Knights of the Force 2.1 mod for Star Wars: Jedi Academy

Ambition... And hunger for power...

I started working on reviving KotF in 2015.
My main goal was to restablish KotF community and make sure that players
have access to high quality of content which wasn't the case in KotF 2.0
I made sure to gather all the necessary approval from independent creators.
Every author of every skin, map and detail is mentioned in credits.
I tried to repair all the mistakes that were made by previous creator - Tim.
And make sure that people will respect the KotF name as much as I do.
This task was very difficult and the only help I got in the beginning was from my C.i.S clan mates who helped in minor but important things.
People like Dragon, Sidios and Molotov created very important features that became the basis for future content.
With a lot obstacles on the path and a lot of hard work I managed to release alpha version in November 2016 which included mostly MultiPlayer.
The mod grew on popularity very quick and I was invited to lead the discord server by The New Order and J19 and thus KotF modding team was created.
The New Order wanted to work on the code part of the mod. Mostly regarding new weapons and saber colors while J19 looked for model improvements.
I also needed a nerdy guy who could write descriptions for every Star Wars character in the game. It was this moment when Linken appeared.
I liked him from the start because he was loyal and trustworthy. I could depend on his judgement most of the time and he rarely did let me down.
We worked together on the beta version which included mostly SinglePlayer content. After he finished working on character descriptions I learned that he knows how to code.
His enthusiasm and loyality were main reasons why I decided to nominate him as second in command to lead the KotF team in my absence.
I ignored the fact that the launcher wasn't working after every update, or that I had to fix missions for him, because he was loyal and dependant friend.
His knowledge about programming and IT was practicaly non existent, he treated KotF as a training ground for himself, this resulted in many glitches and bugs in mod.
We never had any serious disagreements and the mod grew incredibly fast each day. Unfortunately Linken's arrogance and self-esteem grew along with it.
I trusted him with more and more things and apparently it was too much for him to carry. He became arrogant to KotF community and also me as well.
He still treated me like boss, however he demanded settlements and changes that I did not always agree with.
Of course I never harshly opposed because I felt he deserves his voice about the mod for his effort.
After releasing beta I stopped microchecking his work, giving him more freedom which resulted in freelance modding. He focused mainly on SinglePlayer missions, commiting some small code changes from time to time.
Meanwhile he got a job thanks to the KotF project which he included in his CV. His ambition and arrogance grew even stronger.
His arrogance resulted in insulting and banning several community members mostly because of their "annoying" behaviour which was caused by their mental disabilities or just their character and low CPU use skills.
Despite all of this, everything went pretty smooth untill the mod team became overpopulated. More and more people volunteered to work on such a promising project.
It was very difficult for me to coordinate so many people work on such a large mod. Unfortunately most of team members didn't work on anything or did freelance modding because of their own vision.
Even when I tried to give specific task, I only found disappointment because the work was either not done or it was of very poor quality because of little skill in modding team. I was often involved in fixing their work which took more time than creating stuff from scratch.
Meanwhile The New Order became "burnt out" and stopped working on the mod. He took a break to focus on his real life and said Good Bye with hopes that he will one day return. J19 has also been kicked from the team for failing to obtain proper permissions for new models we intended to use.
Unfortunately current Movie Duels leader - swegmaster proved to be a snake who used every occasion to destroy KotF and it's reputation. Instead of informing us about missing permissions and letting us calmly handle the situation, he rushed to one of model authors (Penekowski) like a crying baby.
All this effort to start a drama and smear the mod and it's reputation. Apparently he doesn't have any honour or morality because after all this he begged me to allow his return to KotF team.
The situation went under control as I negotiated unlimited use of the models created by Penekowski. However action had to be taken and J19 had to suffer the consequences for his lack of vision.
Except for these 2 members who left, The KotF Team only increased in numbers.
Among these people, some very toxic individuals arrived to our team. Names like Troop, Nerdman300, almec and recently nominated as one of rebel activist - Darth Voiid always caused trouble and disagreements within the team.
They never did any significant work for the mod. Quite the opposite - they took part in destroying it.
They demanded voice about crucial aspects of the mod. For obvious reasons I couldn't allow just any newbie to walk in and change what they want. Their ideas would downgrade the mod and I decisively kept denying them.
This caused conflicts, tension and hostile atmosphere in the team. Due to all of this I lost interest in working on the mod.
Linken always approved even the dumbest idea but never really anticipated the consequences and the mod was slowly turning to chaos.
Of course I was labeled as a bad dictator who doesn't care what others say and Linken was the good, friendly guy. The truth is he was very easy to manipulate and became pulled by the strings.
The real problems started when I left to medical school. Unfortunately cruel capitalist world wouldn't let me spare more time on hobby. This meant I couldn't work on KotF anymore for some time.
Of course I announced this to public and trusted Linken to lead the mod in my absence. I also mentioned that I'm still able and willing to lead the mod. The school only limited my time for actual modding nothing else.
I instructed Linken to give me detailed reports about every release and things that were being worked on. I wanted to go back to modding several times but each time I attempted my return I was finding huge chaos and disappointment which drained my strength and motivation away.
For a time Linken followed the instructions, kept sending reports and asked me about "blessing" to release updates. The same happened with the last update but he only mentioned part of the update which included DotF mission changes.
Unaware what was actually going to be released I agreed on DotF changes and went offline for few hours. After I came back I learned that a lot weapon and saber sounds were smuggled behind my back and released to public without my approval.
I didn't like most of them so I was pretty irritated that nobody told me they were going to be included in public release. I knew that some team members worked on sound replacements but they were far from finished and they shouldn't have been included in final release.
I overreacted and harshly expressed my opinion because this wasn't the first time and it was very frustrating for me to repeat the same all the time.
A little later the situation was calm and we reached an agreement that the sounds are going to be optional for players to choose.
Everything would be fine but suddenly filth named Darth Voidd started a vote to transfer mod's leadership to Linken heating up already hot atmosphere. Voiid along with some useless team members gave me ultimatum to submit or they are gone.
To be fair I looked forward to the day when I can finally purge the vermin off my Team. Despite the fact that the vote wasn't even complete because most members who were offline didn't get the chance to vote, those traitors considered that everyone would prefer Linken as a leader.
In the end they left and took Linken with them. They started a new mod with Linken at the helm using KotF assets and popularity. Hundreds of hours of my hard work and now they are the ones who take all the credit and profit.
For all my hopes, creativity and hard work, all I got was being labeled as cruel dictator who doesn't care about others. The truth is - if it wasn't for me there wouldn't be KotF resurrection. Linken and others would still be random nonames with no recognition.
I gave them power which was used against me. If it wasn't for me, hours of fun playing this mod would not be possible and KotF would forever remain as a disappointing dream of the past.

Fire Phoenix