Dear fans,
The Rome: Total Realism development team is concerned about how the former project director Tyr was administering funds from donations and ad revenues. We are uncertain if any abuses were committed, but it is something that concerns us. We have requested information, and copies of records, however Tyr has of yet not been forthcoming on this issue.
We would prefer to dispense with donations and ads all together, but we do have expenses related to the forums and will have expenses in the future in regards to domain name, hosting, bandwidth, software, etc. The team is going to create a contract for all team members to vote on and sign to specify how the money will be used and how it will be dispensed at the end of the life of the mod. The money that will be collected will of course only be used for costs directly related to running the website and the forums. Some on the team have suggested we give the excess revenues to a reputable charity when the mod and its successors cease to be developed.
To ensure that no abuse is committed the team will elect a treasurer and an auditor. The treasurer will be responsible for collecting all revenues and paying RTR related expenses. The auditor will monitor the activities of the treasurer and regularly post a summary of the finances of RTR to the rest of the development team and the public. We hope that these changes will improve the transparency of the finances in our project and ensure that no abuses transpire.
- The RTR Team
N.B. There seems to be some confusion among members, these are not personal statments by me, but a statment from the whole team.
Update
There are many details we could have added to this post but felt since we couldn't provide full details do to conversations occuring on IRC at unexpected times and so logs where not set up it time. So all I have is my word and the truth.
Some of you may believe that Tyr was the heart and soul of RTR. And to an extent he was. And to a further extent he was an 18 year old kid that made alot of bad choices for RTR, choices you never saw. He continually made slanderous comments in public that sadly have hurt RTRs image in the community (and actually have caused us to lose the help of some very talented people). He wrongfully terminated several members and one member resigned simply because of Tyrs abuse. I had been told by several members that they wanted to leave RTR because they felt Tyr wasn't being fair and wasn't running the project effectively.
Then it came to our attention that our website recieves many hundreds of thousands oh hits each month (600,000 on the website, 1.1 million on the forums in the month of august) and even if a small fraction of those people donated we would actually be in the possesion of a fair bit of money. And so with these two things in mind the team came to the conclusion that it was time for Tyr to disclose to us what was going on with the donations account and that he also resign and allow a team member to be elected the new project manager.
He then told us that he could not supply the donation account history at that point, but that expenses on the website and things like the forum license had drained the account to 2 or 300 dollars. Tyr also claimed a $400/monthly fee for the hosting of the website (co-location rack) up until a month ago when we were sponsored by recongamer.com and offered free hosting. Upon contacting a recongamer.com representative to confirm this information, we were informed that we've been recieving free hosting not for one month, but since the start of may 2005. It should be noted our peak traffic in the last 6 months was june, july and august.
It was also revealed at that time he bought a team member a video card. After some debate on this issue of his abilities as a leader he resigned. Tyr was allowed to stay in the development IRC channel and follow the progress of the mod. However he stopped appearing a few days after. So I sent him an email asking if he could supply the team with the records of the pay pal account (paypal tracks all transactions with an account history feature that lists all incoming and outgoing funds). At which point he stated he could not. As the account was that of a "business associate" and he did not have access to the account and so could not provide me with the account details. He then said he would send me the last 80 dollars that was in the account (down from the previous figure of $200-$300). I have not heard from him since.
The days before we posted our message we learned more. Tyr actually runs a few other websites all running numerous adds to make money. So sadly all of this points to one thing for me and the team. That a person I considered my friend was cheating us and the community. I put this out only because there are those that questioned my motives when we posted the original letter. We have spoken to a lawyer and according to him Tyr has commited fraud (by stating that the donation money is to be used for website related costs) and we are lucky not to be associated with him anymore or else if the people that donated were willing to pursue the case we could have been in just as much trouble as Tyr.
