Staff Report

[James]

I understand that FL has been inactive for a while, and we know we deserve criticism for how the revival attempt has gone so far. I know many of you have your own thoughts on this, but this is mine based on being here for too many years. It is not fair to say that anyone "killed" FL, it died slowly over several years despite the efforts of multiple different teams. The reason why it's down right now is because it was already dead, and since then we've been slowly working on the necessary changes for a revival attempt.

We won't bring back the old gamemode because it doesn't solve the root cause of why it died off in the first place. While I understand that many people have nostalgic memories of the "good old days", the gamemode wasn't the primary factor that made it fun back then, and therefore not much would change if we reverted today. We're not being stubborn; we know it won't work because we've already tried it.

We plan to either bring FL back up with our complete overhaul or not at all. There isn't any other option at this point. We're doing our best to make the first option happen, but unfortunately, it's a lot of work. Regardless of what happens, I'm glad many have fond memories of FL and that it lasted for such a long time. It'll be nice if we can make a revival work, however, we can't make promises nor do we know when it'll be done. This revival attempt is also going in the opposite direction from the previous nostalgic one; it's quite different from older iterations, and we know some may dislike it due to some significant changes we've made. While it will be polarizing, it's a risk we have to take.

This isn't a sarcastic question, but do you think a release could be possible before the end of the year?

We are currently in the process of creating a new internal roadmap to gain a better understanding of our current position and prevent any further feature creep. We cannot provide any timeframes until the roadmap is completed, as the purpose of this is to plot the next steps required to meet our "minimum viable product" state. It isn't going to take another year, but I can't give anything more exact without having that detailed plan first.

i like it - you should make a roadmap for how long the roadmap is gonna take