Good news
Guys, I've reconsidered my plans for new versions' volume and understood: big versions, that are in development for a long time, is evil.
You waste a lot of time doing it and make the players, that are looking forward to new parts of the game, stay in the dark about things for months. That's atrocious!
When spending a lot of time on development, you drive yourself to exhaustion because you don't quite understand when you'll finish. Therefore, I've decided to make fewer versions but I'll release it much faster.
Finally, these very news.
Soon you will be appeased with the release of the version 0.15 and with a little more of adventures of our great cadet Sasha.
You can start to wonder if future versions will get too small to be interesting to play.
I can assure you, in the next version, there will be lots of new actions, hot scenes and other adventures that definitely won't leave you indifferent.
Hope, these changes will be more to your taste and they will have a positive impact on the project as a whole.
It's not just that... it's the time to reflect on the journey they've all taken to get there. They're all so focused on the game, it takes a tech pause for them to actually look beyond their monitors (literally) and to see the thousands of people that traveled there and waited in the cold to watch them play a video game.
All these guys are veterans. It wasn't that long ago that they were playing "big prestigious LANs" in hotel conference rooms and basements with no crowd, no stream, and prize pools that barely covered the cost of travel, room & board, and food. They played for love of the game and for the intense competition.
Never in any of their dreams did they ever expect to fill arenas full of diehard fans, playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars; to be admired by kids and players from all over the world, to be seen as "sports" figures. And for what? For playing a game that they simply loved to begin with? This is passion for these guys, not sport. A kid who loves playing basketball knows that going pro in the NBA would make him a millionaire. A kid who loves CSGO/Dota just five years ago went into it knowing that going pro guaranteed absolutely nothing, except the chance to be the best.
Every single player on the stage was that kid; even the coaches, who probably earned more in the past year as a coach than they did their entire careers as players in the early/mid-2000s. There was no money or long-term career in it, they all just dared to be the best in something that had no other apparent long-term benefits (in fact, gaming was detrimental because it affected school and work).
Guys like GuardiaN and olof especially appreciate this moment because of how good they were 2-3 years ago when esports really took off, and how far they both fell after getting injured. The two of them for sure do not take a crowd gesture as simple as this for granted.
We're in a really weird time where a lot of the best players in the current "professional" environment were the best players of the previous "DIY/amateur" environment as well. They knew what it was like back then, when esports was a dead-end hobby and not a viable career.
In 10 years or so, none of the top pros will ever know what it was like. They'll all have grown up with/in a professional esports scene. A crowd gesture like this would be nothing out of the ordinary to them, but for a guy like olof or GuardiaN—right now, in this moment—it's the affirmation of a lifelong pursuit. It means absolutely everything.
