Hello everyone.

You may have noticed that there has been an extended period of inactivity with the project, in terms of player activity and developer communication. There have been a lot of things that have changed internally over the past month; one thing that has come about is this: I (TheSpookiestUser) am now a Project Lead for the Creators.TF project. I have put into motion a few plans that I have for the project, all of which begin with this restructuring and the making of this announcement.

Creators.TF is currently experiencing a large lull in development and playercount. Due to several departures (due to a combination of stress and an unpleasant environment caused in part by a now-removed staff member) and the fact that much of our existing architecture was originally designed by those long gone, we have found it difficult to develop new systems to our satisfaction. This has contributed substantially to the lull, but it is also true that there has been a natural decline over time as well following some suboptimal leadership decisions.

I hope to turn this around in the coming months. Creators.TF still has all of the basic things it needs to succeed:

We still have enough Patreon support to continue hosting our website and servers (though we may need to downsize a bit to conserve resources for later);

We still have a large existing community that continues to turn up for events when they are organized;

We still have the attention and interest of our internal development team, who are eager to continue working on this project should we have a plan to follow;

We still have a steady supply of workshop submissions coming in from various different contributors; and, most importantly:

We now have a path forward that will be sufficient to see the continued success of the project over the long term.

We have split our internal roadmap into five different Directives. These Directives are, in order:

Directive Alpha: Reorganize internal affairs to a point where staff members feel comfortable discussing and working on the project. - Finish in 1-3 weeks

Directive Beta: Develop a new system by which to serve players custom content on our servers that is both easy for our users to understand and for our developers to create and maintain. - Finish in ~4 months

Directive Gamma: Utilize our social media channels, existing community, and potential contacts to help establish and maintain our public image. - Have stable in ~3 months

Directive Delta: Develop an update that we can release to help draw attention back to our project and engage our playerbase. - Finish in ~6 months< /li>

Directive Epsilon: Maintain the work done in all other Directives to ensure that the project does not backslide into old issues. - Indefinite

The timeframes listed are currently estimates - they may change as we more accurately determine the full scope of the tasks at hand.

We thank all who continue to support this project - whether through Patreon pledges, content submission, development work, or just plain playing on our servers - and promise to continue development of new and exciting features without compromising the content we already serve or overtaxing our development teams. (If you have any interest in possibly helping with development, please let us know on our Discord by DMing our modmail bot (@Creators.TF ModMail#6049) or emailing us at support@creators.tf; official applications will not open for another month or two.)

With Love,

Creators.TF

Postscript: As a consequence of what was outlined above, there are insufficient resources to produce a full-scale Smissmas update. We will be releasing a small map pack (4 maps) in the next few days, but cannot provide anything more. We will keep you posted on the development of the next full update.