Recent drama has lead to the abrupt shutdown of LegionDark. From what I understand, its owner (R3P0FFXI) lost his tempter, and took his ball home. I do not know what this means for kupo, which was going to be hosted on the same network on a temporary basis. From the outset the LegionDark server has been plagued by behind the scenes stresses. I guess it finally became to much.
I have only spoken with R3 at this point, I have one hella backlog of messages to read..I was only able to speak to R3 because he called someone else who could hand me their phone for a bit. My internet connection has been out throughout all this and in the last 2 weeks my only online time has been at the public library. As it is the only internet I have had all year was because R3P0FFXI hooked me up so I could continue fixing things. He knows my weaknesses: KFC and free hand me down tech. Like Leeroy Jenkins, at least I have chicken.
I've helped out LegionDark for a long, long time here and done the bulk of the fixing broken stuff on a server that isn't even mine -I have my own but its always been invite only, that may change but I won't be running LegionDark ever, sorry guys. I can try and help get someone else up and running to continue LegionDark though after I talk with R3 some more.
When I first started helping LegionDark's codebase was a totally unusable crapheap. It could not do 'git pull' from Darkstar|master at all. I had to show everyone why they way they were doings was unmaintainable and could not survive long term. There was a lot of resistance at first. Within a week I had gutted 80% of it, but it could finally pull updates. A condition of my help was "if its fully retail, don't put it directly in LegionDark, send it to Darkstar and then pull it back to LegionDark after its merged". Everyone agreed. And then right away someone tried to ignore that and then rage quit LegionDark when I called him out on it.
It was like this with most subjects. I wasn't trying to control LegionDark - far from it, I don't even LIKE item level post lv99 gameplay. Nothing in terms of what drops where or what the endgame was like, was ever my decision. And I insisted it be that way because this ain't my server. I had my own server I ran, and I was just helping here. "Just helping" steadily grew to be more and more "cleaning up all the broken things" and then I got so sick of it when I couldn't even play the game anymore I wanted to just create new stuff out of sheer boredom, but I digress..
R3 was good about asking ppl on the staff for opinions on stuff, but the endless precession of lets have one million meetings and conference calls on every subject is so mind numbing that before long one pushes it form your mind and not only forgets wtf everyone said/wanted/agreed to, but one does not wish to ask later either. I tried to just make sure there was something in writing instead. once in a great while, that helped. Most of the time it was decision making chaos. Most past GMs always felt they should later be promoted to co-admins and be creating their own content to. This always lead to new drama and an eventual angry quitting. It got to where I just didn't care and tried to whittle away at my workload quietly without interruption.
I wanted to get the last batch of new content out and bug fixes, which would have added multiple new zones and 3 new endgame activities while allowing a lot of older boring crap to go back to stock so we'd ..I mean so I'd no longer have to keep repairing it to keep it custom instead of stock Darkstar, and the server would finally be able to "just pull". I'd no longer be needed for the most part.
Over the last 2 years, a lot had changed in expectations of staff. To protect the servers reputation, the reputations of GMs who were doing their jobs, and to catch any rogue GM abusing privileges, and to catch certain types of player cheats, I added logging to just about everything you can think of and showed other admins where and how to access the logs. For a short time I was also logging certain chat, where immediately I saw conspiring to cheat, and placing blame on certain GMs among other fantastically douchbag things. Some of our GMs were vindicated, having proof positive they were being lied about. Some others were caught doing things they shouldn't. Several loud annoying players seemed to think this should have been the other way around, and continued to create drama. New GM expectations and limitations were laid out for all to see: Your GM powers do not exist to make your game easier.
Some players continued to spread lies and rumors anyway - nobody want to think their buddy cheated and then lied to them about it, so of course it must be that evil GM, never mind those log confirmations or even the fact that there is no physical way to even do some of these things being accused of. Most recently just days before the shutdown, one of LegionDark's founding staff members (Loki) returned and was just willy nilly using his GM powers having been out of the loop (R3P0 is not so good at making sure everyone got the memo, though I'm not sure Loki would've have cared).
Naturally people were concerned about this. Drama and and douchbaggery ensued, bystanders got the poo on them too. I think if I had been able to be present I doubt this would have gone down like it did. Rumors were spreading, doesn't matter if it was intentional or not. Ultimatums were considered, leveled, and acted upon. R3 was not going to be cutting off the person who provides his hardware/firewall/os/vm support and spends a lot of real world cash on license keys and hardware. And the full extent of what he provided wasn't widely known (and should have been). All I could do was sit back and see who pressed the nuclear option first, and wonder if the server would survive the radioactive fallout.
Friday night R3 told me he shut the server down and that shortly after he flipped the switch he could no longer access the repository and that he himself left the discord. It is unclear if someone removed him from repository access or not.
I see atom0s left the repositories group. I still have local copies of all the code, in all its branches so that includes the unfinished in the pipes stuff. The database is preserved as well. I do not expect the same team to be at the helm if LegionDark returns.
When I spoke with R3 he indicated he was alright with someone else running LegionDark but with the express exclusion of atom0s and Immortality.
I haven't spoke with atom0s yet but was told he was looking for me. If any of "the team" starts any new FFXI servers, I do not intend to be part of it. R3, Loki, atom0s, Immortality, I wish you all well but I'm done for and didn't have any reraise so Ima homepoint outa here! I don't have any malice toward anybody, it just wasn't worth all the effort for this hobby project for the last 2+ years. Somehow I'd gotten way off track from what I was even here for anyway.
I can help whoever is willing to try and run an "lv99+ server with oldschool lv75 feels" see wtf was going on in the other branches and they can decide if they want to pick up where we left off or not but I won't be along for the ride. Honestly you might be better off with a full content reset anyway just keeping the characters intact. Everything I wrote is about to be public anyway, keep an eye on Darkstar forums.
..I must have "almost quit" a dozen times but was looking forward to my release of 50+ new custom NM, 8 new zones, and 2 new custom battlefieLegionDarks, almost the entire lineup of retails "high tier" battlefields - all of which would have been my FINAL additions to the server so I kept telling myself I'd hang on till that happened. When I first started helping LegionDark's codebase was a totally unusable crapheap. It could not do 'git pull' from Darkstar-master at all and had many copy pasted scripts that would trigger crashes. I had to show everyone why they way they were doing things was not maintainable and could not survive long term. There was a lot of resistance at first. A condition of my help was "if it's fully retail, don't put it directly in LegionDark, send it to Darkstar and then pull it back to LegionDark after its merged". Everyone agreed. And then right away someone tried to ignore that and then rage quit LegionDark when I took it back out and insisted it go through a pull request to be reviewed by Darkstar. After that a lot of things were getting shared back. But A lot of bad custom was still slipping in (like substitute stats on items) and often the review process was reacted to with unreasonable anger. AT LEAST 2/3 of the team members we had over the life of LegionDark did this: a "take it or leave it" attitude, and when that happens the answer is almost always going to be leave it. I eventually was too worn out to keep trying to teach a man to fish by the time LegionDark got more willing team members on board -
This entire paragraph is here because I want to apologize to you guys (you know who you are) that wanted to learn and do more, I am so so sorry guys but your predecessors really drained me. The new guy (Autkast) did everything right and put up with 20x more BS than anyone ever did before him on his pull request.
My feels for the players too, those of you not cheating your rear ends off deserved more than what I could give you.
Update/clarifications:
As I mentioned previously R3 had quit the discord, and when you quit you strip your roles making him the same permissions as a regular player. It looks like he tried to return and assumed he had been manually removed. Permissions did change but this was afterward. Mine changed to, so did everyone else more on that below.
Spoke to atom0s, says he removed everyone including himself except me from the repository access for the reason of preserve my work. Since R3 shutdown the server he says he was concerned the repository would be deleted as well. No official replacement host is decided on yet but another server was already given the character data to handle the influx of players exiting legion. On the discord atom0s removed the existing permissions and added all former staff to a group that can read but not post to the admin room. Still waiting to hear from Loki now to determine the fate of the server.
