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TL:DR near the bottom. Please try to use key reseller sites to buy Them's Fightin' Herds like Fanatical so that your money does not go to the scummy publisher, Maximum Entertainment, the indie devs behind this project won't be receiving your money by buying it natively!

Them's Fightin' Herds is a fighting game with a dedicated community of players, but after layoffs occurring, scaling the Mane6 dev team from roughly 15 people, to about 3 people, back in December of last year, the game has been left in an awful state by the publisher, pushing out an unfinished, broken patch, because nearly everyone who knew how to develop the game didn't work there anymore. We are deeply saddened by this turn of events. The game doesn't deserve this, the community didn't deserve this, and Mane6 most of all didn't deserve to have their passion project taken from them and left in this state by corporate greed. General gist of the situation is below:

Maximum acquired Mane6 in January of 2022, immediately announcing a season pass with 4 new characters, and a promise that story mode development would be accelerated due to the new resources. It basically means the devs had a budget now.

A year and 10 months pass, in November of 2023, the last two DLC characters are announced, and we are told that chapter 2 and beyond of the story mode is CANCELLED now! This was a very sad moment for the community, and naturally, there was a lot of backlash from the players and backers (yes this was a crowdfunded game on Indiegogo back in 2015) It was only a month later, on December 13th when the Mane6 layoffs I mentioned earlier had occurred.

Modus staff had came into the official TFH discord server that same day, to reassure players that the update featuring Baihe and Nidra would still release in early 2024 as planned. But most people were not convinced, especially when the people who have been working on this game for years, who had been heavily involved in their own games community, suddenly didn't have their jobs anymore.

Fast forward 3 months, on February 22nd, 2024, the 6.0 patch containing Nidra and Baihe release, and the ex-Mane6 devs come out and basically say that they were all fired RIGHT in the middle of rigorous QA testing, and that Baihe was NOT a finished character and should be banned for competitive integrity. 

The community, now having their hands on the patch, within hours/a few days, they had already found a ton of game breaking bugs, related to the new characters, as well as crash issues, and more. It's very clear that Maximum simply decided to push out the patch that they had, no matter if it was finished or not, just so they could wipe their hands of the game, and look towards the future.

But our community isn't sitting down and taking it, we have caused outrage against the publisher that messed with our favorite game like this, causing a huge dip in stock value, as well as them just, blocking people on twitter that called out their awful practices. On top of that, a few hours after a video released that went over this patch and the whole situation in way more detail than this petition will, prominent and well liked members of our community were REPEATEDLY banned from the TFH official Discord Server, which was now in the hands of Maximum Entertainment since the layoffs, solely because of us having called out their horrid practices, once again. Myself, and many others, including tournament organizers, passionate fans, and top level players of the game, all struck with the ban hammer by Maximum, and as I said, when the mods with their permissions given to them by Mane6 unbanned those affected, Maximum kept rebanning them, and again, this included me. Eventually they stopped unbanning us, but we don't know how much longer the TFH server is going to exist.

I am writing this petition merely to bring more attention to the situation, so I will include resources you can look into if you want to get a better understanding of said situation. 

TL:DR:

https://twitter.com/Shattubatu/status/1760770569828503963

https://twitter.com/Shattubatu/status/1760983238372430158

Thread full of clips of bugs the community has discovered in the 6.0 patch that was rushed out: https://twitter.com/Cryena_i_guess/status/1760780484978557329

Pocoquinn's deep dive video on the state of the patch and the situation with Maximum Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGCa7WRhyUs

All we want is for Maximum Entertainment to fix the game, and leave it in a playable state for years and years to come! Join us with the hashtag #SaveTFH on social media like Twitter!