Fizzer no longer gives a bloody damn about how we as a community feel. He will never listen to us.
I do care about how the community feels. I've read every post in both of these threads. I'd like to hear more from those of you who are upset or say you're quitting over this. Why does the name matter?
My guiding principle when building WarLight has been, "What would I want if I was a player?". That principle has been what's avoided all the pay-to-win features that most of the other free games are doing. And if I was a player, I wouldn't care at all about the name, and this is why I am surprised there's such an outcry over it. Help me understand.
He is just going to turn this into a "click here to play for money" game.
It's true that my primary goal right now is to make the game profitable. I wish this wasn't true, I wish I could just continue adding features and customization to the game forever and never have to worry about revenue or profits. That's the stuff I enjoy doing. I don't enjoy working on payment or advertising systems.
In fact, WarLight was ran that way for its first 3 years. It did not make even one cent of revenue, and I paid the hosting fees out of my own money. I wish I could have continued doing that forever, but it was simply not sustainable. As the site grew, the cost grew, and today it costs over $1,000 per month just to keep the servers online.
Eventually, we plan on doing a lot of marketing and promotion of the game. This is something that's been sorely missing in WarLight's past, and it's one of the reasons that it's still a niche game and is not well known. When doing marketing, it's important to have an easy-to-hear and easy-to-remember name, and after talking it over a lot and testing the names on lots of people we eventually decided that a name change was necessary before we should do any big marketing pushes.