Announcement Regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development

[Gleeok]

Hey Gleeok, hope you're doing well. Speaking on behalf of the PureZC Staff here.

We just wanted to touch base around a few things you have stated around PureZC's involvement - and us being "complicit" around the ZQuest Classic devs and their moving of the repo.

First off, an apology - while we did scrub most links to AGN at the time, removing acknowledgement of AGN's contributions to ZC development was a mistake. We have decided to restore those acknowledgements on our About page.

In the days after the repo pull, you approached us regarding the status of the repo ownership - David and I agreed with you about moving it back. We began conversations with the ZQuest Classic dev team to try to intermediate and facilitate a return.

I do appreciate you putting Phantom Menace and AGN back in the credits, and I will take that as an olive branch. But unfortunately this matter is not settled. While I am glad you realized you made a mistake and saw fit to remedy a part of it, on the purezc main site "Zelda Classic's Homepage" still links to zquestclassic and AGN is no longer an affiliate even though VG music and spriters resource is? It's a joke. Also your account of events is disingenuous still (see below):

In the meantime, you posted the "Announcement regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development" thread on PureZC. This thread served nothing more than to agitate the community further in the wake of the monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, as well as deadnaming several of the ZQuest Classic developers in the process. The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

I came to you and the other site admins on September 14th after every effort to reach out to the other devs was met with failure, or worse, as was the case when War Lord and Emily were on the agn zelda classic discord discussing the situation when Tim "decided to break ties with agn completely" and deleted the zc server.

This correspondence ended on your end on Sep. 19th, where I showed a bit of urgency and tried to get you guys to get somewhere in the next two days, and yet I waited a whole week until Sep. 25th for you guys to try and effect what you said you were wanting to help with. I initiated additional messaging to the zquest devs during this time after the 21st, and again was met with no desire to negotiate, or respond in the case of Connor. So whatever intermediation you did at that time was obviously a failure.

Then Sep. 26th came which was two weeks after the incident and we decided to make it public so the community could be informed. You see Russ, that was the last-ditch effort to try and get someone to come to the negotiating table. We don't go around banning users willy-nilly and threatening devs. We always try and treat everyone working on the project as family. Personally, I think half of the zquest devs would of rather preferred to stay on agn going forward and eventually working with new and old devs had they not been forced to deal with the aftermath of the Connor repo transfer, even though some might of dealt with it badly as a tribal sort of thing.

So again, Sep. 19th was the last I ever heard from you or another admin on the topic. And my last three messages went by with no response. To claim this was "in the meantime" and it interrupted anything you were doing cannot possibly be based in reality. How can you even claim this?

You declared us "complicit" after the PureZC staff held a poll in regards to pre-emptively banning you from the website - a poll that ended with the majority of PureZC staff voting *against* the ban. You had access to the moderator forums as a show of good faith courtesy of being a ZC dev, and in response you leaked remarks around your own ban poll, as well as other internal discussions. As a result, the website was DDOS'd out of spite for three weeks by another member of the community.

I just have to say first and foremost that your "pre-crime" staff threads are a step too far by any accounting. This is simply me speaking as staff myself and hoping you will try and end this type of behavior.

That's a nice story, but unfortunately it's just that, a 'story'. I'm not some random staff member that gets triggered by trivial matters such as getting "hurt feelings" from drama or anything of that nature. Look at every single one of my posts on purezc since 2007 and find me a single one that will give credence to any such claim. It doesn't exist.

And again, for the DDOS I had nothing to do with that. If you don't know why purezc was 'attacked' then I don't know what to tell you. You might want to try and talk to some members or even ex-staff outside purezc. I'm sure they will be happy to tell you. Someone might even be so kind as to post it in here for you to see.

As for the kangaroo courts you run, well it's already a meme at agn! and I wasn't even around during those years for any of that.

The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

I don't know about anyone else, but I was nothing but friendly and cordial to yourself and the purezc staff. If you want to make up stories to try and make yourselves look good then you can only fool the low hanging fruit. In reality you are not fooling anyone.

The lies have to stop. Seriously. The community deserves better than this tit-for-tat bullshit he-said she-said nonsense. You're not going to make everyone look good on the purezc side, and I'm not going to make everyone look good on the agn side either. The sooner you understand that purezc is not as innocent as you make it out to be, the sooner we can make progress on any front.

The lies must end Russ. The lies must end.