This will never, ever work

[Question]

Just happened to stumble onto this project from wikipedia, saw the last news update on the front page was in 2012 and checked the forum to find this thread.

I felt compelled to say this : I have seen a project similar to this and i got a massive sense of de ja vu looking at the site and this thread.

The project was a fan made MMO and was going to pick up where EA's MPBT 3025 left off before it got shut down in closed beta. It was supposed to be a mech simulator with a galaxy map and players would join one of five factions to wage war over planets.

At the beginning there was massive enthusiasm and a ton of hardcore fans from the previous games (EA's MPBT 3025 was simply the latest version). Some of these guys had been waiting for more than a decade for the next MPBT game to come out. Lots of people were offering help of all kinds and the team was pretty large with several developers, programmers and artists. They were making pretty much everything from scratch though, and got as far a limited alpha release with several partially working mech models from what i heard. They were releasing like one or two new mech models a YEAR (although they were more animated screenshots than models)...everytime one was released, the community would get super excited before interest dwindled off again. There was a lot of "what if" designer talk....how to design this, what would work best for weapon values, etc, etc.

The problem was that there was actually very little work getting done...the dev team was very hush on what was going on exactly. Everytime someone asked, all they would do was link to a forum thread, tell people to sign up for the newsletter, get pissed and tell the same story about how they had lives and were doing this on their own time. The most info we got was when they went to some convention and met the licence holders who gave them the OK to continue (whether official or not i cant remember) and there were some speculation that they might get official funding for the project and setup a company to make the game (which of course never happened).

Eventually i forgot entirely about the project. Many years later, i remembered it and went looking....i had never received any newsletters from them and their site had vanished off the net....after asking around on a fansite, i found out that the devs had simply lost interest and pulled the plug one day without so much as bothering to make a news update or final forum announcement. After many years the project had almost no progress and they just gave up on it. I tried sending the devs emails (found their emails on an archive version of the site) and not a single one bothered to reply. Ironically i had run into one of their assistant developers last year in another game (without remembering who he was)...he had been appointed forum mod by a games company and was going on a crusade mass deleting any posts that disagreed with his views, and was caught exploiting for ingame currency. Dozens of reports were filed against him and he eventually lost his forum mod status. Ran into him a few months back again and the first thing he did was start trash talking like a 12 year old and teamkilled me. With people like that on their dev team, i'm not surprised they failed to accomplish anything of note...

You can view an incomplete archive of their old website here : http://web.archive.org/web/2007091208174...s3025.com/

Not trying to rain on your parade here, but like i said, huge sense of de ja vu after finding this site and this thread...