-In 2016(Yes, nearly 5 f'cking years ago), new devs promise an update that focuses on fixing the bugs and instability plaguing ZPS by porting it to a newer version of the Source Engine. They promise to wait with adding new content so that they can push out the update faster - Dev team breaks that promise and turns it into a mega update with tons of content and spends over a year developing it, only to release the update with tons of bugs and lots of instability because they piled on too much work for them to playtest and quality assure - Community is upset. Didn't ask for all the changes. Don't think they were needed. Devs tell them to just go back and play the previous build on a beta branch(which doesn't actually work) if they're upset and think the game was better before - Dev team makes a few patches to try and fix their mess but give up - Devs decide, for the third time, to re-write the source code for the game and start working on a new update - Community is very upset now. Devs excuse themselves by saying that it's the broken code that's making their development of what should have a been a simple engine port take years to complete - Community suggests to turn the update into an open beta; Replacing the main game that is broken and unbalanced, giving the players a bigger influence on the changes and the developers more feedback. Community suggests to stop the mega content updates and instead focus on quality over quantity - Devs turn it into another mega update, spend over a year developing it and launch it filled with bugs, on a beta-branch instead of actually going open-beta - Community is pretty p'ssed at this point. Only a few bother even testing the build. The entire beta has to be re-downloaded from scratch if players want to switch back to the main build. Servers are laggy and crash often. The balance and changes are so messy that it's hard to pinpoint what the actual problems with the gameplay are - Developers get upset. Stop hosting playtest events so the open beta is completely deserted. Starts blaming the community for not giving enough feedback. Won't listen to the few players actually posting feedback because it's not enough feedback - The devs decide to work on another mega update for the half-open beta. They release it filled with bugs a year later. This time they double down on their distaste for the community and the idea that the game before they started developing had superior gameplay. They decide to add the recoil system from CS:GO, the melee system from Contagion. They completely slow down the movement and break the balance even further than past attempts - It is revealed that their main programmer has been working on Contagion for a long period of time after signing on to develop ZPS. He apparently prefers it over ZPS and also really likes CS:GO. Contagion received a large number of sizable updates while ZPS was stuck in development hell. They never bothered telling the community. Multiple examples of how he's turning ZPS into Contagion is presented to the community by concerned players. He's even caught using ZPS to test content before putting it into the an update for Contagion. Devs defend this, saying that he can do whatever he wants The half-open beta is still deserted and unstable, and the changes are even messier than before. Developers get upset. Start blaming the community for not giving enough feedback. Won't listen to the few players actually posting feedback because it's not enough feedback(Sounds familiar?). One particularly bitter developer, with an act for authoritarianism and a reputation for insulting players, gets upset and goes on a rant, telling players that he and his team know better than them and won't bother listening to their concerns. He bans several players, some permanently, for calling him out on his bitter and arrogant approach to game-development. - Community is furious at this point. Developers receive tons of backlash. They decide to take a break to think things over - It is revealed that during this break, the main programmer is once again working on Contagion. 1 big update, along with 3 patches in the span of a month of no ZPS development. Devs stay quiet - Nearly 4 years later and the game is still broken - and we still haven't gotten the proper engine port that was promised - Nearly 5 years later and the 3.1 build is released. The enormous backlash from the community force the developers to "tweak" the CS:GO and Contagion content. Not remove. Tweak. In very small steps with each, overdue update - The game is still a mess. Tons of bugs. Despite all this new content and literal world-wide lock-downs, the game still fails to gain in player numbers. Gameplay still sucks because nothing gets rolled back, just "carefully tweaked" for years on end