Short said- fix Dev team.
The current people are doing too little in order to make some major changes- they implement half-thought solutions that create new issues instead of fixing the existing ones.
They have no idea how to complete complicated project by delegating the leggwork/grinding tasks to less qualified but motivated people.
Instead of doing the grinding they could write FAQs/Step by Step tutorials and leave the grinding to the willing community members while controlling the quality only.
It is idiotic to have more admins and mods then devs.
The obvious game flaws proven by many examples ( OP GBs, TS/Zooming bombers) shows the incapability of the devs to fix minor issues.
The bomber case for example is extreme because it was oversight made in 4.86 beta, it got fixed by next 4.86 beta version in order to be forgotten again in the final version, fixing it should not take more then couple hours work, autoaiming snacs is not fun, good Fighter pilots having no chance vs 4 Energy gun bomber piliot with 100% auto aim accuracy is not fun. It is there already for 2 years since the current devs cannot bother to fix such small and fixable issue.
Being robbed by "green" freelancers is not fun- the simple suggestion that requires 2 min work was not implemented even if it was promised to be done: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=74184
Fixing all small but annoying issues would bring more activity to the server.
They cannot cope with the server reality and they cannot bring swift working solutions in reasonable time frames.
This leads to general activity decline.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
Not another post full of vitriolic trash by Govedo
(08-13-2013, 02:08 PM)Govedo13 Wrote: ...
They have no idea how to complete complicated project by delegating the leggwork/grinding tasks to less qualified but motivated people.
Instead of doing the grinding they could write FAQs/Step by Step tutorials and leave the grinding to the willing community members while controlling the quality only.
...
Funny... this was basically implemented in the Infocarding department. Guess what happened? Most of the community volunteers flaked out and produced next to nothing.
Well this means that your content creation organization is bad, nothing more or less.
Echo 7-7 great example of Devs doing stuff wrong is his quite right explanation about bases and characters where he forgot to mention that each character docked at the said bases could be manually moved- but it requires really huge amount of time and manual work that the current Dev team is not capable to do due to understaffing. Echo 7-7 before throwing more mud in my yard-example of this is the admin team beaming players out of the 4.85 Conn before the 4.86 Conn implementation.
When they say something is not possible do please double check it because it could mean "it is possible but we are not capable to do it". As result it is technically possible to delete bases and systems out of the server without harming the gameplay, the Dev team is not willing to take another approach that allows structural changes in order to do it.
There is no transparency about requirements who gets what under what conditions.
Form a Lore council full of 30-40 old and respected members that does not like each other but even if not active in game are willing to vote on major lore changes after reading the proposals, current active experienced devs and dev leaders get 3-4 votes each.
After the lore changes get approved by the Lore Council the next version pending tasks list is created, experienced devs are appointed for team leaders, the rest of the community should be motivated to help them doing their tasks in pre-created workflow, everything should stay written and documented. The auto-updater allows smaller projects to be executed the 2 years huge version update should be changed by many smaller hotfixes and updates. It is not possible to fix everything at once but going in with small steps by small updates can fix the mod over time.
Dev forums are closed for the general public- they should be read only but not closed-the working process might motivate more people to join. Dev team structure is not transparent and open to the community- the devs should try to actively recruit more people instead of sitting in the shadows.
There are no clear FAQs helping the wannabe devs. If one Dev can make ship that suits the mod then he should be capable to write detailed FAQ and step by step guide as well- this counts for every task in Development. There is lack of pending task lists.
There is zero award policy for the contributors, you would be amused how many people would agree to grind for you if you give them harmless stuff like custom paint-job or custom thruster exhaust instead of freaking single alien Zoner battleship for example.
People are motivated in general by different stuff if you fail to find the right motivators you fail to achieve results.
There is no point to continue with arguing because you cannot take negative feedback in honest way while trying to improve the situation, you just ignore it as trolling.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
(08-13-2013, 01:15 PM)Echo 7-7 Wrote: I'll explain the issue to the best of my ability.
Every base has a unique code that identifies it in the mod files, called a "base entry". For example, Planet Manhattan is li01_01 (Liberty system 1 base 1).
Now, as you know, every character has a unique map of systems visited. In the game files, this includes a list of base entries to note which bases have been visited.
A base can be deleted from the game by erasing the base entry and removing the associated solar object (the actual thing in space) from the system file. However, when a base entry is deleted, it's only gone from the game files, and not the character files, which are stored on the server. You would think that this is not a problem if the character is beamed away from the base that gets deleted. However, it turns out that a character with a non-existant base entry in its file can become corrupted.
Thus, the issue is not about how to delete bases (relatively straightforward) or systems (very easy); it's about preventing character corruption. So, if there was a total character wipe, we wouldn't have to worry about character corruption, and we could pretty much redesign systems from scratch. Hypothetically, this identical issue would overflow to any other server running mod version X and wanting to upgrade to version Y, where the latter version has deleted base entries.
I welcome anyone more knowledgable about the issue to correct me, but I think I've got the basics down.
(08-13-2013, 02:08 PM)Govedo13 Wrote: Instead we can focus on smaller things that are annoying but fixable
I have to agree on this line. There are some issues what could be fixed long time ago. One of it is as mentioned the TZ/TS what makes people hit with 99% accuracy and its throwing the balance out of the window and causing people getting disgusted by it ( example: snubs <--> gunboats)
Connecticut. As the command /conn has proven very useful, it is also causing problems, like people looking for easy interraction in ooRP world instead of the roleplay world. I know we complained about people who sought pvp in roleplay systems back then. (example: its better to have at least some interraction in roleplay systems than none)
POBs. no comment ( example: POB at the o 49 hole in dublin, POBs can be harmed only by caps, their location for example at Manhattan orbit looks just awful)
Official factions. The faction rights dissapeared in time and there is no real difference of being an official faction or unofficial. Of course I wouldnt like the official faction making their own developement of the story, because thats just stupid, because everyone wants to be on the winning side. But on the other hand the official factions took mostly care of the independent players and made them stick to the faction role. But with all the freedom brought into disco, some people abused the fact nobody will/can do anything about independent players, so they done shit without ANY consequences. That is also why being an independent player is so much more worth than being in a faction.
Systems. Even though we all can see the horrible activity drop in the omicron systems since 4.86 came out, the only way the developers are going to try fixing it is to shrink the systems ( what is of course a good idea, but will it be suificient?), the new systems like useless zeta and mu will remain.
The whole problem is that all bad moves what are not fixed soon make people disgusted and cause activity drop.
So even though I rarely agree with Govedo, he is right on this one. There should be at least minor fixes without waiting years for a next update...
Here's an idea. What if we added hard points to the engines of our ships. That way instead of always blowing eachother up we can completely immobolize other players. In Leu of the also make player ship have a "tow" beam capable of towing ships their class and below. The larger the ship the bigger ship needed to tow it. This would affect the efficiency of pirates and militaries greatly. However I'm sure this will give the flare troll squad something else to troll us all on.
(08-13-2013, 02:49 PM)Vrabcek Wrote: There should be at least minor fixes without waiting years for a next update...
All minor fixes are possible to be implemented.
It requires server restart, the autoupdater automatically updates the client to the server status when the player starts the game. Cannon made possible every day updates. Also a lot of stuff is sever only controlled like PoBs etc- then only server restart is required.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
(08-13-2013, 02:43 PM)Govedo13 Wrote: ...
There is no point to continue with arguing because you cannot take negative feedback in honest way while trying to improve the situation, you just ignore it as trolling.
Saying "the work you do is wrong" is not an argument, it's an opinion.
Quote:There are no clear FAQs helping the wannabe devs. If one Dev can make ship that suits the mod then he should be capable to write detailed FAQ and step by step guide as well- this counts for every task in Development.
Most Devs are self-taught, and not to mention, tutorials do exist for many aspects of Freelancer modding, and they're certainly not all hosted on DiscoveryGC.
Quote:... example of this is the admin team beaming players out of the 4.85 Conn before the 4.86 Conn implementation.
The issue I described has nothing to do with whether a player is present at a deleted base or not. You also need to differentiate between what the Devs are capable of doing and what the Admins do. They are distinctly separate, regardless of the fact that many lead Devs are also Admins.
If you're going to criticise the organisational structure of the Dev team, do your homework and point fingers at specific people rather than the team as a whole, whom you do a vast injustice by criticising equally for the same issues.
Addendum: I will repeat something I've mentioned before (in other topics); Discovery v4.87 is the first mod version developed wholly without any content input from Igiss. However, we're not miracle workers - v4.87 is partially damage control given how much development momentum the mod already has.
Aside; be careful not to confuse ill intent with ineptitude or laziness.
One side keeps repeating themselves explaining what is wrong. It's actually became an easy topic to correctly say what is exactly wrong since nothing changes for years.
Another side is not in favor of fixing old scars but mostly aiming at adding something new, because it's understandably more interesting then trying to fix the broken parts.
And this is going nowhere. Why I know? It's already gone nowhere. Why this happens? Because there is no super admin like Igiss to make hard decisions when it's necessary. Character wipe is one of those topics. There was so much cheating and abusing that it looks logical to remove everything and use the opportunity to clean out the mod from useless systems (well, it's a problem, but not that much. However I was always in favor of improving the vanilla systems rather then adding incredible amount of new once), fix trading, mining and smuggling incomes which are currently absolutely retarded. Fix bases, it's easy to fix them by making them SRP things with many restrictions on where they can be placed and how they will be run. That will add, at least, some RP reason into their current pointless and harmful existence. And so on and so forth.
However the decision-making system looks broken by now since it takes ages to do even the simple changes and it takes the infinite amount of time to actually make any significant change to the game. Admins and devs and mods are the people too from the perspective where we all are playing the game and are part of the factions and groups. As said people like to win and resistance to the changes is very hard when no one can make it one sided.
I'm going this far simply because opinions are welcomed around here but they are not taken into any consideration any way. So we can keep talking and voicing any ideas and opinions we please but the only thing I'm expecting to hear once again is that no one needs it, devs knows for better what is ok and what's not. Yea.
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