Hello dear Dwarves,
I have kept the status of Toadwater pretty close to the chest, really only mentioning the issues we face on IRC, but I feel you all deserve to know where we stand and what the future holds.
First, some background for those not current on the situation of the Toadwater administration: Travis Bates purchased the game from Dragoon (who purchased it from the original owner, Qill). Like Dragoon had his Matt Siegmann and Qill had his BoonZee, Travis has me as his tech guy. Travis did a lot of content, like the widely beloved peas, and he ran all the monitary aspects of the game - accepting and filling donations, as well as buying and paying for the physical server the game runs on. He also paid me, as I am not a part owner, just sort of an employee. My job was three parts - I wrote the "new" Java client after the old client stopped working, I added some less beloved content (irrigation ditches, lodestones, the physical part of the mines, the new world map), and finally, I did all the operational things: running the Linux server the game lives on, updating, configuring, fixing bugs, keeping things running in general.
It is not entirely clear what happened over the last two years. Travis was less and less present, and on multiple occasions forgot to pay for the server, leading to long outages that the more addicted of you no doubt remember. It was during the server outages that we first noticed that he would not even pick up the phone when he recognized my number or that of others associated with Toadwater. Around that time, he also stopped filling donations and paying me, although he talked to me a few times for short durations - little more than asking if I wanted to work even more on Toadwater, and promising to pay me "soon". As of today, he has not paid me in 18 months. He ignores all emails, voice messages and phone calls related to my outstanding payments or the status of Toadwater. As far as I can tell, I am the only one giving people their donation rewards, he just takes your money and ignores emails and PMs.
The last three times he forgot to pay for the server, he would always pay for it again and apologize after being called or mailed, but this time, we had half a dozen people call him and mail him daily until after a week he finally paid for the servers to come up again, but without responding in any other way. We can see that he receives the mails, he just ignores them. It seems pretty clear that this is most likely the last time he will pay for it - as of this post, he is already over a week late with the payments again.
This is where we are now. The owner of the game is totally absent, refusing to comment or talk to me or any of us. He is still accepting all your guys money, but like I said, he is not paying me and probably not going to pay the server again. I, for my part, am not willing to continue working for free for someone who treats me with so little respect as to not even respond to desperate emails. It's not that I mind working for free, I worked on Toadwater for free for years before Travis started paying me, and the payments never amounted to anything even someone in China would work for. But I don't feel right pouring what little free time and energy I have into a game with an owner who seems so determined to let it die, especially one who is basically stealing from me.
The other issue are the donations - how can I in good conscience keep up a website promising rewards and a game server for real life money donations when I know people will not get the rewards until they know to contact me and where I know the game server may go away any day ?
So this is where we stand now. I honestly don't know how to move forward, and would appreciate any input.
There are three options I see:
a) Let the game die through inaction and say screw the people who donate in the meantime. Since he stopped paying for the server again, it will likely only last another month or two, but may stop tomorrow due to our crappy current server.
b) Spend my time to keep the game up and running and disable the donation system in the meantime. Since he stopped paying for the server again, it will likely only last another month or two.
c) Take the game and run it myself. Other old players have indicated they would help and support getting a new server to run this game for as long as it has players left. This option seems a bit shady, since I don't actually own the game, but arguably, I'm owed more in back pay than the game is worth. As Travis still holds the domain and is apparently unable or unwilling to transfer it, we would eventually lose
www.toadwater.com as our URL.
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