Lead Developer Change

[Ledmitz]

Hello all. The time has come for me to step down from lead, of which I've always considered myself as a placeholder for a suitable successor. Hopefully, I've proven that I can be trusted and that I put the game itself first, regardless of any content disagreements, which there will always be plenty of.
The reasons are many; Some personal, some qualification based and the rest is about the amount of backlogs and correspondence to keep up with as well as MR reviewing and all the rest of the time consuming aspects. Making decisions on content and game mechanics has also weighed on me.
I plan to keep my sound lead position and remain on the team, so I'll respond to any highlights/requests I receive. I'll simply be able to ignore the backlogs and I'll no longer have to relay admin related requests so often.
The chosen lead has finally accepted and I believe there's no better person for this position for a multitude of reasons. Some of which include; They are a former founder, the creator of Tiled(our map making software), the creator of Mana(the original official client which is quickly becoming up to date for official use), A/The Manaserv developer which is completely compatible with Mana and a very possible successor to TMWathena. I'm sure there's a lot more than what I've listed as his credentials.
Please give a warm welcome to our new(and returning?) lead and congratulations/condolences(hehe) to thorbjorn(Purple in game). I have a lot of backup and notes and will not hesitate to help in any fashion that I can. Thank you to developers, admins and players alike for your kind words and trust, especially since I lack knowledge in many technological aspects. I cannot deny that I was thankful and appreciative of having played this role for as long as I have. It has been a good experience overall. I am also thankful to finally be able to have passed it off. I doubt I'm needed to make any changes to my access myself so feel free to lower my privileges accordingly(to staff) and if you feel I'm okay to have access to something as a placeholder or backup key holder, that's okay too. I will not act on any unless requested to, in any event.

[WildX]

Thank you for taking over when it was needed. People stepping forward, even unexpectedly, is how the game has lasted over 20 years.

Also glad to see Bjorn back to his old position. TMW has come full circle with its original lead back in place! Another 20 years now?

[Bjørn]

Thanks for the kind words, Ledmitz and WildX! I'll gladly takes this new role for The Mana World, where my main hope for now is that I can enable other developers to make improvements to the game. I have some changes in mind to improve our processes, but we will take that step by step.

Since my return to this project little over a year ago I've been focusing on reviving the Mana client and until it is ready for a new release this will remain my focus. However, I've also been doing occasional patches to tmwAthena and server / client data, am helping with general server administration and have been trying to help others make changes to the game. I'm looking forward to see what we can achieve together!

Just a small correction, from 2005 - 2012 or so I've considered myself only "lead programmer" since my focus has always been on client/server development and not so much game content. And with having been away 2012 - 2024 as well, there's a lot of content in this game that I'm not aware of. It'll be nice to (re)discover the game incrementally as the Mana client becomes fully functional.

[Hello=)]

Thank you Ledmitz for all your efforts! You've been here with TMW in its most critical moments, helping us previous spring a lot, when things spinned into unfortunate directions, threatening whole TMW existence. When everything been hanging on a thread, you've been here to help with situation. I will never forget this. Hopefully we'll be able to have more fun/crazy co-op like its been these crazy days.

And welcome (back) Thorbjorn. Freeyorp called your guidance "Golden Age of TMW". Now that "immediate threats to TMW existence" are hopefully no more, its time to try to go forward, make dev processes what they really should be, and what ppl loved about TMW ... I'm curious what it can still achieve, evolving like it did for 20+ years. I remember myself as newbie - what I loved about TMW is: in between chaos, hype and life on volcano of experimental things - and empty abandoned worlds - there was shiny little green gem, TMW. Featuring balanced approach to development, gradually evolving while still usable, playable and yet extended here and there. On my side I feel what TMW currently lacks most is: new quests, advanced events and so on. These are "bigger" features - which could use some coordination and co-op. Thorbjorn proven to be helpful in these aspects, and his experience around (MMO)RPGs is something to learn from.