On the contrary, bashing is not our style. It's too easy. Instead, TF21 took a more ambitious approach by directly involving ourselves into PR as military advisers, testers, coders, and lead developers in an effort to make it better. We created things like the Jdam, turret stabilization, and others. But over the past two years, hundreds of hours of coding, thousands of hours of playing, and countless hours of discussing game ideology with other devs in teamspeak, three things have become abundantly clear to the point that even in our own forums, there simply isn't anything more to say about the mod we wanted to love so much.

1. PR has no leadership.

When Rhino took over as operations lead, it was in title only. His technical mapping skills were excellent, but his understanding of game strategy was non-existent and his ability to manage people was even worse. The net result was no clear vision of what PR should be, poor development schedules and worst of all, developers were left to make mod decisions on their own as they saw fit, regardless if it harmonized with anything else. The mish-mash would be jammed into test builds and eventually released to the public with little or no thought to the overall gameflow, strategy, purpose and/or the resulting exploits.

6-man medic squads? We recently played that way to demonstrate its absurdity after we repeatedly warned other developers this would be exploited. These and other concerns fell on deaf ears. Nobody cared about the overall picture because there was no leader to do it; every dev is just doing their own thing. Forest through the trees. Over time, we left the development team because it's worthless to bang our heads against the wall pointing out common sense to devs who have none. So, "bashing" without speaking to anyone about the contrary? We've been bashing our heads against the wall for years. Nobody listened. The OP offered a satirical commentary with a side order of truth. If that's "bashing", I think we've earned it.

2. The BF2 engine will never allow realistic combat weapons to coexist with a realistic combat experience.

At the heart of this discussion, there are two types of players. Those who want realistic weapons, and those who want a realistic combat experience. Hardcoded aspects in the BF2 engine prevent both of these occurring simultaneously. You can't copy and paste wiki military stats into PR deviation then expect the gameplay to be anywhere close to real. Why? Because BF2 solders have no mass. They can run, jump, dive, and turn without penalty; just a 1/10th movement of your mouse simulates 220 pounds of solder and his gear.

PR.8 was a radical experiment in using deviation to simulate mass and thus change player behavior; an attempt to sacrifice realistic weapons for realistic combat. While it was successful in that regard, it was released while still in development which shattered any hopes from it being perfected. PR.85 stepped away from that approach, returning to a more run'n gun feel. Combined with a myriad of vehicles, overflowing ammo, and overpowered aircraft, this latest version of PR feels like the BF1942 Desert Combat Mod recreated for BF2. Worse yet, even if it were possible to do both, to have realistic weapons and realistic combat, people wouldn't want it. That brings us to the last point.

3. Creating a realism mod from the instant-gratification playerbase of BF2 is an effort in futility.

The vast majority of the public players, including a vast majority of the devs, don't seem to be interested in creating a realistic combat experience as the title "Project Reality" would imply, unless of course, you want to make PR only somewhat more realistic than BF2 without actually being realistic. In that case, PR is perfect. Otherwise, players who want something deeper, more intense, and more realistic will have to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, there isn't anything else. Yet. Some of us are looking forward to Operation Flashpoint 2 that despite its fancy graphics, is advertising itself as a brutally realistic combat experience. We figure, why push PR into a realistic direction when that's where OFP2 will start.

Long story short, TF21 doesn't hate PR, the players, or the devs. We just disagree with its direction (or lack of direction) and are somewhat frustrated by many things that happened (or more accurately, didn't happen) behind closed doors. Personally, there are a few people I'll miss working with, and Jaymz, you're one of them. I may not like your new deviation (and hey, nobody knows more about receiving deviation criticism than I do), but you're a good human being. Hopefully we'll see ya in OFP2.

Semper Fi