On the 29th December, the Arma 3 gameserver know as „ANZUSGaming“ (https://anzus.life) plans to release a new version of their modpack.

Sadly their „new“ Arma 3 terrain was originally created by the ReallifeRPG Team in 2019 and remains their intellectual property to this day. The map is still under active development and used on our own life servers.

ANZUSGaming was not given permission by the owners of said intellectual property to use or derivate their work. ANZUSGaming is currently distributing a modified version of the original terrain „Nordholm“ via different digital means.

TLDR;

• ANZUS Gaming has (again) stolen content from our team
• They claim to have bought it but fail to produce any evidence (nor has anyone from our team sold it to them)
• Their behavior is hurting the Arma 3 modding community

What’s ReallifeRPG?

The RealLifeRPG Team has worked for more than 7 years to bring modded Arma 3 Life gaming to a new level. While we appreciate that our content is valued by others who want to use and build upon it we cannot under any circumstances accept that it is used without our permission.

Let’s take a look at ANZUS‘ new map

On the left: Images Screenshots taken from Nordholm!, on the right: ANZUSGaming’s terrain

The screenshots of Nordhom were taken on a version originally compiled on May 18 03:46:28 2020.

The screenshots from the ANZUSGaming terrain are sources from a Video uploaded by PsySin to YouTube All Rights of these screenshots belong to him.

Version on Imgur.

I don’t think there is any more need to prove that this terrain is ripped from Nordholm. But lets get to the fun part of this story. When our content get’s stolen, we always try to make the most of it and have a good laugh. So let’s take a look at the sheer incompetence of whoever ripped our map.

Looking into the modfiles

Quickly unpacking their terrain „ANZUS_Map.pbo“ – SHA: F4CD6BE8A5B50097B3A8ED179D26B58B8CFB1FE7 results in some hilarious finds:

Well they definitely didn’t waste any time trying to hide who actually created this map. Some of this stuff is pure gold, these textures are also quite a bit newer than the version of the terrain that was ripped. So the alleged one time purchase seems to not have been enough! They came back to get the newest and greatest UI icons straight from ReallifeRPG!

Anzus‘ side of this story

We of course, after noticing that this was going on, got into contact with Doug Jumper, the infamous owner of ANZUSGaming. Well – Infamous for ripping content and hated by any honourable Arma 3 content creator (just take a look at the IP rights violation channel on the offical Arma 3 discord). We of course wont’t show any sort of private conversations with him, as even he deserves his rights to privacy. He told us that he bought the map from a „rogue developer“ in our team who allegedly sold it to him about one and a half years ago. He of course can’t remember the name, can’t show us any prove of that purchase happening or even just some sort of transaction details. Neither did he want to provide any other sort of document stating that he was allowed to use the authors‘ intellectual property. As the RealLifeRPG Team is and has always been a group of close friends who do much more than work together on Arma 3 gaming projects we are absoulutely sure that no such thing has happend (and even if, the transaction would not have been rightful as no single person has the right to sell the IP of a group of people).

Instead of providing any evidence he offered us „compensation“ in form of access to some of his custom buildings – probably bought 1 1/2 years ago from a „rogue developer“ somewhere (lol). We declined.

Why didn’t they create their own map?

I suppose they saw our work and gave up on creating something good themselves, they atleast seem to be unable to use Arma’s mapping tools properly. If you take a look at their terrain in the editor you’ll find a ton of clues that you’re actually on Nordholm. Why these were not properly removed ? I don’t know, they probably just don’t care.

Well let’s still have a look at how they messed up our beautiful terrain (if you load it up without their mission objects)

You play on Anzus and don’t care.

We don’t want to accuse ANZUSGaming of stuff they didn’t do. Stealing Nordholm is our „big“ experience with ANZUS, besides Nordholm they always took some of our stuff (bridges and props). A lot of other modders and content creators claim to have had their content stolen, derived and monetized without their permission.

As a player, you may just not care, you’re having fun playing on Anzus and you don’t care about theft of Intellectual property whatsoever. – Well I’m probably not going to be able to persuade you to stop playing on Anzus and that’s fine. Just know that their wrongdoing is massively hurting the modding community, which in turn just leads to less content for everyone.

I don’t buy it! Doug is such a great guy!

Take a look: Download the old Version of Nordholm and put it into your ANZUS folder, it should work alright since they have ripped most of the required assets. If you have serious doubts you can get in contact with us via E-Mail. WE can provide any further prove you may be interested in.

This community ain’t dead and we do care about our content beeing stolen.

Last edited: 29. December 2021 14:15 CEST