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To be brutally honest I personally want transparency because I’m one of the all of two people I’m immediately aware of who did indeed shell out thousands over the years to keep it running, and nobody remaining on the team actually has come close to that. So yeah, I want to know where it’s going. Folks who have dumped thousands of hours of effort into the project also deserve that information. Whether that means public or internal transparency I don’t really care, but accountability is important to me. It’s principally why I privately discourage folks from donating currently. It’s indeed a black box associated with what I privately refer to as a criminal organization (due to the whole, ya know, conspiracy to commit grand larceny and all that, though surely it must be that they still don't truly understand what it is that they have done right?).

If I don’t feel something I’m saying is an irrefutable fact and isn’t an obvious opinion, or if I’m having to recall something without referring to logs/notes, I’m going to use qualifiers far more often to indicate such to the reader so that they know information somewhere along the way could indeed be wrong, but that I do believe such to be accurate (and in general probably is accurate). This topic especially is one where an erroneous statement would be far more likely to upset someone. That said the bill gates clip is always funny lol

It should be trivial to add to the server list if it's needed, since game time is already tracked.

I agree that things get finicky, like people might suddenly start pushing people out as soon as them covering the bills for years on end is no longer necessary. Not saying that was everyone's thought process, but I can think of at least one person where I truly think that was the case. Publishing some sort of numbers, at least internally where stakeholders (including both 'current' and 'former' devs) can see them, would help repair some of the mistrust directed towards the team. As far as I'm aware, there's zero accountability or accounting being done for these donations. There's zero transparency. At least if some sort of numbers are published, the chain of trust is strengthened -- for there to be malpractice, someone would have to be lying about both the published numbers and the misuse of funds, rather than just lying about (or just not mentioning) misuse of donated funds. Organizationally, there's still some serious issues around the donations, and lack of transparency even internally. It's a concerning trend that's gotten much much worse over the course of the year (2021).

iirc there were a few thousand dollars back in May (~4-5 months into donations). I would assume that balance has grown since, but wouldn't actually know, and there's no way to know what donations are actually spent on beyond "IT and freelancers". As far as I'm aware / as far as I recall, no developer has had to pay for anything RenX related in 2021 specifically (though they certainly did try to back out of that...), nor has any volunteer (non-freelancer) dev profited in any way. For context, our IT costs were typically running < $200/mo going into May from what I recall, but I don't seem to have my accounting notes readily available. Emphasis on the "as far as I'm aware" / "iirc" qualifiers and that none of that should be taken as fact; I could certainly be wrong or mistaken on any detail, I can mostly just assume folks have been honest and extrapolate data from the first several months of the year and a few other data points. Personally I would love for there be more transparency around donations, if not to the community at large then at least to those who have a direct stake in the project: ALL devs (with none of the 'former'/inactive vs 'current'/active nonsense). Unfortunately I kind of doubt that'll happen (and honestly it's kind of a coin flip whether or not this post will get deleted since everyone's gonna over-analyze every word and make me out as the devil lol).

Updated! For full change log & release binaries: https://github.com/JAJames/Jupiter-Bot/releases/tag/v1.1.0 Ordinarily releases wouldn't be so close together, but the 1.0 packages were taken down due to language considerations, and 1.0.1 packages were never published. Therefore, a 1.1 release was necessary.

Quit being an ass. I was one of the people who largely supported moving creative control for those limits from server owners to level designers, and even I assumed you were talking about commander mode and building armor and airdrops and such. There’s been lots of changes over the years, the limits were comparatively small. There’s nothing wrong with trying to establish a default game style, which we seriously struggled with for years due to the lack of any official/vanilla option, no way to fund such, and some folks actively and very vocally objecting to the creation of such. It was part of the “de-facto official server” crap shoot issue that was extremely difficult to manage for years. There’s no such thing as an easy solution to a hard problem. Establishing some commonality between servers so people could still feel like they were at least playing the same game, was one of those overly complicated hard problems. Not sure why you’re taking your distaste for a really old small change out on madkill of all people, if it bothers you that much make a mutator, something like that would be trivial to implement. I did get a giggle out of the phrase “refresh your brain” though, not gonna lie, but still very rude!

Yeah, it's one of those things that are absolutely impossible to do without controversy. I suppose you wanted more direct responses to your initial question though, so here we go with my more in-depth personal perspective I guess: I don't really play anymore for obvious reasons and I voted as such. For the last several years though, I mostly just played whenever friends or people I knew were on voice chat. As the years dragged on that became less and less frequent, as many of the folks I'd come to know became less and less active. Whether I played PUGs more or pubs more tended to alternate. PUGs are great for planning a specific time to play some RenX for folks, everybody can plan for it. Pubs are great for impromptu, when you're just quickly looking for a game to play together. That's just part of the nature of organized events vs standard matches. The game quality of PUGs vs pubs didn't really matter that much to me, I just enjoy playing games with folks I know and like, regardless of what the game is. I suspect that's true for at least a few people. And I by extension the only reason I would ever play the game again, is to play with friends who happen to be playing it. After 7 years, people do get tired of just playing the same game. I guess as far as personal preferences go, the pugs do tend to be more organized, but also more stressful and more prone to people getting upset with eachother. I can't remember the last time I played a pug and felt comfortable speaking as a player. More recently when I was playing New World (MMO), I actually ran into the same exact issue -- I just wasn't comfortable speaking in such a large group, but also so many people just sounded so incredibly pretentious when talking to eachother that I didn't even want to take part anymore. That issue doesn't really happen with pubs. You'll occasionally get obnoxious people moaning about the team or something, and in pubs I was always more likely to get PM'd about random things when I was just trying to play a game, but in general you'll have a more fun casual experience in a pub game. You just have to focus more on having fun than on winning in pubs. That difference isn't exactly unknown, either: Even those who aren't trying to play with anybody in particular, they're preferring to play matches with other players. I guess that's where the player counts tie in I guess. All of that is to say, the game styles... don't really matter, to me anyways, as long as people aren't jerks. I suppose if I were to try to play today on my own, the first thought coming to my head isn't actually pug vs pub, it's "am I going to be bothered by other people?", and I can't definitively say no, and I don't think I'd have any real recourse if someone did, so I just don't.

I’ve said this before, but the issue with only one server cannot be resolved without one of the following, preferably some combination of the three: 1) An influx of players 2) A technical solution to load balance players across multiple game servers when a match ends (see old posts about “soft limits” 3) Reduce the hard limit back down to 40 Blaming the community, be it the players or the server owners/staff, is pointless. My understanding for as to why the soft limit idea was never implemented, was just that nobody else knew how, and I never had time. It requires devbot or other systems work to orchestrate. Since the concept was entirely opt-in, it was relatively uncontroversial. In theory this could still be implemented with some bot changes and maybe a mutator, but would require coordination with a server owner.

It was, my memories of Crashing on map change follow me to this day Jokes aside, it was so cool back then to see so many familiar names as well as new names, getting to know folks, and getting to work and compete with others. Tested my bot on St0rm, EKT, TmX, my own server, got to know all the folks in those places, it was fun. It was also perhaps the most stressful year of my life, so having a fun distraction and getting to know many awesome people was very welcome.

Admittedly I do wish there was a way to request tracking information be deleted. Having my IP + MAC address + steam ID + username + game server address + time logged to a massive searchable database every time I join a server is a little disconcerting. It’s weirder when I realize it’s stored alongside similar data for C&C Renegade players, at least for MPF. I also have no idea who all has access to that really.

Updated! See https://github.com/JAJames/Jupiter-Bot/releases/tag/v1.0 for details. Most recent change includes a new plugin requested by server owners to enhance player privacy and data security.

The bot that both the dev team & servers use has the ability to auto-cancel a specific votes (i.e: "vote ban"), specifically for folks who abuse the vote system. If shpetim is still constantly casting bogus votes despite a continuing months-old thread calling it out, it's because both groups don't want / care enough to take that privilege away. I think the rationale in the past had to do with kicking cheaters, etc. There's a lot of valid reasons someone might want a player kicked from the opposing team.

I've generally always been against the idea of making default single-player local play significantly differently from default 1-player multiplayer. That's part of why the instant-vote stuff checks the player count, rather than whether or not the game is in single-player mode. It creates a divergence in the behaviors that folks who are just setting up a quick server to play with a couple friends, or to test things locally, wouldn't expect. The default behavior most people would expect when quickly setting up a server for a game, is that all the standard gameplay features would be enabled. That said, a voteable option could be less messy than it sounds. Instead of tacking it straight on to the vote menu, a "Match Settings" submenu could be added that might tweak settings that are commonly changed, i.e: the minimum players for beacons (maybe even just "Disable/Enable Beacons"), or "Enable/Disable Pedestal Beacon", or anything else that's exceedingly common. That does allow players to customize their matches if server owners allow it, tailoring the experience more towards the people specifically playing at that time. Availability of that submenu could be controlled by the servers as well, allowing them to choose how much flexibility to give to players, as well as to prevent vote spam at higher player counts.

Honestly I'd assume so, but as screenshotted in the third post, I'd agreed to transfer the domain and discord and such in part because of the assurance that there would still be regular tester access and more or less treated the same as any other former dev.

The only significant underpinning I'm aware of is that I had previously been trying to negotiate for an apology from the team for causing damages, which obviously provoked much controversy and issues back in May, and in exchange for which I was willing to wave any liability for those damages. To be entirely honest, I'd fully believed that given time, they would've reflected on the events and become open to that possibility. I was clearly incorrect, but I'm still not sure if those requests were what provoked restricting access or not. Prior to accesses being removed, my last communication to Fobby had been a single message sent on July 4, and before that, a single message sent on June 17. I'd for the most part quit bothering about it once it started to become increasingly obvious that they simply were not interested in an apology, even in exchange for waiving liability.

Posting publicly was the last resort. I'd attempted repeatedly to contact Fobby directly, as well as to try to remedy in the same group chat as agreement was formed (which includes Fobby, Sonny, and 4Horsemen). I'd also attempted to try to get someone to speak on the public Discord when messages continued to be ignored, but was simply met with a "no". I have sent Fobby 40 direct messages, spread across 7 different days, in addition to the group chat messages, since his last response to me on June 14 about a variety of issues. First messaged about losing internal access on July 13th, then messaged about losing testing access on July 14th. I then moved on and messaged in the group chat on July 18th @ 12:55 AM, notifying that there had been a willful violation of our agreement and that it was at risk of being terminated. In that communication I mentioned a variety of things I would like to discuss, that all items were perfectly negotiable, and that ultimately I just wanted to get a conversation going to try to resolve as many issues as possible. No reply was received until well over 24 hours later on July 19 @ 2:51 PM. I greatly prefer private communications rather than public, however given that they have taken away all private communication channels to the team directly, and actively refused to respond to messages (going so far as to direct team members not to interact), unfortunately the only option I could think of which remained to try to gain attention was to post publicly on the forums. The lack of communication only exacerbates my concerns that leadership will decide to further violate agreements. I do also feel that current, former, and future team members should be informed of affairs and developments, since I have no way to know how informed the team actually is of current leadership decisions.

For transparency, there has been a conclusion to this conversation. Apparently, the team's stance is that testers are not those who have access to testing resources, but rather those who are aware of how to install the test client: I'll move on from the topic for now, however aspiring developers should be aware of how predecessors are treated.

Also, for anybody on the team not already aware, the revocation of tester access directly violates agreement regarding recent events:

And I suppose thinking about it further, these changes must be at least somewhat targeted, as at least 2 of the former developers impacted by the change were also originally closed beta testers, and no longer have access. The only reasonably conclusion that can be drawn without clarification is that leadership has become unnecessarily petty. I'm not aware of any case where anybody has had their closed beta testing access revoked, and as far as I'm aware, the only circumstance that would've occurred in the past were if someone leaked builds or other not-for-public information. Even pruning in the past on Discord I want to say was only on the discord side; there was always value to maintaining a decently sized mailing list for when a new round of beta testing needed to be whipped up. I could be mistaken though.

Recently it seems Former Developers were removed from the Closed Beta Testing forums, as well as the internal ones, without any communication as to why. It seems counter productive to kick former developers out of the closed beta/alpha testing, a group which is very likely to provide valuable feedback, as well as to remove former developers from the internal forums, where they might provide context and information that might otherwise be lost on various topics. It may also send the wrong message to various former developers that they're no longer welcome to rejoin or are unwelcome otherwise, potentially reducing the candidate pool available to easily recruit from. It may also be interpreted offensively, even if no offense is intended. If the changes are intended to be more targeted in nature, then that simply seems rather petty, and does not paint a very positive image of what remains of the team. I sadly cannot come up with any constructive rationale for choosing to reduce access to former developers and leads, the effects all seem rather negative.

Probably next year would be my estimate, assuming momentum doesn’t slow and the team doesn’t lose any more critical talent or gain new talent.

There's an EVA message at the top left, but with so much information/noise in the game, it's very easy to miss (and I myself often forget it's there!)

There were plans to bring an NA server back up some months ago, but I think it might have gotten lost in the noise. Options are being discussed for an NA game server again.