Arclegger

Arclegger · @Arclegger

5th Apr 2019 from TwitLonger

Dear H1 community,

Let’s be real, the game no matter what will always be known as H1. This is something we said many times through all the name changes and it’s what I will refer to it as here on out.

I would first like to take this time to apologize to the survival community. I personally feel like I took a hard left turn somewhere in 2015 when I saw the battle royale mode start to pick up and I left for greener pastures. I had a lot of fun creating and helping make that survival world we all had fun playing the true H1Z1 and I wish I had put more time into it. But being in the moment and seeing what was going on with the BR mode and now huge genre, it was too hard to not want to be a part of. I hope you accept my apology as a dev. Now in terms of what happened to the game after 2015, I had no control over or was ever in charge of. Once I left for BR that was the end of my tenure on the survival portion.

To the BR community I want to thank you all for helping me grow in the good times and in the bad and while it was a roller coaster of emotions I am very grateful for having experienced it all.

To Playerunknown, thank you for creating your mod on Arma 3. Without it I don’t think people would be playing what they are playing today, there would likely be no pro scene for players, streaming would look a lot different and so would peoples careers. Your mod helped start a revolution and I couldn’t be more happier that I was there in the beginning working with you side by side.

To Jace, thank you for being the biggest fan of the game more than anyone could ever know. Without your love and support for the game it would have been shut down a long time ago (I don’t know what daybreaks/NantG plans are for the game but without Jace it would’ve been shut down a while ago I can guarantee that). You could have created and got funding for a league for any game and you chose ours because you were a fan and loved it and only wanted the best for it. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you and you had to take a ton of heat but I know you only meant the best for the game in your heart

To Miranda, thank you for teaching me what it takes to live in the esports world or should I say E-Sports (she hates that). I learned so very much from working with you and it was the part I grew the most in for sure.

To Castoro, you are the man dude. You believed in me the most when most never gave me the time of day. I hope we can work together, like now.

To Whisenhunt and Smed and the original H1 dev team. We did something very special guys and I love so very much working with you all.

To my spectate/observer crew. We had the most Herculean task of showing the world how to view a BR tournament and I think we did a hell of a job considering we had no experience starting out. Our casts of the invitational and elite series and pro league were top notch and I don’t think people really understand how hard it is to capture the action the way we were able to do it. I’m so proud of you guys.

To Lirik, I don’t care what anyone says if you never played the games you played and reached out of the box on the twitch platform then there would be no battle royale movement. You were the introduction to myself, our team, and Playerunknowns game. I’ll always love ya and respect your gaming style and work ethic.

To the streamers, and there are a lot of them. I will be forever grateful for the relationships we have built and the fun times we had over the years. Thank you all for playing our fun little mode and giving it a platform for exposure. I think the invitationals at twitch con were the most fun I ever had during this whole journey and meeting all of you as well as the players.

Thank you to Twitch, Daybreak, NantG, Twin Galaxies and everyone else I’m sure I’m missing. I’ll never forget the experience.

I have been extremely blessed over the past four years working on a game like this. Most people work their whole career and never see even a sliver of the success we saw. I got to travel the world and meet so many awesome people who were die hard fans of the game and that always energized me and kept me going when I got back home. I love you guys so so much and am so eternally grateful for all the experiences I got to live. Were there hard times, yes, did I have to deal with a lot of hate, yes, did I say some dumb things along the way, of course. But all of that was a learning experience and I am better for having experienced it.

Say what you may about executive decisions, budget spending, and all the other things people never see as part of the business in this industry. This game will always have a place in the gaming world and gaming history in the hearts and minds of everyone who got to play it.

I do want to touch on the bigger topics because now is probably the best time to talk about it. I want to at least give my point of view.

On splitting the game - I understood why the decision was made, two different communities and two different games sharing the same databases and perforce check ins. It was a huge hassle and both communities had to suffer through which game got the updates and BR was winning by a mile. I don’t like how the survival team was handled afterwards and I feel like they deserved a better opportunity to thrive and I still think there is a space for a massive sandbox zombie experience. Thats not up to me to decide though.

On combat update - Was very against it obviously but remember this was just after we got banned from China and PUBG just came out in alpha I think. Pressure was on the executives to make a move, it was just the wrong one. In hindsight the right move was to fix the bugs, fix the latency, fix the engine, and lean into supporting the game that people fell in love with. Unfortunately those things were starting to happen too little too late.

On a full revert - We brought this up many times but the work involved on the infrastructure side was very expensive and none of the devs really thought we were giving the players a good experience. We all were there during PS3 getting yelled at by the community to fix the lag fix the headshot body fix the hitreg fix the shotgun. PS3 was when we had the most players but it was also when we had no competition and putting in the money to try and make a revert work would essentially break the game and make it feel really buggy and really old. Especially after everyone has played newer and more shiny BR games since then. I know some of you will disagree and think just revert and everything will come back but I do think you are chasing ghosts a little bit. It was amazing because it was an amazing time. All the streamers were playing it, no competition, all the players, and big China numbers boosting the concurrents. The only way you capture that magic again is to make a new game that’s amazing or make a new genre that’s also amazing.

Finally if you made it this far thank you for reading, I kind of just did this in one shot and wrote how I felt as I was feeling it. It’s the only way I know how to write, never been good at writing something and mulling over it and rewriting 100 times to get it all just right. Always been more of a feels type of guy so please excuse the errors in grammar or structure. But I want to leave you with two quotes that rang very true throughout this experience.

“Be careful who you step on, on your way to the top of the mountain. Because you never know who you’ll run into on your way back down.” This was very true during the rise and fall and I always tried to stay as humble as possible, although there were times where I stumbled I would always tell myself this.

And “work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen to you.” And they did.

I love you guys. On to the next journey.

Arclegger

RIP Carter, Avram, Roy

Reply · Report Post