Despite all of the troubles, representatives from Microsoft Gaming Zone, when publicly peppered in chats by Ants players, would refuse to give a direct answer on the future of Ants. Ambiguity ran rampant, with crisp one or two sentence responses becoming standard. Finally in early 2004 Joshua Howard announced that Ants would eventually be taken off Microsoft Gaming Zone servers, and not released to anyone else or the general public. News of this created distress within the Ants gaming community, and an independent attempt by an Ants regular to begin creation of an "Ants 2" code ended with Microsoft threatening legal action towards the player. Refusing to back off despite attempted negotiations, Microsoft continued its threats and eventually the project was scrapped and the code hidden away.