Open Letter To Ze_PilOt

[Sheeo]

Hello Ze_PilOt,

Thank you for your work on FAF, I and many others have had many hours of fun because of it.

I first heard of Forged Alliance Forever in March, 2013. I discovered this community through Gyle and his casts on Youtube, initially just watching replays for entertainment. It wasn't long before I started being an active player, enjoying this awesome game for what it is.

When I realised that the development of FAF was a one-man job, I started to help out where I could. So I started helping people with game problems on IRC and on the forums.

I ended up starting to work on bugfixes. In collaboration with most other developers of this community, I have helped create and test a large part of the latest patches to the game.

Together with Eximius, I have even created a patch for Forged Alliance that allows a cool new feature: Shared Armies. This is a feature inspired by Planetary Annihilation that adds a new cooperative gamemode, where you share control of your army with players on your team. This feature requires an update of FA itself, and I cannot publish it without your cooperation.

On several occasions, I have reached out to you and offered my help beyond what I can do without your cooperation:
- I have offered to help maintain the server when it was having issues (Which are still there)
- I have offered to help merge pull requests on Bitbucket and push out patches
- I have offered to help writing changelogs for patches

Every time I have attempted to actively help you with the work that comes with running FAF, I have been let down. You have either not replied, or replied vaguely and then not taken action.

I am disappointed that a great project like FAF cannot move forward at a faster pace, which for it to stay relevant, I believe it needs to.

There are several unsolved problems at the moment, some of which have been around for a long time, I may even have missed some here:

- Current release has two absolutely critical exploits that we have fixes for
- Replays desync
- Issues connecting to other players
- The following tabs in the lobby cause problems/have issues:
- Tournament tab
- Replay vault
- Map vault
- Mod vault

You promised to push patch 3635, which fixes the exploits, over a week ago.

Along with problems, these projects are just stale:
- Galactic War
- "Trip Down Memory Lane"


I can and will help with solving all of these issues, including many more. I am determined to help keep this community alive and growing, getting new players, updating the game and empowering more people like me to help out with the project, to ensure that this great game stays alive and well.


For me to do this, it will require some action from your part: I will need full server access, nothing less can enable me to work freely on keeping this community alive.


If you do not allow this, I have no choice but to make a clone of FAF, and get the community to come with me.


I highly apreciate your work for the community and FA, but I want the community and the game to move forward, being attractive to new players and most of all; I want open collaboration between a group of developers, which FAF does not have currently.

[gnatinator]

For me to do this, it will require some action from your part: I will need full server access, nothing less can enable me to work freely on keeping this community alive.

This is an issue.

Don't have a aneurysm when ZeP doesn't want to give out full control of the server like candy. Don't pester for control. It's nothing personal, but hostile takeovers of online communities happen all of the time. It's how online communities get ruined very quickly.

Even in our own community this has happened before with Anaryl attempting to resolve a personal spat by taking over the FAF facebook page, see: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2111&start=10#p22513

If you have a burning desire to do something, just do it. Talk is cheap. If it ends up being integrated, you'll get full credit of course.

[Sheeo]

If you have a burning desire to do something, just do it. Talk is cheap. If it ends up being integrated, you'll get full credit of course.

There are things you cannot do--as I have written in the post--without cooperation and access to the server code. Since this isn't open source, I cannot just run a server locally and test modifications.

If it comes to having to fork, I'm prepared and ready to do that. Talk is indeed cheap.

[IceDreamer]

It's not about that, gnat, this is a different thing to Anaryl. This is that it seems PilOt has lost his enthusiasm, his drive to run a community like this one. It took up so much of his valuable time for so long that I don't blame him, but we really do need someone with that drive back. To him I say this doesn't have to be seen as a hostile takeover, more as the biggest thanks we can give him for such an excellent program. We'll take over all the boring responsibilities, all the heavy lifting, and PilOt can relax, play some games, and generally admire the community which he has created.

It will be so much easier if he gives Sheeo access, so much friendlier, but at this point sporadic updates and no drive aren't going to keep the community alive, so if we have to make a rival... We will

[RK4000]

If you have a burning desire to do something, just do it. Talk is cheap. If it ends up being integrated, you'll get full credit of course.

This is the problem. Us modders have done things. As an example, a game-breaking bug, which lets you get infinite resources, no less, has been fixed. Yet it has not been put into a patch yet. Why? We don't know (for sure). But it's rather alarming how many fixes, and just fixes have been laying around, proven to work, yet have not been patched. That is what bothers us. Not just lack of "new" things, but a lack of anything, even simple bugfixes that could potentially fix game-breaking bugs.

[Sheeo]

I'll add to unsolved issues that rks_explosions_v7 is still unranked.

[galacticfear]

I think crotalus has loads of pending features/fixes, you should talk to him.

[RK4000]

It's not about us modders talking to eachother at all. All of us have pending features/fixes, but we need Zep's activity to actually get them into a patch. That is the issue here.

ZeP is the only one that can push our work into a patch.

[Poch]

I'm really glad someone finally had the courage to start discussing this matter publicly.

If you talk to modders and people that try to help, plus read maybe a year of forum history it is without question that Zep is today slowing FAF improvements. He even actively prevent a lot of them and gives about 0 good reason for it. It is also clear he shouldn't have been the community manager. His way of leading is making things slow and complicated. Those times, nothing seems to be really happening and when i see him talking, i prefer him to do nothing at all, since all he talks about is killing FAF features or stupid shit like that.

Full control in hands of one people is NEVER good. It was good or even necessary in the beginning when it had to be built from scratch but now it is bad. For Tons of reasons that could be demonstrated by tons of examples. ZePilot is scary but even if he was the perfect community leader him being our "supreme god" would had to stop now that he is done creating the world. Time to let the humans play with the world and lead it.

For me there is only 3 solutions :

1) ZePilot Keep everything blackboxed and dictatorial like he seems to like it. But he includes more people into the dictators circle.

2) We finally go for a community-driven project and never again a SINGLE man can threaten the whole community to remove a feature we like & want to improve just because he behaves like a child and lacks emotional maturity (not saying it happened, just saying that with only one man in charge bad things can happen : go study history if you don't agree).

3) Nothing special from him happens and eventually we will recreate another FAF-clone by taking care of not doing the same mistakes again.

As long as the server is up and game works we don't have any rush. I don't care which direction it takes or how long it takes i just want it to be done as it should and i want it to be "perennial". If ZePilot restart working actively like at day 1 it is ok too but i don't see it happening, and i think he better things to do in life that managing 27/7 like everyone does. FAF is too big now to be a one man thing.

[Taffy]

This project gets my support and I can only hope that pilot will be understanding and allow you access to the server in order to keep faf and this community going.