It is generally considered heresy to criticize anyone who is doing work for free. Therefore, I am walking a very fine line between a legitimate complaint and straight out blasphemy with the title topic of this post. But frankly, I've seen the boards for Team Gizka and, like most things online, eventually valid criticisms are stifled at some point or another. It is human nature. When people are volunteering their time for free, they don't particularly like smart a** bloggers or forum posters suggesting they should be volunteering it a bit more efficiently or quickly. Any suggestion that they may want to hurry up a little, because lord knows I think the Sith Lords Restoration Project has barely made any progress whatsoever in the last five or six months, is buried under an avalanche of "how dare you" responses that anyone would malign the sainted souls who are volunteering their time and effort for free. I suppose I'm a bit of a coward in that I don't have an account on the linked forum boards. I've never made a post there. I'm posting from my own little private corner of the internet where I can say just about anything I damn well please within the Gamespot TOS and get away with it. But all that said, the Sith Lords Restoration Project should have been completed months ago. I come to look at the progress meter a minimum of twice a week, and it has hardly budged since Thanksgiving. Yes, the people working on the project are doing so for free and that shields them to some extent from wise guys like me chipping in my two cents, but by the same token, if you're going to get everyone excited about an imminent release by fixing nearly all issues by Thanksgiving, and then hardly touch your project until July, you should expect some disillusionment from your loyal fanbase.

And now, we're nearing the end of the summer months. The fall lineup of games is the best in years. A six month long dry spell of game releases is about to end with a reaction quite similar to what happens when a piñata gets hit with an uzzi. The piñata explodes and candy flies everywhere. I'm not so certain that in another two months I will even care about a re-release of KOTORII since I will have so many new games to play that I have been tracking. I suppose I'll play it eventually, but the sweet spot for me buzzing in excitement for this has worn off as month after month has passed without the project being completed.

It just seems that the folks making the Sith Lords Restoration Project are abusing their "we are volunteering our time doing this, so any criticism of how long we take is the height of being an a-hole" card. Yes, people understand that volunteers have other, real world, responsibilities. People also are human, and they don't like being yelled at for having human impatience when any idiot that has any semblance of pattern recognition can see that the project doesn’t seem to be a priority any longer. Yes, the folks at Team Gizka have never put out a release date beyond “whenever it is done”. But people are smart. When for the first few months of the Sith Lords Restoration Project errors were being identified and fixed at a phenomenal rate, they notice when it seems that one error fix a month seems to be too much to ask. To be treated like gods requires a godly effort. If you eventually stop putting forth the effort that justifies the adulation and praise, then eventually the worshippers stop coming to the temple to sing the hosannas.