07-19-2020, 05:39 PM
So... unfortunately I've been having to bring this up as part of quite a few discussions with quite a few people involved in different areas of the mod, so I figured instead of havin to go through this over and over with each of em one by one, I'll just make a forum post about it to sum it all up in one place.
The general direction of the current dev cycle, be it ship, balance, system or what have you, seems to essentially be "Out with the old, in with the new", and that's fine, a place as stagnant as this does need things changed around and freshened up every once in a while... but to a moderate, sensible degree. It's one thing to go around the mod freshening things up, its another to outright dismiss all the time and effort previously put into the mod (both by devs and the community), toss it in the trash, and just replace it with something completely different - That's no longer freshening things up, that's just exploiting the shell of this mod to build an entirely different mod more conveniently than from scratch.
Though there've been quite a few examples in recent patches, my actual concern is not with any one particular piece of equipment, asset, or system being ditched/recycled, it's more a general concern about the total disregard the current team seems to show for "legacy" of this mod, as it were. In my honest opinion, this mod is not, and at this point can never be a "marketable product" and yet the current team seems to be trying to apply a set of standards suitable to that around here, which I'm afraid will in the long run turn out to be disruptively disproportionate to not only the community's wants and needs, but also capacity and capabilities of the dev team itself.
This is a bit of a wall-o-text, so let me break it down into 4 general points:
The general direction of the current dev cycle, be it ship, balance, system or what have you, seems to essentially be "Out with the old, in with the new", and that's fine, a place as stagnant as this does need things changed around and freshened up every once in a while... but to a moderate, sensible degree. It's one thing to go around the mod freshening things up, its another to outright dismiss all the time and effort previously put into the mod (both by devs and the community), toss it in the trash, and just replace it with something completely different - That's no longer freshening things up, that's just exploiting the shell of this mod to build an entirely different mod more conveniently than from scratch.
Though there've been quite a few examples in recent patches, my actual concern is not with any one particular piece of equipment, asset, or system being ditched/recycled, it's more a general concern about the total disregard the current team seems to show for "legacy" of this mod, as it were. In my honest opinion, this mod is not, and at this point can never be a "marketable product" and yet the current team seems to be trying to apply a set of standards suitable to that around here, which I'm afraid will in the long run turn out to be disruptively disproportionate to not only the community's wants and needs, but also capacity and capabilities of the dev team itself.
This is a bit of a wall-o-text, so let me break it down into 4 general points:
- Of all the people who'd be playing the game until the plug is inevitably pulled on the server, very few are going to be fresh faces. Most of the people who'll still be around by that point are people who're already around and have likely been around for more than a few years. So in my opinion, focusing the development efforts towards "attracting new players" is... suboptimal, so to say. You can't attract too many new players to a 20yo game, no matter what a fantastic job you do at it, which is why imho building the mod around existing community would be a much more sensible approach, and a "better investment". Now don't get me wrong, new players are absolutely important and enhancing their experience and easing them through their first few months should always be a priority, but making that the topmost priority and doubling down on that as if we still have (or will ever have) the same influx of new players as we did back in the early 2010s isn't really the most realistic way of approaching the development of a mod of a game that's been around for so long it's starting to toe the rim of that bucket of "Retro" already.
This is a place most of us have spent thousands of hours in. We're all essentially just overgrown kids still playing with the same toys we did when we were 14. At this point, the toy itself doesn't matter much anymore, its value becomes mostly (if not purely) sentimental. Everyone here has a bunch of favorite ships and favorite guns, i.e. favorite toys, and if those toys are to be touched, the sentimental value of it should also be taken into consideration, and I'd go so far as to say that sentimental value should be taken into a higher consideration than whatever technical aspect might concern that toy. People want to keep playin with their favorite toys, they won't appreciate if you outright yank it away, even if you instead give them an "objectively better" but different toy. If they wanted truly "objectively better" from a purely technical standpoint, they'd already be off playing Elite, Eve, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen, Everspace or what have you. So the value of this place to most people is nothing technical.
I've been seeing so many honestly needless replacements recently, be it ship, gun or system reworks funneled into the mod on no basis other than following a purely technically-minded outlook for the mod and putting no importance on anything but "improved technical quality". It's wonderful that the devs are working towards bringin the average technical quality of the mod up, but I feel like it's gotten a bit excessive, with devs more concerned with how the mod looks in FLStat/FLstudio/3DsMax/etc than in the actual game itself. It wouldn't matter to someone how "pristine" the "technical execution" of some new toy is, they'll end up disliking and despising it if it ends up needlessly replacing their old favorite toy that "was already fine", and honestly, they have every right to feel that way cause it cost them their favorite toy, even though it didn't have to and could've just been added as a brand new toy instead.
Effectively, the only thing this achieves is devs putting in more work to give people less toys. Unless some asset is outright broken and causing actual problems for the game, there's honestly no need for removing it at this point. Any new asset can be added in as fresh entries instead of replacements of the old stuff (unless they're a direct remake/remaster of the old asset), and while the stats can (and need to) still change, they shouldn't be changed so much so that it starts playing like a completely different toy. Look at it this way: The two options are either "recycling" an old entry for a new toy and in the process pissing off anyone who may have grown attached to that old-n-crap toy, or just adding the new toy in as, y'know, a new toy - and that way everyone would be happy.
tl;dr - Dont take people's toys away just cause you put it under a technical microscope and fail to see its value, because that's not where its value lies. Unless something is being outright problematic, it's much more considerate (for want of a better word) to keep that toy in and let people who like it (few though they may be) continue to enjoy it, and add that new shiny toy you made as an actual new toy, instead of needlessly ditching a perfectly functional toy that a handful of people might have really liked. Having too many systems can stretch the small playerbase too thin, so there's a valid argument against having too many systems, but there are so many duplicate vendors or vendorless stations still in the game that there's literally no harm in having "too many" ships and guns. Adding a new weapon entry is barely any more work than editing an existing one, after all.
So why put roughly the same amount of work in, but opt to do it in a way that'll leave people with only one toy which they may or may not end up liking, when it could've instead been two toys that people could've picked based on their own personal taste?
It's better to have 20 toys, some of which see more use than others, but everyone gets to choose a toy they genuinely like, than 10 toys that all get the same amount of use, but most people use it cause that's what they're stuck with.
- This is a fanmade mod, always worked on by a limited number of hobbyist, with limited experience, time and motivation. A handful of people come round, make a handful of contribution to the mod, then inevitably they either get bored or that dreaded RL catches up to them and they disappear, and someone else takes their place to essentially repeat the same cycle over and over again. That's how the development of the mod has always been and always will be. In this context, the mod is being developed on extremely restrictive resources, and so "resource management" becomes of utmost importance. This quality standard or that development criteria might be perfectly valid and objectively correct... for a AAA production, but it becomes problematic when imposed on a development of this scale and this nature, as it becomes disproportionate to what the mod needs and what the dev team can offer.
It's absolutely wonderful to have a set of quality standards in place to make sure nothing outright problematic gets in the mod, but it's too easy to go overboard with that and end up imposing a set of standards that takes 50% more time and energy to implement, in return for only 5% actual improvement, and at that point, the dev team would be mismanaging their very limited resources and subsequently providing the community with far fewer toys than they could've before their inevitable jettison.
- There have been so many people who've put so much work into this mod before your time. They were essentially volunteer players contributing to the mod they enjoyed playing - just like you - and they were passionate about what they were doing - just like you. Sure, their work might have not aged too well, or they might have lacked technical experience and ended up making a bit of a mess, but the fact remains that directly because of their contributions the mod has gotten to a much better place over the years. This mod started as a ship pack for a bunch of Star Wars and Homeworlds imports. It was through a community effort that it turned into what it is today. It might've had its ups and downs and highs and lows along the way, but honestly.... For the most part, they were doing the best they could with what they had, and the mod is all the better for it, so it's outright disrespectful to just dismiss anything from before your time as disposable/worthless, and look at it as just some template entries in game files to use for more conveniently adding your own stuff in without having to create new ini entries for it or whatever.
- This is literally the first dev cycle of the mod in almost a decade where every aspect of the mod is actually covered. Almost every generation of devs post-2010 had to deal with "we could've done this but we dont have a system dev" or "we could've done that but we dont have an effects dev" etc etc. You're fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do dev work in an environment better than what some previous generations of devs could've even dreamed of.. so please, make use of it. The reason this dev cycle being so inefficient is bothering me so much is because this is the one cycle that can actually achieve something substantial for the mod if only they manage their resources right. Don't get me wrong, a lot of wonderful work has already been put into the mod over the recent months, which I greatly appreciate, but still the fact remains that there's so much time and energy being put into "change for the sake of change", instead of everything getting funneled into a more substantial and meaningful project that actually pushes the mod forward and leaves a lasting impact, and won't be right down the drain if some future generation of balance dev decides to just change one number here another there, or some system dev decides to move this base from this system to that.
So don't just pour your time into busywork. Don't neglect the much-needed house-keeping, but don't make that the main focus of your dev work, cause that'd be fitting for a dev team that's barely lasting on life support with only 2 people still around and doing work, not what you have now. What you have now allows for actual development of the mod across a larger scale than incremental stat changes and whatnot. Take advantage of that opportunity. "Balance team are crunching numbers in their own corner, ships are being made in their own corner, and systems and infocards get drafted up in a dark room under candle light" is not really a fitting flow for a team that has more than 3 active people.
a very inefficient tl;dr of the whole post:
Hi, in case you just scrolled down here thinkin this is just a typical "Change bad! Don't change anything!", that's not at all the point of this post. Change is much needed especially in the current stagnant state of the mod, so by all means do change all you want, but make sure the work you're putting into the mod builds upon what's already there, rather than knocking it all down and building in its place. That way, later down the line we'd have a mod twice as rich with actual, substantial content, rather than a mod that's been offering roughly the same amount of content for a decade cause for any one new toy that gets put in, an old one gets tossed... for whatever reason.
