On Transparency, and some tough questions.

[Celso]

Semirant wall of text. TL:DR at the end.

Greetings.

I've been waiting to see how things develop before making this post, and even though it has barely been 3 weeks since the server opened, after the debacle of the patch release of yesterday, reasonable doubts have turned into (I think) reasonable questions, so I'll go straight to them, and I'll try to explain why I'm asking each.

Before the 1.18.1 patch fiasco, doubts about the quality and proficiency of the work from the dev team has been brought up repeatedly by several knowledgeable members of the community. As these comments developed over the days, we got the announcement that the project has definitely grown bigger than what was originally expected, and you mentioned the amount of people working on it has "doubled", but no specifics have been given about which roles.

So, first question(s) is.

On the internal of the team. What is the internal structure (how many Devs, GMs, DevOps, etc), and has there be any change in the governance since the project started?

Meaning (and I don't know how to phrase in a non inquisitive / offensive way, so I'll make both perspectives as equally valid). If you have already admitted the project is overgrown, is it possible the initial devs weren't that much skilled and new blood that actually knows what they are doing are now involved? Or is it possible that the internals of the team are being plagued by the standard "I created this, I won't delegate, I won't let the people that know actually do what is best"?

And if it's not the case, and is all a number of bad coincidences that makes you look bad. What systems or procedures have you put into place to avoid these kind of dynamics from happening? Because no organized group of people is immune to this, and it's guaranteed to happen once a critical mass is reached.

Second question is.

Why is most of the development tree / effort not open source yet?

When this started, AFAIR, was all announced as it was going to be different from the Sheena / Business perspective, that it was going to be a "Community Effort", with (blackjack and hook...) transparency on the economics, the decisions, etc. And yet, for now, all we have to read from official announcement are corporate standarized communication, no answer on the Open Source part, and affirmations from Project Snapjaw main dev that it's codebase it's being used (With no confirmation or denial on your part), a communication shutdown for 5 days under the premise of "Big changes are coming", resulting in a blatant failure of a deployment for what it seems, was caused for not following the most basic principle on IT (You don't deploy directly to production), with complete radio silence after a non(?)-completely-successful rollback.

Granted, you want to do this zero-trust. Okay. How do you expect to create trust with the community if the entire toolchain is obscured? I honestly believe the only way of creating trust and having actual accountability (Or as far as it can reach, some parts will never be public I guess) is if everything that is done is done in the open. Every commit, every decision on changes to the game (Classes, tents, whatever), economics, for everyone to see.

Again, sorry if it's sound off putting. I think we all can stand blunders and growing pains, is a beta, we know what we're in for. But silence is allowing for doubts to grow. I say this in the best way, If you want to make it a business, If you don't know what you are doing, If you are already using Snapjaw and / or contributing to the restoration effort upstream but in an anon way, please.

Be. Transparent. To. The. Community.

Is not about things going one way or another, is knowing what the direction will be, if the original plan still holds, and what will be the community position in shaping it's future.

And on the community, my third question is.

Will we eventually get a completely new Discord community?

Meaning. It was specifically stated you were looking for team members to manage it, and yet, the people managing the current fan made one are NOT anonymous, at all.

So,will we eventually get a completely new Discord or other platform based community that is actually managed by team members that look and behave in a way that benefits the entire community, might be held accountable ||(Everybody makes mistakes, but an admin (authority) having a fast trigger (abusing its power) on bans because it can't measure properly (indiscriminately) has already provoked the first excision inside the community)||, and would also be protected by the zero-trust principles? Or are those principles more lax now?

Final Note: I wouldn't write this if I didn't care about the community. The initial idea of the server was good, but in such a short time too many reasonable doubts have been risen, and decisions (And lack of) from the team hasn't helped. Still, I would like it to thrive and things to improve, and I do plan to stay. But at this point i sincerely believe some transparency on the plans, state and future of the server is due.

TL:DR

- What is the internal structure of the team now that it has been expanded?
- Has there be any change in the governance since the project started? Lead Dev, processes for improving / making things properly?
- Is the project going to remain an open source effort, or has this view changed to a business focused one?
-- If it's to remain a community effort, can you please confirm or explain If (or why not) the restoration effort in Octo is being merged into the Snapjaw upstream? Or are they 2 different development trees?
- How do you intent to create trust to the community IF the approach is different from open source / transparent governance?
- Will there be a specific OctoWow managed Discord?
- What happened for the deployment of 1.18.1 to go so bad? Is the rollback even clean? Is it possible a hard reset might be needed?


05-18-2026: I can’t believe that the idea of accountability for what happened in discord is promoting the owner as the official Discord CM.
The writing signature is so obvious, that at this point you are just grooming him to make him a visible head or something. No person with a minimal opsec mindset would do or recommend a change of scene this blatant.

Does this confirm then, that the fan discord community is now the official one representing OctoWoW?

[Darktifa]

Good points, hopefully we ll get some answers...

[Montery]

I do think this well written post deserves to be answered. I especially second the concerns about the project not being open sourced, especially since they are using Snapjaw learnings without giving credit.
Less concerned about the Discord. It is a bit of a mess over there but we always have forums to use.

[Erdul]

I have definitely come around to this being open source now. I hope we can have a community poll maybe to decide this? both pros and cons can be laid out, and the fans can decide.

[Bunguspepus]

Definitely hoping to see more open communication from the devs

[Coffeenated]

I would like to see more transparency and answers to these questions as well.

[Catoblepa]

Their silence on these matters is not a good sign at all.

[Darktifa]

According to GM PiG, forum announcement soon™

[Kestrel]

First of all Celso thank you for making this post and consolidating these concerns of the community. We have been debating making public statements about some of these internally and this gives us the opportunity to address them all at once.


In regards to the first question

One of the first tough decisions that our team made early on was that it would be important for the security of the team to maintain an opaqueness about some of the operations. Specifically staffing levels and roles. This decision was made knowing it would make it more difficult for those on the outside to trust the organization, but we feel it is vital to ensuring the safety of those in the organization. Should some legal action ever occur, we would want any aggressive legal entity to have as little information as possible. Publicly announcing too much of the team structure would only serve to map what said legal entity needs to do as much damage as possible in one move.

We can tell you that we have absolutely grown larger than what we had expected, or at least much faster than we had expected. Our initial plans assumed a more Slow and Steady growth with most of our team being developers and devops while we very slowly built up a trusted team of community managers, GMs etc. As you may have been able to tell (and as we stated in our Join the Team post) our initial team was lacking in community management skills, and I have somewhat begrudgingly taken on the responsibility of communicating between the devs and the community in the interim. This led to a poor decision on my part that was not fully thought through in an effort to offload some of the community responsibility. I will touch more on that later in this post.

In regards to the development concerns, several factors led to the catastrophic release that we had this last weekend, all of which we are taking active steps to avoid in the future. The first issue that we ran into was the presence of some band aid fixes to individual players that we enacted during the first few days of the Beta. These small patch fixes put players data in a state to be corrupted when this 1.18.1 client/migration was implemented. These were not caught in our staging server because we tested the migrations on a subset of the now substantially larger player population. The second and more impactful issue which caused the rollback was the increased load on the server. On the staging server testing sporadically with 5-10 testers we had no issues, but as soon as we pushed to prod we ran into multiple race conditions when certain actions were firing simultaneously across the world in the same server tick.

Any developer will tell you that oversights like this happen and are unavoidable, but resilience and uptime are achieved despite them through robust systems (unit test, integration tests, 1:1 prod like staging servers, etc.). As part of our ongoing effort to improve the stability and reliability of the server, we are working on an official PTR and staging versions of all of our services. The PTR will be available to anyone with an account, and we are building it with weekly resets pulling down player data directly from production. This should allow us much more extensive testing befitting the larger community that we have now become.


Moving into question 2

First the obligatory, we are still dedicated to maintaining this as a community first project, full of blackjack and hookers and shellcoin to the moon.

The full open source question is one that we have had many many internal conversations (and research) about, and ties in nicely with the question about project snapjaw. Our stance is that open source is a great tool and great way for communities to come together to build interesting and useful things. However open source is not right for every project and there are significant issues with maintaining an active development open source project at the same time as trying to maintain complete anonymity and running an active server and community. Open sourcing a project even after just a few changes is significantly more difficult and risky than doing so from the beginning. Our stance is that if there were to be an open source version of what we have, we would want it to be base 1.18.1 with none of our changes as a pure archival project.

This leads nicely into Project Snapjaw, who have already taken up the mantle of working towards a fully open source 1.18.1 version of Turtle WoW. In addition to our previously stated reasons, we also do not feel like there is any need for more than one open source 1.18.1 restoration project. Creating a second one would only serve to divide the open source community further.

We have been made aware of claims by some on the Project Snapjaw team that OctoWoW is in some way using their codebase. We can confirm this is not the case. It is however impossible to prove a negative and thus the burden of proof lies on those making these claims. We saw a claim that there is "Poisoned data" present only in their project that they have been able to see in our server, but no evidence to support this has been given and we know it to not be possible. Given the nature of both projects starting from the same leaked code we chalk this up to a hopefully non-malicious mistake on the part of the accuser, as we have a lot of respect for what Project Snapjaw hopes to accomplish.

That being said, we of course have done an inventory of what the open source project has built so far to see if there is anything that we should look at implementing or learning from. After reviewing it in its entirety however, it does not appear to be in a close to playable state or capable of being used on any real production server. This is not to discredit the work the team is doing but merely pointing out what I am sure they themselves would admit, that they still have a lot of work to get to 1.18.1, and even more work if they want it to run in a production environment. Our long-term goals align closely with theirs and we look forward to developing side by side. When they do get a working 1.18.1 playable version out we intend to release a character exporter feature allowing you to take your OctoWoW characters offline into their client (likely sans new custom OctoWoW content).

As for trust without being fully open source, we have clearly seen a level of trust with other non-open source projects and look forward to slowly building that trust ourselves. As we are new to the scene and operating with a novel and unique model we do not expect to instantly have the trust of the community, nor do we think that would be healthy. Trust is something that we will build together through continued conversations like this, through improvements to the game itself, and through the dedication of our team. We will continue to gauge community feedback on changes, and make public statements on our reasoning where necessary (akin to the statements made about our Hardcore Changes).


As for the third question

I am not a community manager at heart, and our goal for this project was to be one where the community managed itself and grew somewhat naturally around us as we built out the project. Build it and they will come (and self organize) was our idea early on. In retrospect this was naive and when we started to gain traction we recognized that we needed help managing the community and controlling the flow of information back and forth between the dev team and the community. I took on that role and too quickly looked to delegate the responsibility of communicating to each platform onto an internal community manager, this is where Wolfe comes into the picture.

Wolfe started as a dedicated community member doing just what we had hoped would happen, forming a community discord. We knew anonymity for them would not be a possibility and made that clear from the beginning. Over time, we allowed Wolfe to become more integrated into the team than we should have. That is a mistake that lies solely on myself. As we worked closer with him, it was proposed that he step into more of a community management lead role to take more of the burden off of myself so that I could focus more on development. This of course was not well thought out and not a decision that would stick. As it stands currently (In case you haven't seen the discord message from Wolfe), Wolfe has parted ways with both the discord and the OctoWoW team. We are so grateful that we had such a dedicated individual willing to put so much time and effort into our project, we would not be where we are today without him and the entire community Discord moderation team.

Moving forward the community Discord will continue to be run by the community. We do anticipate communicating directly with some Discord owners/moderators when necessary to get a handle on community concerns, ideas, and opinions. Moderation of the discord will continue to be run by the community and we will not have any direct power over it.

We absolutely agree with you that transparency on these matters is long overdue, and we appreciate you giving us the opportunity to address them here. We hope that you can understand the issues with communication this last week given all that has transpired, and we look forward to improving ourselves and how we communicate with the community going forward.

Sincerely,
- Your Temporary Part Time Community Manager, Kestrel

TLDR:
- it has expanded mostly on the community/GM/management side of things, still are looking for more artists (2D & 3D if you know of anyone). That is all we are able to disclose
- Dev team has remained relatively stable in structure, still building out how we are going to structure our community engagement members and its a learning process
- It was never going to be an open source effort, but we support and encourage open source projects and hope to integrate with Project Snapjaw rather than compete with them in the future.
-- They are two different development trees only sharing the same forked/leaked code from the 1.17.1 hack
- Slowly and through continued improvement in our operations, with transparency where we can afford it
- No, Discord would rat us out at the drop of a hat
- So many things, some of which listed above. There will be no hard reset in the future of this project.

[Dracarusggotham]

First of all Celso thank you for making this post and consolidating these concerns of the community. We have been debating making public statements about some of these internally and this gives us the opportunity to address them all at once.


In regards to the first question

One of the first tough decisions that our team made early on was that it would be important for the security of the team to maintain an opaqueness about some of the operations. Specifically staffing levels and roles. This decision was made knowing it would make it more difficult for those on the outside to trust the organization, but we feel it is vital to ensuring the safety of those in the organization. Should some legal action ever occur, we would want any aggressive legal entity to have as little information as possible. Publicly announcing too much of the team structure would only serve to map what said legal entity needs to do as much damage as possible in one move.

We can tell you that we have absolutely grown larger than what we had expected, or at least much faster than we had expected. Our initial plans assumed a more Slow and Steady growth with most of our team being developers and devops while we very slowly built up a trusted team of community managers, GMs etc. As you may have been able to tell (and as we stated in our Join the Team post) our initial team was lacking in community management skills, and I have somewhat begrudgingly taken on the responsibility of communicating between the devs and the community in the interim. This led to a poor decision on my part that was not fully thought through in an effort to offload some of the community responsibility. I will touch more on that later in this post.

In regards to the development concerns, several factors led to the catastrophic release that we had this last weekend, all of which we are taking active steps to avoid in the future. The first issue that we ran into was the presence of some band aid fixes to individual players that we enacted during the first few days of the Beta. These small patch fixes put players data in a state to be corrupted when this 1.18.1 client/migration was implemented. These were not caught in our staging server because we tested the migrations on a subset of the now substantially larger player population. The second and more impactful issue which caused the rollback was the increased load on the server. On the staging server testing sporadically with 5-10 testers we had no issues, but as soon as we pushed to prod we ran into multiple race conditions when certain actions were firing simultaneously across the world in the same server tick.

Any developer will tell you that oversights like this happen and are unavoidable, but resilience and uptime are achieved despite them through robust systems (unit test, integration tests, 1:1 prod like staging servers, etc.). As part of our ongoing effort to improve the stability and reliability of the server, we are working on an official PTR and staging versions of all of our services. The PTR will be available to anyone with an account, and we are building it with weekly resets pulling down player data directly from production. This should allow us much more extensive testing befitting the larger community that we have now become.


Moving into question 2

First the obligatory, we are still dedicated to maintaining this as a community first project, full of blackjack and hookers and shellcoin to the moon.

The full open source question is one that we have had many many internal conversations (and research) about, and ties in nicely with the question about project snapjaw. Our stance is that open source is a great tool and great way for communities to come together to build interesting and useful things. However open source is not right for every project and there are significant issues with maintaining an active development open source project at the same time as trying to maintain complete anonymity and running an active server and community. Open sourcing a project even after just a few changes is significantly more difficult and risky than doing so from the beginning. Our stance is that if there were to be an open source version of what we have, we would want it to be base 1.18.1 with none of our changes as a pure archival project.

This leads nicely into Project Snapjaw, who have already taken up the mantle of working towards a fully open source 1.18.1 version of Turtle WoW. In addition to our previously stated reasons, we also do not feel like there is any need for more than one open source 1.18.1 restoration project. Creating a second one would only serve to divide the open source community further.

We have been made aware of claims by some on the Project Snapjaw team that OctoWoW is in some way using their codebase. We can confirm this is not the case. It is however impossible to prove a negative and thus the burden of proof lies on those making these claims. We saw a claim that there is "Poisoned data" present only in their project that they have been able to see in our server, but no evidence to support this has been given and we know it to not be possible. Given the nature of both projects starting from the same leaked code we chalk this up to a hopefully non-malicious mistake on the part of the accuser, as we have a lot of respect for what Project Snapjaw hopes to accomplish.

That being said, we of course have done an inventory of what the open source project has built so far to see if there is anything that we should look at implementing or learning from. After reviewing it in its entirety however, it does not appear to be in a close to playable state or capable of being used on any real production server. This is not to discredit the work the team is doing but merely pointing out what I am sure they themselves would admit, that they still have a lot of work to get to 1.18.1, and even more work if they want it to run in a production environment. Our long-term goals align closely with theirs and we look forward to developing side by side. When they do get a working 1.18.1 playable version out we intend to release a character exporter feature allowing you to take your OctoWoW characters offline into their client (likely sans new custom OctoWoW content).

As for trust without being fully open source, we have clearly seen a level of trust with other non-open source projects and look forward to slowly building that trust ourselves. As we are new to the scene and operating with a novel and unique model we do not expect to instantly have the trust of the community, nor do we think that would be healthy. Trust is something that we will build together through continued conversations like this, through improvements to the game itself, and through the dedication of our team. We will continue to gauge community feedback on changes, and make public statements on our reasoning where necessary (akin to the statements made about our Hardcore Changes).


As for the third question

I am not a community manager at heart, and our goal for this project was to be one where the community managed itself and grew somewhat naturally around us as we built out the project. Build it and they will come (and self organize) was our idea early on. In retrospect this was naive and when we started to gain traction we recognized that we needed help managing the community and controlling the flow of information back and forth between the dev team and the community. I took on that role and too quickly looked to delegate the responsibility of communicating to each platform onto an internal community manager, this is where Wolfe comes into the picture.

Wolfe started as a dedicated community member doing just what we had hoped would happen, forming a community discord. We knew anonymity for them would not be a possibility and made that clear from the beginning. Over time, we allowed Wolfe to become more integrated into the team than we should have. That is a mistake that lies solely on myself. As we worked closer with him, it was proposed that he step into more of a community management lead role to take more of the burden off of myself so that I could focus more on development. This of course was not well thought out and not a decision that would stick. As it stands currently (In case you haven't seen the discord message from Wolfe), Wolfe has parted ways with both the discord and the OctoWoW team. We are so grateful that we had such a dedicated individual willing to put so much time and effort into our project, we would not be where we are today without him and the entire community Discord moderation team.

Moving forward the community Discord will continue to be run by the community. We do anticipate communicating directly with some Discord owners/moderators when necessary to get a handle on community concerns, ideas, and opinions. Moderation of the discord will continue to be run by the community and we will not have any direct power over it.

We absolutely agree with you that transparency on these matters is long overdue, and we appreciate you giving us the opportunity to address them here. We hope that you can understand the issues with communication this last week given all that has transpired, and we look forward to improving ourselves and how we communicate with the community going forward.

Sincerely,
- Your Temporary Part Time Community Manager, Kestrel

TLDR:
- it has expanded mostly on the community/GM/management side of things, still are looking for more artists (2D & 3D if you know of anyone). That is all we are able to disclose
- Dev team has remained relatively stable in structure, still building out how we are going to structure our community engagement members and its a learning process
- It was never going to be an open source effort, but we support and encourage open source projects and hope to integrate with Project Snapjaw rather than compete with them in the future.
-- They are two different development trees only sharing the same forked/leaked code from the 1.17.1 hack
- Slowly and through continued improvement in our operations, with transparency where we can afford it
- No, Discord would rat us out at the drop of a hat
- So many things, some of which listed above. There will be no hard reset in the future of this project.

I have a couple of questions regarding the server's future:

1. The server's intention is to restore version 1.18.1. Have you tried to negotiate with Capybara WoW to perhaps become a Western arm, since, essentially, both projects are "anonymous"?

2. Do you plan to use the leaks that Turtle WoW released in its final days to continue content in the distant future?

3. Do you have the necessary basic tools to do so, such as Noggit, code, etc.?

4. How stable is this project? If at any point the situation seems very difficult in terms of execution, what guarantees do we have that the project won't collapse under its own weight? I mean, we've already had our first setback; everything starts with mistakes, even Turtle had them. But what guarantees stability and a promising future?