Hey everyone, it's time for me to finally break my silence and speak up.
I have grown tired of GTA modding and the community surrounding it.
While I've tried to stick with it through thick and thin, but recently I have realized that the only thing that comes out of it is a continued degradation of my mental and physical health, and frankly, I'm exhausted.

I'm sure most people reading this are already aware of recent demands that have been made and the attention it has brought up, with me being subject to thinly veiled legal threats by ThirteenAG, the creator of FusionFix, and the people surrounding him.
With these recent events, I have decided to quit GTA modding indefinitely. This was not an easy decision to make for me, as GTA IV was my childhood, a large portion of my teenage years, even a large part of my adulthood because of modding, and making mods is something I enjoy greatly.
This announcement will undoubtedly be a call for celebration for some, which is one of the reasons I have pushed through for so long.

The truth is, the recent actions are by no means something out of the ordinary. People around ThirteenAG have been trying to ruin my reputation and slowly grind me down mentally for multiple years at this point, with the hope that I'll break, that I will give up, or worse.
Over the past 3 years, they have called me slurs, attempted to leak my personal information, tried to DDoS me, spammed my forum threads and comments sections with misinformation, spread slander about my mods being malware, shared out of context screenshots from years ago to try to make people distrust me, twisted my words and actions to make me seem like the most evil person in the community, reverse engineered and stole code from my mods, raided Discord servers I was in so they could try to get me banned, on multiple occasions attempted to take these things to other communities such as NFS, and are now fully teaming up behind a large mod and making legal threats.
The process of modding this game is incredibly enjoyable for me, but at some point I realized that no matter what I do, every single mod I release will be met with immediate negativity, harassment and slander.
I have tried to ignore this for years at this point, with the hope that not paying them any attention will make them go away, but not only did this cause me unimaginable amounts of stress and anxiety, but as I learned, that is just sadly not how this works. They've proven time and time again that even without me directly addressing anything, the smallest displays of light, even joking negativity towards them will come right back to me tenfold as massive drama in an attempt to keep me in silence about this.
Over the years, I have slowly started realizing that none of the points they bring up ever even mattered to them, especially when they make up outright lies. They themselves do not believe any of what they have been saying, and their only goal is to harm me and my reputation.

At the end of the day, was I stirring up a hornet's nest by continuing to maintain my fork of FusionFix for 1.0.7.0/1.0.8.0? Yes, but I weighed the risks, and decided that the good that would come out of players being able to play the mod on the best and most popular versions of the game was worth it, regardless of the harassment I would receive by doing so. But it seems my judgement on this was wrong, as a member of the FusionFix team has underhandedly changed the license of the mod specifically to stop this from happening, and ThirteenAG is now publicly demanding me to shut down my open-source fork, in order to replace it with his own 1.0.7.0/1.0.8.0 version that he has purposely made incompatible with other mods that a large portion of the community considers essential for those versions, in a fully transparent attempt to push me and my work out of the modding scene. They are trying to justify this by framing my lack of experience with GitHub as malice, and using the lies they themselves made up and have been spreading for years to claim that I have a "history of shady behavior".

All in all, I know I can't offer any meaningful pushback against this, as I am only one person with some moderately popular mods, while FusionFix is a comparatively massive project maintained by an entire team, and so them putting their full weight into bullying me out of the scene is something I cannot fight back against in any way.

To those people:
I am not sorry, I did nothing wrong, and I would do it again.

To the people who actually care:
For those of you who are still going to stick with the game, have fun. I know it doesn't matter much, but I would appreciate it if you at least did not use any of these people's mods, as a small way to fight back against this. There are a lot of good people in this community who make great mods, such as Claude_III with The Actual Complete Edition, ItsClonkAndre with his various scripts and downgrader tool, catsmackaroo with Liberty Tweaks, icelaglace with the upcoming iCEnhancer 4, and tons more. They all deserve the attention more than them.
All in all, it's been a good run. I've had a ton of fun in this community despite these issues, and GTA IV modding has led me to make many great memories that I will never forget. See you all, and goodbye.