(02-22-2021, 10:31 PM)Toaster Wrote: The evidence posted so far betrays a clear lack of even basic human decency.

Well that's just the nature of out-of-context screenshots. They of course wouldn't share (or want shared) any screenshot of their own behaviour which built up to the posted snippets. They'd just go for screenshotting the reaction prompted by the final straw and try to paint that as the full story, because otherwise they wouldn't have anything to post here.

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First off, let me start by saying I'm not happy at all with how this has gone and I don't consider myself to be "in the right", it's been a mess through and through and there's been missteps at every turn, and in a different, better world maybe this would've gone differently. but unfortunately, the other side of this whole drama consider themselves to be absolutely in the right and think everything they've done has been perfectly just, which makes me far less inclined to have any discourse over this than I otherwise would have been. Though in fairness, one thing I wont argue with or try to justify is the choice of language in some of the screenshots, same things could've probably been said to more or less the same effect with lighter phrasing.

That said, I don't see how this is in any way relevant to GM feedback. Making 3D models for this mod is not part of the responsibilities I've agreed or am obligated to as a GM, and I'm not officially part of the Dev team so there are no obligations attached to any 3D assets I may decide to make for this mod. It's a side hobby which I do for fun, when I have the time and when I feel like it, which naturally makes it go at a slower pace than seems to be to some people's liking. I'm sure those people would much prefer it if I quit my job, put my entire life on hold, and did nothing other than 3D models for Disco 24/7... But still, regardless of whether that's a reasonable expectation, it's still not a matter for GM feedback.

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But nevertheless, an issue was raised so let's address it:

1. Regarding "withholding models", I'll just quote what I said on discord earlier:

Quote:no, the line isnt completely finished, it still needs a bit of work
if it was 100% wrapped up I wouldn't be deliberately holding it just to fuel drama
I still need to sit down and work on it some more, and I cbf for now thanks to reeves
the way I see it, its plain and simple: this is somethin I do as a hobby and for fun, and I'm not gonna sit here spend my spare time wrapping up somethin that constantly reminds me of how cuntish someone's been acting, cause that's not fun, so I still put that time into the mod, just a different area of it, which ultimately is a net gain

So no, that's not the case and far from it in fact.

And to highlight the last line of the above quote, here's a copy of the log of the stuff I've submitted in recent weeks, you can verify it with the devs if you want:
That's 9 ships, 6 guns, and 5 fixes.

So to be perfectly honest, I'm a bit lost on what people who've come forward with this criticism expect regarding this particular point. An apology that the work I'm putting into the mod is not being entirely funneled into your faction? I'm not some saint who's "making a sacrifice for the good of the mod", I'm just making these toys because I've been playing this game for over a decade, gotten bored of the toys we've had all these years, and want some new toys to play with, so ultimately "I'm doing this for fun", so I don't expect any thanks or empty praise from anyone, but it doesn't detract from the fact that when someone actively goes out of their way to make this outright unfun, or expects me to put the rest of my life on hold to prioritize pushing "their ship" out the door before anything else, I might just shrug it off and go do something else that's more fun. That's just the healthy way of approaching a hobby, which this is - as much as it might not be to some people's liking.

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2. To provide the other half of the picture on GC side of the drama:

To give just a little taste of how wildly inaccurate the description of events coming from the other side of this drama is:

(02-22-2021, 10:27 PM)Megaera Wrote: Aerelm kept stalling the model for months and refused to give updates on its progress to both me and the dev team involved.

Even though Megaera keeps insisting that it took "months", in reality it was only 3 weeks, so not even a single month, and at no point during those 3 weeks was I approached by any of the devs asking for a progress update. I started working on the blossom textures on 22nd of December, and the drama came to head on 19th of January.

Here's the other side of what happened during those three weeks:

Jaypate has been an official member of the art team since April of last year, and despite having been a dev for almost a year, he still lacks some of the very basic skills required to contribute anything to this mod as an art dev. Extent of his capability is just doing meshes, he can't even texture his meshes himself. It takes him half a year do to a plain mesh, then he has to find someone else to texture and wrap up the ship for him - which means even as a mere modeler his contribution would've been extremely lackluster, let alone a proper gold-named dev. That's the core of the issue I took with him - The fact that after almost a year of having already been a dev he still can't do it at all goes to show that he hasn't even tried, and that's completely unacceptable and inexcusable. For anyone who already knows how to navigate any 3D modeling program, getting a general grasp on the very primitive and simple texturing technique used in FL is something that doesn't take more than a few hours (or a few evenings at most).

He's always making wild promises about this or that revolutionary thing he is "planing to learn how to do" for the mod, but the total of his actual contribution to the mod so far has been 2 meshes for GC faction (yes, he's an official gold-named dev who, in almost a year, hasn't even tried to contribute anything to the mod that hasn't been on GC- faction's specific request, which is something people who are now criticizing me for my treatment of him just happened to conveniently leave out). He convinced Felsvar to texture and wrap up his first mesh for him, and I made the mistake of agreeing to finish his second ship for him, and even then, I did specifically tell him that my RL is quite busy and besides that I have my own disco models to wrap up, so he knew from the get-go the ship might take a while to be finished (and even then the 3 weeks it took, compared to some other ships taking over half a year, is still quite a short period).

What he decided to do about it was to tell everyone in GC discord to keep pinging me and pester me on until I finished the ship (I'm not in the GC discord anymore, so can't give a direct quote, but it was quite close to "just @ him until he's finished XD"). This got to the point where I decided to leave GC discord altogther, and even any time I was posting anything in modelers discord someone would jump at the opportunity to completely derail the topic and make it about the GC ship instead, it was essentially just three whole weeks of "Why are you doing anything other than finishing OUR ship?".

Admittedly, the fault was entirely on me. At that point I should've just dropped the whole thing, told Jaypate to go learn how to do it himself and just gone back to wrapping up my own ships, but I instead made the mistake of putting my own projects on hold, nudging my schedule around to open up some free time, and wrapped up his ship in the middle of a 65 hour work week, and it was only after I had finished the ship that I found out they had already gone to another modeler and asked them to finish the same ship, with neither of us knowing the other one had already finished it. So because one incompetent, unqualified dev can't even carry his own weight and contribute as much as a mere modeler to this mod, two other people who already had more than enough on their hands had to completely waste their time redoing the same work for absolutely nothing.

Worst part is, after I confronted him about wasting my time like that, he had the audacity to say, and I quote, "hey, atleast something of mine has gotten done". So, I put my own projects on hold to wrap up his ship for him, and at the end I get feces flung my way about none of my own projects being done. Yea. that's outright gross.

The snippets posted as screenshots here are only after all of that, and yes, I admittedly lost my composure and I could've handled the situation better (or relied on less heavy vocabulary at least), and I wont try to justify that part, but regarding the general treatment of Jaypate, I wouldn't have approached it the same way or even remotely similar manner:

- If he wasn't a gold-named dev
- If he had wrapped up the model himself instead of just going and leeching off someone else instead
- If he had given me a just a simple heads-up that my pace is too slow for his liking and he's passing the rest of the work to someone else (frankly, considering the work week I was having while all this was happening, I would've been quite relieved if that was how it went instead)
- Most importantly, if he hadn't tried to turn it into a laughing matter and pretend like there was absolutely nothing wrong with what he did
- And also since people love twisting little technicalities (otherwise we wouldn't even be in GM feedback about this) Jaypate has frequently mentioned that he's not playing the game at all, so even by his own admission he's not an actual member of this community, so even as a GM I wouldn't have any obligations towards him.

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3. Regarding "Banning Jaypate from "Dev" Discord":

No, Jaypate hasn't been banned from any Disco discord server. He only got booted out of an unaffiliated discord server I made when I started doing models again just to make gathering feedback more convenient (because spaming faction discords in the middle of ongoing unrelated discussions was starting to feel a bit disruptive) and as more modelers, devs and members joined it over the months, it naturally evolved into a bit of "modelers hangout", but anyone can join the server and check (it's the same server I've been putting at the bottom of every model thread I post), the first paragraph of the rules channel of that server makes it perfectly clear that the server is in no way an "official" disco dev server, or affiliated with the official development or disco staff in any way, and that line's been there since the start of that server, so I fail to see how that's "questionable GM ethics" either. If I had kicked him from any discord that was in any capacity associated with disco then sure, that would've been a valid criticism, but booting him from some random discord I made is far from "Power Abuse™", no matter how hard some people try to twist it, because I could have done it (and probably would've done it much sooner) even if I wasn't a GM at all.

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4. To provide the other half of the picture on XA side of drama:

It's a whole can of worm of its own, and the coin on this one has more than two sides somehow, as this one stretches a few months back and going into that wouldn't achieve much other than derail, so just as a brief tl;dr - when Reeves originally approached me about doing Xeno ships, I initially refused and told him I have nowhere near enough time to deliver a 3D project of that scale in any timely manner, he in turn told me I'll just have to do a bunch of 2D sketches to put an idea their faction had for their shipline to paper and that they'll find another modeler to turn them into actual game assets and I wont need to get involved in the 3D side of things at all. That was all done and wrapped up in a few weeks but through the course of that it turned into a 3D sketch cause some parts were just easier to communicate that way (but I specifically and repeatedly reminded everyone involved that it's a sketch and would need to be rebuilt from scratch in order to be usable as a game asset, but people in all their excitement kept overlooking that crucial bit of detail). What happened next was those sketches sat there for a good few months with no progress at all - and I dont fault the modeler they had approached about this, cleaning up someone else's shirt is far from fun and he had his own projects and RL matters to deal with on top of all that, so it was perfectly understandable, but still, that led to a situation where certain Xeno players' patience had already grew thin even before I decided to pick up the actual 3D of that line myself.

Then, one thing led to another as things do, and Xeno line ended up being 8 ships instead of just 3 (the thread is extremely outdated, at the time it was changing too much too fast to bother keeping the forum thread for it up to date) which meant more work, which I gladly chose to do, but also meant the whole thing would take longer to actually wrap up.

During all this, there was some unrelated friction going on the side that involved one of Reeves' friends, which led to a fair bit of drama, and Reeves being Reeves, he sure doesn't shy away from drama. This led to multiple instances where he'd just come across some discord, see me and that friend of his typing in the same chat, and without even checking the backlog would just assume that I was having a go at his friend (even when we weren't part of the same conversation and were each just having a separate conversation with different people) and would just flip out and start cussing me out over something that... didn't exist outside of his own head. Then the next day he'd come into modeler chat and would try to be super nice and throw around some empty words of encouragement in hopes of XA ships getting finished sooner - That's why I called him a "twofaced sleazerag" in one of the posted screenshots, the choice of word might have been admittedly harsh, but it wasn't really an insult, just an honest observation. Seeing him repeatedly bounce between being super nice and being super reeves with clearly no gain in mind other than getting his way was what I found so utterly repulsive that made me not want to have anything to do with anything that has anything to do with him (ye, that bad), but even at this point I had no intention of actually putting the line on hold, in fact, around this time I was more in the "lets just wrap it up and be done with it" mindset.

But that all happened to coincide with some work related stuff that made me have to put everything disco-related on hold for about 6 weeks cause I simply didn't have any spare time, but Reeves being Reeves and always thinking everything is just about him once again assumed that I've dropped the xeno line completely because of him, he just left the modelers discord soon after, so when I came back to disco stuff and resumed the xeno line he didn't know because, well... he wasn't there anymore and I certainly had no intention of getting into direct contact with him after all just to keep him in the loop (which wouldn't have achieved anything anyways). So, while Reeves was going around the place telling people I had "dropped the xeno line", the reality of the matter was I was actively working on it, just not bothering with keeping him in the loop.

A couple of other things also factored into the line taking longer than expected - First, since I had a little break inbetween and came back to it with a fresh pair of eyes, I wasn't all too satisfied with some elements of the design and wanted to go back and redo a few bits, and also, initially the idea behind the twin line was to have carbon copies of the same ships with different textures just to show different xeno bases building their ships out of whatever material they can get their hands on easier, but devs decided they were going to give each line its own set of stats rather than making them carbon copies, and while I wasn't against the idea, I didnt like having them as palette swaps since that would've come across as a bit halfarsed when put in the new context, so that also required going back and reworking some more bits here and there, and this wasn't being kept "a secret", a few people who were interested enough to actually approach me directly and ask me the actual state of xeno line already knew about this, as well as the official devs.

tl;dr - The actual reason Xeno line has taken this long is a whole chain of events that mostly has had nothing to do with Reeves, and also because it's gone through 3 partial redesigns which isn't a usual thing to happen, Reeves' less than pleasant involvement has certainly played a role in slowing it down, but unlike what he or certain other individuals like to claim, I haven't "dropped the line because of him", nor is the line "completely finished but being held hostage". So yea, there's no real drama around this one, just a whole chain of stuff coming up and getting in the way. I'm working on those ships on the side and on an "it'll be done when it's done" basis, and people will know when it's done when they see it ingame, or if another modeler beats me to it with their own line for xenos, then that's perfectly fine too, I'll just give em a cleaner paintjob, smooth out a few edges to make them look less aggressive, and submit as Lib civ tech so Xenos would still be able to use them at 100% core.

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To wrap this post up:

Since a lot of people have probably just scrolled all the way down here skippin the entire post, if you want the gist of it scroll all the way back up and just read the paragraph near the top of the post that starts with "First off,". Or scroll up a bit more and just read Karlotta's post.