I am interested in participating, but I'd prefer to do that on my own terms if that's possible, without feeling as if I'm very responsible for the progress of the potential development.'

I figure I should comment publicly to close the book on my involvement here since my name came up a few times in this thread. Unfortunately this is a complicated topic for me in a few ways but most of it stems from the quoted comment above.

Over the past 5 or so years I've been a part of this community, there has been this recurring point from Simon regarding game updates being contingent on a "new website". This arrangement was communicated to me and other community members in various email chains in various contexts - from inquiries into purchasing the cultris 2 IP, to simply advancing the popularity of the game itself. Perhaps initially and at various points I agreed with Simon's idea that a website would be a logical next step for the game's future, but now I have a much more pessemistic and jaded view of this initiative.

Frankly, while my and many other community efforts have kept this community vibrant and stable, I've come to the point where I feel that the rewards - tangible and not - for commiting time to Cultris 2 are largely non-existent/not worthwhile. There simply is no longer any gratification for me that warrants further effort, especially on a new website. In the end, a game update or sign of reciprocation for this quid pro quo verbal agreement Simon has put forth a few times would have probably been enough to keep me interested personally, but my belief that it is anything more than an empty promise is gone.

Regarding cultris.net: I would have loved to have formalized this "test website project" into something fully functional and directly integrated with the game database that is now on azure. Unfortunately, for a few reasons, I did not really get anywhere beyond deploying the front end, hosting my own database that is painfully webscraped from gewaltig.net and in game using OCR scripts (yikes), and creating a publicly available API (which others have used for their own projects to my delight!). I will share these reasons so as to inform anyone who chooses to do further work on this project:

- really poor communication overall, especially response intervals. being dependent on simon/rick for basic things like azure access, database access, information about auth/api/tech stack was completely unrealistic when the responses happen q1-2 weeks (at best)

- forcing a tech stack/unwillingness to use cultris.net which is already hosted on a vps and only really needs db access to continue to develop. to this day despite collaboration and constant I still have no database access provisioned to my account on azure. not sure why since it was always the first thing i asked for. 

- lack of independence/autonomy: the decision to use azure was unilateral. the decision to not host via a vps was also unilateral despite my request. i was asked to write serverless db functions in c#, a language i dont even know and for which there was never really good justification. i was also asked to implement microsoft authentication library (MSAL) (which was the last thing I did, for reasons that are not clear to me). i was told to let rick write the db queries/create an api via azure functions which did not ever materialize far enough to get the basic data needed for cultris.net. it would have been nicer (+ easier + more efficient) to just write my own queries, deploy my own api, and immediately have working results on cultris.net while staying within the stack i already created and deployed.

TLDR: sad's quote above.

In the coming weeks I will likely stop updating the database that currently serves cultris.net as well as take down the cultris 2 discord bot as maintainig either of these out of pocket does not seem worthwhile based on the feedback and usage (or lack there of) from players.

I hope anyone who is interested in working on this project finds more success than I did, and hopefully things can be different next time around. I am happy to talk with anyone further on discord kb1900#0178 and I fully support anyone who chooses to put their efforts towards this.

What a sad read. Also sad to see cultris.net and the bot go. Hope, you still stay active in the community! And thanks for your efforts, even if it didn't work out in the end :(

(Please note: Parts of the above post are potentially misleading. Azure Functions, C# or MSAL are not required. As written in the OP, feel free to pick the tech stack of your choice, as long as it runs on Azure App Service. Direct database access is available.)

Simon, if theres anything you should do to get this going, that would be at least weekly meeting with your development peers.
But you were reluctant todo so in the past, so don't wonder if complicated things are not communicated well.
The mood, around this is pretty salty by now, and since you were dismissive about the communication line, you just made it worse with your correction.

If it wasn't complicated, you would have results by now.
It takes the 'bestest' people to make 'hard' look effortless.

I sent you an email Simon.

Thank you so much for your effort Corrosive.
For some reason, wix blocks the VPN - so if you want to see the site, try to turn off the VPN.
I'd like to support your efforts by giving you some guidance on tools you can use to make it even easier.