User blog:Ishmael Venables/Pirates Online Rewritten Closing

Here is the message from the Project Leader.

Ahoy Mates!

I would like to take the time to address the community. I am the now former project leader of Pirates Online Rewritten. Many members of the POTCO community had very little faith in Pirates Online Rewritten, and we had every intention to recreate POTCO. We had our ups and our downs as a team and we finally have reached the point in which we have decided to let the project set sail for the last time. We are extremely disappointed to be bringing you the news that we simply cannot recreate Pirates Online. We are limited on resources, manpower, and skill. Many community members would like to believe that they knew we were going to close for some time, but rest assured that isn’t the case. The ideas and reasons that were previously brought up were far off from the real reasons. When we took on the project, well, when TheGleamings and X Jumper took on the project. They had very limited knowledge and created a simple walking simulator. This was just not the way to do it. They were pulling phase files into a game and setting them up. It looked good, but it wasn’t POTCO. When Josh Kenway took over, we were given hope again due to the fact that he had a team of individuals that have rebuilt games before. Unfortunately, they had some really pressuring life issues, and they were all trying to work on their own Pirate’s game. They couldn’t dedicate the time they wanted to Pirates Online Rewritten. Then finally, I was elected Project Leader. I wanted to focus on learning as much as we could about how the game worked, how the server system needs to work, and how to go about rewriting all of it. When we spent a good week just strictly learning, we discovered the ability to build create-a-pirate. This was done by Dark Shadow, Skipps, and Mike Wass. Then we ran into several issues and drama within the staff. Many of the developers could not figure out how to get along. Everyone was getting tired of errors and not getting far. Shadow Coder, then took a leave to work on her own projects. Open-source server constructs with similar features to Astron. This left the team with very little knowledge on how to remake POTCO. We spent weeks, the many weeks without an update trying to figure out if it was even possible. Yes, it is possible. When we started to figure out piece by piece what needed to be done, we simply realized that we do not have enough people to continue the project. We apologize to all of those whose hearts we filled with hope. Mine was surely filled to the brim with hope for this project and I am sad to inform you all what is happening next.

Those of us currently working on Pirates Online Rewritten are going to continue to stay in touch and a few of us are beginning work on other projects that we are more than qualified to complete. We don’t want to release any details on our other projects, but they aren’t of much interest to many of you. We wish you luck in your many adventures and if anyone is interested in discussing the failures and what code we have now please contact me at tom.fury on skype, or ofuryswtor@gmail.com. We will not be releasing a public copy of our current code, but will take all requests by other teams and determine if we want to release our work to them.

Thanks,

Jacob