Sadly we had to notice, that the termination of the partnership happened without prior notice and our project manager, despite the statements to the contrary of PBBans, was not informed about their intention. Indeed there were two emails sent but they were sent to our webmaster adress, on which hundreds of spam emails per day are sent to. In addition to that the email was sent via the real name of Maydax, which was unknown by the project management. This is why the emails were not prioritized by us and in consequence they were not read by us. But especially at this email adress we point out via autoreply that requests have to be made via support ticket to avoid important requests going unnoticed. An approach via one of the contact channels we usually used between PBBans and us would have been much more appropriate and would have had a possitive effect on the whole situation. All the more if there is something important to communicate, there are many ways to do so - assumed there is an interest in getting an answer.
We would like to dissent the accusation of stealing data too. Until now there was an agreement between PBBans and GGC which regulated the access to the ban list of each other. In contrast to us, PBBans has never offered us an interface to access their data, which forced us to use the public access to synchronize with them. After the access via the public port was not possible anymore, we had to guess, that blocking this access was a safety measure against DDoS attacks. Therefore we used an alternative path to align the banlists as we could not assume that there was the intention to block specifically our access. This would not have happened if we would have been informed in time. And we would not have tried to gain access when we were informed. Instead every link from our site to PBBans was forwarded to their news to the termination of the partnership without trying to talk to us.

Since Partnerships are founded on a Give and Take, in consequence PBBans won't get access to our Banlists, as long as they refuse access to their own.

To justify the termination of the Partnership, it was publicly claimed, that GGC would
encourage their Users not to stream to PBBans, since their Bans are implemented in our Lists as well. We want to make clear, that in the specific and criticised thread we do not encourage the User to stop streaming to PBBans nor did we do anything like that elsewhere. We just mentioned, that he, who is forced by his provider to choose only one Streaming Partner, still benefits from the Banlist from PBBans, since it was in our external Banlists as well. Just like PBBans Users who had a benefit from using our Banlist through PBBans external Banlists, without streaming to us.
By doing so, we can say that we emphasized the benefits for both sides of our former Partnership and not trying to prevent Users from registering at PBBans or other Anticheat-Communitys.
On the side of PBBans, maybe due to an inaccurate translation, it might have sounded like an appeal to not stream to them or exclusively stream to us, which is just not true. Quite contrary to this, we have stated explicitly since our foundation, that we are standig for cooperation and even manually helped countless Admins with setting up multistreaming on their Servers - of course to PBBans as well.

We shared Informations with them, looked for Communcation with them and even managed to get the one click streaming setup to PBBans into RCON Tools for BC2 for example. Unfortunately our efforts in this regard were quite one sided and so our Motivation to promote our Partner diminished with every further step from PBBans to make us look silly in public, instead of dealing directly with us, to discuss different point of views or possibilities to optimise our Cooperation. Even in this case we offered a conversation which was denied, so we can not lay down our differences at the moment. Banning our Staffmembers from PBBans IRC Channel without need didn't help either in this regard.

We will not return the like and try to polish our image by smudging PBBans. Mistakes have been made on both sides. Technically and humanly. By Individuals who misinterpreted the contest between likeminded as a rivalry between competitors and misunderstandings that occur when crossing language barriers. So we stay on course and emphasize that the fight against Cheaters is only possible when doing it together and encourage every Server Admin explicitly to get every Protection for their Servers they can get and to support every Anticheat Community they choose, by all means. We are all like-minded Volunteers with the same goal. We are all putting a lot of effort in our Projects and only the Cheaters do benefit, when misunderstanding, lack of communication, but also envy, defiance and arrogance tear us apart.

So we still reach out our hand to everyone who shares the same idea - even to PBBans - to fight with us, together against Cheaters.

P.S.: As a native german speaker i want to add, that sometimes meanings get lost in translations and Google Translator does not make up for reading in your own languages. This Text might differ a little from our original german Text. If you have Questions – ask before acting.