A letter from the community to Jagex

[RB98]

Jagex,

I do not believe you need money and I also do not understand why you had to ruin Ace of Spades I quite enjoyed this formerly free to play game and now that you have made it pay to play I do not feel the need to buy the new version nor do I wish to what I want is it to go back to it's free to play state these are my requests and have a good day

RB98

[TB_]

You could have just left the servers running and released the new AoS

You sure about that? Wouldn't not being a part of jagex be a good idea?

[Eimis]

Jagex, if you want money, don't screw up the game

Sincerely,
Eimis

[GreaseMonkey]

Jagex are actually in serious financial trouble right now.

With that said:

Jagex, you had aquired the copyrightery to a popular game. Your attempts to plasticise it in an attempt to make it more attractive has backfired horribly; while you were thinking you were "playing it safe" by doing what everyone else was doing, you then attempted to slap it over the top of Ace of Spades, which resulted in something which was... um, not Ace of Spades, for starters.

In thinking you weren't risking anything, you actually took a very big risk, and it was Not A Risk Worth Taking. I don't know if the classic mode will rectify this issue. You'll probably just make the SMG even more overpowered than the one in 0.75, and absolutely crank up the spread on the rifle so it ends up firing backwards on occasion; after all, the SMG is the cancer of Ace of Spades. (Griefing and whinging isn't a fault of the game itself.)

It would have made more sense to just add in the health/grenade crates, the mounted MG, the RPG, and maybe the helicopter, and worked from there. I've also joked that there should be a free version with an SMG, and a paid-for version without it. Making certain weapons optional would be a good idea.

Unfortunately, you've already done the deed.

Here's a good question: How did we milk a dead cow for 7-8 months?

Maybe this question might help: What piece of GPL-licensed software did you close up and snuff out by paying off the developers and getting them to sign contractual agreements relicensing their code?

Both questions have the same answer.

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Pyspades.

Y'know, that server which was made by blatantly white-box reverse-engineering Ace of Spades itself with Hex Rays, even going so far as to include some decompiled code just so it can deal with the weird compression / decompression. Fortunately, that code happened to be a part of ENet. Even more fortunately, Ben Aksoy is a nice guy.

It's also the server that got popular because server admins now had a considerable amount of power over what their servers could actually do. (I would also like to note that Lexsym's ServerBot, written in the utmost well-respected Visual Basic, also played a part - I don't know the exact history of these two pieces of software, though.) Control of the way the game operated was passed onto those who ran servers, as Pyspades had a scripting system.

This had the ultimate advantage that the community could in effect work on making Ace of Spades better, without having to rely on Ben updating stuff. (Yeah, OK, I wrote that script on an early 0.76 RC. But it DOES make AoS better.) This is not entirely accurate, as Ben was still in charge of the client, and it was easier just to stick with an unmodified client. But it did allow for an awful lot of interesting experimentation which would not have been done had the game been left to a select few let alone one man.

I am reminded of the Multiverse hack for the free version of Minecraft, which I have implemented myself with my own custom server which nobody uses. (You take note of which world each client is a part of, and then you resend the map. Changing the server title/message is a nice touch. Kudos if you make the loading bar do silly things.) It was not a feature of the game itself. But it became popular in custom servers.

I remember a time when the free Minecraft had very few people hosting custom servers, and my Polish friend was running custom servers (had JTE's, also had my one at some stage). I also remember about a year later when there were very few running vanilla servers, and said friend was running a vanilla server. (By that time, hacked clients were everywhere (this was actually a good thing provided your server software was good), and the infamous spawn jails were useless against actually stopping grief.)

Nowadays, absolutely nobody runs the vanilla 0.75 server. Probably because it doesn't actually work. (I run Linux, though, so it might just be Wine that has that issue.)

Another advantage is that, because of Pyspades, we could have a global blacklist. This was introduced because Lexsym wrote a spambot to screw up AoS servers. (Of course, another advantage of Pyspades was that it was possible to prevent crap like that.) After some time, it was used to ban people speedhacking, rapidhacking, and inf ammo hacking. From 0.70 onwards, thanks to Maciej Kusnierź (also known as "hooch"), it was also used to ban an awful lot of aimbots, and not just the few who had private ones. (I was one of the few, but I have never been GBL'd. I wrote mine as an antigrief tool.)

And you know another advantage that you overlooked?

People didn't have to subscribe to it.

People could also publish their banlists and other people could subscribe to them. I think Aloha cancelled their Minit banlist subscription because we eventually banned Brazil. (The "Regional Interest" section used to have 4 countries: Australia, Brazil, Germany, USA. It currently has just Brazil and Germany. a_girl is considering banning Germany from Testdrive, although there are a few German players we don't want swallowed by such a ban.) Once again, admins actually had a choice.

You could have had specially endorsed official servers as well as people running their own. You could even have had (could'en've'd?) your own Global Blacklist (which would be optional of course) and it would have been all fine and dandy. But no, you decided you were going to be the only ones running servers.

People like to play games at LAN parties. People discover games at LAN parties. But no, you screwed that up, too.

But most importantly, you limited development to a select few. And why the hell are we not able to make maps, let alone decide what maps are allowed to run on any servers whatsoever? Maps need to be tested, you know! Oh wait, you don't.

While we're at it: Maps are 512x512 headerless VXL (like in AoS 0.x), 240 high (instead of 64), can have completely blank columns (00 F0 EF 00), and uses a block type byte (0xFF solid) instead of the lighting byte - seriously, how is that "really really different from the tools you use"?

Does Arash or anyone left even know how the VXL format works? (I would really like this question answered by someone who does, or if you can't find anyone, just admit that you don't.) I do, mat^2 does, I don't know if Ben does, and it's not even trade secret information.

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Anyhow, let's get this back on track.

Why do you only ever listen to the people in the community who sound really, really young, and really, really ADHD? Basically the whole <@> clan was saying "fix your damn bugs first and THEN worry about adding stuff" (which didn't happen, of course). Maybe this was an issue with Ben, maybe it was you. I don't know.

I remember the gobshite that 0.61 was... OK, it was just the font renderer, and it didn't affect Vista/7 users, but it affected everyone else. It was eventually fixed in 0.76, but before that I offered to write a font renderer that wasn't crap. (It was seriously horrible, and did not take any advantage of what Ken Silverman bundled in, which I suspect was just written in C, without using any assembly.)

I'm reminded of something else. If it were just that and the .ini parser shitting over your config every time you cancelled during map load (`chmod 444 config.ini` ftw), that would be easily fixable. But oddly enough, stuff was lost in that version.

Game designers / developers, if you never played a version where, when someone captured the intel, you could see where the enemy was on the map for a minute, you should not have been let on the team. (The last version to do this was 0.61, and that had a bug where the enemies would just stay visible on the minimap once someone did that.)

But there's another thing that was lost, this time 0.61 is purely to blame. Your graphical polish also made it nigh impossible to set up fake intels. This was a popular tactical trick back when I essentially started in 0.54, and while you could work out which one was the real one, you could throw people off quite nicely. A quirk, but it essentially became a de-facto feature. Hell, you don't even have the up/down arrows anymore. I don't see how this is an improvement.

I'm aware of the likelihood that Ben may have just completely flipped his shit, as it's hard keeping everyone happy, and I would know this. However, I'm fairly stubborn and have told people several times that a certain feature is not going to be implemented in a certain game I'm working on. (Don't worry. It doesn't have an SMG in it, therefore it's not your game.)

But seeing as you guys were in charge from 0.54 onwards, I would assume you would be able to pressure development in the right direction (read: not CoD Fortress 3craft), or assist him with stuff.

-----

I think the bottom line here is that the only people you listened to in the community were those who didn't realise that their ideas would make this game suck. Furthermore, I am reminded that you kept us in the dark for 4 months (actual figure may vary), and we had 0.76 ready to release for 2 of those months WHICH WOULD STAVE OFF THE AIMBOT PROBLEM FOR AT LEAST A SHORT WHILE - leaving us in the dark for that long made me skeptical it was even the same game anymore.

You also refused to let the admins of the not-that-old forums archive the content despite a eunanimous decision to have it publically archived somehow.

And thus I must conclude.

You didn't listen, you just put your fingers in your ears going "Laa laa laa" while you shat all over us and killed a game we enjoyed.

You're a disgrace, Jagex.

I would like to think that your senior management would stop being incompetent with making games that don't suck, but I think you're beyond repair.

Enjoy your bankruptcy.

[CelticEnigma]