Team Avolition

About

Team Avolition (also known as Team aVo) is a controversial griefing clan, mainly recognized for their greifing raids on Minecraft, which gained widespread attention after posting videos of their Minecraft griefing raids on the video sharing website YouTube.

Team Avolition has employed many methods of griefing, from the most common forms of greifing, such as destruction of Minecraft creations, to more elaborate methods using their private self-developed Minecraft mod client known as Reliant. Members of Team Avolition are known to have understanding in programming, which allows them to complete the more difficult griefs they have attempted to past.

Since the rise of Avolition's popularity, numerous of users have spawned YouTube fan tributes, as well as grief servers that were recently raided by Avolition. An legitimate offical forum^[1] has also been created by Avolition for general and programming discussion, as well as occasional reviews of released games.

Origin

Avolition's First Grief

On January 9th, 2011, a YouTube account with the username teamavolition was created.^[2] On the same day, teamavolition posted the first part of a video of Minecraft users Storm_Surge, Sirenfal, happytimeharry, relocationagent, warchamp7, and RAWB3RRY flooding another user's house with lava on a Reddit server known as Spacemonkey. The server administration failed to discover who griefed the house, which led to the group of griefers to act innocent and restore the victimized user's house. As a result, Storm_Surge was promoted to a server moderator. Avolition members Storm_Surge and Sirenfal then proceeded to grief the Spacemonkey server more, by burning down a tree fort dedicated to the marijuana subreddit /r/trees.

In the process though, a fleeing Storm_Surge was spotted by the tree fort owner Sugarfree. Sugarfree accused Storm_Surge of griefing, but Storm_Surge denied any involvment. Sugarfree did not follow through in reporting to the server administration but instead would go on a rampage and decimate the entire server by griefing the following day. Sugarfree was banned, and Avolition would later commit to an "All Out" raid of Spacemonkey. Though they were banned afterwards, Storm_Surge succesfully used an altrnate account to extract revenge and have a last laugh on the server, after the administration and other Spacemonkey users griefed any creations that were made by users accosiated by Avolition.

/r/Minecraft Aftermath

Following the posting of the Spacemonkey Greifing Videos, as well as griefing other servers, Team Avolition gained attention from the Minecraft subreddit /r/Minecraft from the video depicting of the burning of the /r/trees fort in the early Spacemonkey griefs. Many redditors became outraged, and subsequently DDoS'ed Avolition's forum, as well as attempting to dox any users accosiated with Avolition.

Rumors then arose that MCAdmin (a server provider for multiple Minecraft servers) creator Doridian would globally ban Avolition. Avolition retaliated by hacking the MCAdmin global banlist, and banned Spacemonkey Administrators, MCAdmin creator Doridian, and multiple other users. Avolition then banned users that were logging in and playing on Doridian's Furry server. During this time, Doridian discovered what Avolition was doing and shut down MCAdmin and restored the ban list prior to Avolition's raid, as well as banning Avolition members and anybody remotely associated with them. After these events, Minecraft servers featured on Reddit were often subjected by griefing from members and fans of Avolition.

Search Interest

Mojang Quake Battle

In early 2012, Dylan, a supposed sibling of one of the members of Avolition was contacted by Mojang concerning a website that allowed visitors to play a pirated version of Minecraft. Dylan was given a cease and desist of the website, and Avolition replied on behalf of him joking that they should have a Quake match to settle the dispute, in reference to the Bethseda lawsuit Mojang had recently undergone^[6]. Mojang accepted the challenge, and both parties made an agreement that regardless of the outcome of the match, the website that provided the pirated version of the game would go down.^[3]

However, both sides agreed that should Avolition win the match, they would be given Ice Cream Capes (in reference to the Avolition Deserves Ice Cream Meme) and if Mojang won, Avolition would have to make a dubstep. Avolition posted the match on April 24, 2012, showing Dylan, Storm_Surge and sirenfal representing Avoltion, and Notch, jeb_, and kappische represented Mojang. Mojang would win the match, and Avolition would later post the dubstep onto Soundcloud^[4] which was then linked to Reddit.

Decline and Copyright Controversy

Following the Mojang Quake battle, Team Avolition has declined in updating their YouTube channel. After frequent inquiries by subscribers, Team Avolition released a video on July 19th, 2012 explaining the decline.^[7] Avolition cited that personal real-life obligations had begun to conflict with eachother's schedules, and had thus resulted in the decline of videos. Avolition would eventually later post a new griefing video of them playing in popular Zombie Survival mod DayZ for the tactical shooter ARMA II.

Further controversy arose when some of Team Avolition's videos started to be deleted. It was later revealed^[5] that they had to re-upload some videos, as they had sought to become a YouTube partner for monetary purposes, which required them removing copyrighted content from their videos. The said deleted videos have been since re-uploaded with the copyrighted music removed and replaced.

External References

^[1] Forum – Team Avolition

^[2] YouTube – Team Avoltion's Channel

^[3] Gamezone – Notch crushes Minecraft pirates in Quake 3 match / Posted on 4-24-2012

^[4] Soundcloud – HUMILIATION (dubstep song for Notch) by DJKITT3

^[5] Forum – Old Team Avo videos removed. Anyone have them somewhere? / Posted on 7-29-2012

^[6] Ars Technica – Bethesda, Mojang settle trademark dispute over Scrolls name / Posted on 3-12-2012

^[7] YouTube – Updates and Source Forts / Posted on 7-19-2012