Favorites, into battle! - 11.

Something feels like the Heroic spirit is in the air...

Everyone here spends their time voluntarily, for free, and you're no exception. But nobody is demanding money.

What time and what are we even talking about?
If we're talking about how many people do so much for the community, I can understand that. But. There is a "but." Baratorch has already voiced his position on this several times—he is not interested in SOD. At the same time, we don't see a fierce crowd of other Baratorches who will take on the support, development, and implementation of SOD improvements. Furthermore, allow me to remind you that the publisher-developer, whom all the old-schoolers (including myself) who remember the days of CD-ROMs paid faithfully for discs with every update, stopped the development and support of the game, vanishing into oblivion: I repeat, does this stop you from using amateur pirate mods in general? Or are you still playing from a disc?
And if a programmer at some point states that he is no longer willing to maintain this mod on a sponsorship basis and wants to somehow compensate for the resources he expends—that is completely normal (because this is precisely where the response of the target audience follows—whether it's needed or not).

And compensation is not commercial profit, but specifically compensation—a volunteer's expenses for maintaining the project—this is kind of standard practice. It's just that we've grown accustomed to freebies and have been spoiled. Times have long since changed... And if tomorrow, for example, the Creator says that some minimum subscription fee is being introduced on the portal, I will categorically support him and sign up for a subscription.
It is my deep conviction that a person should not work for free. And to reproach someone for not wanting to work for free is utter madness, along the lines of "there's no money, but you just hang in there"...
As for the fact that OX will gradually be introduced at the rules level—this is, if you will, a trend of the times—it's much more convenient to spend 6-8 hours on a game with all the restarts, rather than 10-12... Especially when it comes to meeting tournament deadlines. I'm actually in favor of introducing OX by default until the date of a possible "by agreement" re.
And in a paid mode for this matter, the target audience will finally be able to dictate their own conditions, needs, and wants to the person handling development and support. But until the moment of any payment, no one owes anyone anything a priori and has no right to make any demands, claims, or the like.
And right now, work on bugs is ongoing, regular updates and fixes are being released (aren't they?). OX is generally a very bug-prone thing in principle. Or do you want everything all at once? For a ready-made, ideal, maximally tested version to be handed to you on a silver platter (especially since we're talking about existing primary code with built-in bugs)? That's possible—but the price tag will be different (about two hundred times higher)... Ready to cough up the cash?..

Yes, there is some insignificant decline in the tournament audience, but the general trend itself is already such that without any OX, regular traditional tournaments are becoming less interesting: everyone has played everyone and then some, it's grown stale. The tournaments themselves need new formats. The problem with filling the "Favorites" tournament, for instance, is primarily linked to that strange commotion with discussions that was started, which significantly deterred not only potentially new audiences but also a number of "fathers." And on top of all that, the final regulations only appeared a few days ago. That's why many started registering in the last few days.

And for the principled—again, you can still find discs somewhere, and even computers with disc drives... I recall our offline tournaments of the early 2000s in Yekaterinburg... When sometimes 8 hours were spent just on restarts... We paid for that even back then and were happy: game discs, renting computers in clubs...
And let's not forget that in the standard licensed version, there are dozens, and now probably hundreds, of times more bugs than in the evolving "pirate" mods.