You may have heard that The Frontier, a big and certainly bigly-hyped mod for Fallout: New Vegas that had been in the works for 7 years, spectacularly crashed and burned last week, with the mod itself being deleted and most of the dev team (including the project lead) jumping ship. Well, now it seems The New Order, a similarly huge and hugely hyped Nazi-victory mod for HOI4 that started construction back in 2014, might suffer a similar fate.

Now I've been watching TNO's development since 2018 or so, and have downloaded and finished a few games in the mod itself. I know a KIA regular once wrote an article about the mod (which he posted to both half-KIA and the TNO subreddit) a few months ago and had been in talks with ThePinkPanzer, the mod's then-lead-dev, while writing this article. So naturally I was interested to hear that it - despite being one of the largest, most ambitious and best known HOI4 mods to date - might have started falling apart at the seams starting two days ago or so. I've been trying to piece together what happened from the mod's own subreddit, /vst/ and Kiwifarms, and I think I now have an idea as to what's been going on:

1. There was some controversy with a submod, The New Order Redux, which (like Kaiserreich Redux) tried to introduce some fun and less 'grimly realistic' content. Apparently the TNO Redux team was willing to let 'transphobia' go unpunished on their server; upon finding that he couldn't ban people for not appeasing and bowing to troon demands, a Redux Discord server mod who was also a mod/dev for TNO proper went running to his friends among the latter.

2. Redux was accused of bigotry and doxxing people, including TNO's lead dev Pacifica (actually the second lead dev, PinkPanzer quit shortly after the mod's first few releases). The former was true (if you define transphobia as not enabling and appeasing trannies on demand) but the latter has since proven to be untrue.

3. Redux got shut down and its team disbanded, a team formed on 4chan is trying to pick up their pieces now.

4. Somehow, someone got their hands on TNO's Gitlab repository, including the devs' names and contact information (particularly that of Pacifica, the aforementioned lead dev). So now they've been doxxed for real. Excel devlogs show the team to be insanely bloated with literally hundreds of members, disorganized, inefficient and riddled with infighting, with many complaints about the project leads acting harshly & high-handedly toward their underlings and demanding crunch time (keep in mind that everyone working on TNO does so for free, so I don't know how they could have even considered 'crunching' anyone).

5. They also revealed Discord chatlogs that show the TNO dev server to be a hotbed of troon cliques and grooming, including at least one occasion where they push a 15-year-old to declare himself trans and seek HRT, as well as degenerate sexual fantasies in general.

6. This has since led to Pacifica jumping ship, his successor jumping ship, ThePinkPanzer apparently washing his hands of the mod altogether, mass panic and infighting among the dev team where supposed all the team leads have abandoned ship and left a massive leadership vacuum, and the TNO Discord moderation trying to insist that everything is A-OK while also banning anyone who suggested otherwise or tried to talk about the leaks. The mod's meltdown is still ongoing.

It's still not clear who leaked everything; it could have been vengeful Redux members, but since TNO has a history of dev infighting (at one point, half the devs formed a 'shadow server' to develop their work & trash talk PinkPanzer's stupider decisions, then got purged when he found out) it's also entirely possible that some burned out dev did this to spite Pacifica for putting them through crunch to get TNO's most recent releases out the door. Regardless, the damage has been done and the dox info, the chatlogs, the Excel logs and even the latest dev-build of TNO are now floating around out there.

I'd link to the KF thread directly but I'm not sure if that would fly, even here on KIA2.win. If you just want to see the depraved chatlogs, just look for their TNO drama thread and start around page 24. Start at page 1 if you want the full story plus unrelated prologue and background materials. Alternatively, wait a week or two and there just might be videos cropping up summarizing the mod's downfall, as was and is the case with The Frontier.

Tl;dr apparently trannies have the reverse Midas touch in modding too, anything and everything they touch turns to shit and falls apart. Also, what the absolute fuck is wrong with major mod teams in general nowadays?