Unwarranted Banning

This is fibby - I'm a long-time player on your servers, and have always enjoyed myself on them. The other day I joined the #2 Mixed Maps server off of a friend and we were playing fastlane. The other team went nearly all scout the first round and blew through us. One or two of my teammates had a sentry up on the last point, which held the enemy team at bay for the time being. After several deaths, I switched over to engy to help my teammates build their things faster, eventually throwing up my own sentry gun to cover an entrance that was exposed. The other team was being generally idiotic, suiciding into our guns and not taking the time to build ubers to effectively handle our strategy. A TF2F admin, Album, was on the other team and seemed to be getting frustrated at his team's inability to cap our last point, and started giving us a hard time over all chat to switch off of engineer. This seemed like a ludicrous demand, and none of us saw a reason to change. He said something to the effect of "I don't care if you play engineer, but you shouldn't play it at this point of fastlane," to which I replied "watch a cevo-p demo - many teams use at least one engineer here. Eventually, his team ended up capping, but this was after he had switched to spec to no doubt record our horrible doings on the server in a demo.

The next round started, and I had switched to scout. We still had several engineers on the team, and we started seeing angry messages over SourceMod admin chat telling us we have no more warnings to switch off engineer. As I thought this was blatant admin abuse, I switched back to engineer on my next death and my engineer comrades started getting kick-permabanned one by one off the server. Two of them were banned for "no recoil hack," one of them for something equally unrelevant, and then finally I was banned for "ignoring admin." I believe it was a permanent ban, and I am still banned over 24 hours later.

I've played enough on your servers to see that a lot of your tagged community members often playing certain classes way more than others (most notably huge pyro and demo stacking). It's never been an issue. I have to wonder why Album feels the need to micromanage the server in the way he did, kicking several frequenters to the pubs in the process. We weren't team stacking. As several friends, we were having fun playing a class that often gets little playtime on a map such as fastlane. If you really think that 3 or 4 engineers is a terrible game-breaking mechanic, you can easily enforce class limits via Valve's new cvars or through SourceMod, which you are already using. If a player is not griefing his or her teammates, cheating/exploiting, or doing other actions which are breaking the game as a whole, I don't feel that an admin has the right to tell a player or group of players they are playing the game wrong.

Anyway, sorry for this novel of sorts - it's late and I'm in a rambly mood. I hope to get some feedback from Album (who I've attempted adding to Steam friends to sort out what happened) and the rest of the TF2F community. I've heard bad things about Album as an admin from other pub frequenters, but I wish to suspend my judgment until I have more to base an opinion on.

Edit: after checking the server bans section, it seems we are all now banned for a week, and all of the ban reasons have been changed to "Ignoring admin." 

Originally Posted by fibby

Firstly, welcome to the site.

Now, I see your bans are actually listed to last 1 week, each for the same reason.

Sounds like a sort of misunderstanding. In any case, your side of the story is appreciated, thank you.

Originally Posted by NULLNAME

1.) Sorry, you say you frequent our pubs; yet I've never seen or heard of you.
2.)3 or 4 engineers?  I could be wrong because I, sadly, rarely play on #2 but I thought that all our servers but 5 ran class limits.  That may just be 1 and 4 though.
3.)Album is an amazing admin and I have no idea where you would hear bad things about him as an admin.  After all, he got person of the year.
4.)If your post didn't "look/read" so respectably (good spelling, grammar, sophisticated) then I would label you a troll.....but it seems you just have some misunderstanding or are only seeing your half of the fight.

2. I can't remember if the server had class limits or not, but if it did we were well within them.

3. As I said, I don't wish to come to any quick conclusions about Album. Yes, I have heard negative things about his behavior as an admin in the past, and his behavior and subsequent banning of us only served to reinforce these opinions I've heard.

4. I'm sad you would consider labeling someone a troll when they come to your community with a legitimate grievance regarding how they were treated in your servers. I guess it's a good thing I tend to write properly. 

Originally Posted by NULLNAME
Quote:
1.) Sorry, you say you frequent our pubs; yet I've never seen or heard of you.
2.)3 or 4 engineers?  I could be wrong because I, sadly, rarely play on #2 but I thought that all our servers but 5 ran class limits.  That may just be 1 and 4 though.
3.)Album is an amazing admin and I have no idea where you would hear bad things about him as an admin.  After all, he got person of the year.
4.)If your post didn't "look/read" so respectably (good spelling, grammar, sophisticated) then I would label you a troll.....but it seems you just have some misunderstanding or are only seeing your half of the fight.