vishnou00 wrote:
I respect your opinion as one who have invested considerable time and efforts on the project, but it seem as you have executive role (wrapping public review, etc) people assume you have superior authority over other members with equivalent involvement.
What is 'equivalent involvement'? Who are the 'people' that make these assumptions? The project has a certain structure. It's very transparent (for now, since we're small enough to make it that way).
I absolutely agree that 'Aquitaine says so, ergo it's good' it most certainly not an argument -- I think, though, that the issue here is one of passed features vs. present debates. 'Because I say so' on an issue currently up for review doesn't inherently carry any more weight than anything else; if it did, I probably wouldn't have been persuaded to the exact opposite of what I originally wanted.
However, there are several things -- like economy foci, like various things in the v0.2 doc -- that are part of the game, for better or worse, and that we won't revisit every time someone asks us to. That's also 'because I say so' because I assemble the design doc, but in that case I'm saying so just to spare the community from having to argue and re-argue every single issue.
It seems to me that one of your bigger unanswered questions is 'under what circumstances will we revisit, and, if necessary, completely rewrite something we have already passed.' The answer is 'when the consensus of the developers and the design team feels it's necessary.'
Being executive officer (design lead) is managing (doing communication, planning, resolving issue), not being a one man army doing all the work.
Tyreth is the project lead.
you could say). The post was meant to point out invalid aguments I often see on the board:
-it is realistic, so it's bad
-it exist and is good in unrelated game, so it's good
I take issue with two of your four points. The latter one first: whether or not a game is unrelated is subjective. For example, I think we, as designers, can learn from things like Chess, even though Chess and a 4X computer game don't seem to have much in common. Does this mean we should do everything Chess does because Chess is a great game? Of course not! But it doesn't render invalid any analogy simply because Chess doesn't have space monsters and death rays. I shouldn't think it'd be too much to ask of the community to weigh such arguments appropriately.
As for the realism bit, the proper phrasing would be 'it's realistic, so it's irrelevant.' We wasted a lot of time early on with realism arguments. For better or worse, the FO team has come to the realization that we simply aren't concerned with it. Realism is not one of our goals and whether or not something is realistic has no bearing on its gameplay value, from our perspective. More than anything else, I would expect this to be the case throughout the entire project.
I feel the need to come back to that post because it may have been misunderstood, as Aquitaine felt his integrity questionned, which was not my intention.
Not at all; I'm not worried about my integrity.
One of the parts of my job is to keep our process as transparent and well-understood as possible. This gets harder the bigger we get, but for so long as it can be done, I'm happy to take the time to do it.
What I fear is that their systems (in general) while seeming innovating, will lead to absence of features (ie possible strategies) that people expect in a 4x game. These will require band aid solutions ("generating" the special case situations, artificial limiting formulae) that aren't very elegant. I believe my system is innovative, because it hasn't been attempted extensively in the past, while their is only replacing standard features (like local production) by features with less input. It's avoiding micromanagement by removing proven gameplay mechanics and replacing them with unproven one with seemingly less micromanagement and less possibility, out of the box.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. Unfortunately, after numerous brainstorming sessions, a 25+ page DESIGN thread, and two public reviews, that's not the direction that we're going in. I would expect that it's the kind of thing that would appear as a mod after our v1.0 release, though, because it is, as far as I'm concerned, a very valid design choice.
I don't like drek's argument, because when I attempt to refute them, he doesn't care to refute my arguments and go on, telling he already convinced the community. I know he did, he did before I was even aware of the existance of FO. Does precedance all that matters? I'm not asking to throw away all the decisions for every new member, but I would expect an healthy debate when it isn't already available (there are
Our design team is expected to thoroughly discuss a matter when it is in the DESIGN thread phase, and then in the public review. After that, if anybody takes the time to argue it again, it's a courtesy to help somebody new understand why we got to where we got to. The converse of what you are indirectly suggesting is that we should always let every aspect of this game be open to challenge whenever anybody with a modicum of eloquence shows up to challenge it.
We are in an unfortunate position, having moved forums twice in the last year, where a lot of our early debates are no longer here. That should not happen again (for various reasons), so I should think that the number of invisible debates establishing FO canon would decrease as we move on.
Why should things would be different in two months? People involved in design won't change much (like 2 new, 1 gone), and they still won't listen to such a debate because they consider it already settled and done thoroughly (which I think it isn't).
What is it, exactly, that you expect to be different? We get new people every couple months and we lose people every couple months. When the FO design team collectively decides that an issue is settled -- which it does through the process of public review -- then you're exactly right, we won't be stirred into a wholly new debate on the subject, no matter the extent to which you or anyone else feels unconvinced.
I may seem full of myself most of the time, it's because as a new member without any responsability or authority, I think I can say anything and people will take it only as it is, my opinions/ideas. I get the feeling a lot of people understand that, as they simply ignore my posts as if I was a troll in the forum, but it's my excuse for my indelicate style.
I don't really know what you're referring to. It seems to me as though you respectfully disagree with what we've decided. There is nothing to apologize for in that. Being vocal about your ideas isn't a crime. If you'd been trolling, you would've been warned about it or banned. Don't imagine a 'us versus them' mentality here where none exists.
Aq