Cold War: The Iron Curtain – A Letter of Resignation
If you stumbled across this mod, you probably made a good choice. I have to say, it’s great! Any I’m not only saying that because I worked on it a lot.
But this description is a lot different than others.
I will now explain, why there is a new workshop page and what the story behind Cold War – The Iron Curtain is. What I explain below is the truth I know and have been told. If you view is different, well you could have told me, right?
swf541, starwarsfan541, or just "swf" like everybody calls him is the current project leader of Cold War: The Iron Curtain – A World Divided. As of the 29th July 2018, he decided to host the mod himself, thus not caring about losing the over 100.000 subscribers who subbed to this mod. This is fine, sure, though he could have asked me, which he didn’t do. I wouldn’t be writing this message if it was different.
Why he decided to host a new page is not entirely clear to me, probably to push out updates faster (which he failed to do in the past) and to put up his middle finger to my face. What does this mean? Good Question, let me explain:
This mod was created by "Riprap", with the idea to recreate the whole Cold War in Hearts of Iron IV. Problem was, he couldn’t code, so he needed coders. He stumbled across "Hans" who hosted to mod originally on the Workshop, when it was first released. But the mod was extremely buggy, not because of any bad coding skill but just a lack of experience and a project too big to be completed by just one person. By the summer of 2017, the mod had become unplayable and Hans didn’t want to work on the mod anymore. A new coder had to be found. This is when "swf541" stepped in, but not as a regular coder. He had lots of experience in the past with modding other Paradox games like CK2. He made an agreement with Riprap: They both own the mod in a same manner. This means, if their ideas would step too far away from each other, one could take the decision and ‘take’ the mod to him and put his name on it, and so, creating a new mod with all the content of the other. This is called a "fork".
Everything was going well and there were no big problems until September 2017, somebody told swf, I was spying on his CK2 project (publically available on GitHub I’d like to point out), and he took the decision to leave, deleting the workshop mod and leaving everyone with just questions and no answers. I took the initiative with Riprap to reupload the mod (and I still was in charge of updating it until this 29th July 2018) and we managed to reconcile with swf after he leaked all our files to the other Cold War project and told them they could use everything they wanted (which they didn’t do, as confirmed later). This although left me in charge of the Workshop page. As you were able to see here before, I tried to make it always look great. I tried to improve it as best as I could with images and html coding (compared to the new page). We then thought everything was over.
Now sadly, the fork happened in Februrary 2018. Riprap was leading the mod, but swf was doing most of the work (I stepped in as a regular developer shortly after swf started hosting the workshop when Hans left) and it was going well. But some people weren’t happy the way Riprap asked them to work on this and that, so a coup was organized (I was part of it, but only at the very beginning, as time zone differences forced me to go to sleep). When I came back the day later, the whole coup chat had exploded. Riprap didn’t want to give leadership away and was blown away by the coup attempt. I won’t bother everyone with the details, but it was just a huge mess. But, to my surprise, no ranks changed on the Discord server. I expected swf to be in charge, but this wasn’t the case. What I didn’t know: Somebody (I still don’t know who it was as of today) told swf and others that I was trying to coup the mod, which I never had any intention for.
The Mod then split in 2: On camp, led by swf, with others he recruited shortly after. Their main bonus was swf himself, as he was in charge of creating the focus trees. He also had a lot more time than me, as I had to focus on university.
On the other side were me, “Generalis” and Riprap with the remains of those who didn’t want to join over. Instead of having one in charge, we formed the “Council” with 3 people taking decisions together (something that I really missed later on). Our bonus was the workshop page, but our negative was the lack of a focus tree coder. Coding wise in general, swf and I were on the same level so this wasn’t a real issue.
I realized that we shouldn’t stay divided, for the sake of the community at least. I messaged swf and a long discussion began, resulting in both sides joining together again under the lead of swf (which was all he wanted from the start?).
Then, leaving out some issues every big team sometimes has, we grew bigger and everything was going well, although some people (me included) weren’t happy with recent decisions taken by the lead, but soon silenced again.
Today, I realized that this mod has bothered me way more than it should have in the past year. I was often stressed and couldn’t concentrate on what was important because this mod made up a big piece of my free time. This is why I write this, my letter of resignation.
I thank everyone who supported me, who asked me not to leave and who were always friendly to me. Thank you very much guys!
This is where my journey ends.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1458561226
Stuffi
Required items:
Click the title to search on this site.
Cold War: The Iron Curtain - Music — Steam Workshop
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
