GRENADOBAHN City on 🌎✌️

I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that E2V1 is no different from the fantasy maps found in thousands of other open-world games.. you seem to like repeating this phrase so I thought I'd try give you a little perspective here. I’m not aware of another open world operating at the scale and geographical accuracy of E2V1, mapping real-world geography at this level of detail. Perhaps the closest comparison in terms of global scale is Microsoft Flight Simulator, but even then we are talking about a franchise that has been developed for more than four decades (44 years actually), backed by one of the largest technology companies in the world, with access to enormous resources and some of the best technical talent available. Even their latest release would have probably cost near $200M and that was built on core technology costing hundreds of millions over those 4 decades of time before its release. Earth 2 has had nowhere near those resources. In fact, we have continued building through years where the project has frequently been prematurely labelled and misrepresented in ways that have undoubtedly impacted our ability to generate the kind of revenue and support normally available to projects attempting something of this scale. Despite that, we have continued to build and deliver. And importantly, we haven’t just created the geographical foundation of E2V1. Even in its current pre-alpha state, we have a persistent multiplayer world running across that global terrain, with server-authoritative systems, Characters, inventories, crafting, resource discovery, teleportation across the planet, property synchronisation, persistent building placement, cooking, clothing and equipment, quests, Player-created quests, gardening with persistent multi-state objects, harvesting, structure demolition, ESS-powered utility systems and much more. Players can place structures on their actual properties, grow and harvest resources, craft items, create quests for other Players, teleport between locations around the world and interact with systems that persist beyond an individual session. This is all operating within a world mapped against the geography of the real Earth, and we are still in pre-alpha. That is without going into everything currently being worked on or what is coming next. And there are countless smaller technical distinctions I could go into as well. Even with something like MSFS, there are differences in how locations are loaded and accessed, whereas in E2V1 a Player can teleport from one side of the planet to another essentially instantly and continue within the same persistent world. I could spend a long time going through examples like this, but that’s not really the point of my response. The point is that there are many things happening technically and behind the scenes that may not be immediately obvious to a Player running around on the surface, and reducing E2V1 to “a fantasy map like thousands of other open-world games” simply isn’t an accurate representation of what we have built. Then there is the EcoSim underneath all of this, which has already been operating at scale for years. Millions of OUs are automatically mined by Cydroids every week across hundreds of thousands of real-world locations through a verified system. We have processed more than a billion Player-driven raids and billions of internal transactions across the EcoSim involving raids, resources, purchases, trades, Jewels, slotting, items in E2V1, crafting and numerous other systems. All of these are interconnected pieces of a much larger platform we have been progressively building. So when the geographical scale, E2V1, persistent multiplayer systems, Player-owned properties, gameplay systems and the existing EcoSim are considered together, I really don’t think we are talking about the same ballpark as a typical open-world game or fantasy map you keep claiming that thousands of other games have. As for the connection between Earth 2 and the real world, I can speak very directly about that because I am the person who originally described the vision of creating that bridge. I have not forgotten it, moved away from it or abandoned that vision in any way. There is, however, a process to building it. We needed to build the digital world first and get that world operational. If we had simply created an AR layer over the real world without first building the persistent digital world and the systems underneath it, Earth 2 would have been something fundamentally different from what we set out to create, and I’m fairly certain we would then be hearing that Earth 2 is “just an AR app” or one of many other possible accusations. What we have built so far was considerably more difficult, but it was necessary groundwork. My original desire was for you to eventually be able to feel Earth 2 around you, wherever you are in the real world, and that remains very much part of my vision for Earth 2. I understand that you want to see that connection now, and I understand the disappointment that it has taken longer than you expected. But wanting it sooner doesn’t change whether it is part of the plan. It was always part of the plan. There has simply been an enormous amount that needed to be built first to make that connection meaningful rather than superficial. The bridge between the real world and Earth 2 becomes far more meaningful when there is actually a persistent digital world, economy, resources, properties, Players, gameplay and infrastructure on the other side of that bridge. That is what we have spent these years building. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I haven’t forgotten the original vision. Quite the opposite. Much of what we have been building is what ultimately makes that vision possible in the first place. We will continue building towards it, piece by piece, as we have been doing all along. I believe that as more of those pieces come together, the reasons behind the order in which we have built them, and where all of this is ultimately heading, will become increasingly clear.