with zero players than with players. SZs PVP servers are pumping and still hit max capacity on the weekends. His 3 main PVE servers are losing numbers each week.

Whilst at Salty Zombies, we have since expanded into Europe. We bought a dedicated machine there and opened up 7D2D and RUST servers in the EU, we also opened up a 2nd 7D2D server in Asia, and we now have full-time overhaul modded servers. For the first time in years, our servers were voted the #1 server worldwide, and 3 were ranked the top 10 most popular servers globally.

You must admit that it’s quite the turnaround to have years of your work stolen from you, only to rebuild bigger, better and stronger in just a matter of months. Whilst at the same time, the person who stabbed you in the back and thought he was the only reason for the success ends up struggling and unable to keep the community he stole alive.