I used to play NS a ton, even was in a clan for a while. It was one of the most original and novel video games i've ever played, only planetside comes close.
Combat played a sizeable role in killing the original game and turning it into something i'd expect from a CS mod. An entry level, bland generic version of the original that gutted all the strategy and coordination and teamwork that you required to win on ns_ maps. (A good commander alone was worth gold)
You built upon what many people considered cancer (combat to some extent, but definitely xmenu combat) - tumors get serious when they hit the lymph nodes, and they probably saw it as that.
I quit before this era happened but I probably would have hated you if i hadn't - even if you aren't technically the one to blame.
I'm the author, and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote - NS was special and trying to preserve that specialness was why I put the buildings into Combat in the first place. I miss that era of experimentation both in mods and commercial releases. I would've loved to be online during the heyday of Tribes 2 or Planetside.
Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.
Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.
Fate was probably determined at the point that combat came out, xmenu just accelerated it with absurd upgrades that let one person steamroll the server (though it was sometimes fun to be that one person, it wasn't for the other half of the server...)
At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.
Both of planetside and tribes were amazing. This was really before the age of competitive gaming so it was actually fun to play and not just another day job
I couldn't remember if I'd played this mod - then I saw the teeth/mouth that surrounds the screen when you play on the alien team in one of the screenshots and it all came flooding back.
Original HL had an absolutely awesome modding community. As well as the huge one (CS) there were tweaks to make it better in all sorts of ways:
- Adrenaline Gamer or AG - which changed the movement a little to make deathmatch super fast-paced.
- Bubble Mod - which make a few gameplay tweaks to make deathmatch more sensible and manageable in large servers
...and I even wrote my own for the deathmatch games we played on our LAN at Uni, which announced a particularly annoying players name whenever he got fragged.
You guys should try the current crop of FPS games like "Hell Let Loose" which actually require a lot of strategy and coordination! HLL, for example, has huge battles with commanders and several squads of different types with squad leaders, and you earn upgrades and abilities over the game as you take positions and etc. I haven't played that one for a while, but it could scratch that same itch that NS scratched.
I play NS2 sometimes, which still has a pretty active community.
It's a tough game to get into and even harder to get good at commanding since being a bad commander will sink your whole team. But it feels extremely rewarding to play on a well-coordinated team.
Programmers sometimes have that experience, as do musicians, hardware designers, film directors, novelists, painters, game designers and all other professions that create things regular people interact with casually.
Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no real imagination what making a thing means and under which constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free.
In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to change a thing.
> Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies mediocrity.
All creators should learn to find value in criticism, especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as faults are perceived as such and you should at least think about why that is and if that means you can do something better rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes.
It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers" (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill.
> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right.
Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat.
If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
> If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
Having the means to do something in no way gives you the right to do so. I have the means to speed in my car. I have the means to murder someone. I don't have the _right_ in either case to do so.
I don't disagree, but I think you are largely conflating the right to speak complaints with the right to be an entitled jerk.
Few creators will object to criticism that shows an understanding of the work/product. Most will object to personal abuse empty of any actual criticism.
Understanding the context of a product makes for better complaints. Just venting is not helpful and often abusive.
Criticism has zero inherent value. It’s easy to assume that stuff people like is inherently better, but anything with widespread appeal ends up really bland. You can’t do better than simply ok while making everyone happy.
This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time for 12 year old boys only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank.
Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.
I think you two may have a confusion of terms. I'm just guessing here, but I suspect the complaining they are referring to is the zero content anger spew some people think is appropriate, not critique.
I see it a lot in small communities centered around open source games. It is easy for some one to vent their anger in a useless fashion (can we agree that pr teams calling it passion is a euphemism they use to avoid insulting people giving them money?), and comparatively difficult and rare for people to put their experience into relatable terms or to criticize a change as it pertains to the project's goals.
> This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws.
Maybe I need to clarify a little bit. Of course everybody hast the right to complain about everything (as people do). But not every criticism is sound cricism. Everybody may just get themselves a Turbo Encabulator and complain that the malleable logarithmic casing is misaligned with the pentametric fan. That is okay. They sold you a turbo encabulator after all and you rightfully expect the pentametric fan to be surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with it – this is what they told you, you will get.
Whether criticism is "sound" by my definition or not has to do with expectations one some part. If someone sells you a backup software that is "guarantueed to be 100% formally correct" for 100k€ and it then proceeds to munch your disks and set your computer on fire, criticism is not only okay, it is outright needed. But if someone puts their "works for me, but I strongly advice anybody else against using this"-backup-script on Github and it munches your disk, you may complain, but the other person is not at fault. A lot of people complain about things where someone basically just was like: I made this for fun in my spare time, take it or leave it. And they complain about it as if it was a commercial product they sold their firstborn for.
My other point with making and being right has to do with instutional experience. You don't have to be able to build a turbo encabulator yourself, but before you criticise it maybe make sure you have read its manual. Maybe that is my first level IT-support trauma speaking here, but many people are very quick in voicing criticism, and don't do the research whether the thing they criticise is wrong or they just had the wrong expectations. Of course a product can also be designed badly so it produces these false expectations and such things should be criticised.
Other things are purely subjective and criticism is worth nothing. You may complain about a experimental noise rock band being noisy of having nasty lyrics, but that is no meaningful criticism as this was very likely their goal. That person's feeling of "I hate that sound" is totally valid and true, and the musicians may or may not decide to take it seriously, but it is still just bad criticism – like complaining water is wet or complaining a weight is heavy. That is sort of the point of the thing.
That being said, as a creator I value negative criticism. And I take the feeling from where it comes from seriously most of the time. I just don't trust what they tell you the solution is.
I'm at the opposite: I think people have the right to complain about anything, especially when they're the target audience (in this case, the game player). This doesn't change even if the product is free.
I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons), move on.
I think people have the right to complain about anything, especially when they're the target audience (in this case, the game player).
What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it, no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You have no right to demand someone does something; you can only inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
There is one counter example to your position that immediately comes to mind: architects! If you create something, the primary driver should be its users, and not your ego. I believe there should be a law which mandates that architects need to stay at least 5 years in every building they "design" so that they actually see and feel the consequences of their work. Art might be a different issue, but just because someone is creative does not free them from the responsibility to build something useful! If the user experience is no fun, the user has every right to complain.
>If you create something, the primary driver should be its users, and not your ego.
Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't going to care about the end user.
Of course. I have been talking about building small projects mostly for yourself. If you build your own house in a weird way, knock yourself out (especially if there is no family).
This is about expectations. Good architecture serves many users. Good films serve many viewers. Good software ...
You get the point. And it is always better if you can serve two target audiences at once instead of one – IF you can do it without compromising.
But some software doesn't want or even need to serve all users. Take vim for example. For most people it would be a horrible experience to use it and they could criticise it for a ton of things. But what value is there in this cricism as they don't understand how vim is intended to be used? Their cirticism comes from a true place, but it still isn't worth a lot, because if you followed it to the end you would end up with something like notepad.exe or MS Word and loosing everything that makes vim special and interesting.
So if anything, what I say here is: good criticism is critcicism by people who see the same thing in your thing as you do, as their vision likely aligns with yours. If you are painting impressionist pictures for example, the criticism "it could look more photorealistic" by some guy is utterly useless, while the criticism "I think you should rely less on simple complementary color combinations" by someone who understands impressionism might be really helpful. The photorealism guy just tells you that there are people looking for this out there, but as you already know and/or actively decided against it, there is no use in this.
The special thing about architecture is that it imposes on others. You can't not see a building. So I agree with the conclusion but not the reasoning. It's not users vs creators, it's the public who are not the users that get harmed by ugly buildings, even if those buildings are private and desired by those who pay for them. (The government commissioning ugly public buildings is a problem with the government, not the architects)
Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough compliments".
If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only speak up if they are irritated.
Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied the people on average really are with your work.
Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been following for a year or so.
Just wanted to let him know his work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing.
He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I guess I should do more of that.
Different people interact with things and have different reactions. Some are moved enough to develop strong feelings. Some share them nicely. Some write hyperbolic forum posts full of hate. That’s just the reality of having an impact.
My main take away from the post is that anything worth making will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to be reacted on.
There are other things at play here. It is important to understand that the average human is unbelievably limited and delicate (in the modern era, they don't understand any of the systems that sustain their lifestyle and have skills of only marginal use). There are multiple systems in place to take all these delicate humans and set them up to live comfortable lives.
The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but more useful.
The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things. Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part of a community that generates chatter to help guide the conversation of the people who actually decide what should happen at the mass-market level.
Was für eine Überraschung, ein arroganter Deutscher, der nie Natural-Selection gespielt hat, hält einen Vortrag.
Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine kleine Ergänzung zu einer Ergänzung.
>Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good, but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something positive.
I'm not sure that it is really similar. I would translate "Wer macht hat recht" to something more like "the creator knows best" or "the creator gets to choose". "History is written by the winners." has, I think a less creative context. Perhaps because history is what is written after wars, conquests and other applications of violence. The word "winners" requires and implies losers. Creation requires neither.
Not similar at all, and an absurd comparison. The former is a value/moral judgement while the latter is an empirical observation about how history is written, and not at all an embrace of such a supposed fact (which would effectively translate to “might makes right”).
Because of course /buildmenu took users away from regular Natural Selection servers, resulting in a holy war dynamic: https://gwern.net/holy-war
>The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform.
>The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
The trouble with the Python 2 => 3 transition is just how much work it imposed on everyone in the ecosystem, and the general lack of care for backwards / forwards compatibility in the ecosystem - the fact you need something like "virtualenv" at all is damning in itself, out of the major stacks only NodeJS requires similar hacks (e.g. nvm).
The PHP world, for example, is very famous for its focus on compatibility: breaking changes are generally announced far before they are released, and the amount of actually breaking changes is very very small - out of my mind, the only thing that really bit a lot of very old code was the removal of implicitly provided global variables and the mysql legacy functions, which by that point were deprecated for like a decade and in many cases could be resolved by more-or-less simple search and replace runs. Other than that, a lot of legacy code works fine or with similarly minor modifications in PHP 8 - while the runtime itself is capable of running code with syntax features of the modern world.
The 8 series has made a lot of little changes that are currently deprecations but if converted to errors as promised in 9 will be the end for lots of legacy code without changes: most of the standard library not taking null arguments where it used to, changed/added typehinting for the standard classes affecting anything that extends/implements them, and disallowing dynamic properties on objects are some big ones that come to mind.
Once 9 makes some of this mandatory it'll also be much more difficult for a single codebase to work across a wide range of PHP versions. That's possibly even an explicit goal: forcing narrower support from applications and libraries will prod more hosts and end-users to update.
Not that these are bad changes, but that the philosophy of extreme compatibility really isn't in force anymore. It's not a Python 2/3 scenario but a gradual constant shift.
Ah, angry Internet people. I have my own collection of responses, from someone who argued that my choice of a default value for a setting was tantamount to forcing someone to have an abortion against their will, to the time when restricting comments on a bug another team had WontFixed led to a change.org petition to get me fired.
People feel like they have very little control, and that no one is listening. In that environment they sometimes scream into the void. It's counterproductive, but understandable.
The golden age of moddable games ended a long time ago, and it's a major shame. Mods for Starcraft, Warcraft III, Half Life, etc. spawned thousands of sophisticated game modes that turned into dozens of independent games.
There's plenty of moddable games still available though. Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Beat Saber. Even Dota 2 has what they call "custom games".
Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
The mods for modern games involve making those games better for a specific audience. I've played a bunch of Stardew Valley and Minecraft mods. High-end Minecraft graphics and massive content packs make for an interesting (if buggy) experience.
On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
I wish any of those hit the levels that Warcraft 3 did. Having infinite, sophisticated game modes to play online with others was so fun. Unfortunately Fortnite, Roblox, and Dota 2 have not been able to do this nearly as well.
The people that would have made mods for those games are still able to make mods for TES, Witcher, GTA, Stardew valley (off the top of my head), but the people who made full blown mods like DOTA in WC3 are now using tools like Unity or js frameworks like pixi and publishing on itch.io instead.
It's a shame that some studios are extremely against modding. Take for example Riot Games, I love their games but no modding support at all for League of Legends or Valorant. Considering their competition (Dota2 and CS:GO respectively) have an active community of producers and consumers of custom game content (maps, skins, game modes, etc), it's a real disappointment. I know leadership must believe the benefit isn't worth the cost, but a small part of me believes it's because the studio doesn't want to be "shown up" by the community getting excited about content they didn't make. I'm reminded of the Replay system in League of Legends. The community requested it for many years and was always told it wasn't going to happen, but once a third party releases a web app that allows you to download your previous games, suddenly the studio allocates a huge effort into getting an official version out the door.
I don't think so. Steam, for example, supports mods directly from the Steam client. Many of the games I play specifically support mods from within the game itself, integrated with this Steam mod functionality, and it even takes care of upgrades, dependencies and such.
There's a thriving ecosystem of games and mods out there, no such thing as a golden age that has ended.
Starcraft II for example has a host of excellent mods. My group doesn't even play the original Starcraft game, and I don't have any interest in it either, but we have sunk many hours into different custom maps.
This is a great write up. I'm so envious of those days. I was around and got a taste of it, but my mum perpetually banned the computer from me, and limited my internet usage to 1 hour for brief time I did get.
"To keep viruses out of the power supply and to stop me from talking to pedophiles"
Wow, I really really wish I was a little older during the Half Life / Flash era of game development. Will we ever get anything like that again? Nowadays this kind of creativity always seems to exist in walled gardens like Roblox. I feel like the concept of software freedom as the gnu folks pitch is the environment that that half life / flash area of modding and game dev existed in.
Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.
Minecraft is comparable. I think the general trend is right though, there was a lot more creativity in random Warcraft/Half Life mods. Shit, DOTA was a Warcraft mod first.
Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game. Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays though.
Wasnt the modding scene a result of game dev from scratch being inaccessible? Downloading UE/Unity/Godot and making your dream game is probably easier nowadays than trying to make it as a HL mod then.
You could inject code in a lot of places and people were doing wonky things. I think it had to do with the user base being far smaller at the time. Knowledgeable people were still a significant part of it and security was far less of concern.
There was also far less money involved which is always a great filter for the kind of personality you want in this kind of community.
Modding a game means that you have a specific starting point, the original game, which you are probably a fan of. And you may want your creation to be a part of this original world, share some (or most) of gameplay elements, design elements, story elements etc.
People modded Half-Life not only because modding Half-Life was somewhat easier than making an FPS game from scratch, but also because they wanted to explore the original story from another angle, or they liked how engine feels to play, or for whatever other reason wanted a starting point to be a complete game. Kind of the original asset store: the assets of the game you are modding.
To me it is about focus. If I am interested in game AI, I can mod a game and focus on just the AI. No need to build out the rest of the art assets and design.
If you are a big fan of open world games, GTA and Skyrim took teams of a 100 people, years of effort to make. Not something an indie is going to be able to reproduce. Modding allows you to create in that world.
Third would be reach. Getting people to try out a mod for a game is often much easier than getting them to try out a whole new game.
There is nothing stopping you from making a web browser based JavaScript game right now that you can throw up on a basic webpage and share a link for people to go play instantly. You just don’t want to!
I don’t understand the downvoted, you really can just make a pure JavaScript game. Pick up an easy rendering library like PixiJS and just start making a game loop, etc.
Readit News
Combat played a sizeable role in killing the original game and turning it into something i'd expect from a CS mod. An entry level, bland generic version of the original that gutted all the strategy and coordination and teamwork that you required to win on ns_ maps. (A good commander alone was worth gold)
You built upon what many people considered cancer (combat to some extent, but definitely xmenu combat) - tumors get serious when they hit the lymph nodes, and they probably saw it as that.
I quit before this era happened but I probably would have hated you if i hadn't - even if you aren't technically the one to blame.
Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.
Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.
At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.
Original HL had an absolutely awesome modding community. As well as the huge one (CS) there were tweaks to make it better in all sorts of ways: - Adrenaline Gamer or AG - which changed the movement a little to make deathmatch super fast-paced. - Bubble Mod - which make a few gameplay tweaks to make deathmatch more sensible and manageable in large servers
...and I even wrote my own for the deathmatch games we played on our LAN at Uni, which announced a particularly annoying players name whenever he got fragged.
Don't really have time for these things any more!
I think I'd throw Tribes (2) in there as well. Those were the days.
It's a tough game to get into and even harder to get good at commanding since being a bad commander will sink your whole team. But it feels extremely rewarding to play on a well-coordinated team.
That said, NS was prob my favorite multiplayer game of all time... After Age of Empires 2, OFC.
Combat is fine to fill the server with enough players for a normal NS game.
Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no real imagination what making a thing means and under which constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free.
In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to change a thing.
This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies mediocrity.
All creators should learn to find value in criticism, especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as faults are perceived as such and you should at least think about why that is and if that means you can do something better rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes.
It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers" (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill.
> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right.
Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat.
If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
> If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
Having the means to do something in no way gives you the right to do so. I have the means to speed in my car. I have the means to murder someone. I don't have the _right_ in either case to do so.
Few creators will object to criticism that shows an understanding of the work/product. Most will object to personal abuse empty of any actual criticism.
Understanding the context of a product makes for better complaints. Just venting is not helpful and often abusive.
This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time for 12 year old boys only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank.
Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.
I see it a lot in small communities centered around open source games. It is easy for some one to vent their anger in a useless fashion (can we agree that pr teams calling it passion is a euphemism they use to avoid insulting people giving them money?), and comparatively difficult and rare for people to put their experience into relatable terms or to criticize a change as it pertains to the project's goals.
Maybe I need to clarify a little bit. Of course everybody hast the right to complain about everything (as people do). But not every criticism is sound cricism. Everybody may just get themselves a Turbo Encabulator and complain that the malleable logarithmic casing is misaligned with the pentametric fan. That is okay. They sold you a turbo encabulator after all and you rightfully expect the pentametric fan to be surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with it – this is what they told you, you will get.
Whether criticism is "sound" by my definition or not has to do with expectations one some part. If someone sells you a backup software that is "guarantueed to be 100% formally correct" for 100k€ and it then proceeds to munch your disks and set your computer on fire, criticism is not only okay, it is outright needed. But if someone puts their "works for me, but I strongly advice anybody else against using this"-backup-script on Github and it munches your disk, you may complain, but the other person is not at fault. A lot of people complain about things where someone basically just was like: I made this for fun in my spare time, take it or leave it. And they complain about it as if it was a commercial product they sold their firstborn for.
My other point with making and being right has to do with instutional experience. You don't have to be able to build a turbo encabulator yourself, but before you criticise it maybe make sure you have read its manual. Maybe that is my first level IT-support trauma speaking here, but many people are very quick in voicing criticism, and don't do the research whether the thing they criticise is wrong or they just had the wrong expectations. Of course a product can also be designed badly so it produces these false expectations and such things should be criticised.
Other things are purely subjective and criticism is worth nothing. You may complain about a experimental noise rock band being noisy of having nasty lyrics, but that is no meaningful criticism as this was very likely their goal. That person's feeling of "I hate that sound" is totally valid and true, and the musicians may or may not decide to take it seriously, but it is still just bad criticism – like complaining water is wet or complaining a weight is heavy. That is sort of the point of the thing.
That being said, as a creator I value negative criticism. And I take the feeling from where it comes from seriously most of the time. I just don't trust what they tell you the solution is.
I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons), move on.
What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it, no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You have no right to demand someone does something; you can only inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't going to care about the end user.
This is about expectations. Good architecture serves many users. Good films serve many viewers. Good software ...
You get the point. And it is always better if you can serve two target audiences at once instead of one – IF you can do it without compromising.
But some software doesn't want or even need to serve all users. Take vim for example. For most people it would be a horrible experience to use it and they could criticise it for a ton of things. But what value is there in this cricism as they don't understand how vim is intended to be used? Their cirticism comes from a true place, but it still isn't worth a lot, because if you followed it to the end you would end up with something like notepad.exe or MS Word and loosing everything that makes vim special and interesting.
So if anything, what I say here is: good criticism is critcicism by people who see the same thing in your thing as you do, as their vision likely aligns with yours. If you are painting impressionist pictures for example, the criticism "it could look more photorealistic" by some guy is utterly useless, while the criticism "I think you should rely less on simple complementary color combinations" by someone who understands impressionism might be really helpful. The photorealism guy just tells you that there are people looking for this out there, but as you already know and/or actively decided against it, there is no use in this.
Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
I have limited amount of time and before I spend 20 hours on a book or game I would like some indication that it's not a waste of time.
One could argue that both the good and the bad should be highlighted, but my experience is that I'm get most value from knowing about the bad parts.
There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough compliments".
If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only speak up if they are irritated.
Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied the people on average really are with your work.
Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been following for a year or so. Just wanted to let him know his work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing.
He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I guess I should do more of that.
Of course we know nothing about that inflamed moderator. Oh well.
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My main take away from the post is that anything worth making will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to be reacted on.
The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but more useful.
The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things. Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part of a community that generates chatter to help guide the conversation of the people who actually decide what should happen at the mass-market level.
Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine kleine Ergänzung zu einer Ergänzung.
Ain't dealing with an avalanche of Abmahnung, and ain't going to shut up either.
This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good, but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something positive.
I used to be a person that criticized a lot. One day i realized what an cheap ass i was. Talking is easy. Now i say silently to myself:
"Shut up or do it better yourself."
It is very healthy to remove narcissistic micromanagers (driven by subconcious anxiety) from your life if you can.
Closest thing in English that I could think of: history is written by the winners. Similar concept.
>The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform.
>The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
The PHP world, for example, is very famous for its focus on compatibility: breaking changes are generally announced far before they are released, and the amount of actually breaking changes is very very small - out of my mind, the only thing that really bit a lot of very old code was the removal of implicitly provided global variables and the mysql legacy functions, which by that point were deprecated for like a decade and in many cases could be resolved by more-or-less simple search and replace runs. Other than that, a lot of legacy code works fine or with similarly minor modifications in PHP 8 - while the runtime itself is capable of running code with syntax features of the modern world.
Once 9 makes some of this mandatory it'll also be much more difficult for a single codebase to work across a wide range of PHP versions. That's possibly even an explicit goal: forcing narrower support from applications and libraries will prod more hosts and end-users to update.
Not that these are bad changes, but that the philosophy of extreme compatibility really isn't in force anymore. It's not a Python 2/3 scenario but a gradual constant shift.
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People feel like they have very little control, and that no one is listening. In that environment they sometimes scream into the void. It's counterproductive, but understandable.
Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
There's a thriving ecosystem of games and mods out there, no such thing as a golden age that has ended.
Starcraft II for example has a host of excellent mods. My group doesn't even play the original Starcraft game, and I don't have any interest in it either, but we have sunk many hours into different custom maps.
1. I was threatened once with fisticuffs because the person spent too much time playing Empire
2. I was blamed for causing one person's divorce
3. I was blamed for a student flunking out
4. Empire was blamed for consuming all the resources of Caltech's PDP-10, and was banned during daytime and during finals week
"To keep viruses out of the power supply and to stop me from talking to pedophiles"
Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.
Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game. Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays though.
I miss Flash games!
You could inject code in a lot of places and people were doing wonky things. I think it had to do with the user base being far smaller at the time. Knowledgeable people were still a significant part of it and security was far less of concern.
There was also far less money involved which is always a great filter for the kind of personality you want in this kind of community.
Modding a game means that you have a specific starting point, the original game, which you are probably a fan of. And you may want your creation to be a part of this original world, share some (or most) of gameplay elements, design elements, story elements etc.
People modded Half-Life not only because modding Half-Life was somewhat easier than making an FPS game from scratch, but also because they wanted to explore the original story from another angle, or they liked how engine feels to play, or for whatever other reason wanted a starting point to be a complete game. Kind of the original asset store: the assets of the game you are modding.
If you are a big fan of open world games, GTA and Skyrim took teams of a 100 people, years of effort to make. Not something an indie is going to be able to reproduce. Modding allows you to create in that world.
Third would be reach. Getting people to try out a mod for a game is often much easier than getting them to try out a whole new game.