Dear New World Interactive Developers,
When Sandstorm was announced, we were excited to see what you had in store for the next iteration of Insurgency. Many of us have put a thousand or more hours into your 2014 standalone release, and hoped to be able to do the same in a release that expanded and improved upon the game that we love and play daily. Unfortunately, on a recent livestream you announced that you would not be supporting Ambush mode in Insurgency Sandstorm at release. From both a player and development standpoint, this is a bizarre decision. Depending on the day, the #VIPLIVESMATTER 24 player slot Ambush server is ranked the 1st to 3rd most popular server on the entire game, edging out the other 32 player Push servers for the top spot. Ambush is a game mode that many of us have played almost exclusively, finding the other modes do not provide any lasting appeal or depth.
Over the last few years thousands of ambush regulars have kept this game mode’s community healthy and vibrant, often despite neglect and a lack of support on behalf of the developers. This community has endured countless game mode breaking bugs, maps for Ambush that are broken and unplayable to this day, as well as 6 months of frequent server crashes across all Ambush servers due to a faulty patch which was followed by silence from the development team. Those server crashes nearly killed off our ambush community. However many of us enjoyed this game mode and it’s community so much that we bit the bullet and put in a massive coordinated effort to keep the server populated, even as it crashed every few hours. It has been an open secret for years in this community that the developers have no love for Ambush.
Despite these facts, thousands of us will always remember the friends we made and countless hours of fun on these servers. Over the past few years many in the Ambush community (as well as myself) have donated in some cases hundreds of dollars to keep one of the most popular servers in the game going, so that Insurgency veterans and new players alike can experience the joy of Ambush. Over the last year and a half, almost 150,000 players have played on our original Ambush server alone. After thousands of hours playing and moderating Ambush we have many ideas for how the game mode can be improved, and we would be more than happy to share our ideas with you if that would be helpful. Ambush is arguably the best game mode you’ve created, and it offers a level of depth, engagement, and community that is not shared by game modes such as Push.
That is why we are writing to you, in hopes that you will choose to include Ambush in Insurgency Sandstorm at release. We feel that despite your past neglect of the game mode, it has proven over the past few years that it has broad and lasting appeal to thousands of players. We hope to be able to build an even bigger Ambush community when Sandstorm releases. If you do not intend on including Ambush, please know that we do not intend on buying Insurgency Sandstorm. (TRANSLATE)
View Letter to NWI: here
Petition Entries: here (updated: 06.07.19)
Español: aquí