Dear OutFox Community,

As we move closer towards the release of Alpha V, and after the issues we had with the release of 4.9.9, we would like to address some of the things that as a team we have noticed over the past few months. As a community, we're not sure if the addition of a Discord server has caused some of these issues and behaviour, or if it's the fact that we are more easily accessible than if we were on a forum or IRC channel. We are writing this post to make our stance and that of our staff and volunteers, as well as those who contribute time or content to make the game better.

We love OutFox, and still love a lot of the things that StepMania was. The name change was needed so we can sign our MacOS (and soon Windows) builds. There is no conspiracy about moving away from the core playerbase. There are no other issues about us 'abandoning' our dedication and efforts on improving StepMania via it's own repository in the future with some form of update from our team as discussed with Shakesoda. There is also no conspiracy theory about us hating 'dance' based games. Just because 4/5 panel is not literally everything we live and breathe does not make it correct for you to throw out misinformation or treat us in a way that moves toward literal cyberbullying to the team. We understand your passion and drive for the modes that you play, but this does not give you any right to try to enforce that view in a negative manner towards us.

What we don't love at all is continued demands and entitlement - something that over the past two to three months has begun to get extremely volatile from certain communities and individuals. OutFox is not our life or existence. OutFox also is not our job. We code and develop (and support) OutFox as our fun and to drive us to do better. We will always do our best to fix things or do things as fast as possible, including updates, bugfixes, support, handling feature requests, supporting legacy 5.1/5.0 code, providing support for players who don't even use OutFox, etc. This also is true when that demand is your first or one of your only interactions with our team or server.

Before you ask us, (or anyone else in your life) to do something for you, please take time to carefully consider what you are asking for, and where this expectation has come from. We are extremely patient and generous here at Project OutFox, so some expectation of us for very little in return is something we have become used to; including community support, bug support, even code support and providing test builds to fix issues folks have. What you are not entitled to however, is to expect some defined service level or response time, or to demand information at a whim. We do things as quickly as constraints of life allow. Whether that be minutes, hours, days or weeks, you have no entitlement to expect one or the other. The game gets improvements as and when - if you cannot see the improvements this brings to your specific mode of play, then that is a shame. As we improve the engine it benefits more than just a specified mode, and this is the future of OutFox. It will become more than what it was when we took the reins, and that is to support a brand new rhythm game sandbox moving forward.

We thank you for continuing to support the project, but for the sanity of the team, we felt this issue needs to be addressed before it gets out of hand, or worse we suffer from the demands of people who do not consider how their actions affect the team.

~Project OutFox Team