deedubya wrote:Screemonster wrote:just because a majority vote agrees on something doesn't make it a good idea
Best answer to this and anyone currently working as a maintainer is something I learned working closely with a lead designer. He told me that even if you somehow wind up making the most well designed, perfectly balanced, and flawless game experience possible within your framework, it'll all be for naught if the people playing your game hate all the design elements you pushed through to get it there. There were a lot of changes that he wanted to implement, but he couldn't because the community backlash would be massive - and people would quit over it.
Which is more or less what's happening with these awful merges from oranges. People say the PR is awful, give plenty of reasoning why, and get promptly ignored as the PR gets merged. But I guess it doesn't matter to them, when all the quality players jump ship due to the terrible merges, we'll just be replaced by ssethtiders and the population won't dwindle at all. So realistically they have nothing to lose by pushing this crap on us, since we don't matter to them and are completely expendable in their eyes.
People are good for figuring out feedback on things that don't work, but they rarely provide useful changes or long term solutions. Even in popular games and big game communities(e.g. dota) a lot of changes receive a lot of initial hatred or dislike and it takes time for opinions to develop. The most useful way to listen to community input in these cases is to test it, wait until the initial impressions wear down, and people are used to the feature enough to try to at least give a non bandwagon opinion or take on something.
Listening to the slightest screeching results in a horrifically unbalanced mishmash game and results in a dangerous case of exclusively "merging inoffensive things" which results in us avoiding major changes and reworks to broken or imbalanced mechanics because they might offend people. People will naturally care about their own interests and if a pervasive but broken game mechanic exists, people will desire that it remain untouched entirely out of their own self interest. Do I need to bring up circuit killbots again to showcase this?
An excellent example on self interest is the singularity removal, to the lot here who may be too new to remember it our previous main engine before the supermatter was the gravitational singularity/tesla. We've had attempts to rework the singularity itself into a new engine and almost every single attempted rework was unpopular as a result of people using the "core ss13" argument to reject alternate engines that enable modifiability and creativity, are harder to sabotage silently and instantly end a round with, and are more mechanically interesting than "Set up emitter field generator, fire emitter, fill plasma generators, and fuck off". In fact, the reason the pr was likely not as heavily contested as it should be was because before the PR even went up there was over a month long period of rounds ending within 5-15 minutes due to instant engine releases or power not being set up. The fact that an objective improvement to the game required a literal month long period of 1000+ rounds being ruined by a feature to get people on board with a change is a testament to why a lot of oranges policy is to ignore players who refuse to actually make useful changes and instead complain about a "core mechanic" being changed, especially when most of the complainers have only been here for a year or two maximum.
If you doubt me, during the taser removal 98% of the people complaining were genuinely at most 2 year old accounts. Most of them were less than a year old and were arguing that tasers were "core ss13" despite how new they were, and while that's anecdotal it's a pretty harsh example of why oranges steps over peoples toes with prs and makes fun of people who complain constantly without making changes. Burning out contributors and preventing important and nescessary game improvements and changes because people who have only been around for 3 months dislike "core ss13" being changed will result in the game stagnating and dying when those people get bored and quit as quickly as they came. This is the actual true and secret objective behind what oranges does and how to understand his behaviour/merging.
Timonk wrote:Maybe listening to them will help them stay?
That isn't the reason most people quit, almost every new player ends up quitting due to boredom or the excessive time investment required by the game. It's incredibly easy to get a repeated string of bad or unfun rounds while investing 3-4+ hours. Once you pass the beginner hump and get more integrated with the game, it can lose a lot of its luster and wonder and when the game starts turning into someone going through the motions or investing a large amount of time for a small return it can cause burnout and force people to quit. A lot of people don't think about it but ss13 is a huge time investment into a round compared to most games(30 minutes to 2+ hours potentially) where you can just be killed or fucked with and have that much time drained out of your day.
If you reference the older players, a lot of them DO get a voice and contribute, the issue is that any meaningful long term changes get chased off as a result of humoring players who have been around for a fraction of a percent of the time that tg/ss13 has been around resulting in a lack of necessary improvements or changes. You may think laughing and shitposting it off is fine but dealing with crying pissbabies who screech about every single change you do is a very dissuading thing for a lot of people. Why contribute when the net result of your attempt to improve the game and add deeper and more immersive content reworks to the base game is having 50 people screech at you and fling turds at you? Why bother arguing when 9 months later a new set of feces throwing monkies will replace them and throw feces at you over a new injustice of a PR that changes ss13 and apparently ruins the game? It's a major issue and it's why I've been supporting oranges decisions to merge controversial prs, even ones that I've argued against, for the long term health and betterment of the game. Worrying about people who have zero contribution and who don't contribute when they've been openly welcomed to make their own changes is incredibly stupid and is why the maintainers/coders/admins/whoever make fun of you for being a dumb fuck
To anyone newer, if you want to understand oranges mentality and mindset with forcing changes here are necessary reading materials to understand WHY he's been intent on merging or refusing things based on what he believes.
https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 10&t=10074 and the past mindset from other "veteran" and veteran players on this shit
https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 75#p301973
Oranges has been intent on rejecting some inoffensive shit like mechs or guns because they fall into the trap of having a billion lethal weapons you can only use while antagged making them effectively worthless or powergaming grief tools if that's the issue that's causing you to complain. If you're complaining against feature changes it's a result of him wanting to force a change to a bad game system(medical, engineering, security, etc.) that's been stagnant and an issue for YEARS with a rework or update to improve/fix the associated issues. The maintainers didn't wake up one day and decide "Yo fuck medical/science/engineering/security lol" and are instead focusing on persistent issues.
Now here's where i post quotes to gloat and explain my points
oranges wrote:But it's a symptom of the issues, nobody can touch existing stuff in any meaninful way without causing a giant shitstorm
nobody wants to let a single person define the direction of the game without causing a giant shitstorm
any attempt to focus efforts along any sort of line causes a giant shitstorm
oranges wrote:it honestly feels like at this point the design direction is literally just "pr's that aren't controversial"
that's not a blueprint for anything good
kor wrote:
We disagree all the time. Someone even briefly lost maintainer last month. But there is such a big workload and so much hostility from outside coderbus already that we're usually willing to just let things go instead of getting in a big public fight about it. Easier to just let Cheridan break ties and move on with our lives.
and on the topic of "LoL JuSt AdD mOrE sPaCe RuInS fOr EnDgAmE cOnTeNt xD" tier stuff
captain sawrge wrote:
shadowdimentio wrote:Space exploration is another frontier we could expand on, as currently we went from "nothing is in space" to "space will fucking annihilate you, and there's nothing in space".
Drawing people away from the station is absolutely the wrong way to go about things. The focus should always be on what goes on on the station, rather than encouraging people to just fuck off alone/in small groups.
Hello newfriends from 6/12/14/whatever months down the line when i eventually have to repost this, you aren't unique in crying about changes. Hopefully I just learn to not give a shit by that point and ignore it but i am bluepilled so i might reply. I probably put too much thought into these posts for people who are going to quit before I likely do.
