Bryant it's because this developer doesn't know what he's doing, plain and simple.
He treats is beta team like crap, constantly gives up on his own games, starts projects only to do the same crash and burn rutine again and again, royally screwing all the people who worked on the game with him, as well as the players who ignore all the short comings time and time again, just to have some small chance at a game worth playing with a community of people that they become attached too every time, then lose when Mason gets board with his little play thing.
Weather the game is payed or not, doesn't matter to him, the server will go down for hours at a time, and he won't develop anything useful or fix any glaringly obvious issues, for weeks at a stretch, if he doesn't find it worth his time, it doesn't matter if it's full of bugs and problems, directly stolen ideas from other more popular games, or unlicensed professional sounds from those same games, even though he has a good sound designer to rely on, he'll still try to put it forward as a payed product even if he him self doesn't care about it any more, his attitude towards the audio games community is standoffish, dismissive, and arrogantly self important, and he never seems to learn from his passed mistakes, weather the critisism is respectful or not, because he seems to think that everyone is out to get him no matter what.
I thought people were being unfair, until I found out my self, I even gave him the benefit of the doubt when I joined the team, because he was having bad network problems, and seemed very depressed for a few days.
But after having my questions evaded constantly, my messages 90 percent ignored, and after basically, with out directly saying it, being told to fuck off and handle it on my own with inadiquit documentation, access to almost nothing useful even after several kiss ass attempts to gain it from the person who asked me for my help with those very things in the first place, and, after only allot of poking, prodding, waiting, and hounding that I did not! want to do and said as much. I finally got what I needed, barely, to actually do something half way useful with this game that had clearly been launched in it's payed form far too early, for several reasons, chief among those being large imbalances between players, server issues with lag, multiple spawning, and positional updating, a map that was too small, which had a bigger zone that was never even used, ostensibly for the admins, than it did for the players, only a few active admins out of several signed on to the project, issues with cheating using problems in the map, not enough activities to gain XP, lack of adiquit try before you buy info in any form, and more.
Mason said that he was way too depressed and that his network was way too slow to change any of that fast enough, and yet, none of it was enough to stop him from launching a payed version of his game at the worst time possible for everyone involved.
I emmediatly started helping out as much as I could, learning on the fly and talking to the community, answering questions they had and trying to explain that, yes, the game was good, even despite it's problems, which it was, while Mason tried as hard as possible to prove me wrong. I started working on the map after showing him some that I had made before, which he ignored, and teaching other admins how to do it, organizing where people could build so we wouldn't screw each other over, explaining commands that Mason never even bothered to show anyone, and then finally sharing the builder info when I eventually got it from Mason. I also made an audio demo that I was going to add voice over too but didn't get enough time to do so before the questions started piling up too much, wrote lots of suggestions down, something that he wanted me to do, might I add, and told Mason where to find them on more than one occasion, but they were promptly ignored.
I tried to help with sound design, but the most I got out of him was the original sounds which couldn't help me any, and some useless 1 word answers on how I could fix some of the current sounds that weren't quite as top notch, even going so far as modding one of the sounds by searching for it in a giant library, I just happened to have the right one, and showing him the result, which he ignored.
It's true that Mason was alright sometimes, even fun to talk to, but, comparitively, it wasn't worth it at all, for all the times he wasn't.
After being patient and as polite as possible while not actually feeling that way at all, seeing the server go down for hours, on a payed game, several times, even after notifying him that it had done so as soon as it had gone down and knowing he was around because I could see all his passive aggressive posts on twitter, waiting for updates to simple problems for days, doing the same for new documentation after builder changes were made, and learning that, the other admins didn't much like how Mason did things either, I seriously considered just ditching this thing.
However when the game was free, I remember having a hole lot of fun with everyone, even despite the issues, talking to cool people, playing this uniquely awesome game and getting better all the time, and I didn't want the players to lose that, so, I dealt with it, until I couldn't any more.
I tried the more hard ball approach with Mason, trying to help him help me help him, essentially, trying to get him to do things, or at least do things for me so I could do things instead of him, waiting till he seemed happier and not as upset, etc, but he started getting really mad when I did that, because how dare I ask him every 15 minutes for 2 hours to restart the server, nicely but firmly, as all the players that payed him money and builders that are giving him their free time for almost nothing in return are getting pissed at the stupidity of it all, right?
Meanwhile I am still on the forums trying to talk to people, all the while wondering if I am setting them up to be fucked over, but also knowing that the game it's self is really awesome.
It pretty much ended how you might expect, accept for that fact that he suddenly flew into a rage because, he told me, I can't do all this shit your asking me to do at school! You made me restart the server there! Your always pushing, well, I'd never even known that he was going to school before that point, nor when, and based on the fact that he was always playing games and tweeting durring that time, I asumed nothing was different.
I said I was sorry, but everything basically continued even when I made sure not to talk to him at that time, which, only fucked everyone over even more, since now he was doing even less, and it all culminated in him snapping, calling me all sorts of names, saying all sorts of hurtful things to try to get under my skin, and basically using me like his punching bag which, I probably should have seen coming now that I think of it, since it had happened to other friends of his, but again, I wanted to try this for the community, not for him.
I responded calmly, trying to have a conversation rather than a screaming match, but none of it worked, so, when he inevitably came into the game to take away my rank, I managed to do it before he could, and then left, maybe that was petty but, I was mad at that point, and still refraining from saying things about him that he was saying about me, which, would have fit him much better under the current conditions.
Afterwards I reminded him that I still had access to the game, because, it felt like the right thing to do, which he promptly revoked after basically saying, o, I gave you that, instead of making you pay first and then letting you be on the beta team? even though he was the one that had asked me to be on the team just before the switch from free to payed in the first place...
And that, is why we're all pissed, and especially me. Because this particular audio games developer has so few shits to give that they're officially in the negative numbers.
I'm glad to get that off my chest, because it's been upsetting me for a while now, but I do have to say, I don't want anyone thinking, least of all Mason, that I hate him. In fact, I wish all the best to him but, I really hope that he fix's some things before trying this yet again, or, alternatively, tries something else, and treats those who are their to help him, as well as those who are supposed to be supporting him by partaking of the services he is offering, in the way that they deserve to be treated.
