First of all, thanks to all of you who took the time to download the mod and give it a go, even if it wasn't to your liking. Just by logging on to the server and having a snoop around you've been extremely helpful.
I thought I'd take the time to reply on what appears to be the most contentious issue for you all here, namely the state of the mod and our reasons for releasing it in such a state.
As most of you are no doubt aware, Freeworlds:Tides of War has been in development for six years. It's name comes from two other mods, Freeworlds, and Tides of War (crazy right?) both of which were Star Wars mods, but they approached the topic is very different manners. In 2008, members from both development teams decided to join forces to create a new mod, with the best of both worlds. Over the course of the six years since, the mod has gone through total overhauls at least three times, the latest of which being after Sushi stepped down as development lead due to personal commitments, and Sizer took control. This was early 2013.
What this means, in essence, is that while a lot of the assets have carried over from this past versions, many other things were built from scratch. Combat and the systems themselves are two of the things that have been completely revamped since then, as well as the development of new mechanics and development tools. The mod overall is six years in development, but the current iteration has been in development barely a year. It should be noted that the current active development team numbers less than ten, most of whom have been the mod at least four years. We choose to release the mod now, as without the buzz that a public release brings, we were under threat of our devs losing motivation.
Until now, FWTOW has not yet had a stress test for the features it brings. We released a demo in 2012, but that was a severely stripped down build of the game, with many feature that you see today taken out (or in many cases, not even built yet). We could not have hoped to uncover the large amount of issues we've found since release yesterday with only our dev and testing teams.
Despite how many (larger, usually paid) groups and companies define it, we follow more of a dictionary definition of 'beta test'. The mod is basically feature-complete; but it needs those third parties (you) to run amok and find all the bugs we couldn't find with a small team alpha testing.
Perhaps our little teaser trailer raised expectations a little, perhaps a general misunderstanding of 'six years in development' did too, but the crux of the matter is this: The open beta is a bug hunt. A stress test for our mechanics and systems, things that Freelancer was never intended to do. Will that come with problems? Yes. It already has; the server is unstable, and many of our plugins have had to be disabled to maintain a minimum level of stability. Sure, we would have liked everything to just work with no problems, but we knew that wasn't going to happen. In the end, if you choose to log onto the server during the beta period, you should be there to help us make the mod and server more stable. Getting a taste of the mod before it's stable is just a bonus.
Rest assured, we are watching for feedback (even outside our own forums and services) and acting on it, but I hope you'll all give FWTOW some time to mature before you seal your opinion on it.