On one hand. I would be pretty disappointed if Feral Heart did ever shut down. However, on the other hand, if dramas continued to up-rise when it comes to efforts between staff and community (such as the No Mod October proposal and the recent up-roar that occurred), then I would say "so be it", because if Feral Heart were to continue heading in that direction instead of improving, then the game becomes more of a place of hate and toxicity rather than all the good stuff we really love/loved about the game.
Feral Heart was a huge part of what shaped me into who I am today. I was thirteen when I first started playing this game, and now I'm twenty-one. I hold a lot of great memories inside and outside of the game that are very valuable to me. If the game were to shut down one day, the only thing I would expect and hope the game would be shut down for is an ever-inactive user-base, as it would generally make the game's server really pointless to keep up and running. I'd rather that happen than the game end on a bad note.
From the Feral Heart hacking of November 2015 to where we are now, there have been many factors that have disrupted the user-base:
• General Chat's Closure.
In terms of the social side of the game, General Chat's closure did kill a lot of it. But then again, if it returned, would there be much of a use for it? Read on...
The vibe from General Chat was always so informal. It was easy to talk to anybody and everybody. People enjoyed that about the General Chat, and I think this is one of the major reasons why people miss its existence. Other than the informality, General Chat also served a purpose for role-play advertising. However, as far as my knowledge goes, with the Source Code in staff's possession it would be very simple to add a new chat for role-play advertisements specifically and I think that is going to be something we're going to see in future. With that said, that then gives General chat only one purpose; chatting to other users from across the map. All though this could still be beneficial to some wanting to be social whilst role-playing, you could then argue that people can just hold conversations with others in whisper or party chats.
However, I feel that is very restricting when you want to just openly talk with users, and defeats the purpose of these users wanting to talk with anybody and everybody and generally be included in an open conversation while upholding another activity away from social users that are not in local-range. An example of this would be a group role-playing one one side of a map, whilst there's some social activity going on elsewhere. I feel that General Chat's main achievement was getting users to communicate and socialise with each other more confidently and flexibly, rather than it being ease (as that sounds incredibly lazy). Hence why I spoke about the informal vibe it provided users with earlier.
With the things said above, we can't deny the fact that the chat itself was misused quite a lot. Whether it was spam or talking to a user in General Chat when they were in local range, it was still misuse. But with that, I think we do have to trust our user-base a little more when it comes to some aspects of self-moderation. If there was an in-game rule in place about misuse of certain chats, that could aid users with self-moderation to those who may retaliate to those users simply trying to guide other users not to misuse the chat and asking them to use it for its main purpose.
I'm not sure how well I worded that but if there's anything that doesn't sound right lemmi know.
**Disclaimer** I'm not saying I don't want General Chat back through saying this, I'm just giving insight.
• The Feral Heart Hacking of 2015.
This was a fairly scary ride. Not just for those staff members that were dealing with it, but the community as well. This event lead to a week or so of the game being shut down, followed by a re-opening with a new login system in place for better security. Personally I don't think this effected the game a whole lot, it's just a little more inconvenient. But at the end of the day the game is better secure than not secure at all. The only members I think we lost during that time were those who were never able to wrap their heads around how the new login system worked. Those people being the youngest audience the game had.
• The first ever Feral Heart Patch.
Let's be honest. The majority of the user-base lost interest of the game when the new maps took away the role-play vibe. The maps were too different for people to adjust too, and looked nothing like Feral Heart at all. That patch changed everything, and Feral Heart lost it's spark. It did a whole flip-around, even. Yes, there are new users that have joined since and probably enjoy the maps, but the thing is, FH lost the majority of it's old user-base over this mess. Even with new users joining, it's going to take such a long time to re-gain a big user-base because it's practically like doing it by scratch. The 1.14 Feral Heart got its user-base from the Impressive Title game by default. To encourage old users and new users to return, there needs to be some effort to at least re-vamp the current maps and effectively add 1.14 Feral Heart landmarks in there.
• No Mod October.
Do I even need to explain?
• The 2019 up-roar.
I'm not exactly sure what to call this one, but you should all know what I mean. This specific drama was created between "old staff" (the staff that left during No Mod October), and the "new staff" (the staff that were recruited after No Mod October), along with some influential members of the community who sided more with the "new staff" and their situations/experiences, rather than the "old staff". Just oof. This scared people off for sure. Long-term and short-term.
Even though FH has gone through a rough patch after rough patch, I still believe that with the right staff team the game could be brought back to life. But I don't feel confident enough with that at the moment, hence one of the reasons why I decided to reduce my activity around here to almost non-existence. But, I found this topic pretty interesting.