If you take a look at the Initial changelog (of season 1) you can see that a huge amount of work has been done in a relatively short timespan and also tons of changelogs in the upcoming year. Then the wipe was
"announced" less than a year after the start - followed by years without any significant updates. I am sure that this was the point when the development has overall stopped and the dev team started giving 0 fucks, otherwise we would have a great game by now.
While i don't see a problem with that, i do not understand the decision of running the game for almost 4 more years after the interest in development has declined. Kilgore is right, noone is forced to play the game, and it's free, they dont owe the players anything, blah blah, but the game was already very popular and if you typed "FOnline" in Google, the first thing that came up was always Reloaded. They have made a popular game with great potential and they decided to stop working on it.
But that's okay, perhaps they got busy in life or just became bored with devving, there is nothing wrong about that. Then the most reasonable and obvious decision would have been to give the leadership to another dev team (and as far as i have heard there were some volunteers for that) and let them take the legacy, and even though the source code has been released, another project just simply could not compete with the fame the Reloaded "trademark" has. So instead we got years of silence and a wipe, for which people asked because of the unbalanced pre-wipe-smelling updates during the first session, and which brought some balance and new client features, but nothing revolutionary. Hence the nickname "session 1.5".
I am pretty sure that the current Season 3 is nowhere close to what the dev team has initially planned, instead it is just a half-complete, bugged emergency bone that is thrown into the crowd to chew on and shut them up. Also the "i am devving for fun sometimes at weekends but that's all" attitude does not fit a game with this large popularity (not the player numbers, but the registered forum users and overall gamers ever found this game).
There's no doubt that the core playerbase (so-cal PVP apes) of Reloaded is above-average cancerous (Khans coming here was just fuel to the fire), and i can understand the fact that Kilgore has lost motivation to do anything for these people. You are right, you owe us nothing, but i don't think it would've been so much of an effort to say "Hey, fuck you's all, we arent developing the game anymore, there wont be a real wipe and y'all can fuck off finally". Other than that, they
are the majority, if we dont count the newcomers who leave after 2 days of playing because of disappointment/getting bored to death, or the 20 players that play on a regular basis today (bots?).
I love the fact that there are still many bugs and exploits that are thousand years old and would take few minutes to fix. The attempts to balance the server usually ended up with half-solutions such as removing reno locker instead of rebalancing its loot, or removing hexing "because of hex bots" which are said to be "easy to detect" and therefore easy to make an anticheat script against, or removing full loot to avoid new players being made RQ too early - instead of making a proper noob protection system. Just to mention a more recent case, Telltales got nerfed so much that they are not worth to do at all.
Other than all of that, to quote someone who wrote in this thread earlier, if a casual Fallout fan wants to have real PVE experience, they will go and play the original Fallout 1/2. PVE in F
Online should mean quests and group tasks that require player (versus player) interaction to complete to take advantage of the fact that its a
multiplayer game. PVE should'nt be about loners doing quests by themselves. Of course the game requires this kind of content too, but NOT at the cost of removing the two core aspects of PVP gameplay and basically ruining the whole thing. And again, there are little to no updates since the wipe so people are fed up reasonably. I think Reloaded still has the largest potential among all FOnlines, but the development has took a wrong way and it would be a pity if the game died this way.
The best thing about reloaded was the fact that you could get stuff easily and then just go and PVP, except there were a relatively small amount of places where you could find players to kill. FO2 has already implemented many good ideas regarding balance and PVP opportunities, but the game is an autistic grindfest and if you are not a hardcore masochist you wouldn't enjoy your stay there. All that Reloaded needed was more dungeons/random events, balanced loot, nerf to bottable stuff, nerf to grenade launcher, and a more balanced economy. This alone could've made it the greatest server and after this you could have thought about the next steps of development.
FOnline has been around for almost a decade and still noone could make a decent game with more than 200 players, and it's not the graphics or the age of the game to blame. It's probably better to let Reloaded and the rest fade away and look for other games, at least the internet can forget about one of its most cancer smelling places which is this community including the devs.