I think there is a 100% chance we can have JTL, but the only way it happens is if we get devs who are passionate about it and want to commit their spare time to advancing the code.
Let me share a thought with everyone that I often share with people I'm mentoring. There is one resource every one of us gets every day, and we lose when we go to bed that night: Time. It's the same for everyone, kids to billionaires. If that's true, then, in reality, the most valuable asset you have to bring to the world is Time. How you use that Time is up to you, maybe you play computer games, perhaps you code, maybe you walk your dog, spend it reading a good book or just snuggling with your loved one. Let's get real; this project is a passion project, it's a time suck, for the players it is a massive time sink, and for the developers, it's the same if not worse. We code on the game so much most of us never get to play anymore. And we write the code that is the game, the mechanics of the game become less magical because we know the code. It's hard to stay motivated to play a game where the magic is gone; meanwhile, the SO (wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, dog, cat) stares at the back of your head for countless hours wondering WTF you're doing.
I think it's hard for people to understand, but think of this, why do our devs (including myself) spend so much time here? We don't get paid, in general, we get lambasted on the forums, and people are always convinced we're corrupt and playing on dev island somewhere having fun without you all. All of us have different reasons, but some common themes are we are passionate about this game, we enjoyed it so much we want to share it with others. We also love to learn new things and to push ourselves to do something great lots of people can enjoy. But every one of us has to pay our bills, and we have friends, family, loved ones around us who would like to spend time with us doing things together.
The JTL decision is not about technology, it is literally about Time. Time until we can start innovating and being passionate about our work again. Time until we can create new things the community can play with and enjoy. Time to spend with our loved ones playing the game we want to play because we just committed a new quest or whatever and want to play with it and share it. Or we can spend that Time writing more code in the dark for JTL, with everyone complaining about how the project is stagnant and why don't we have x, y or z implemented and why do we let people camp this mob or that. Remember also this "quest" for JTL for us would mean many moons in a dark room, we can't release it incrementally, it'll be long periods of getting lots of systems working and then we can try releasing some test versions that people can use and test. It would be another year before that might happen at the current commit levels of our dev team and at the expense of getting the ground game done. Hence we decided it was time to move on, to finish the ground game and get to a place where we, the developers, are excited again and use that passion to implement new ideas and have the community enjoy those things.
Passion and Time: The fuel that makes this project move forward!
PS: I spent 1.75 hours today on the forums (I got up at 6am, it's 7:44am), is that really how you want me spending my Time on this project?
