Alex has been on very thin ice ever since he deliberately drove Dobromir's player out of the game, and nearly did the same to Deytheur.
Yes, he's been around nearly as long as I have. But when he becomes a cancer on the game, driving away more new players than he inspires old ones, it doesn't matter how long he's been here, just what he's doing now.
For some time now, Alex has clearly felt that it was his job to police the game for what he felt were people hurting the game. This is a noble motivation; however, he didn't do it in a particularly noble way. It started with Dobromir and Deytheur, whom he believed had begun a RL relationship. It doesn't matter whether it was true or not, because Alex didn't actually wait to find out whether it was true. He heard a rumour about it, and then he ran with it. He began spreading the news, not in the way it should have been spread—"Isn't it wonderful that BattleMaster can bring people together like this?"—but in the most twisted, paranoid, and petty way possible: "Well, you know this means that Eponllyn and Caligus will be locked in perma-alliance from now on, and you can never trust either of their characters not to tell everything to the other's characters anymore." He spread these rumours, and harassed both of them mercilessly, in-game and out, to the point that Dobromir's player left the game, and Deytheur's nearly did the same.
When he was brought up before the Magistrates for this egregious behaviour, he was all soft words and protestations of innocence. He only ever did it for the good of the game, and he would never, ever do such a thing again, etc. But his words rang false, and I'd seen this kind of thing from him before: when confronted with something that might make him look bad, he just plays the nice guy.
But it wasn't long before he was doing more of the same. Reporting suspected clans to the Titans is fine, but not when you send 4 or 5 reports within a week just to say, "Hey, why haven't you locked them all yet? I found them for you, that should be all the evidence you need!" (Not in those words, obviously, but that was the implication.) And then when the Titans didn't act fast enough to lock those he thought were clan members, he just made up bogus IC reasons to ban them from Perdan—and some of the reasons weren't even IC.
The most recent incident was the last straw. Miriam, whom I know both of you know from IRC, and I think it's absolutely clear she would never knowingly abuse a bug in any way, had a character move into a region where Alex thought she should have sparked a battle. He immediately took to the airwaves, broadcasting all across the EC that anyone who dared to move into that region now would be obviously exploiting a bug, and thus abusing the game (due to the fact that there should have been a battle, thus giving someone-or-other an advantage they shouldn't have had).
There are three major things wrong with this.
First is that while he did not explicitly say so, it was very clear that his intent was absolutely to threaten a Titan report against people, which is explicitly forbidden.
Second is that for the vast majority of bugs, such as a battle not occurring in a region and potentially giving an advantage to one side in a war, Tom's advice has always been to simply play through it. Only in the case of obvious loopholes, like if a method were discovered to buy a region without having to spend thousands of gold, or to drain your family gold down to nothing with one character in the space of a day, is the rule not to exploit the bugs. And yes, this is a subjective standard, but it's not an especially difficult one to follow.
Third, and most importantly, is that this was not even a bug. The situation at the time Miriam moved into the region was such that it was absolutely correct by the game's logic for there not to be a battle there.
In the end, though, the problem is that Alex believes himself to be not only above the law, but to be the enforcer of the law, when he is not a Titan, is not anyone appointed by any official in the game to uphold its rules, and does not even fully understand those rules in the first place. Not only that, but he has a long history of filing Titan reports against a wide variety of people in realms that oppose him in wars, for absurd and trivial things.
If Alexandros had shown the slightest sign that he understood that his behaviour was bad, and was willing to try to change it, we would have been willing to give him that chance.
He did not.
He kept it up, and showed not the slightest iota of remorse. When removed from rulership, he immediately took the General position, and abused it to continue his vigilante justice.
TL;DR: Alexandros was removed from the game because he has shown a long history of toxic behaviour that has driven a number of people we know about out of the game, and certainly many others we don't. He was given multiple warnings that what he was doing was bad, and showed no sign of actually understanding or believing that. So in order to prevent him from causing far, far more trouble than he's worth, he has been removed.
