Has nobody touched on the point that I can go through any page of the Suggestions forum and only see 1 half decent idea on that page?
If you were to peek behind the curtain that is Empires development you would see that a lot of the suggestion ideas do get discussed. Unfortunately community management discussions seem to be eating up more time than they should be recently. I think if you were to take a step back and think about it; you would realize that these threads are a little counter productive. Instead of inspiring a positive attitude towards moving forward with suggestions; you've created a thread which does the opposite. The simple answer to most of the problems with development here is that we lack resources. By this I mean; lack of time (All the programmers work full-time jobs.) and a lack of manpower. Why do the developers have to justify how they spend their time to you? The team owe's you nothing, we all do this for free; and for the most part it goes without appreciation. Feedback is always welcome and I don't want to discourage suggestions. But please remember that there is already a backlog of issues we are working though, many of them being bug-fixes and correcting some game play functionality. We have only just begun to tackle these issues because so much time was needed to get the release pipeline working correctly; a lot of time and effort has been put in to making this system. I've actually never seen the team so organized. In the past changes weren't reviewed, people added whatever they wanted. Now changes have to be approved by other developers. We also have reliable crashdump reporting which helps us bring stability to our releases. The way I see it, proper development has only just begun. Now that these systems are in place; bugs can be squashed and the focus will soon shift to new features and updated content. Anyway, rant over. I'm gonna go do something more productive with my time.
Never in this thread I stated that team owes me anything, i just want to clarify things on the forum and in the community. As you said, most of things discussed 'behind the curtain' never leaves the backstage, which is why there are people complaining about devs doing nothing. And yes, the gaming is changing for the better, but we still can aim for the ideal. Yeah, we wasted so much energy on that, the heat death of universe is closer than you think
And those decent ideas are all mine, amirite? Tons of stuff is happening all the time, I really don't see why people be complaining.
Has anyone ever considered getting some moderators to filter out some of the more obviously impossible suggestions so the dev team doesn't have to deal with it themselves?
The only way you could do that I think is if you removed suggestions, removed off topic, and forced people to talk about the game only. The forum would LOSE it because 90% of discussion on here I feel isn't even related to the game.
Spoiler: coresponding smithy totally agree with that, but it would still be nice if someone could spend time on a weekly/monthly base to map the dev ongoings and also update times (when thhey can be ~ set) for the community i really the threads Tama posted about ongoing changes - even if i think they are to detailed and are more "changelogs befor something got changed" that have a pro to give us opportunity to critizise them befor they get real, but also a con/downside that they just produce unnecessary & useless critics clutter - also it's quite confusing to differenciate them from real changelogs! (maybe i'm just to stupid because i haven't found them in a fast lookup through the forum, but thats the point! ;-) (i personally avoid commenting them because of this, even if i disagree with some of these changes! - beta testing is the place for that!)
Before I start, I want to say that my views do not represent that of the current development team, just my own. So, when I was a dev, I used to get pretty salty about threads like this. Donald actually touched on most of what I want to get across, but the long and short of it is, the development team is comprised of people putting in their free time to develop the game. They don't get paid and on top of that, there has never been a queue of people ready to jump in and put more time in. Empires development since Krenzo has always consisted of people scraping together whatever little time and motivation they can in order to work on the game. This thread isn't that bad to be honest, but there have been some threads literally dripping in entitlement in the past, virtually demanding that the developers owe people an explanation for everything they do and need to be providing updates constantly. They have never and will never owe people the right to responses on their suggestions, or even posting updates. Developers post updates when they have something worth talking about, when they've added or are working on something worth getting a discussion started about, be it for feedback or just to motivate themselves to continue with it when they see people getting excited. The idea that there have to be weekly or monthly developments, when development can literally go a month with nothing being done due to time constraints is just dumb. This isn't a paid studio, and having to tell people "yeah we had time to do precisely fuck all this month" and dealing with the responses is extremely demoralising. I also want to point out that if I remember correctly, the 3 developers who changed up the suggestion forum to add the whole "under consideration, implemented, etc" were actually 3 developers who did precisely fuck all during their tenure. But lo and behold, the community thought the opposite of that because: "wow, they were replying to threads and stuff, they must be really active!". Suffice to say, that was not the case, because that's literally all they did instead of actually working on the game. That's not to say suggestions get ignored, but if a dev chooses to quickly flick through some suggestion threads, it'll be to get the general gist of an idea and see if there are any useful components to it. There HAS to be a suggestion forum because people will always feel the need to post ideas, whether or not they're needed. It's just human nature. MOOtant was an asshole but he was entirely right, it's to keep that stuff from the rest of the forum. The fact is, there has been a list of things that NEED doing to the game running back the past 10 years. I mean jesus, the GUI overhaul has been on the cards since the game first came out, but it's such a mammoth undertaking that no-one can commit the time to do it. There are always things that the current coders will need to do to continue making the game work. Any additional features are really up to their discretion. If they want to dip into the suggestions forum, that's great. But if they want to add something of their own accord and the other developers agree, then they do not owe it to the community to ask for their blessing as well. It's their time and whatever helps them motivate themselves into investing that time is worth doing. If that's implementing a feature that they personally feel passionate about, then that's absolutely fine. Lastly, it's also worth mentioning what happens if you expect a developer to comment in every suggestion thread. Ignoring the time element entirely, the moment they comment in that thread, it becomes a dev related discussion where the developer needs to continue justifying his position throughout. If a developer drops in and shits on your idea, he's an asshole. If he comes in and supports it, he's almost committing to it being added to the game at some point, which despite how good of an idea it is, could be entirely impractical. It doesn't matter if your suggestion is the best in the world, if no-one has the motivation or time to add it. It's nearly always going to require 10 times more effort than you realise to implement your idea.
tl;dr devs don't own you anything, feedback forum is containment subforum, your ideas even if are god-tier will never be fulfilled because they are too damn hard
It's also worth pointing out that Empires is a source mod, in 2016, actively undergoing development. The same cannot be said for nearly every other sourcemod, and any still in development aren't even remotely close to Empires in terms of scale. Empires sits way out there still going when it has absolutely no right to, it's an achievement unto itself. The other thing people don't realise is just how rapidly they're getting updates now. 2.12 to 2.2 took a year, 2.24d to 2.25 took over a year. Various other releases meant 6 months+ without even so much as a script update. The guys you have now are putting in more work than you realise and doing rapid releases on a scale Empires hasn't seen in a very very long time. Seriously, shit is really good right now and I don't think people realise it.
There's a changelog right here, I don't know what more you people want from the dev team... I like how everyone is demanding updates and stuff from the devs yet when it's time to test the new version, NO ONE shows up.
Yeah like, this was a huge problem we used to have as well. The same people crying about a lack of updates wouldn't show up to a test. We'd announce a test a week in advance, spam everyone, have 30+ people say they'd show, then barely have 5 people actually turn up at the night, including the 2-3 of us. Back then people had to use SVN and stuff. It was a bit of a pain but not that complicated. But now there's the Beta branch on steam. It literally couldn't be easier, but people still don't show.
Paradox. Stop suggesting stuff. Cool. I reckon I have a promising career in community relationship management.
