State of the Server...

[apophis775]

Mostly the same as the post from reddit, with the exception of sections 3.


So, I know a LOT of you have been waiting for this, if for no other reason than to get final answers. I will try to be a concise as I can (many of you know I can ramble).
Firstly, I want to apologize for how long it took me to respond to the community as a whole in an official announcement. Many of you know, what I do outside CM (when I'm not teaching) and I was pretty much trying to manage about 30 people today while also respond a little over Reddit on my phone
So, moving on from that, let’s get started with the easiest and now, most obvious.

1. Minijar
The first message was deleted VERY quickly by the vigilant staff on Reddit so many people didn't see it (including myself), but the report I got was that Minijar (one of our mappers) declared that he was resigning on Reddit and leaked the source-code, and that the post was made from his account. We were furious, primarily because of the trust we placed in him with our code, but also because we've worked with him for so long that it felt like a betrayal since he was part of our developer family (even if he's been less active lately). We quickly learned however, that it was NOT him but that he was hacked and his account hijacked. In response, we banned literally all the things relating to him as quickly as we could to contain it. I sent him an immediate message over skype alerting him to the hack. We have since made contact with him, confirmed it's actually him, and brought him back onto the dev team. I apologize for some of the "rash" comments some of our staff may have made when it was first thought that it was him. They were made out of feeling of betrayal because we are so passionate about our work. We should have investigated a bit more, but considering the posts were from his hijacked account, at the time it seemed like it was him. Please everyone know, that other than a stern talking to our entire staff about password security, he faces no repercussions. While he should have maintained better control over his account, you can't stop assholes from being assholes, so this leak is not his fault.

2. The Forums
The forum was not breached. Once the hacker returned and began using other accounts, we immediately locked down everything we could as quickly as we could. Once completed, we took the forums offline to scrub the entire forum database and everything related entirely to find any possible issues, breaches, or evidence of breaches. There were none. HOWEVER, as a precaution, we recommend changing your passwords if you were using duplicate passwords that matched our forum. Also, the hijacked accounts, we confirmed, all shared passwords with Reddit accounts that were simple works with a single or double number. So you may want to look into changing your Reddit stuff as well. Finally, the forums will be back up "soon". The issue is waiting for NFOservers to approve something.
Why we are closed source... WARNING: a big-ass-block of text, because I am very passionate about this, and if you read nothing else here, I beg you to please read this:
The primary reason we have always been closed source: Gameplay and Design. We have never wanted to remain closed source to discourage competition, make money, or do anything nefarious like that and that is the truth. Personally, as a game designer, I believe that game design and development is a form of Art. You might gawk at this and thing "SPEISSMAN IZ NO ERRRT", but I ask that you at least read my reasoning and explanation about SS13 and how I think this fits in. Because I think this will really help you understand why we've made some of the decisions we've made in development, including the closed-source one.
Game Design, done well, can do incredible things. It can be engaging, lead people through emotions, and suspend disbelief and enthrall people into the round. This is what we focus on, and hope to achieve. One of the biggest things that drew me to SS13 (and kept drawing me back over the years) was the discovery of hidden things in-game and cool things like that. As well as the experience of learning about many of the things through very basic understand (like a poorly written technical manual on a black-hole machine for power). The experience and enjoyment of trial and error to optimize it, and the threat of your experiment going wrong that might result in death and destruction. It was so interesting and enthralling to discovery stuff myself. We've tried very hard to not only recreate that experience, but do it in a unique environment.
Our spriters spent over a hundred hours going through everything in the Aliens universe to try and be as specific and true as we could to the lore to generate a specific experience. We are still working on things, but we are trying to give you as much of the atmosphere of 'Aliens' as we can visually, as well as hide some cool things to discover in the code and design. We want to create that experience where you discover things for yourself and work out tactics and strategies, sometimes we even get surprised by new things we wouldn't even think of ourselves (like the T-comms FOB strategy). It's generating that experience that fuels us and gives us that fire inside to fuel our passion, because we aren't doing this for money, fame or recognition. We are doing it to give the players a truly engaging and enjoyable experience. What drives us, is when we come up with something wicked cool and think "Oh man, wait till they see this in action" or "Wait till they find out about this" and then we wait to see the reactions of players when they discover it or see it for the first time. One of the most rewarding experiences for me as a developer and host is when we launch a new map (like Ice or Whiskey) and see how much the players enjoy figuring out tactics as quickly as they can to try and stay alive and fight on even footing.
The problem is that being open-source can be very counter-productive to that. It's hard to create cool minor things and hide them, when someone can just compare commits and see them right away. This isn't a bad thing for some servers (like most standard SS13 servers, which are fairly sandbox and more open) but to one like ours, with such a focus, one person looking and finding the new stuff in seconds and announcing it is soul-crushing to a dev team. Especially since that dev-team spends several hours working on that feature. We try to push the bounds of what you'd expect and throw curve-balls right back in your face when players adapt to something to keep the gameplay fluidic and interesting. Sometimes, this puts us under fire, others players love it. I know that it sometimes means we have a lot of balance work to do, but it also lets us create a really dynamic experience that changes and evolves over time as our players do.
It's creating that experience, that fuels our passion and development. Giving the players the tools to find new and interesting things, investigate crazy Weyland stuff, and create their own stories about rounds and mythology or legends. Like Bill Carson, A character that can incite massive rioting at the mere mention of his name as the Commander. Or Hunter(666) who single-handedly held off and terrified dozens of marines who were stuck on the Sulaco with him for nearly an hour while the alien forces regrouped. These are some of the stories and events that fuel us, and it's generally been my belief that with open-source works for someone like Bay or /tg/, it's less functional with us, because we try to rely on suspension of disbelief and not understanding how something specific works to generate engagement and drama. And if it's out there for anyone to search through, it cheapens the experience, especially to the developers. A lot of the time, we force players to accept things work a specific way, because they work that way, and this can be undermined when players can see why it works that way and then exploit it. One of the reasons I personally believe we have been so successful, is because we've been able to really limit that and maintain that suspension of disbelief. We've kept so many things mysterious, that it forces people to constantly try to adapt and work out new solutions. If we were to be totally open-source, it would crush that, and probably slowly crush our developers will. I know, some of you might not agree or understand this, but keeping the "magic" intact, is very important to me and pretty much me entire dev team.
Anyway, that's enough about that for now, and hopefully it gives you at least a little insight into our decision making on this specific point.

3. The Future
We will continue to develop as we have been. There are some discussions going on within the Dev team, as to the future of our source and what our plans will be. Much of our upcoming content, was not yet implemented so it won't be affected. Expect us to continue to work to provide the bests Aliens and Marines experience we possibly can.




Thanks for taking the time to read this,
Apop

[LordeKilly]

new forums looks weird. everything is crisper

[DMAN]

Nos-... Nice, glad everything's all great again. Also, if the damage stuffs is getting a rework because of this I just hope it's an improvement more than a few tweaks to counter the new wave of min-maxers who saw the stats. Keep up the passion.

[Hikato]

The issue is waiting for NFOservers to approve something.

The issue is NFOservers, silly! :P

[Boltersam]

While I'm sure most people *cough* Sheepgods *cough* will understand your reasoning and sympathise with your speech, we all know there's a group of neckbeards out there that want to ruin what you've built up.

And when we find them, we will wreck their faces. Mandatory.

Other than that, congrats on completing the forum purge and reinforcing the security used, you really have peoples' safety in mind!

[ZDashe]

Cheers!

I'm one of those who enjoy discovering strategies and tactics, and I'm glad our Tcomms FOB idea was replicated so much that it became a popular strategy on LV-624. It makes me nostalgic because me and WyattH were discussing heavily in the past over the ideal location for a FOB, placement and all that strategy and military significance. Soon others caught onto our idea when they saw us put it into action and started replicating it until it became one of the defacto FOB location. Was really surprised, but stuff like this makes me happy when it contributes to the community =D

[coolsurf6]

I don't know why but this who thing makes me sick. In what way does anyone have to ruin a community just because they want to be closed source. I hope this 'Hacker' does not go with us again.

Whoever you are, Don't...

[Tristan63]

I really REALLY think something should be done about marines not listening, particularly greytide marines.
Atleast make it a rule to follow orders unless utterly ridiculous or contrary to marine law.