FAFOREVER TAKEN DOWN

I tried to connect 5 times and I was like wut? Then i tried to go on the forums and I knew exactly what happened then came here straight away. Can we get some live updates on this thread on when a new server will be up? That would be really awesome!

Props to Sheeo and others who are working on a clone.

In short, some community members decided it would be best if they took over ownership of the server and demanded the keys from Ze_PilOt.

Ze_PilOt got hounded constantly, called down, his efforts portrayed as dirt... and so he has decided to simply pack it all in and move on with his life.

Unfortunate since arguably Ze_PilOt was doing a fine job. The FAF lobby was excellent. We were getting patches like every month and he has continued to donate thousands of his own man hours.

Now we have none of it.

Ah, does anyone have any idea why he would have redirected the link to here? Or is that still an unknown?

Personally I can see why some people wanted to be able to host their own servers with whatever he was using, another ironic thing, actually, as he's been pretty hardcore against the non release of PA's server architecture so far, though I could be missing quite a bit of information (and I won't deny my ignorance to the situation at the moment)

Basically what happened:

FYI.

Cached last news post from faforever.com:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...e-end/ &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au#.VCOZ7PmSyig

Cached view of the original Open Letter to Ze_Pil0t:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...?f=2&t=8546&start=0 &cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

To view subsequent pages, search for http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8546&start=## in google, where ## is 0, 10, 20 etc. for pages 1, 2, 3 and so on. Then click the down arrow next to the URL and click Cached to view the saved version of the page.

It appears that @thepilot(whom I assume is Zep here on the Uber forums) has become the very force he has spent so much time being angry about.

He took money(yes, donations, but still took money) to make a product(FAF) and then when people became unhappy he decided to act like a child(yes, a child) and say, "Well if I can't have it my way than no one can have it at all!".

Even if he was being hounded he could have given the reins over to the community and washed his hands of the issue. Instead he packs up and destroys everything.

It's like if Uber said, "We hate this bad press and people being angry at us, we're done!" and they took down Ubernet deleted all their forums and websites and disappeared with only a message saying, "We hate long posts. Goodbye."

That is not how mature people act nor how business people act. He could have simply handed it off and been done. That's it.

That's also all I have to say on the subject as it now stands.

This was a terribly shitty move on his part. I get he was angry and sad that people did not seem to appreciate his work, but to tear it all down? Come now man. We not 5 years old anymore. This type of **** grates me a bit, as he just ruined an entire community because of his inability to compromise.

This is how I know I'm getting old, every time I see a streamer's bedroom I just want to make a post demanding they tidy up.

You know how to make someone feel old? Say "Remember a decade ago..."
YES YOU DO BECAUSE YOU'RE OLD.

Now i'm hoping that PA can replace FA for me one day.

Oneday, it can. Ten years down the line when it has been refined by sheer time input, like a diamond in the earth.

Right now, someone like me knows the importance of the retro game maintenance scene. I would like to see FAF returned to functionality.

I am just sad to see his work get hassled if it was in fact, honestly if it were my work nobody would get it from me neither if by "demand" alone. Then again, wasn't there not very much binding him to listen to the others? If he simply rerouted all contact information into a dump folder somewhere in internet void, and continued doing what he's doing, nobody would have blamed him really. If he came back and rehooked FAF back up, I am sure everyone could even agree on a measure of cooperation on whatever both sides want. Because nobody wants this for sure.

yes the source was readily available.

well there are definitely things we could improve on, like making a native linux version (which would then hook onto the (rated-platinum) Wine-FA). but apart from that like @cola_colin said it's 3+ years worth of improving upon, not by just zep, but a whole ton of other coders, of course none were ever working full time.

But I'm really devastated now because one element we will most certainly loose is galactic war, which was an indigogo campaign by zep and his own property, there would probably be legal issues with putting that back up and I doubt the source for it was ever disclosed.

tried but I can't get page two. it redirects to faf.com
https://www.google.fr/search?client...r.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8546&start=2
help?

It is a bit sad when a large, popular project such as FA Forever is taken down in such a manner. I guess some people just don't want such a thing to live on without them being involved.

No doubt the community will scrambled to get the FA Reborn project up and running though. It is a bit of a shame that such a lot of work and code will be reimplemented from scratch or written based on the decompiled client code, when working code was already out there.

Such is the power of ego? Best of luck to all of you FA players out there, I hope you come up with a solution to this loss.

You want start=10 for page 2 (start refers to post number, with 10 posts per page, starting at 0). Note that not all posts on each page may be visible, it depends when the Google bot did the capture.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/forged-alliance-forever-next-galactic-war
Looking at that, this is hardly anything new or special. I've been over this with Ubisoft and Project Stealth back in time. Ideas are very hard to copyright, and just a few small changes is enough to make it stand out as something new, rather than "cloned" or "derived".

In Zeps defense tho, it might be a "trantrum", but it's his good right to pull his property offline if he so desires. It's just not very classy to do it without any further notice. But I'm not sure what kind of service/user agreements you guys agreed to when you signed up to use his lobby.

I can't believe I'm going to be the one to do this, but I actually have a degree of sympathy for @thepilot here.

It's been clear to me through his postings here and elsewhere that FAF was very much HIS project. It's clearly something he is very passionate about and has devoted hundreds if not thousands of hours of his life developing, curating and refining. As much as I personally dislike the guy, I can't help but respect his dedication to his passion.

The mistake being made, here and elsewhere, is that people are calling FAF a community project. While Zep was a community member of the original FA, and I believe on occasion he accepted limited help from other sources, calling FAF a community project is a complete misnomer. He wrote it, he ran it, it was his. He was the developer for FAF in the same way that Uber is the developer for PA.

Regarding donations lost etc. I would hope that he has the sense to return any large donations made in the last month or so, if only to preserve some of whatever reputation he commanded. I'm not too sure how much money was at stake here, but I suspect he would probably have lucky to even break even on his server costs over the course of FAF's lifespan.

He's here reading this thread of course so he can clear up any factual inaccuracies that arise.

In any case - the point I'm trying to make is that when you pour that many hours into something like this, and then find that not only are people deeming it a 'community effort' but are also demanding access so they can 'fix' things you've spent days poring over, I can see why he got frustrated. Again comparing to PA, imagine that we as a community claimed credit for PA's success (and then shouted at Uber to open-source it because they have no idea what they're doing and we can do it better). It's no secret that Zep has a fairly sizeable ego, so not getting recognition from the community for the fact that it was all his hard work must have stung pretty hard.

Of course the whole thing could have been resolved better. But even if Zep were to apologise and bring everything back online now, the damage has been done, people have seen the fragility of having something so popular being developed by a single person, and people are already seriously looking at an alternative. Likely if he hadn't thrown his toys out of the pram, FAF would have continued largely as it was, with people still under the illusion that it was a 'community' project.

There are no winners here. Zep has lost years of hard work, and a lot of people have lost something they enjoyed very much and had no idea how fragile it was. Here's hoping that a true community project now springs up, and for goodness' sake I hope it doesn't have as much drama in it as most modding communities have (looking at you, Minecraft).

I agree entirely, it is like saying PAMatches is community ran when the community contributes significantly (what is any project without it's "user") yet the site itself is ran and furnished mostly by a single man.

"People" includes Ze_Pil0t though, as evidenced by the banner on the FAF website describing it as "The community-driven lobby for Supreme Commander : Forged Alliance.".

Last publicly visible donations, all from this month:

• €123.45 EUR (just yesterday)
• €40.00 EUR
• €70.00 EUR
• €20.00 EUR
• €5.00 EUR

or $328.23 USD, that we can see in the last month.

The issue here was also that it was a 1 man responsibility, imagine if PA was made by "Brad" only, the **** he would take each day i guess could drive him crazy.

I think this just shows how dumping your frustrations onto a forum can actualy cause some harm.

We sometimes forget(myself included) that there are people behind these games and communities, i guess being a group of people and a company makes it easyer, since the focus isnt on one guy but on a brand and a name.

When the focus of rage and criticism hits a person in particular, it can be damaging. So folks lets start being more polite around here unless we want PA to shut down like that XD(joking obviously)