We dropped the ball on Domination.

There, I said it.

I feel bad about it, but I hope you guys understand that we have a very small team here. We have approximately 1.5 full time employees (Myself and JB for about 6 months a year) and this is a large, constantly moving site.

The rest of the work is done largely by volunteers or people who are willing to work for the change we can scrape up, and we really appreciate it. (I think when you guys see how much quality content there is in Ep3 you’ll appreciate it too!_)

The major problem with volunteer work is you can’t really force people to do it. Sometimes people start doing it enthusiastically, but then quickly lose steam. This can happen for many reasons, from obligations in their personal lives to just plain losing interest.

Running a site like this might seem easy on the outside, but you’d be amazed how much work it is just to stay on top of your volunteers. We have to trust the people who work with us — we don’t have time to apply pressure constantly and remind people of their own deadlines because we’re so busy just doing the jobs we don’t really have enough time to do in the first place!

Now I don’t want to upset anyone when I say this, but since there was speculation on the bottom line: Episode 2 has by FAR been our most profitable product. We’ve spent a lot of time and money developing Episode 3, and it’s important to release it just to keep our heads above water. Yes, I agree that Dominations failings hurt our bottom line, but not nearly as much as delaying a new Episode.

So where do we go from here? Episode 3 is almost out the door. There will be some support that follows that, since last minute bugs are always found even following a long Beta period. After that, we are going to re-evaluate our priorities, and I promise Domination will be high on that list.

I’m also interested in improving the process — why was it that after a week or two of Domination enhancements most people felt the game was worse?

How can we have more themes? How can we have seasons end on a regular and predictable time frame?

So the tl;dr version is: I’m sorry it’s been broken for so long, but the major product that’s gotten in its way is almost done, so it won’t be much longer. As for the end date, I’m posting a new thread about that now.