Yeah. I pretty much got all of that already. And good on you. But I am asking you, why can't we have both things? The game didn't die in b17,b18 or b19 did it? Yet those were the builds I played with no time limit and freedom to roleplay. There were lots of people online, it didn't fracture the community. Servers were still 5 minutes and did not deviate from the competitive-style format of old. There was just this extra, juicy bit on the side with custom FA classes, taking advantage of force powers like destruction and blind and custom maps for fun and epic gameplay with no time limits and just having fun.
Can you honestly answer me why this change was made if 100 percent of the open mode servers ran the same settings pre hardcoded timelimit as they did post-hardcoded time limit? The only affected party was the roleplayers who took advantage of custom classfiles to F**k around and have fun on the weekends but also played plenty of normal MBII and duels. What reason is there to hard-code a timer if all servers already play at 5 minutes? Only reason seems to be RP-hate, since the servers were following the format pre-hardcoded timer. This is why I am having a hard time believing in and getting behind any argument against the timer being unlocked.
No it didn't die in those time periods, but as I was made aware after I joined when the team wanted to re-hardcode the timelimit (I was not there the first time this happened), it was far more than just RP related reasoning. I am not going to say RP was not one of the reasons because that would be untrue but it seriously only got a couple minutes of discussion over the other reasons and the only reason it did was because I was curious to the reasons RP wasn't liked and asked why. I was the ignorant newb at the time and had nothing to do with it. I have already addressed the other reasons for it several times and I am guessing there is plenty that I even I forget. Yes ridiculous FA classes can be fun, but I would be fooling myself if I believed that you couldn't have that same amount of fun with a time limit.
The only affected party wasn't RPers. Anyone who created the modded packs (Umad, Powerbattles, CMP style stuff) was affected as well as an example. I do remember joining servers that weren't RP with various modded server values way back then and when I was 13-14 it made a mod I was unfamiliar with at the time fairly confusing having different point values, FA stuff that varied, etc. We, the dev team, was also restricted with how we did things in the future (Hello MGMP). The team chose to standardize some of those values and restrict them into the range they thought was appropriate. Yes the majority of servers stayed with the standard point limit, time limit, etc but it wasn't an "only RP servers modified things" or a "competitive servers were always standard" kind of thing. I never even intentionally went onto an MB2 RP server until RC1 (I had played RP in JA+, Lugormod before that) and I still ran into modified servers plenty before that.
So no, the main reason wasn't RP. It was a a contributing factor but the team made a decision to standardize the value because they believed consistency and following those design goals was far more important. There were even discussions over the years about removing FA and just focusing on open mode for some of those reasons as well. Not because any one of us hates FA, hates the freedom it gives us, but because its difficult to maintain and is completely different from the base mode. Chose your class on one of those levels can be a pain as you have to search descriptions, which sometimes aren't even correct, might not get the class you want because of class limits, etc. When you are making a game, especially with a limited team, you want to focus on creating things with a specific rule set so that you don't stretch yourself too thin. You also want that ruleset for consistency in the game, balancing reasons, level design reasons, etc. Just because it SEEMs like something was targeted at RP, doesn't mean it was. Again, not denying that it was a contributing factor, but was far from being the only reason. I only know of maybe 2 people that have been a part of the MB team that might have a hate for RP, while the rest have maintained the position that maintaining the timelimit restrictions is not only important for gameplay reasons (Spag, Ben, Tempest,and I all mentioned gameplay reasons in part of their posts) as well as technical and resource restrictions from the team (mentioned by Viserys, Ben, Tempest, Myself).
Blinding yourself outside ideas because something feels like it is under attack because that is the primary subject people bring up when mentioning removing the timelimit is of course going to make you feel like RP is the sole reason. It is the topic that is brought up every time, and is usually brought up before I even post in the thread. So of course people are going to address RP. No one bothers to mention the restrictions we put on FA creators or our own internal level design as well with this (until your post above). I had to change the original RC and Kashyyyks layouts simply because they were too large to fit within the 5 minute limit, the same thing happened with the original JT. It was built too large and had to be redone to stay within the standardized parameters. RP players were far from the only ones impacted by the decision, they were not targeted by it at all. You can even see that over time our goal with several level design related things changed to encompass smaller levels (Changes made to DOTF for V2, Smuggler, etc) and it is even my goal to do more work on that front for EC to make things flow better, less time at the beginning of the round for you to enter the fight, etc. Those level design changes for EC may affect the overall time limit to the point we lower the high end from the currently set 6 minutes to say 4 minutes. As you know now that time wasting is a problem and that sometimes the 5 minute timer can be too long at the end of a match and I have modified DOTFv2 and other levels in the past to help alleviate that problem.
There were a lot of things considered when implementing the time limit when I joined, and isn't as simple as "fuck RP" and never will be. Discounting decisions made for the benefit of gameplay because you don't agree with them is stupid because I had to do a ton of work to stay within my bounds of the gameplay rules as well. If I went "Fuck the rules. FREEDOM!" my levels in MB2 would be vastly different from what they are today, and actually probably for the worse. That isn't saying my levels are perfect because they aren't and that is why I am redoing almost all of them for EC but I can't just go outside the rules the others set for me and I set for myself. There are plenty of articles about restricting yourself game design wise and how that is beneficial to what you are creating.
I, for the longest time, fought for the launcher so that people had an easy way of downloading the additional packs the community made so that the community wouldn't even be fragmented with CMP maps.