but more seriously, i guess i should apologize for how this run has gone. we all know by now that the game turned out to be a complete disaster, with egregious mistakes made throughout. i wasn't personally responsible for most of what upset our players, but regardless of how it happened, people grew jaded with the game. their collective enthusiasm and all of the goodwill we had at the start of the run (believe it or not, 50 people signed up to play mercs 3) evaporated, leaving behind an empty shell. mercs became an eyesore that everyone wished would just go away.
the goal of this change in administration was never to make mercs fun again - it was far too late for that - but simply to end the game as quickly and as cleanly as possible. thanks to our awesome playerbase and impeccable ruleset, most would argue that neither of these objectives was achieved. be that as it may, we did what we could - and for better or for worse, deserving or not, our winner has emerged from the wreckage. incident resolved.
i'd like to thank our players for bothering to stick with us, my fellow admins for helping out, our various proxies and replacements for keeping the game afloat, and even our few casual voters for following the topics. i begrudge nothing to the people who quit and even sympathize with them - fighting is just something i do until i stop having fun. that's the way it was for me in mercs 2, and i'm sure it would have been the same here. but for others, fighting is a process you go through until you win. this 'timeline' was for them.
in closing, i'm sorry that everyone has had to spend two and a half years putting up with a poorly conceived and poorly executed game that i helped to create. to put it uncharitably, too many things went wrong to count. i hope that some of you were able to derive at least some modicum of enjoyment from mercenaries 3 despite this.
-hgr (i don't speak for anyone else on the admin team with these comments)
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