Why Does This Always Happen?

by GreatOverseer

Taggart Undying experiences a series of griefing incidents on his server. But as he searches for an answer he uncovers something far larger... and more terrifying.

He stood on a hill, sword out, staring ahead.

Taggart Undying had been plagued by a griefer for the last few weeks. It had started in early January (January 2nd, 7:30:55 AM to be precise), when a mysterious fellow joined the server. As always, Taggart had shown him the ropes and set him free. However, when a string of violent killings and explosions began to ripple out from the spawn, Taggart had begun to get worried.

Later that month (January 10th, 8:55:40 AM to be precise), Taggart was facing a multitude of complaints from angry users. Their houses had been town down by TNT, and some even claimed to have seen the griefer as he flitted away into whatever convenient crevice was available. Taggart Undying personally interviewed a shell-shocked witness via Skype, and the following conversation was transcribed into words:

Taggart: So what happened?

Witness: I was sitting there crafting a diamond sword so I could kill stuff. Then my house blew up.

Taggart: And? Any details?

Witness: It started from the roof, like there was a strip of TNT or something, then it went down to the floor, then I fell into a big crater.

Taggart: (eats a potato chip) Did you happen to see him?

Witness: No, man. No...

Taggart: Well, it was nice talking to you.

Witness: You too.

Taggart: Oh, and just a reminder, I think I might place the survival portal under lockdown. Just to be safe.

A day later (January 11th, 7:45:12 AM to be precise) Taggart followed through with his promises. Many disappointed users complained to Taggart about how they had been creating mansions in the survival area when Taggart had closed it down, or had collected fifty stacks of diamond, or had almost mined enough iron to make a house out of iron blocks. But Taggart always told them that there was a griefer about, and to be safe he had to shut down the survival area. Of course, many still complained, and their complaints gradually became more and more badly spelled and grammatically incorrect the longer the lock was in place.

That afternoon (January 11th, 12:34:30 PM to be precise) Taggart logged off his server and went on XBox Live to play some Call of Duty: Ghosts. While online he recieved a voicemail from a user whose name was distorted strangely. Curiosity overtaking him, Taggart opened it. The message was garbled and almost incoherent, but with some help from a friend the voicemail was transcribed into words:

User: (static for 1.34 seconds)...lockdown...mumble mumble...(short burst of static for 0.32 seconds)...don't like...(static for 5.49 seconds)...gonna go now... (message ends)

Faced with a bizzarely incomprehensible voicemail, Taggart returned to his Minecraft server. He figured that the griefer had gone, and thus to the cheers of all he unlocked the survival portal. Within mere minutes, activity on the server was booming again, going from 35 players online to over 70. This monumental growth seemed to calm the server down. No more reports of griefing were pouring in.

Almost a week later (January 17th, 3:10:44 PM to be precise), a single report came in.

To give a little background, after the strange voicemail the server had been running like clockwork. Taggart had been watching over it, and there seemed to be no griefing involved. One day, someone even broke a record in gold: almost 129 stacks of sixty-four gold bars each. Taggart personally congratulated him and gave him a certified server cape and a full set of diamond armor, and even a little celebration in the spawn area.

But after that, everything was quiet. Until, out of nowhere, this report came in. It stated that, an hour ago, a user had seen a strange individual in a forest. This individual, the report continued, had been in a crouch and moving slowly across the ground, with TNT clutched in his hand in full view of the user. When the user appeared to the fellow, the individual had run away and vanished into the trees. The user had tried to seek out the strange TNT-possessing man, but there was no trace of his being there.

This boded ill for Taggart. He suddenly smelled danger.

That night (January 17th, 11:45:38 PM to be precise) Taggart was still on the server. He had decided to enter the survival world and settle down as a fellow player rather than an admin. He was building a grand alpine house out of wood from a nearby forest, but soon he ran out and had to go get more. As he was walking in the forest, he saw out of the corner of his eye a movement. Swinging around, he saw what the earlier report had described: a mysterious figure clutching a TNT block and sneaking through the trees, some meters away. Taggart didn't want to disturb the user, though, for he was curious as to what this person would do. So he crouched down as well and followed the user, keeping an eye out in case he did something unexpected. This continued until a minute 'till midnight (January 17th, 11:59:00 to be precise).

Taggart was deep in the forest. His alpine house was far behind him. The user was still crawling along the grass, the TNT still clutched in his hand. Suddenly, the user froze. Taggart acted quickly. He froze as well, and retreated into the shadow of a large spruce tree. Behind him, snow fell, creating a contrast between him and the mysterious stranger.

The user stood still until a minute had passed (January 18th, 12:00:00 AM to be precise), whereupon he started... dancing. Now, there was nobody else in the server by then, save Taggart and this madcap dancing fellow. The dancer was also filling up the chat with strange sequences of numbers interspersed with decimals, which Taggart felt was rather odd for a user to do. After five minutes of dancing, the user logged off. In his place was a strange block that Taggart felt for sure was not part of the game. It was a solid neon green and emitted a humming sound. Taggart approached the block cautiously, and tried to break it. It killed him instantly, and the word "GRIEFER" replaced the familiar "YOU DIED!" message. Taggart was puzzled. Who would do this?

He decided to sleep on it, and he slept in until late in the morning (January 18th, 10:34:37 AM to be precise).

When he woke, he checked his Twitter. Taggart was very active in social media most of the time, but in the last few weeks he had been embroiled in the griefing reports and had failed to check what the people he was following had tweeted.

The tweets were the usual: sponsorship requests from President Obama, some random thing from Wil Wheaton, and a host of other celebrity tweets including a few from Jordan Maron (otherwise known as CaptainSparklez, the famous YouTuber extraordinaire). A tweet from Jeb caught his eye. Jeb's tweets were always about Minecraft, but this one seemed cryptic and without a category. The tweet was this:

Jeb: They come, they go, but never leave. #serverwatchers

Taggart examined it for a while. What a wierd thing for Jeb to say.

He started up Minecraft again and logged onto his server. Before he resumed his survival campaign, he asked everyone if they had caught Jeb's tweet this morning. Some people said they had, and that it was awfully cryptic and mysterious and quite unlike Jeb. Taggart then resumed his survival campaign, and in the space of a half-hour he had killed twenty creepers, sixteen skeletons, and fifty zombies in one cave system. He also updated his alpine house, and bedecked it with a glass rooftop observatory, which he hoped he could put to use later. Perhaps he would put his bed up inside so he could sleep under the stars and not suddenly die. Taggart also placed in several furnaces to cook meat and create glass and bricks inside. That way he could triple his output without effort and a tedious wait. He mined for coal and stocked up on that, placing it all inside a double-chest.

That night (in Minecraft, you see, not in real life) he killed another five creepers and walked up to bed. It was later in the morning (January 18th, 11:19:31 AM to be precise), and as Taggart lay down in his bed he thought about the tweet. It was very ominous somehow. He didn't quite know why.

As he slept he suddenly heard a familiar sound: that of TNT ignited and exploding closeby. He sat up quickly and ran downstairs. There was a massive crater in the front of his house, and on the other side wearing the default Steve skin and with the TNT in his hand was the individual from the last night. Taggart made a note of the username on the nameplate: xxSW001xx. Then he tried to ban the strange griefer.

He instantly died.

The time was January 18th, 11:24:01 AM to be precise.

Taggart was consumed with fiery rage. What was this thing that lurked on his server, danced around strangely, left cryptic and mysterious decimal numbers in the chat, left bizzare blocks behind when it logged off, and now killed people when they tried to attack it? He resolved to take this thing down, or his name wasn't Taggart Undying.

He decided to see if anyone at spawn knew about xxSW001xx. He asked around, and interviewed some people who had encountered xxSW001xx over Skype. The two interviews were remarkably similar. They described that they were sitting around or doing something that they always did when they were griefed by the mysterious fellow. However, there was a key difference: their interactions with xxSW001XX. Or, in these two cases, xxSW002xx and xxSW003xx.

First, Person One (or just #1 for now). #1 saw xxSW002xx when the latter blasted through his pig farm. Sadly, all the pigs were killed in the explosion. #1 was dreadfully pissed off and tried to massacre xxSW002xx with a diamond sword. He was instantly given the Wither status effect, and died shortly thereafter, losing all his stuff. The death screen gave him the "GRIEFER" message, just like it did to Taggart

Person Two (#2 for now) hadn't tried to kill xxSW003xx; instead, he had tried to talk to the griefer, to ask him to stop. The griefer began to respond with the same decimal numbers that Taggart had been greeted with on the midnight of January 17th. Then the griefer had logged off, and #2 had crashed. There was no GRIEFER message, just a normal error screen.

The most tantalizing detail of all, however, was the time in which the incidents had happened. Both incidents had happened on the morning of January 18th, at about 11:24 AM. So had Taggart's incident.

There was definitely a pattern. Taggart knew that this couldn't just be a user now. He was sure of it. Something was creeping into the server. But he had to be sure: was it localized to this server, or was it on others as well? If it was simply a local case, then Taggart Undying could look for a hacker within the server messing around with things. However, if the thing was tainting other servers as well, then it wasn't simply a hacker's work but something much bigger.

Later (January 18th, 11:52:50 AM to be precise) Taggart logged onto a skyblock server, saying a heartfelt goodbye to the people of his own server. He ordered them to be good while he was gone, however. As Taggart entered the skyblock server and created a skyblock, he discovered that he was very good at this particular activity. He was in possession of a fine skyblock by the time 1 o'clock rolled around.

As he built a modest house out of wood he noticed a strange, burnt-out looking skyblock nearby. The thing was split almost in half by a crater, which couldn't have been handmade and therefore must have been the work of TNT. Taggart decided to go to the spawn area and interview some people. But here he wasn't the admin; he'd be lucky to get even one person to agree to be interviewed, and even if someone was interviewed he wasn't sure whether it'd be by Skype or some other program.

Luckily, he found... one person. It was early in the 1 o'clock hour (January 18th, 1:23:44 PM to be precise). This person shared with Taggart his story. He happened to be the owner of the burnt-out skyblock next to Taggart's, and also happened to be a regular on Taggart's server. Apparently, he was the only one on the server who had been subject to a mysterious attacker. This is the interview, conducted on the skyblock server itself. For reasons of protection, the name of the subject has been blanked out and replaced with a proxy name (John Freeman).

Taggart: so i want to ask you how this happened

John Freeman: ok

Taggart: when did it start

John Freeman: so i was on mah skyblokc

John Freeman: *skyblock

Taggart: go on

John Freeman: and i was building

John Freeman: then someone griefed me

Taggart: did you catch his nam

John Freeman: yeh

John Freeman: xxsw042xx

Taggart: osht

John Freeman: wat

Taggart: we had some on the server too

John Freeman: think he followde me here?/ saw him be4 on ur server

Taggart: idk

Taggart: gtg

John Freeman: ok

Taggart pieced together the clues. In his room, in front of his Mac, he wrote on notebook paper a series of notes. He surmised that this was a new feature of the game, but that it needed some testing. This feature was a Server Watcher. Taggart Undying had observed the usernames of the griefers, and had then looked at the tweet by Jeb. He knew now that the letters SW stood for Server Watcher, just like the hashtag on Jeb's tweet (#serverwatchers). The feature would label people as GRIEFERS depending on whether or not the people attacked the Server Watchers. It was a test of morality, but it was broken, because any user would attack another out of anger or fear. It was basic fight-or-flight mentality. If the users did not attack the Server Watchers, they would leave an alluring block behind. If the user left it alone, they would simply crash; however, if they were to try to take it, they would die and be labeled as a GRIEFER. Those who were labeled as GRIEFERS were tracked and repeatedly griefed back... until they either lashed out again or presumably ragequit.

The developers were responsible for this. But how could they? They had released a feature that incorrectly labeled people as griefers, and they thought it would work? Taggart would have to step forward and take charge of the opposition, because right now it seemed like nobody else could.

And this was why, five days later (January 23rd, 11:42:42 AM to be precise) he was on a server with Jeb himself, standing on a hill, sword in hand, facing the developer down. Taggart had had enough of this crap. For the four previous days after the interview, the Server Watchers had come again. They came once per day, and tested the morality of the users. Only this time, Taggart had warned them about this threat, and many users had created thick walls out of iron blocks that the admin had provided them. Taggart wouldn't suffer people being killed by Mojang's Server Watchers, not under his watch.

But he had messaged Jeb only yesterday, requesting a meeting, and Jeb had accepted, although with one caveat: total secrecy. Yes, Jeb would be setting up a server with a password that only he and Taggart would know. But in his head Taggart thought: secrecy be damned, I'll just tweet about this and there'll be instant scandal. Then he'll drop the update.

The following conversation was between the developer Jeb, and Taggart Undying.

Jeb: So what did you want to talk about?

Taggart: i figured it out

Jeb: Figured out what?

Taggart: you know the server watchers?

Jeb: Ah those. Yes.

Taggart: withdraw the update this is all wrong

Jeb: Why should I listen to you? For all you know the Watchers help not hinder.

Taggart: think again

Taggart: and listen dont fcking talk okay

Taggart: you want to test peoples morality but youre doing it wrong

Taggart: see youre using data involving whether users attack the 'griefer' or not or wether they try to get the block

Taggart: you cannot do that

Taggart: everyone is curious and when they see a griefer they are bound to attack him. so that means they attack the watchers and are labeled griefers

Taggart: the system is broken and if you cant fix it then get it the fck off the game

Taggart: cause i might just be an unimportant admin on an unimportant server

Taggart: but I AM A PLAYER

Taggart: AND I WONT SUFFER THIS

Jeb: Slow down.

Jeb: I'm afraid I can't take this update off... it's doing too much good. Maybe your server's just more stupid than the others

(Jeb shuts down the server)

Aha, Taggart thought as he was forceably ejected from the server. I have the dirt... now time to plant the seeds.

An hour later (January 23rd, 12:45:30 PM to be precise) a tweet was released on Taggart Undying's account. It read as follows:

TaggartUndying: Jeb's not being straight with us. Who's watching the Watchers? #whoswatchingthewatchers

Within days, the tweet was spread throughout the Internet. People read it from every corner of the globe connected to a wi-fi network. Eventually, Jeb was forced into an interview by Jordan Maron, where he confessed all about the Server Watchers and that they "weren't fully completed yet". Jeb, mysteriously, failed to mention Taggart Undying in his interview; he must have known that the tweet was popular enough that many people knew the identity of the update-breaker.

Meanwhile, on his own server and surrounded by jubilant users, the man himself was happy and contented. The update had been rescinded, and now the griefing reports were absent. It really was a peaceful and happy little server... well, apart from the usual scuffles over diamonds and who had stolen whose carrots.

But he was now a new man. No longer would he stand by and allow something like this to happen again. He was now Taggart Undying, Protector of the Server. He was a watchman for justice.

He knew who watched the Watchers: him.