Other > General Game Discussion

About devs, the game in general and people who'd like to help.

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Solar:
I think you actually get a remarkably high amount of interaction with Devs.

As for discussing up coming features, these things take a long time to get done and have a not insignificant chance of being scrapped. If players are getting frustrated at the current situation they would likely be a lot worse if they saw everything that could be done: "Why aren't you doing X!"

Also, its a lot easier saying "Heres an idea, I'll do it" vs spending the hours and hours (and hours) actually needed to get even a simple thing going. Its the same as being a GM, if people knew what a frustrating job it was I doubt there would be anyone asking about becoming one :P

Giemz:
Well I always thougth that there should be a list of "FOnline2238 needs YOU. Things you can help in" topic sticked somewhere. Yeah a lot of people think that loosly throwed idea is enough. And some people are the typical hayfire type of helper. They may start something but when they realize the 80-20 rule they just get bored and stop. But there are people that can really contribute but just don't know how. Scripters, 2D artists, 3D artists, writers, and serious testers that may use their time to try and find bugs in things you tell them to look at.

How can people know if they have sufficient knowledge to help in scripting if they didn't ever see any part of the code used. If it's possible to paste even a simple quest like the "bring Buster a pack of cigarettes" quest code people may see if they can understand how it works and know if they can write their own. My english is really shitty. And my writing skills are crap too, even in polish. But I guess I could take a well written quest design with dialogs done and code it. Yet I never used Angel Script. It would take some time to know it. Like you said, a modder's personality is needed. But it's way easier to creativly copy someone else work then to learn from scratch. To make a quest I need to know how to use npc's dialogue and make checks of diffrent things here and there. And after some time working on an example you got the knowledge to make your own.

To know if I can contribute significantly I lack is an example of the code used and means to test my own work. Is there a possibility to provide that? If you waste an afternoon on this little thing you may notice that it will sort out the men from the boys without any more time of your own wasted.

Lexx:

--- Quote ---But there is still the "what the fuck are they doing the whole time" thing.
--- End quote ---

Posting lolcats in chat and eating savoy cabbage.


/Edit: About discussing stuff, I always have that TLA-picture in my head. Discussing and arguing days and weeks and pages over pages about one single idea. You can kill even the best thing in this way.

Badger:
I don't know what to say here. The players aren't exactly unified in what they want. But even if they were, I couldn't see it having any effect on what the devs are working on. The devs are a pretty closed bunch. A thread with a huge amount of player activity won't see devs do much more than correcting facts. It'd be interesting to actually hear what their attitude or vision about things like PvP. But we don't. You don't need a community manager to say, "I think PvP should be dominated by high levels, not everyone is meant to have a chance" or "We're not interested in adding PvE, we'd like most combat to involve players".

I'd argue that the game is stagnating. We've got players, we've got features, but there hasn't been anything to get excited about in a long while. The game isn't going anywhere new, nor has anything different been tried in a long while. Most of the changes are bug-fixes or brahmin based, and the changes that aren't don't have any real impact on the average game experience. And I don't think anything as significant or game-changing as the 'Create your own faction' feature was, is in the works.

The game isn't going to die, no. There's plenty of die-hard fans that'll keep FOnline populated. The same people that just were grinding cash and xp over and over in closed even though they knew it was going to be wiped over and over. They'll play the game no matter what.

You need fresh blood, a new vision, a new team leader, or something. Because at the moment, what I can see is a group of skilled and capable people, who are clearly committed to their project, just tinkering because they've got nothing else to do and no clear direction.

Just take combat, or PvP, or quests, or PvE and run with it. Find one particular aspect of gameplay that's important but neglected, and focus on it as a team. Work out how you can make PvP accessible and fun for more players, and start experimenting. Start messing with melee and unarmed, see what works. There's a whole bunch of stuff that has barely been touched. We're still pretty close to vanilla F2 combat in a multiplayer game.

I don't know. Take this guy. He was a capable coder, with both interesting and relevant ideas. He had vision, and obviously cared about the game enough to write a damn novel about how it could be worked on. But the dev response was to just go through each point he made and tell him why he's wrong. Nothing was of interest or taken onboard. The poor guy may as well have been arguing with a dining room table. The devs have already decided they know what's best, because they're the devs. If that guy knew what he was talking about, he'd be a dev. Obviously.

It's nothing personal. Like he said, it's your game and it's your rules. You've built a game you like and that's about all you're going to do. I can't fault you, but I'm just sad you've put so much effort into something and aren't taking it as far as you can go with it.

Heckler Spray:
In my opinion, players should stop wating for the devs to find some ways to have fun, they have too much bugfix to focus on one particular aspect like quests, for instance. Create your own quests, your own events, I'm pretty sure we have enough role-players/PvP players here to have fun.
Maybe the server needs more players. Maybe people shouldn't spend all their time in NCR... I don't know.
I know what you mean, Badger, but I think it's just a beta, there're too many things to fix before we could really enjoy this game, we have to be patient and find some ways to have fun by ourselves.

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