Let’s talk about Dergun Town
This announcement does not include everything Dergun Town has ever done against Pony Town or others who had issues with them. What's included here is only the key events that happened over the past ~six months. Although we've tried to keep the announcement as concise as possible, it is still quite lengthy. If you aren't interested in the details and want to jump straight to the point, feel free to scroll down to the conclusion.
Let's start from how we were introduced to Dergun Town.
On September 7th, one week after the release of custom servers, we got an email from one of the Dergun Town founders, Tom, in which he notified us that they intended to make money off of Dergun Town. Now, people wanting to profit off of our work by hosting a barely modified version of Pony Town wasn't exactly something we were looking forward to, and it was the first time we had to deal with a case like this. We replied saying that, according to our assets license, using them for commercial purposes would require our approval, and we would need to discuss it first. We agreed to have a proper discussion with Tom in a group chat the next day.
In this talk, we discovered that Tom hadn't even taken enough time yet to learn proper development workflow, yet we’re already talking about them making money. We explained the workflow to him, as well as made other suggestions on how to make hosting the game cheap. Regarding donations themselves, we shared some ideas, but didn't go any further than that in the talk. In the end, Tom promised to keep us posted.
Soon after, unbeknownst to us, Dergun Town had opened a PayPal and linked it both in the official Dergun Discord and on the site itself, going against everything we had discussed. Tom had promised to keep us posted, so we decided to wait, but after waiting for four days without any explanation, we messaged Tom ourselves to ask him what had happened.
Tom explained it was a simple misunderstanding, even though the discussion itself didn't seem to leave any room for that being possible. Tom removed the links and claimed that, despite their Discord having over half a thousand users by then and the links being up for four days straight, they received no donations, so no money was illegally made.
At this point we also had some concerns with the way Dergun Town used other Pony Town groups to promote themselves and, instead of taking a unique direction, were mostly adding content like manes and tails which directly appeals to Pony Town users, which made us question what their true intentions were.
We decided to move further discussion to a voice call to reduce the chances of misunderstandings. In that call with Tom we went further into the issue of donations, and also discussed project goals and the importance of avoiding deliberate competition, which would be harmful for everyone. We all agreed that it is crucial to keep each other's interests in mind.
We discussed some solutions, among which we brought up adding the "Visit Pony Town" button that we were planning to release in the next custom servers update. Tom called it a good idea and agreed to add it to Dergun.
Discussing the button during the call:
The next talk was also attended by the second Dergun Town founder, Q. This talk happened a week later and lasted nearly four hours.
We discussed two main topics: them accepting donations, and our projects coexisting without creating unhealthy competition. Regarding donations, we pointed out that making money off of Dergun Town, which was still just Pony Town with a few new manes and tails at the time, was not a comfortable idea, and we didn't want to set that precedent for other custom servers. They assured us that their vision was completely unique and their end goal was a game entirely different from Pony Town, but it would take more time to start taking shape. Bearing each other's interests in mind, we tried to find the best short term solution. The best we came up with was them temporarily moving hosting to Tom's personal server to reduce hosting costs, as well as limiting their uptime to only prime hours. This would allow them to dedicate more time to work on the game itself as it meant they didn't need to keep an eye on the players during most of the day, especially since they didn't have moderators at the time and handled in-game moderation themselves. Tom himself expressed being happy they would be able to dedicate more time to the development.
We ended the talk there, after which they started to work on an offline page, and soon had it ready to be published.
After that, communication began to slow. They consulted us about how to do some game related things such as map editing, and mentioned that implementing the offline page was not absolutely straightforward. But otherwise, we didn't hear anything from them for the next three weeks.
Meanwhile, they updated Dergun Town with a newly released version of the custom server code, and included seemingly everything from that update except the "Visit Pony Town" button. Every other custom server who merged our updates included the button; Dergun Town was the only exception, despite our explicit agreement. We decided to hold off on asking them for the time being, in order to not come off as not trusting them with upholding the agreements.
In the meantime, we considered a deal that would allow them to open donations, and finally came up with terms we thought would work well for everyone. We informed Tom and Q about that, and decided to schedule a talk to discuss. The talk was also to be attended by WireBound and Craig, new additions to the Dergun Town team, allowing us to get to know them as well.
But just a day before the talk, we received a very disturbing call, a call from someone we knew personally and trusted.
This person described that, during September, they had a private call with Tom, and although they initially had agreed to keep that call private, they since decided that we needed to know what was discussed.
They described how Tom tried to convince them that we, the Pony Town developers, manipulated this person in our own interests to gain more influence over the community. Tom also ranted about how what we do was "complete bullshit", that the license we have was flawed and would be easy to bypass. After that, Tom bragged about how Dergun Town "will soon release a huge update and make Pony Town shit itself".
After receiving this information, we went to Dergun Town's official Discord and searched for messages from Q and Tom. What we found was completely baffling.
They publicly mocked us, made fun of us and our game, and claimed they can't even play Pony Town due to how "shit" it looks. They even went as low as to personally attack former Pony Town team members, and used the agreements they made with us to instigate their users against us.
An example of mocking our assets by comparing our grass to pee:
Blaming our code when they forgot to color in some pattern pixels:
Instigating users against us:
In the first screenshot, Q claims that we wanted to get rid of them more than work with them. And that is after we gave them the game, had been teaching them how to work with it, and even released a patch specifically because they asked us! That's after we proposed to pay for their server costs for September out of our own pocket! After they said to our faces how reasonable our agreements were when we made them! Tom stated to us multiple times how he thought we were such good people and how grateful he was for us sharing our game with them. Then they went and backstabbed us, spreading nasty things about us behind our backs, showing how two-faced they are.
After seeing this, it became obvious to us that these people were not who they pretended to be. We were forced to accept that we'd have to postpone mainstream support of custom servers, as they would simply continue taking everything we have, only so they can use it against us. We prepared our announcement notifying people about our decision to suspend custom server support, and planned to post it unless we would be able to resolve things with the Dergun developers, which seemed possible should Craig and WireBound not support Tom and Q's actions.
Unfortunately, our subsequent meeting did not go well. In the beginning of the call, everyone consented to the call being recorded. During the call, it became apparent that both Craig and WireBound would side with Q and Tom. But while Q and Tom at least tried to hide their intentions, WireBound was much more blatant, openly stating he didn't care about our interests, perplexed why we ever expected them to. After asking for an explanation, he basically told us we just don't understand how things work.
We asked them about our previous agreements: them moving hosting to Tom's server and adding the "Visit Pony Town" button, and let them explain why nothing has been done after almost a whole month. They replied with nothing but poorly-made excuses, followed by WireBound and Craig demanding an explanation as to why we even asked them to add the button, and whether we were going to put a button leading to Dergun Town to our site as well. But this was followed by Tom reiterating his promise to add the button.
Button agreement - Audio clip 1 (mirror)
Button agreement - Audio clip 2 (mirror)
Despite still pretending, there were a number of slips, and they even told us directly about their tactic to drive users away from Pony Town and other custom servers.
Slip up 1 - Audio clip (mirror)
Slip up 2 - Audio clip (mirror)
This explained why, despite their claims of wanting to make a game about dragons, most of the assets they had added at the time were pony assets that appealed to Pony Town's audience. It also seemed to us that the Dergun Town staff had no intention of seeking our approval for donations any longer.
After the business part of the call was finished, we called them out on the things they had said about us behind our backs. They responded that we were completely out of line for questioning the statements they made on their own server. When asked "does it mean we can go to our server and tell anything we want about you?", they said while they would not be able to tell us not to, they didn't think it would be acceptable.
"Out of line" - Audio clip (mirror)
Seeing as the Dergun Town administration was unwilling to listen to reason, we proceeded with our announcement regarding postponing support of custom servers. You can read it here.
While we mentioned the key reasons behind our decision, we avoided naming any names. We hoped it would avert these people from continuing to subvert us, since by doing so they would risk giving themselves away.
After the call and the announcement, Dergun Town continued to spread lies about us, even more so than before.
They would regularly spread these lies to instigate users against Pony Town.
Their "biggest issue" of Craig having attempted to work with us and being turned down, was easily proven to be simply not true.
With them wanting even more from us, and wanting us to allow them to make money off of our work, we had indeed asked them about contributing something in return. With them so far only taking from us, we wanted to discuss options on how it could be made more fair. However, they didn't believe anything to be unfair with them not giving anything back.
Discussing assets - Audio clip 1* (mirror)
Discussing assets - Audio clip 2 (mirror)
* Update: “Was that ever agreed upon?” at 0:22 has been cut upon the speaker’s request
We made it absolutely clear that we just wanted to know their opinions on sharing some of their assets. We also made it clear that we did not find a fully single-directional relationship healthy.
And they used it to lie about us, claiming we straight up demanded “all of their code and art for free”.
Another one of their lies, that we might steal from them, is one they frequently refer to. Despite us being the authors of the original game and its original style, and despite them claiming to be making a dragon game, they concentrated a lot of effort on adding as many pony assets as possible. Even if sprites and features we added were unique from theirs, they still claimed we stole their idea, no matter how generic the asset in question was.
This extended beyond their own content as well. If something was contributed to Pony Town from a custom server, Dergun wouldn’t hesitate to blame us in stealing it from that custom server, never even caring to check whether it was a contribution or not.
They’d even gotten as ridiculous as claiming that we stole from ourselves. Body patterns had been discussed in our internal development team chats since at least 2017, long before any custom servers existed, and the very first release of custom servers contains a body patterns test already set up. Once body patterns were finished, Pony Town was the first server to release them. Dergun itself didn't add body patterns until 2020. But no facts would stop them from claiming that even that is stolen and proudly proclaiming how they aren't "stooping to our level".
Taaffeite, a Dergun artist at the time, claiming we copy ideas:
While other people in the community help and share with one another, Dergun used the approach of accusing people of stealing to stifle everyone else's creativity.
In mid-December, these topics were brought up in a talk with Craig. He claimed he doesn't believe we had stolen anything, and disagreed with what other Dergun Town team members had been spreading.
After this discussion, Dergun developers indeed seemed to stop spreading lies about us stealing. However, the lies were never otherwise addressed, so all the users, taught for months about how we steal from others, still think that it was true, and continue to spread it.
Dergun Town continued to expand their team and it’s noteworthy what kind of people they were getting.
At the beginning of November we received a report regarding a user who was apparently telling others to kill themselves. After looking into it, we banned them from Pony Town.
Not only was that person telling others to kill themselves, they also bragged how they can get away with doing so. Soon afterwards we learn that they did — by getting on the Dergun Town team.
When Tom was confronted about this person’s actions by someone from the community, he answered that he doesn't care, as that person hasn’t done anything wrong on DT.
Of course, he might not have believed the accusations, considering no proof was provided.
However, even with proof, no action was taken and the person is still on their team.
They would get another team member, who’d quickly introduce themselves:
And that’s all despite Dergun Town often comparing their community to Pony Town's, claiming how much more they care about it and how they want to keep everyone safe.
As time passes, it became more and more apparent that the Dergun staff would go ahead with their plans to steal from us by bypassing our licenses and using Dergun Town to make money without permission. They surveyed their users with questions regarding donations, and seeing positive reactions, started by posting links to Patreon of their other game, Mirrorwood, which shares the same lore with Dergun Town.
Even that is by itself illegal, as they are using their community for commercial advertising. They shared the link and kept it pinned in their official Dergun Town Discord for weeks, after which they decided to go even further and open a merch store. They posted about it in the announcements channel of their Discord, added a bot that will spam the link to the general chat, and even added the link to the roles channel, which is the first channel you see before you even have access to rest of the Discord.
In their store they sell merchandise of a character from Dergun Town itself.
Finally, this proved too much, and they received a lot of backlash from the users, including their unofficial VK fan group with over 9,000 followers, saying they don’t approve such actions as they were not coordinated with Pony Town.
(Full view, transcript & translation)
Despite the amount of backlash, it took three days of us messaging them and telling them to stop before they finally complied, and we reached an agreement with them directing all the profits from the store to charity.
During discussions with Q and Craig regarding them opening the store, we made it clear that we didn't see the point of having much more patience with their actions. We requested their previous lies to be addressed publicly, and Craig agreed to do so.
Knowing we want to have their lies and harassment addressed publicly, what did they do? They instead erased all the evidence they could find, in case we were forced to address it ourselves. They went through nearly four months of messages from their official Discord and deleted entire conversations that could be used against them. They indeed managed to erase a large amount of information. The screenshots in this announcement have been taken before their cover-up.
Craig is the only Dergun team member who expressed regret over their past actions, and in the end, nothing was ever publicly addressed. It would have made sense that Q and Tom, the ones responsible for their team spreading lies, should've been the ones to address them, yet they were busy with anything but that. And now, after three long months of waiting, we have decided to address it ourselves.
With the release of custom servers over half a year ago, we wanted to continue providing all our new game updates as custom server releases, and as well encourage people to help and share with each other. Dergun Town wasn't an exception; we provided them with our knowledge and advice, and even offered to cover for some of their server costs out of our own pocket.
But they decided to see it as our weakness and use it against us.
They harassed us, deliberately spread false information against us, and stole from us.
Even one of their core team members eventually expressing regret over their actions was not enough.
We want to make clear that people like the Dergun Town staff have no moral right to use any of our work.