/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

so, basically, why does oranges keep merging heavily disliked stuff? shouldnt there be something that prevents him from merging (policy wise) without considering what the community wants?
Examples:
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/44324
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/44530
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/42386
all of these were heavily disliked, yet oranges still merged them.

dont get me wrong here, this isnt just oranges, but hes doing most of it.


also a gem i found in my pics, god bless his soul

Kenteko wrote: Look the fact is, communities have very often taken things that were bugs, oversights, or obviously bad and simply ignored it and made it work. One of the biggest disasters examples of this backfiring to the developers, Absolute Virtue, also caused such a massive ruckus that it created echoes in the company that forced them to change design philosophies or face potential legislation. This happens so often, multitudes of lists have been written explicitly covering this exact phenomenon. A game designer has intent, but that withers in the face of community scrutiny and acceptance. This is even where the memes of Tires Don Exit/Fox Only Final Destination come from.

The game upon delivery starts as intention and then it evolves. Organic evolution works best when the community is behind something, or even better, perverts it using the bugs available to make it work. Almost all of speedrunning and sub frames is a culture that has exploded from this. It's so prolific that MARIO MAKER not only has its own set of bugs, but that the developers accepted that some levels required the bugs to function and allowed a split for those with the original bug (P Switch Jumping/Yumping) and those without it. People are literally wondering if they will reintroduce the feature when 2 comes out.

Alienating the community just causes people to be less interested/engaged and prevents a substantial amount of organic evolution. Donut, while being a massive meme, was often still seen semi fondly because it was such a small map with a singulo, that it wasn't a question of IF the singulo popped but WHEN. Remove that and people seem to find the map to be a weaker/lesser version of almost every other map and are now arguably campaigning for its removal. You can argue correlation does not equal causation, but the fact is that without its chief gimmick, Donut just feels cramped for no real reason. There's other designs in SS13 that, through a bug or bad design, are often abused or simply used in a lateral way and people just shrug and accept it. There's a reason I put the Stealth Implant up there.

I got no clue what the fuck you're talking about still. How does unintended things being discovered related to anything in this thread. This argument doesn't make any sense, why am I even engaging with it.
You're talking with a shitload of authority on a subject that you clearly don't have a lot of experience in, and is highly opinion driven anyways.

actioninja wrote: I got no clue what the fuck you're talking about still. How does unintended things being discovered related to anything in this thread. This argument doesn't make any sense, why am I even engaging with it.
You're talking with a shitload of authority on a subject that you clearly don't have a lot of experience in, and is highly opinion driven anyways.

I mean, you clearly asked for me to provide examples of a community outsmarting the developers.

actioninja wrote: I gotta say, care to give some examples of "community outsmarting the developers" if this is so common?

I did and then some. Developers created content and design with an intent. Community ignored it and found a new meta. Developers shrugged and either incorporated it or admitted the problem and solved it in future patches. This is, quite literally, the definition of organic design. I would appreciate it if you stayed on topic or at least acknowledge that I addressed the points presented.

At this point I'm not sure what even is the original problem we're trying to solve. OP was about merging controversial PR's without server oversight, but this current line of discussion is about something else altogether.

My point was that we don't need more codebase-server integration, they're already very tightly integrated. Coders don't just appear from the mysterious code dimension, they come from the community. Community votes happen constantly, even if they don't take the form of a public facing poll.

I mean, we could use something like the recent hygiene poll more

Timonk wrote:I mean, we could use something like the recent hygiene poll more

the evil black coderbus cloud would never listen to player input at all. They have never used polls to resolve controversial non game integrity PRs and they refuse to allow anyone to join their exclusive code club so no one else can provide contributions.

To be fair, those two most recent polls were by nervere, and the hygiene one is being ignored so not necessarily the best examples

I mean, gang one was disregarded too but whatever I still can't put my collar on UwU

I just dumped everything I saw i didnt discriminate

it's been used multiple times in the past now only real difference is that oranges is willing to step on a few toes for (what he believes is) the betterment of the game or forcing change into poorly designed mechanics that people refuse to touch due to backlash or other reasons

4dplanner wrote:To be fair, those two most recent polls were by nervere, and the hygiene one is being ignored so not necessarily the best examples

I only ignored the first one because it was too early.

the other isn't ignored, we're just not going to do the work for you

Just to clarify, I personally don't have any strong feelings on hygiene either way.

As to thread topic, maintainers are accountable in that if they do indeed fuck up the game there are a multitude of other codebases for players to move to/MSO to switch to. It's not as though they can just wantonly do as they wish, especially given the source code is open and so can be forked with minor effort. As to "accountability" (i.e. inability to push unpopular changes) on a feature by feature level, I think it's been sufficiently explained why the systems proposed here would be terrible.

Karp wrote:
it's been used multiple times in the past now only real difference is that oranges is willing to step on a few toes for (what he believes is) the betterment of the game

Why do polls if you are going to disregard it either way

The point of game integrity changes are just that, game integrity changes for the long term health of the game. Things like the drone removal pr, circuit removal pr, the original dualsaber crafting removal pr, etc. If we had github react emojis and the same level of player involvement in the git as we did in the past things like the stun glove removal/parasting removal would probably be semi controversial issues as well.

The main reason some PRs need to be pushed through regardless of community opinion is because maintainability and balance on these features are out of wack and have been impossible to fix in every iteration. Playing "Improve don't remove" with something like ntsl is just an unnecessary headache that nobody wants to deal with. Oranges has said repeatedly that if someone is willing to code an alternative that tackles the issues he's stated he'd be willing to merge the alternative pr instead of the controversial pr as well.

Oranges can be abrasive at times but he's reasonable and he's interested in tackling the core issues in the game's design. These changes may seem like he's trolling players or ignoring the community but he genuinely does care about said issues plaguing the game and he's willing to push PRs through despite the current community disapproval over the change for the betterment of the game longterm.

Another important line a previous headcoder once said, partially restated in my own words due to my memory. "We have dozens of players join and leave on a regular basis and we cycle our entire playerbase yearly. Expecting coders to listen to people who disappear as quickly as they join and have effective blips in community involvement is an insane practice and would only lead to coders burning out and quitting."

The ball is in your court. Be the change you want to see.

good post

Maybe listening to them will help them stay?

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.

your friend sounds like a bit of a bitch

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.

who are these alleged good players that are leaving over having a third gender option

I hoped ryan cobb was leaving for hippie

Mickyan wrote:who are these alleged good players that are leaving over having a third gender option

That's impossible. Good people wouldn't do that. That's like asking "Hey, where'd all the good murderers go?"

Timonk wrote:

Karp wrote:
it's been used multiple times in the past now only real difference is that oranges is willing to step on a few toes for (what he believes is) the betterment of the game

Why do polls if you are going to disregard it either way

Most of those polls were from headmins expressing their disinterest in the feature and didn't have a backing code-wise.

Also because polls are a way of polling player feeling, not a divine instruction from god to do [x].

If tomorrow a poll concluded that 90% of the playerbase wanted to "ban all players with ckeys starting with V" I wouldn't support it because it's dumb and random.

You should support getting feedback from players, but don't mistake getting their view for mob rule.

why get Player Feedback if you wont listen to it

think about how many prs are merged without controversy, and realise that they are the ones where we "listen to player feedback"

Timonk wrote:why get Player Feedback if you wont listen to it

Let's do a little hypothetical. You run a pizza parlor. You like your pizza parlor but you're curious what people think of it. So you hand out questionnaires/send email surveys/etc.

From those, you find that 60% of respondents put in "Your pizzas are too expensive, give me pizza for free".

Now, clearly there's customer feedback here that your pizzas are too expensive, but giving your pizzas away for free would make no business sense! You could look at lowering the quality of your ingredients so you can hit a lower price point, or you could hand out coupons to long time customers to ensure they feel they're getting a deal. You might even decide that you don't care about the 60% of respondents because your profits from the 40% who are a-okay are fine. All of these are listening to customer feedback, but they're using them as a point in your decision making, not slavishly following them - after all, you would be handing out free pizza if you did.

I love how we have people going"The majority is dumb and dont have good ideas" when that same attitude has torpedoed a lot of games. Like I understand you think you know whats best for the game more then the people that actually interact with the game and the community, but ive already seen a good chunk of players leave just because the "balance" changes made playing unfun and an absolute slog. No ones asking for infinite TC or toggleable Godmode, they just want you to stop tearing shit out of the game that the majority was happy with.

Kholdgrave wrote:I love how we have people going"The majority is dumb and dont have good ideas" when that same attitude has torpedoed a lot of games.

Such as?

Like I understand you think you know whats best for the game more then the people that actually interact with the game and the community, but ive already seen a good chunk of players leave just because the "balance" changes made playing unfun and an absolute slog.

Where are they going?
There's still enough players to have three more server than there was prior to the ssethtide. If anything player population declining is completely normal following a tide like that, you can see how the total number on byond has been steadily declining to a more stable state. That's always what happens. There's a huge spike, it drops off, then stays at a more stable population.