You're misunderstanding. Its a waste of resources to constantly redo the saber system and focus on duel mode for 10+ years, and have people still be unhappy. Many of us are done with this crap. How many times in the past have we had people saying "Why cant we get X's saber build update yet? It sounds finished and sounds great!" And it releases and it doesn't live up to the same hype you are associating with it right now, because people find some exploit with it not found in testing (or even possibly intentionally hidden by ego saberist testers so they can abuse when love) that ruins the entire thing. I have heard this sooo many times. I have also heard "Just revert to X build" so many times, which is a build that many people I know detest, while another group adores. An example being 1.3 Peneke suggested above. That is one of my least favorite builds, because I believe it lead is down the wrong path for sabering that lead us to here. I pretty much stopped any sabering at all outside of helping test in beta, because of that build leaving such a sour taste in my mouth. Going back past the ideas of 1.3 and redoing everything is the only way its going to work.
This isn't sustainable when we have such a small team. Just go back to my list of features for things that could have been added if the same effort put on the saber system was put elsewhere. We are in a worse spot as a game/mod because of all of this. Sabering is literally choking us to death, but no one wants to give it up for a time as evidence by the three threads in the past week. Time to move forward, rather than reinventing the wheel the 100th time.
We have, for 10 years. That is why the saber system keeps getting updates. We've tried builds with suggestions from the community, beta, devs, everyone. None of them are working out. Some are better than others, but still have a large enough segment of the community that finds and abuses exploits, or just wants changes to have it feel a way that they like, or whatever the case may be. We've been running in circles for years. Just because you have only really been around recently to see how things are now, doesn't suddenly discount how we got here.
I have no problem with open betas, and would like to do them more often. They are a massive chore to setup right now though. However, people acting like Tempests build will suddenly stop a large chunk of the community from requesting another set of massive changes is completely wishful thinking and not at all based on past evidence. Tempest has been doing testing on it outside of the dev and beta team to get more feedback but I almost guarantee something will be wrong, and someone will end up bitching about something once we set it up for open beta or release it. It is inevitable based on past patches. Meanwhile the rest of the mod suffers while I sit here not having features I requested 10 years ago added to the game. Features that I could have done myself in 2 weeks in UE4 but need help here.
He started saying that 2 years ago, its still not done and hes still tweaking it. That is beside the point as because months ago we did a massive code merge which reworked a lot of the backend of mb2. That build has not been updated with that code merge yet, and basically all gameplay changes need that code to go out before those changes can be done. I am tempted to release what we have for the current changelog once everything is a bit more well documented just so people can see how much is actually changing. The patch notes currently sit at 8 pages, with no main gameplay changes being present and things currently in it not being fully documented.
I would love to finally have a sabering build the majority is happy with, that we don't constantly have to keep tweaking, but that seems like a losing battle after trying for over 10 years while everything else suffers. We are not Mordhau or Chivalry where the majority of the characters carry swords, with things like archers and spearmen sprinkled about. We have a whole wide variety of character types/classes in the SW universe that aren't even represented in this mod 16.5 years later. Lets make those cool things.