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Player created Dev Team.


Prefontaine
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9 minutes ago, Hime-sama said:

For clarity, are these people who simply help code new mechanics, or do they pitch ideas too?

Clarified in DMs with pre, its just giving/discussing ideas. No helping code 😛

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Guest Zephyr
5 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

I've finally gotten the go ahead to created a player based development team. This will be a small group of players lead by me which have a separate channel in the Politics and War discord to discuss game development. There will also be an observer. The point of the observer is to provide public updates of the game dev group is working on, though I will still give my regular monthly updates. The observer will be required to clear their public reports through me first, just incase there is a feature Alex doesn't want to be public knowledge too early. Since this position will operating on discord, to apply contact me on discord. My user name is Prefontaine#5550. 

So now a small clique of players favoured by you will have Alex's ear to try and pressure changes in their interest? Seems like befriending Alex really paid off for you, now you'll be a powerful influence on what game development looks like moving forward. I guess we can stop pretending the Game Suggestions forum matters now; if the dev clique isn't aligned with our game ideas, it won't go anywhere.

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1 hour ago, Zephyr said:

So now a small clique of players favoured by you will have Alex's ear to try and pressure changes in their interest? Seems like befriending Alex really paid off for you, now you'll be a powerful influence on what game development looks like moving forward. I guess we can stop pretending the Game Suggestions forum matters now; if the dev clique isn't aligned with our game ideas, it won't go anywhere.

The real issue is, are the people who geniunely have good ideas and know what they're talking about going to be bothered to help fix the game?

Plenty of people have checked out at this point. 

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[11:52 PM] Prefontaine: But Keegoz is actually bad. [11:52 PM] Prefontaine: He's my favorite bad leader though.

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51 minutes ago, Keegoz said:

The real issue is, are the people who geniunely have good ideas and know what they're talking about going to be bothered to help fix the game?

Plenty of people have checked out at this point. 

Probably not. I mean there's very few people I'd consider competent enough for this and almost all of them checked out loooong ago.

I'd do it, but then I'd get removed two weeks later for being well, me.

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1 hour ago, Keegoz said:

The real issue is, are the people who geniunely have good ideas and know what they're talking about going to be bothered to help fix the game?

Plenty of people have checked out at this point. 

I know I'm not gonna bother applying, I'm just too disillusioned.

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Guest Zephyr
3 hours ago, Keegoz said:

The real issue is, are the people who geniunely have good ideas and know what they're talking about going to be bothered to help fix the game?

Plenty of people have checked out at this point. 

And their views will need to align with what Prefontaine declares acceptable. This is centralising a lot of influence around a single player because they befriended Alex. Furthermore the idea itself with or without Prefontaine at its centre isn't great; when you decide to limit discussion to a small group to push through ideas, who represents the ideas nobody in the group likes? Would those ideas really get fair consideration? The answer is nobody, and nobody will be making an honest case for those ideas. If your views don't align with the clique, they no longer matter and you'll be wasting your breath.

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7 hours ago, Zephyr said:

So now a small clique of players favoured by you will have Alex's ear to try and pressure changes in their interest? Seems like befriending Alex really paid off for you, now you'll be a powerful influence on what game development looks like moving forward. I guess we can stop pretending the Game Suggestions forum matters now; if the dev clique isn't aligned with our game ideas, it won't go anywhere.

 

4 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

I know I'm not gonna bother applying, I'm just too disillusioned.

 

1 hour ago, Zephyr said:

And their views will need to align with what Prefontaine declares acceptable. This is centralising a lot of influence around a single player because they befriended Alex. Furthermore the idea itself with or without Prefontaine at its centre isn't great; when you decide to limit discussion to a small group to push through ideas, who represents the ideas nobody in the group likes? Would those ideas really get fair consideration? The answer is nobody, and nobody will be making an honest case for those ideas. If your views don't align with the clique, they no longer matter and you'll be wasting your breath.

I understand the lack of trust and the apathy. This dev team isn't designed to be a group of yes men. In fact I'd prefer a group of different minded individuals to approach problems from other angles than I would. Let me give you an example of how I see the standard method used by this group:

  • Alex wants to change current content or create new content and reaches out to the group with a project.
  • We brainstorm ideas and come up with a few solutions.
  • During this process we take the best ideas and come forward to this forum asking for opinions, and alternatives.
  • Once one or two of the best ideas rise to the top we refine the solution and post a more detailed breakdown of the change to start tweaking the finer points.
  • Provide finished product to Alex for approval. 

This group is designed to work with the community. To make projects known and have community input. This isn't supposed to be a shadowy organization that pushes an agenda of its own. That's part of the reason why we want an observer. 

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3 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

Provide finished product to Alex for approval. 

I think the part we're worried about is that "approval".

 

How is the approval going to work? Is he going to just go with it, because it's made by a few community members (who can be biased)? Or is he going to actually ask/vote the community? I know Alex will vet the idea, but every change affects someone and those effects need to be discovered before these are implemented. Only discussing with the whole community can do that.

How transparent will this be? Will we be able to see what ideas were proposed and approved? If they are approved, will the community be informed beforehand, as the team members' alliances can potentially have an advantage if it's not transparent.

Will any player be able to contribute into the suggestions or just the team members?

How will the members be accepted?

Why is it better than discussing on the forums?



I think it's pretty clear to you too that a good amount of players believe you give biased suggestions (every change affects someone). If you want this to work, be transparent about it's working.
 

EDIT: 

16 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

The observer will be required to clear their public reports through me first, just incase there is a feature Alex doesn't want to be public knowledge too early.

And this is why people don't want it? If there's a feature Alex doesn't want to be public knowledge too early, then why exactly should your dev-team members have access to it? Development Teams are not supposed to have interests in game politics. If Alex is putting people on a Dev Team which will have access to future restricted features, then they need to quit alliances and move into their own alliance with Alex. Thank you.


tl;dr If this was a public think-tank with transparency, I would support it. But this is about making a development team that can change game mechanics with potential conflict of interest. I don't support it.  

@Alex Care to elaborate on your approval for this team? Why would you trust this team with future secret features?

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11 hours ago, Zephyr said:

I guess we can stop pretending the Game Suggestions forum matters now

Not trying to start an argument but we can be honest and acknowledge that 9 out of 10 game suggestion threads go unnoticed or at least un-commented by Alex to begin with.

At least a small team that is "okay'd" by him can potentially begin moving things forward in terms of solutions and updates the players would like to see from him. This also has a nice benefit of having more than one person making snap decisions on game mechanics. ie - the latest removal of beige while the alternatives are still being worked out.

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Is this along the lines of what was done on the forums however many years ago? If so, I think it's a great thing to give another go. There were complaints back then, too, about it being a bunch of yes man illuminati types, but a lot of productive and in-depth conservation came out of it, from what I remember (I was part of it, but admittedly not that active in it). It's more a space away from the trolls, blatantly IC-biased, and otherwise toxic types that inevitably pop up in the general suggestions forum.

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On 7/4/2020 at 6:38 AM, Malleator said:

I wouldn't describe this as a dev team, but perhaps a think tank. Also don't see the difference between this and submitting game suggestions. 

Yes, I would say that's a fairly good description. The difference between this and the suggestions forum, though, is that it's difficult to have nuanced conversations about the pros and cons of any suggestion in the game suggestions thread because even if you write out a nice, detailed response people will come in and troll you, flood with short snarky comments, etc. that really just make it unproductive when it comes to discussions about actually fleshing out and implementing changes.

We've seen over and over again polls brigaded by alliances that may be negatively impacted by a change (even if it's for the betterment of the game) etc. which is why having a more private discussion area with members that are less interested in advancing their own agendas and more interested in considering edge cases, potential issues / repercussions, etc. will be useful.

On 7/4/2020 at 9:37 AM, NastyGamer said:

I think the part we're worried about is that "approval".

 

How is the approval going to work?

Approval of any and all changes has always really been at my discretion, and that won't change. I am far from perfect and will be the first to admit that, but I do believe that my complete un-involvement in in-game politics leaves me relatively unbiased in making changes for the purposes of benefiting one side or the other. Ultimately my goals are to increase the number of players and the amount of fun that the game is, so my approval and feedback are really shaped by my beliefs on how any given change will impact those factors.

On 7/5/2020 at 12:58 AM, Kurdanak said:

Is this along the lines of what was done on the forums however many years ago? If so, I think it's a great thing to give another go. There were complaints back then, too, about it being a bunch of yes man illuminati types, but a lot of productive and in-depth conservation came out of it, from what I remember (I was part of it, but admittedly not that active in it). It's more a space away from the trolls, blatantly IC-biased, and otherwise toxic types that inevitably pop up in the general suggestions forum.

Yes, it will be essentially like that but setup in Discord for easier discussion.

On 7/4/2020 at 9:37 AM, NastyGamer said:

@Alex Care to elaborate on your approval for this team? Why would you trust this team with future secret features?

I think that "secret" updates is probably a misnomer.

I would say that we will want to review and approve what's shared out of the group to ensure that there are not really bad mischaracterizations. It is also possible that there may be fun "surprise" or "secret" updates that we wouldn't want to be released early. For example, if I were going to add some temporary global event, such as an outbreak of a new disease that turns your citizens in zombies around Halloween, we wouldn't want everyone to know everything about that way ahead of time.

We would not, however, plan a whole secret change to the war system or some other major mechanic and prevent information from getting about that. I hope that makes sense.

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