An explanation

So, many of you have looked at why TLR shutdown. Obviously rumours and conspiracies will form and circulate over the next while, that's to be expected. I won't go into massive amounts of detail because I don't feel it's fair on Mike (chefinal - ie. the owner of TLR) if I did that.
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When I joined last year, I only really intended on having the Rockit COD4 team there for LAN support and such due to Rockit kind of going down the drain. I knew Josh (pesteh - ie. the webdesigner) for a while and he encouraged me to join, foolishly I didn't know too much about TLR's history. Shortly after I joined, I wanted to push into the ET scene somehow and deliver on some promises. This is where I found out that TLR had truly lost the trust of the ET scene a while back, so I adopted this as my mission to regain the trust from this community.

Shortly after this, it then became apparent that ET wasn't the only community to have been let down by previous TLR antics. Now I was hit with a dillema; bail out now or work hard to regain respect from all scenes that were, well, fucked over (for lack of a better term). And here's my weakness, I don't like to abandon people because I end up feeling guilty, although it's not even my fault.

Then came the planning for the LAN event. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time so I start putting plans together and then eventually announced it. I wanted to keep it seperate from TLR but also brand it as TLR to help improve the name within the communities further, no TLR sponsors or staff would be involved apart from myself.

The progress that TLR has made from July 2010 to April 2011 is massive in terms of activity and support from "fans" and communities. However, I wanted to give more. I wanted to be able to do so much for everybody who'd been let down in the past by TLR.

Eventually, there were delays in some funding from our partners and sponsors. Essentially, no deadline dates could have been given. Without this security, we started to look elsewhere but time was running out in terms of preparing for the worst. By this I mean, "what if TLR couldn't get funding in time to deliver its promises and let teams down and then put them at risk of not being able to find somewhere to help them continue on?" This is where I took the decision to inform the teams of the situation, simply to make sure they ended up coming out of this in the best possible way.

After discussing it with Mike, he agreed to close the org down (at least as a temporary measurement). He may, or may not, re-launch in the future. That's his decision and I wish him the best of luck, and hope that my efforts have made his future a little easier with the organisation should he re-launch it.

I don't yet know what I plan on doing, I want to focus on the event and make sure it's a good one for everybody attending and for everybody at home watching.

Random booth babe
Mandatory YouTube video in journal

Peace and love comrades!