Thank you all for playing for so long, and for joining us on this incredible adventure. It’s been an exciting process moving from beta versions, especially adding and removing tech trees and developmental updates, but once we released the story mode, the response was simply overwhelming.
Granted, everything wasn’t always great. The community has had its fair share of bad actors and griefers, and as devs we did a lot of work to crack down on this. We were particularly interested in handling it via in-game events, as the bans shattered immersion; using the syphilis virus to remove bad actors in addition to the random spawns was, we think, a move that allowed the players to stay invested in the world. In retrospect, we probably should have used a smite event, as there became a marked tendency to think that any virus was a deliberate ban for bad behavior – we assure you that these were merely random in-game events in almost all cases.
We appreciate you staying with us for the incredibly ambitious Great War arc, and its sequel World War 2, which allowed us to introduce the nuclear tech tree in a very dramatic unveiling. It’s a long way from the Imperial storylines of earlier launches!
However, we have begun to run out of material for this world. The repeating event of Middle East Invasion is beginning to become a predictable drag for the factions involved, and there is a marked lack of interest in new tech developments. Further, as designers, we have other exciting projects we’re interested in working on and have to prioritize these new projects over maintaining the current ones.
We will not be shutting the servers down immediately, to be clear. We still believe there is a measure of entertainment and we have no interest in cutting anyone’s fun short prematurely. We do want to be perfectly transparent: A number of bugs and potential exploits will occur. We will no longer have the resources to address these issues. Again, while not ideal, we must focus on these future projects in order to ensure a high standard of production. We will, however, stop active maintenance in December of 2012. Please enjoy using Earth while it remains functional. We wish we’d implemented a legacy system for enjoyers of the classic experience, but unfortunately that data is long gone. Perhaps one day we will be able to revisit this with a Classic Experience, but for now we have to move on to the future.
Again, thank you all so much for your support, and we hope to see you all on our next project!
Patrick Tadge 