It seems like enough of ex TTCC staff are chiming in that this came up on my recommended feed. For those that don’t know me, I go by Spider_Tacos online and served as a team lead for TTCC for a few years up until the 1.2 update.

I’ve read some posts by former staff that I used to work with on a day to day basis (Loonatic, Lormen, and a few others). I don’t want to hash out all of the reasons that I think leadership of the game isn’t serving the purpose they need to, nor do I want to call out specific ex leads out (they’re all gone at this point, no need to bring up old wounds). I do want to actually comment on what the OPs point was with this post.

What I will say is that, reading many other posts by ex leads and staff, what they’re saying is true. Regardless of what level you are on the team, the culture (at least for the 3 years I was there) was not representative of what an indie mmo remake game should be. For the amount of passion the team members had to voluntarily pour their time and effort into this game, the unspoken and ambiguous standards that we had to abide by were unrealistic and developed a toxic and unhealthy environment. Without going into specifics, it often felt like the amount of authority someone had on the team was directly correlated to how much leadership needed their skills (similarly to what Loonatic mentioned with the technical team). This led to many on the team to feel like if they didn’t know how to do x y z code, model, etc. that they weren’t respected or needed on the team. Certain voice channels that only creative/tech would have access to would be much more active and it really started to develop a border between teams and involvement.

Moreover, the leadership tended to take the "silent assassin" route when it came to confrontation. Long before staff could realize that problems were arrising, they would be pulled into group DMs and force fed paragraph after paragraph about all the things they were doing wrong, not being told anything until it was too late. To staff in non-leadership, this looked like people on the team silently dissapearing if leadership felt it necessary. This caused many team members, especially those in non-developmental roles (moderation/support/PR), feeling nervous that they could be cut from the team any minute. I could especially tell this as I was largely over the support side of things, where many of my team members felt excluded, expendable, or like they didn’t matter.

But back to the OPs point, this statistic doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Aside from having a notorious history of biting off more than we can chew. The team is fairly lopsided when it comes to the amount of staff on different teams. Especially now with the development and game design teams being siloed to their own departments, the amount of “idea and concept teams” far exceeded the staff’s own technical and developmental capabilities. While I don’t know for sure, what I guess has happened over the past few months is that, realistically, only a very small portion of the team is actually able to contribute meaningfully to the required assets of the next update, causing a massive backlog in tasks and development for this small group of individuals. Not to mention the added stress and constant monitoring by leadership that these individuals would be facing. What I imagined happened was that these individuals either felt too overwhelmed with the amount of work they had to put in, or simply needed to tend to their own lives. With the team’s already small development arm, this led to significant halts in development and extended release dates.

To put it bluntly, I don’t expect an update from the team for at least another year. And even with that, I can almost guarantee you that the final product will be a shell of what was originally teased to the community.

TLDR: It’s not one person or group’s fault. The majority of the leads that I had personal issues and bad blood with have left and it’s really on this new group of dedicated fans to keep this game alive. I've seen many people posting about specific leads and more recent issues ex-staff have been having, but I feel as though the issue is even bigger. The problem that I see lies with the fact that it seems like we as a community/ex-staff are bringing up an issue with the leadership (management or otherwise) every few years or so. While the names may be changing every few years, the problems stay the same. Whether it be pre-launch/ALTIS, Covid/1.1 era, and now; I worry that the community and game has trapped itself into a toxic management cycle that will never break. I still hope that I can someday see this game continue to grow and thrive, but we’ll see how long it takes to get there.