Akarrian Refugees

Fledge

New Member
Some of us here are familiar with the small-community MORPG called Whispers in Akarra that was run by Swedish video game developer Jens Bergensten, owner of Oxeye Games. He terminated the project in February of 2002, after previously passing on the project's leadership to an incompetant, fun, power-abusing party animal.

In the summer of 2005, Jens released Whispers in Akarra's Alpha 1 server package and content editors for public use. Many servers of Alpha 1 with new and unique, non-canon content appeared in the following year and a half.

Meanwhile, since the termination of Akarra, former Akarra developers have been working on a game called Dawn of Daria that was originally intended to use Akarra's engine, but later decided not to.

The following summer, Jens sold the source code and all abandoned content to a Canadian named John Pawlak for two payments adding up to $1750.00 USD.

John began a project that would become known as Whispers in Akarra Alpha 2. His poor leadership skills compensated for the talents of many of his co-developers. He deemed the project inactive, while his only two remaining active developers had continued work without consulting him for leadership, due to his constant inattentiveness. John fired all of his co-developers apart from those that were his closest friends in real life (whom had not benefited the project in any way). All were terminated without having been given any notice or reasoning of the dismissal.

John and his close-friends continue to develop the project in secret, without any of their former co-developers, while telling the Akarrian Community that the project is dead. The development IRC channel is completely inactive at the moment.

Many of the people that used to work on the Alpha 2 project that were hindered by John's poor leadership have come here seeking refuge, to help Solectral and BigRed work on their MORPG project.

Here is my humble opinion on Whispers in Akarra's spin-offs:
- Project Phoenix was the only spin-off of Whispers in Akarra that I don't consider to be a tragic mockery of Akarra. All other publicly-run servers as well as Alpha 2 were corrupt, unbalanced and badly developed. The same goes for the original Akarra when under Trance's leadership.
- Alpha 2 suffered greatly because of one incompetent person calling the shots. A keystone analogy works here, or the Open Source Development jargon term of 'Bus Factor'.
- Akarra was a good 2d MORPG system that NEVER reached its full potential.
- Alpha 2 has yet to have a capable programmer that can actually use the Akarra source code in a useful manner.
- John Pawlak is a manipulative, emotionally immature person with bad judgment and leadership skills when it comes to online MORPG development. However, he is academically intelligent, and that is about all I care to give him praise for. I believe that he is the reason Akarra's most talented developer, apart from Jens, quit his hobby of game development (Antoine Lemay-Joly, the Akarra player known as Felicia).

Here is a list of those that have or may come from Whispers in Akarra Alpha 2. Please judge us individually, not as a group.

Antoine "Felicia" Lemay-Joly <[email protected]> (Seems to have given up on MORPG development)

May-Lynn "SLJ" Chan <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

Derek "Firestorm" Aldrich <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

"Cade" <[email protected]> (We are having problems contacting him...)

Patrick "Chybi" Chapdelaine <[email protected]> (Will only join if Antoine does also...)

Matt "Xet" Gervasio <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

Aaron "Fledge" Cairney <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

"Miklotov" <[email protected]> (Swedish)

Shannon "Elerrina" Horbatiuk <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

Gage "Fyran" <[email protected]> (Might prefer to hang out on the sidelines, Major in Computer Science at University)

All of these individuals are 17+, about half are 20+. Roughly another half are Canadian, most living near Toronto. A vast majority played the original Akarra. There are a few more, but I don't want to include extremely uncertain people.

Do not expect more than a third of the people listed to become active workers here. Do not expect more than half of them to even show up here. Expect hateful spam from John "Veneficus/Slayermagic" Pawlak and his friends if they learn of our existence here. Expect to be banned from #akarra, if they ever start to actively show up there.
 

Fledge

New Member
Clement (Manifold) gave me these quotes from mid-August, for those of you that care about Akarra's grim fate:
(21:50:00) .John. <I'm Bittersweet Baby>: I just wanted to apologize for all those developement days. (21:50:14) .John. <I'm Bittersweet Baby>: They wasted a lot of time ,and were pretty hard on most of us.
(21:50:36) .John. <I'm Bittersweet Baby>: I also wanted to tell you that akarra is being worked on properly underground, and its coming really fast
(21:50:58) .John. <I'm Bittersweet Baby>: A new bunch of people, each one doing about 10x the work of any one individual.
(21:54:13) .John. <I'm Bittersweet Baby>: Wel lthe new team is excellent.
However, on August 24th, John "Veneficus" Pawlak said the following:
As for Akarra Underground... it might not even exist.
Calling the development team "Akarra Underground" sounds unprofessional and childish. However, I doubt that statement is true. I suspect he just wants to divert our attention away from the project, so he can release it in one big surprise; exactly as he has told people that he secretly plans to do.

Clement thinks it was a boastful feint.

I think it is ambiguous as to what he is referring to when he writes, "They wasted a lot of time ,and were pretty hard on most of us." Clement (Manifold) thinks it was a reference to "the development days" in the previous message. I think it was a reference to the voices of dissent that he scapegoats, primarily me and those that I 'infected'. That fits with the views he expressed when he deleted those chat logs and some news posted by Firestorm and I in the Akarra.com forums. (We posted news because the remaining administration had abandoned the forums for months and months...)
Veneficus said:
I'm quite sorry for all the pain I may have brought upon either of you, however, when someone lacks necessary skills, such as teamwork and/or knowledge of the editors and is lazy, they usually don't work for very long.

Fledge, I'm not here to argue, I'm closing this post. You seem to like to inform everyone when there's no one there to contradict you, however, every person associated with akarrian shards at the moment despises/'ed you, and I gave you a chance. I learned why they had those feelings towards you, you're not a team player, you're ideas/decisions etc may suit the odd individual but not this team. No one troubled the project as you did, but many were influenced by your venomous words and were infected by 'Fledge talk'. Unfortunately, to have any chance of bringing this project out, you and people infected by you needed to stop working, I offered some people a chance to work on specific tasks, but I could not trust them to be in touch with the rest of the developpers. If you leave me your address I will drop off the book there ASAP. Once again, you might not be aware of your bad social skills, but unfortunately, unless they change you might see similar behaviour directed at you from other 'team members'.

I would like to ask you to perhaps set your eyes on a different shard or hang around daria's forums or perhaps go back to playing RS or whatever you do, don't pester me please.

As for Akarra Underground... it might not even exist.
Yay, I am an infection of dissent! I'll add that to my resume! ^^;
 

Firestorm

New Member
lol, yes. I saw that. So much for trying to inform the public of what really happened. Maybe we should let Jeb know the truth of all that has happened.
 

Fledge

New Member
Jens(Jeb) knows, and he does not care. He does not disagree with us, but he carefully avoids making any of his agreement more than subtle; as he must not want to jeprodise his final payment.

To be honest, Jens has had the worse end of the spear shoved in his face; with the whole 'technicality' John is abusing to avoid or delay paying the final payment, allegedly half of the $1750.00 US.

However, it is unclear whether he completely agrees with us, doesn't care anymore or simply doesn't want to say anything at all.
 
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