I thought the Quake community was fucked up but Tribes Ascend is even more so. Yesterday HiRez (developer of T:A) declared demos were not longer going to be added to T:A after leading everyone on about them for months. As a player to me this broke any faith or long term interest in T:A. Demos have been in id games going back to Doom 1 (1993) and it's a feature I consider essential to any serious multiplayer FPS with any competitive scene. I have no interest playing in an online FPS league without demos since it makes cheating very easy and frankly I enjoy watching demos of myself/my team and my opponents as I do playing.

http://www.pastebin.com/u4NYwfjk

In the above log you can see HiRezBart being banned/shit talked from a channel full of competitive players. I haven't seen anyone from HiRez in the main T:A channel (irc.tribalwar.com #ascend) for days now (they probably aren't welcome and would get banned). Pretty crazy situation where the competitive community hates the developers. Way to go HiRez! I don't blame the players however, HiRez is a totally incompetent and lying company. They marketed T:A as the "Original E-Sport returning", blah blah and they just hacked in a shitty first person POV spectator mode and gave up on demos as being too hard. Then once you toss in all the other problems, mainly balance, it's hard not to hate HiRez if you play at a decent skill level. They had also teased ranked play for a long time but now that option is removed from the menus. Global Agenda HiRez's first game supposedly suffered from the same and was abandoned once T:A came out. Now that HiRez has Smite as their new baby, T:A looks like it's on the back burner not a game that will be developed for the long haul. It is a shame since T:A could have been a great long lasting competitive game in the arcade genre which is seriously lacking any good FPS right now.