make Fortress Forever's development more transparent
 

Exactly, so make Fortress Forever's development more transparent. It would generate hype, allow the development team to break inevitable rumors, and give the public something to look forward to and comment on instead of a dead beta team.

Stop saying that.

Notice how I stressed (or tried to) the port aspect. They aren't showing anything new. They aren't innovating, they are recreating. Everything they show is familiar and will only serve to generate hype (unless it's of very poor quality, but the BMS team is incredibly competent).

In a non-port, new things can both generate hype and generate negativity (easily at the same time). All you have to do is look back at the skim cap "backlash" to see that. Screenshots can't explain something like the skim cap. Even videos can't make the public feel the impacts of the change and form an accurate opinion. Transparency of new ideas only goes so far, and a majority of the time (unless a lot of time/effort/care goes into it) people happen to form unfair first opinions that are hard to reverse without allowing them to play with the changes. It's a gamble that might be worth taking some of the time, but transparency as a rule is generally too risky at this point.

When this mod finally dies, you'll get it.

A+ attitude, there. You should be our PR guy.

hey guys no one was playing the beta during summer when I was around so the beta team is dead trust me i'm never wrong

Beta is pointless. It's just a bunch of people herded together to test out things you guys think might work for Fortress Forever. I've only once saw a community suggestion (it was my own) implemented, and it had to be done by someone with not as much experience as the rest of the team, whom I respect for at-least implementing the weapon so we could all give it a shot. Too many of the beta testers are either unaccounted for both in terms of their opinions and actual testing. Most of the team probably hasn't even logged in.

Meanwhile, you got tons of people over in the public forums looking for something to discuss, yet you neglect them. No, we don't need them. We got our top-notch team of like, five beta testers, who all have the same opinion on the changes (that they suck) yet don't voice that opinion because they know it's futile trying to argue with the devs, who always think they're right about everything, yet patch after patch dig a hole and bury this mod. Doh ho ho! Why does this game fail guys? We need to fix it up some more. [sound of stuff breaking here]

You guys always complain about not having enough man-hours and resources, yet from the logs, you guys seem to have been dedicating a lot of time toward implementing things to test. Yeah, too bad they are things like one or two people discussed some time last year on the staff forums. Like I said, the beta team is just the work-force that tests your ideas for fixes. I, like others, thought it was going to be our chance to give a little to the game and make it better, seeing as we're the fucking people who play it and give it life.

I love the counter-intuitive nature of the development too. We have to keep shit secret to avoid rumors. Yeah, that's like pouring gasoline on an electric fire to put it out. The only way to kill rumors to prevent them from being made. The secretive nature is so funny. I know why you don't want the development publicized. Oh, it's because you guys don't actually do anything and wouldn't be consistently updating a development blog. It would be a huge advertisement of the lack of order around here.

I mean, seriously, what's the patch rate? Once a year? Lol

EDIT: By the way, the beta tests were terrible even when they were going. We would test something new like every other week. We only showed up to the beta test because we could actually get an organized game of Fortress Forever going, because it was one big joke where everyone was lolling on the microphone over some bug, or because we desperately wanted to play something new instead of 2.4 for five years straight on Destroy.

It's just a game bro.

Bro-force!!!

Also, I'll accept your argument that it was on medium settings. ;)

Oh, so thats why everyone left? pfffff

420 troll FF forums everyday

When all else fails, call people 'troll'.

Is that all you can do, complain? Seriously, take a more active role in shit, or just quit bitching. You put so much energy into those page-long diatribes, that could be better spent coming up with real solutions, or learning to code to the point where you could SOLVE some of those problems.

I've never ignored your suggestions. Although, if you could code, you could make a difference on the Dev team. But you aren't interested in doing that, are you?

I was interested at one point, but I lack the experience.

Bridget, I don't know where you got the idea that beta testers would steer the development of the mod. That's why you're called "testers" and not "designers". You find bugs and stress-test the game. We listen to your opinions about new features because you are the ones who have got to play them, and hopefully, being a tester, you have a little better insight than the average player. That doesn't mean we have to do what you say or hold your opinion in any regard. Again, I don't know why you would think that.

We have been getting healthy turnouts every week, regardless of what changes there have been. There's a changelog thread where you are encouraged to give your opinions, and the beta forum where you can start a discussion. This is useful data that we want, but you don't get to make demands.

look man, just because play-tests were at a standstill when you tried to participate doesn't mean the beta team is dead right now..

I don’t want to sound like a pseudo-intellectual, but Fortress Forever suffers from a huge calculation problem like Communism did. Every thing was controlled by the state, they had no market or price system. The state had the daunting task of allocating scarce resources in the most efficient and satisfactory way possible, which was a lot of guess work and blind throwing due to not having any feedback from the people as to where some resources were most needed. The solution was allow the people to influence the allocation of resources through their participation in a free market. But d’oh! Too late, Communism collapsed for being an inefficient piece of shit.

In context, the Fortress Forever development team has a lot of resources or abilities or general work available to them. They have their ability to produce code, to produce visuals, to write and blog about development, to create maps, blah blah blah. However, they have no fucking clue as to how to most efficiently use these resources for the betterment of Fortress Forever because they have no ‘price system’ or in context, because they refuse to listen to the goddamn community and continue to fuck up the game based on their intuition.

(For example, the beta team is currently working on radically new additions to the Medic and Demoman class, arguably unnecessary, considering this is at the expense of man-hours and resources being dedicated toward actual problem classes like the Engineer, Heavy, Sniper, and Pyro.)

The only solution is to establish that “price system”. That is to say allow the community and their actions within the game dictate where to best allocate your resources on the development team. Oh, look, the overwhelming majority of the people think the Engineer is underpowered? That must mean something. It might be some sort of indication. Maybe we should fix the Engineer instead of wasting our resources on adding implementations to classes that arguably have no problems or balance issues?

Summary: Until you listen to the community, you will have no fucking clue where to focus your efforts. You don’t even have to take our suggestions into consideration (unless they’re suggestions as to where you can better spend your damn time.) Why do you think the patches take one whole year to release? It’s not because it’s hard work. It’s because you guys sit around twiddling your thumbs trying to figure out what to work on.

TUR HUR.

Well there's two sides to this. You don't want people to make up their minds on something without having all the information and form an unfair bias. I get that, and secrecy on that can help with that. On the flipside, transparency of a bad idea is no-win scenario either way. Here's an extreme example to illustrate:


Idea: remove medic and scout class from gameplay

Secrecy method: Wait until release. People play it, many hate the change and leave or complain, a few like it and stay.

Transparency method: A lot of people hate the idea as soon as they hear it, complain about it, then once the mod is released, many hate the change and continue complaining, a few like it and stay.

In other words, transparency can prevent unfair bias, but it can't save bad ideas.

Several ideas in FF haven't been quite that extreme but just seem like a bad idea from the get-go, so transparency or not, the end result is the same. I feel this way about the O boosts without counters and D nerfs.

Other ideas are less obvious and deserve a fair chance. I feel that way about the hit slowdowns. I don't think they really fix things, but that's a concept that was nebulous enough I couldn't have made a determination on it until I had played many games with the changes in effect.

As for 2.5, a LITTLE transparency would be nice, for instance, I don't have a CLUE as to what direction the devs currently think FF needs to go at the moment (gameplay-wise).


I don't know about all of Bridget's specific grievances, but for me personally, this is irrelevant. When the game's balance is worse than it was in 1.0, the obvious solution (to me anyway) is to ratchet things back to 1.0. It doesn't take a new coder to change sg values back to the past, change hwguy values back to what they were, remove O boosts, etc. When the "to do" list is to basically UNDO half of what's been done, no amount of skill on the individual will fix if the groupthink mentality flies against what a lot of the community (and perhaps the majority of those that left for good) want.

A good analogy to this is say you have a rickety bridge. It need some work, but it's functional. Then almost all of original builders of the bridge leave. New builders come in and take over. They blow up the bridge. Then they fence off the area so you can't lay down your own boards. And you won't be able to lay down your own boards until the majority of the new builders decide that maybe we should lay new boards down. Who makes that decision? Nobody knows, but it's not the people who stress test the bridge and say that it's broken apparently. The new builders do give the remaining pieces an excellent paint job however. That's about how I view the current development of the mod regarding balance.

So yeah, I complain, because I still care about the mod and hope like hell the devs will wake up to how the balance to it has been fucked systematically for about 2 years, but I'm also aware it's probably a lost cause.

Also I'd like to say that while I do generalize the devs, I'm sure not everyone is part of the problem, my apologies to those of you who haven't been actively screwing the gameplay balance.

Oh, Hi Scuzzy.