Jeff Talks Forums

[Actaeon]

"Three Reasons Creators Should Never Read Their Forums"

 

Many of you are probably already plugged into Jeff's blog. Those of you that aren't or haven't caught this round yet, might find the above interesting.

[Lilith]

breaking news: sky blue, pope catholic

[Randomizer]

Just ask what happen to TM over his Avernum 4 comments.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

what happen to TM over his Avernum 4 comments.

[Tyranicus]

I don't remember a scandal involving TM and Avernum 4. I do remember Ashgate though. That was an... interesting time.

[Dikiyoba]

TM's permabanning and Ashgate were two unrelated incidents.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Randomizer]

TM and others didn't like Avernum 4 compared to the earlier games, but I think it was the signature quoting Jeff's personal comments from a beta testing e-mail that really rubbed Jeff the wrong way. Jeff now has a permanent ban on repeating beta testing comments even when they are harmless and humorous.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Diplodocus

TM's permabanning and Ashgate were two unrelated incidents.

Dikiyoba.

I knew this. I was also under the impression that TM's permabanning, which happened at least 6 months (I think almost a year) after the release of A4 had to do with the repeated use of obscenities. (The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back) Sadly, as I am no longer a mod, I can't look this stuff up.

[Rowen]

Quote:

And, if you are a member of my forums reading this, know this. I love you guys. The idea that anyone wants to discuss my work at all, even to dump on it, is insanely flattering. I just hope that this makes clearer the instincts of efficiency and self-preservation that lead me to keep a little bit of distance.

I like the bone he threw us to make us all not feel like asshats. We love you too Jeff.

[Tirien]

I wonder how many of the people that flame at Jeff have ever even tried to make a rpg.

Maybe we could have them walk by Alorael's house and hope he snipes them.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Tirien

I wonder how many of the people that flame at Jeff have ever even tried to make a rpg.

Most of the older members here (and I assume members here to be a sizeable portion of the people who flame Jeff) have at least dabbled with one of the Blades engines, so they kind of have tried.

And anyway, you don't have to be a chef to be able to have an opinion on whether the meal you just bought tasted like crap - and if it did, you're bound to say some unpleasant things about whoever made it. Why would you need to have made an RPG to have an opinion on one of those?

[Spidweb]

"I like the bone he threw us to make us all not feel like asshats."

 

Meant every word of it. It's hard to explain how you might respect and value something even while feeling the need to keep a respectful distance. I hope I managed to thread that needle.

 

Also, forum posts DO have value. When someone reports a bug or major issue on the forums, it almost always then finds its way to me. The mods are kind enough to draw my attention when it is needed, and I hope they continue to do so.

 

Back to Avadon. The world is almost done.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Spidweb

Back to Avadon. The world is almost done.

- Jeff Vogel

I am getting excited for Avadon to come out. Keep up with your great work.

[Enraged Slith]

Originally Posted By: Nikki.

Most of the older members here (and I assume members here to be a sizeable portion of the people who flame Jeff) have at least dabbled with one of the Blades engines, so they kind of have tried.

Somehow, I think these two distinctions might be heavily correlated.

[Student of Trinity]

As far as I know, nobody tried to make a living from Blades. I'm sure no-one succeeded.

 

It has always been clear to me that Jeff is a businessman. That doesn't mean he's not also an artist. It does mean that, insofar as he's an artist, he's working in a medium with stringent limitations that are not apparent to the audience. He's got to finish on time and he's got to make sales.

 

I think Jeff's profession must be a bit like being a sculptor in marble, who has to worry constantly about fractures, even though by definition no finished piece ever has any. So none of the sculptors fans or critics thinks about fractures at all. But the sculptor has to think of them all the time. There's a limit to how much value such a sculptor is going to find in discussing their work with people who know nothing about stone. Their aesthetic judgments might still sometimes be insightful, but their suggestions are going to be totally off base too much of the time.

 

I've offered Jeff quite a few aesthetic criticisms and suggestions over the years, and even though I've tried to pitch each one as requiring minimal effort on his part, I don't think he's ever taken up any. And that's fine. I'm a loyal long-term fan, but I am not even a teeny little bit of a co-creator of any of Jeff's games. If it were my game, it would be my mortgage on the line. It's not. He's doing his job, and some professional distance is appropriate.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Just ask what happen to TM over his Avernum 4 comments.

This is incredibly misleading, so I think in this regard at least the record needs to be set straight. Nobody was ever disciplined in any way for making comments about Avernum 4 -- in fact, many of the current mods had some colorful things to say about aspects of it. Ash Lael was banned for a week, around that time, as a result of putting a provocative, out-of-context quote from Jeff in his signature. His intentions (which involved humor and irony) were misinterpreted as malice, Ash was banned, and a storm of drama ensued.

I believe that was one of the things that prompted Jeff to distance himself from the forums. But it was not over "Avernum 4 comments" and it had nothing to do with TM. TM was banned a number of times that season, but I'm pretty sure they were all for harassment, belittlement, and profanity -- never anything related to Avernum 4.

[Dintiradan]

Once again, Jeff gets Slashdot coverage. Trying to think of some other game developer, any other game developer that gets such consistent coverage and failing.

 

Good to see Arancaytar is still alive.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Just ask what happen to TM over his Avernum 4 comments.

This is incredibly misleading, so I think in this regard at least the record needs to be set straight. Nobody was ever disciplined in any way for making comments about Avernum 4 -- in fact, many of the current mods had some colorful things to say about aspects of it. Ash Lael was banned for a week, around that time, as a result of putting a provocative, out-of-context quote from Jeff in his signature. His intentions (which involved humor and irony) were misinterpreted as malice, Ash was banned, and a storm of drama ensued.

I believe that was one of the things that prompted Jeff to distance himself from the forums. But it was not over "Avernum 4 comments" and it had nothing to do with TM. TM was banned a number of times that season, but I'm pretty sure they were all for harassment, belittlement, and profanity -- never anything related to Avernum 4.

Thanks for clearing that up, Slarty. That was exactly how I remembered it, which is why I was confused.

[Alorael at Large]

There are people who can manage to interact with their fan communities. Those people need either rabid fans who self-police vigorously, which isn't always actually good for sales and PR, or very thick skin. Or, I think, a medium less open to criticism than games. Write a novel and most of the time people will accept it as a novel. It might have flaws, and maybe people won't like what you did with this or that character, but very rarely will people explode with rage the way they will over gameplay and game design. (And Twilight.)

 

For the record, while I think that there are actually ongoing, helpful, and useful bits of Spiderweb discussion here, I bet Jeff can get them by just dipping his toes. And I'm pretty sure reading silently is more productive than getting involved in the fracas. And, given his enthusiastic self-presentation as a curmudgeon, I think we should all be grateful not to have him grouching at us all the time.

 

—Alorael, who suspects that Jeff gets so much indie coverage (and, to be fair, a surprising amount of mainstream coverage) because he's one of the biggest indie game producers. He produces games in a niche that's both small and largely served by huge companies. He's been doing it forever. He is, basically, the voice of indie, and he has been since it was shareware.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Spidweb

Back to Avadon. The world is almost done.

- Jeff Vogel

I'm almost drooling in anticipation, though the wait will be even longer for me because I have to wait for the Windows port. I really don't mind waiting, though; the first & second Avernum trilogy CDs I bought recently will keep me busy for quite some time.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

[keira]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

the Windows port.

Same here. Question though, If linux has WINE, is there something that emulates Macs for windows and/or linux? MINE or something like that?

I suppose since both Mac and Linux are UNIX based systems it should be fairly easy to do, right?

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Refudiate Exorbance

Or, I think, a medium less open to criticism than games. Write a novel and most of the time people will accept it as a novel. It might have flaws, and maybe people won't like what you did with this or that character, but very rarely will people explode with rage the way they will over gameplay and game design. (And Twilight.)

You make a good distinction in your parenthetical sentence. Most novels are rarely read by 13-year-old boys with unleavened social skills who enjoy simulating blowing things up. Most novels are also rarely read by 13-year-old girls. Therefore, most fiction-writer forums fail to draw from these two deep pools of viciousness which are available to video game forums and Twilight forums, respectively.

In other words, I think the fact that most readers will accept a novel as a novel has more to do with the self-selection of the readers and less to do with the novel.

[cfgauss]

Ehh, well reading this has drawn me back again to make a comment! (If I leave in the middle of a conversation again it's because I'm very busy, I promise!)

 

Anyway, I think a lot of Jeff's comments about this are a little bizarre. First, these have to be one of the friendliest communities dedicated to a developer I've ever seen. I've certainly read plenty of criticisms here, and I would say at least 99% of them are fairly reasonable, not only in comparison to what you see on other forums, but what people who work in businesses see as part of peer reviews, and definitely compared to what I see in my field.

 

I mean, I work in a field where someone can be giving a talk on their results, and some random person can stand up and interrupt with "no, no, this is all wrong, you don't know what you're doing!" Or when you submit a paper, it can be pretty harshly criticized and ultimately rejected when the anonymous reviewer decides it's unfixable. (Though the typical magnitude of these varies considerably by subfields.) But these are seen as good things!

 

Personally, I have a number of people that I go to first when I have some crazy new idea, because I know they're more than happy to say "this is the stupidest thing I've heard in my life, you should never tell this idea to anyone ever again." This kind of thing is very valuable!

 

And, yeah, you can try to say that a scientific field is totally different, and this isn't applicable here, if you want. And even though I have experience programming and modding and stuff, I don't make a living on it so I don't know what I'm talking about. But I've heard plenty of devs talk a lot about how valuable criticism is. Often, they're talking about internal criticism (another dev tells them "this is a terrible idea and doesn't make any sense"), and you can say that's different than a community, but Jeff doesn't really have an internal organization to tell him things like that. Hell, even Molyneux has talked about how community criticism has helped him realize how stupid some of his ideas were!

 

It seems to me like a lot of the complaints about the community not being helpful is due to Jeff's lack of communication skills. Sure, I've only been paying attention to the community for 10 or so years, on and off, but I've never seen him once try to engage the community in specific, directed, constructive discussions about what they think.

 

Complaining that comments on a forum he repeatedly claims to refuse to take part in aren't constructive is just... a very odd thing to claim... It's like me claiming that people at a university next door to us aren't discussing things useful for my research in their offices. Well... yeah...

 

But really, what I see when I play Jeff's games, is that, aside from the occasional graphics or engine improvement, there really hasn't been any improvement in his games. They just look stagnant to me. They're the same mechanics wrapped in a new plot, with minor technical improvements. But there are no gameplay improvements.

 

I don't care if graphics or technical capabilities are improved. The games could still look like the original Exile I graphics for all I care, but they should not play like Exile I, and they mostly do.

 

Changes like "oh you can engineer creatures now" aren't really gameplay improvements, either, they're just a different plot. Okay, so now instead of my other party member being Bob the Warrior, he's Fyora the Fyora. Great. That makes sense in terms of the story, but does the game play differently because of it? Not so much.

 

My impression is that Jeff is just very risk-averse, and isn't willing to make any really significant changes, and just doesn't want to hear anyone suggest that his games could do with any improvements. And that's very disappointing, because there's a lot of potential for good things here.

[Randomizer]

Basilsik Games has a smaler and friendlier forum. Less activity and posting outside of the games keeps it quieter than here. So Tom, the game designer, can easily see suggestions for improving his games since a few members compile lists of ideas and changes. Also having an older average age helps too.

[Student of Trinity]

Criticism works well in science because the audience for technical talks and papers is extremely self-selected. Game audiences aren't, at least not if the game producer is trying to make money.

 

Jeff is risk-averse, and he has been changing his basic game mechanics only very slowly and slightly. And that's a big part of why he's still in business. He found something that worked, and he refrained from wrecking it. He has found enough people willing to pay for his fresh stories and familiar mechanisms that he has made a living as a one-man show for fifteen years. An independently wealthy hobbyist game designer could no doubt have been a lot more innovative, but somehow there aren't many of these around. There's just too much awful, boring work involved in producing a game, for anyone to consistently produce full-sized games as a hobby.

 

Having said that, Avadon does introduce some somewhat larger changes, in character development and in combat. It's still recognizably a Jeff Vogel game, but the flavor change is maybe on the order of merlot to cabernet, if not red wine to bourbon.

[Astinus]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Trying to think of some other game developer, any other game developer that gets such consistent coverage and failing.

Markus Persson (Minecraft) and Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) come to mind but there are very few successful "one man bands" out there.

[keira]

In related news, the article made the /. top stories nightly email whatever-you-want-to-call-it too

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Personally, I have a number of people that I go to first when I have some crazy new idea, because I know they're more than happy to say "this is the stupidest thing I've heard in my life, you should never tell this idea to anyone ever again." This kind of thing is very valuable!

Jeff has these people, too, and repeatedly says so.

Apart from that you do raise interesting points but ultimately I think this is about two different things altogether. In scientific research it is probably easier to say something is right or wrong, or works/doesn't work respectively. In a story-telling environment this very easily shifts to 'it doesn't work for me' or even to 'I don't like it very much'. We are talking about various aspects of how the game may be improved but so far there doesn't even seem to be a unanimous vote on how that's got to be achieved.

A lot of discussions on this board deal with taste-based positions so I do understand that Jeff doesn't want to get too involved in them as they are about his creation. I suspect he reads more comments than he admits, though.

[KrataLightblade]

I myself tend to play sounding board for a terribly intelligent friend of mine who is sadly even more impractical than he is smart. His ideas are often brilliant in their own way, but fatally flawed in some very obvious manner, and he himself has trouble with seeing those flaws. On the bright side, he's self aware enough to bring his ideas to me for analysis first.

 

He and I are seriously considering entering a creative business partnership together. Should we do this, I would under no circumstances allow him within a thousand miles of our fans, should we acquire any. First of all he has a terrible temper, and second of all, it requires a certain amount of delicacy and diplomacy to explain to him why an idea he had isn't quite as perfect as he thought it was.

 

Letting him anywhere near our audience would be a lot like letting a naive eight year old girl post to 4chan. That may be a slight overexaggeration, but it's a good point nonetheless. You don't want to get in the habit of firing shots back at your audience. Many of them will support indirectly you even if they claim to hate you, through free advertising about how much they hate you. I can't speak for others, but I bought copies of the Twilight novels BECAUSE of the hate, not because I cared about them myself. It led me to read a work I otherwise wouldn't have precisely because I wanted to see how anything could be as bad as I was told. And whether I liked it or not, Meyer still has my money.

 

On the other hand, if I hear about a work because I hear about its creator being a whiny childish blowhard who is more famous for attacking his fans than for his work, I'm likely to give it a pass. I might lurk on the forums to watch the flame war, but I won't care about his work.

 

Every medium is different, of course. But in a medium where you need your fans to appreciate you work, and not the spectacle you create, it pays to avoid situations that might trigger your berserk buttons.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Sylae Corell

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

the Windows port.

Same here. Question though, If linux has WINE, is there something that emulates Macs for windows and/or linux? MINE or something like that?

There's PearPC, but it's kind of dead. There's Basilisk ][ and SheepShaver, but that's for older macs (pre-OSX). So, in a word, no.

And none of those are like WINE anyway; they emulate a machine, not an operating system.

Originally Posted By: Sylae Corell

I suppose since both Mac and Linux are UNIX based systems it should be fairly easy to do, right?

Probably not... Mac's kernel may be UNIX-based, but I don't think most of the other API's would be compatible, especially the GUI.

[Niemand]

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel

Originally Posted By: Sylae Corell

I suppose since both Mac and Linux are UNIX based systems it should be fairly easy to do, right?

Probably not... Mac's kernel may be UNIX-based, but I don't think most of the other API's would be compatible, especially the GUI.

Right; the undertaking of replicating all of the higher level libraries would be a project of scale similar to WINE. (The differences between Mac OS and Linux may not be quite as big as between Linux and Windows, but they are still fairly fundamental, like a totally different executable file format.) There is The Cocotron, but it's intended to make porting easy, rather than to enable running unported programs, and it only intends to cover Apple's Cocoa/Objective-C libraries and APIs; it ignores the various other system libraries.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

"I can't speak for others, but I bought copies of the Twilight novels BECAUSE of the hate, not because I cared about them myself."

 

This is what libraries are for. You save money, and said money doesn't go into the pocket of someone abominable. I did that with Left Behind...well, that and it had actual bearing on my thesis. But mostly because of the hate.

[Dikiyoba]

Depends. If you want to read it fairly soon after its release, there's likely to be a waiting list at the library a mile long.

 

Dikiyoba prefers to get knowledge of terrible books through snarky reviews. They're generally more entertaining than the actual writing. The downside is trying to find reviews that are complete, rather than abandoned halfway through.

[nikki.]

Quote:

Twilight

What I *really* dislike about the series is that they came out 5 years too early - my... I wouldn't say best, but certainly the piece I've spent most of my writing-life writing, is a vampire story. I understand, of course, that it's going to suffer from eye-rollings and criticism of it being clichéd on account of the genre, but now I'm going to be accused of ripping Twilight off as well.



edit: oh also, they're shoddily written, and the films were only made to create wads of cash and to wet the panties of 14 year olds the world over.

[cfgauss]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Criticism works well in science because the audience for technical talks and papers is extremely self-selected. Game audiences aren't, at least not if the game producer is trying to make money.

People at talks are definitely not self-selected. Lots of conferences are at universities and random students and postdocs at the university can show up to the talks.

And plenty of criticisms in science are wrong, too; really the only difference is cultural.

Quote:

Jeff is risk-averse, and he has been changing his basic game mechanics only very slowly and slightly. And that's a big part of why he's still in business.

It's a big part of why I haven't bought a new game from him for years. It's a big part of why several people I know have refused to play more than one or two of his games. It's a big part of why his userbase is so small compared to a lot of other indy devs who make very successful games (and who usually get hired by big companies afterward).

Quote:

He found something that worked, and he refrained from wrecking it.

And has refrained from improving it, too. Not to mention improving things is not mutually exclusive with doing things safely. There are a number of ways that this could easily be done, surveys, small proof-of-concept games / mods to see how people generally feel about changes, addons to existing games that make gameplay changes to see what people like, more playtesting, etc.

Quote:

Having said that, Avadon does introduce some somewhat larger changes, in character development and in combat.

I hope so. I'm hopeful he's taken seriously some of the criticisms and made improvements, but it remains to be seen.

Originally Posted By: Locmaar

Jeff has these people, too, and repeatedly says so.

No, he doesn't. He has people who say things to him, but that's not the same as a formal review environment by professionals, or actual interviews and live play testing with customers.

For example, many developers invite people in to play their games in the early stages, and watch them play without interfering/helping (so it's kind of like a "blind" study) to see how they play, solve problems, etc, and have them write/talk with them in detail about what they like, what they found frustrating, etc.

If you listen to what some of the devs who have talked or written or blogged about it, you can see how hugely this kind of thing helps. You can find nice examples of this in the Half-life 2 and Portal commentaries, but some of the written stuff you can find is more detailed.

Any you can try to say "oh but he doesn't have the resources to do this," etc, but it would be very easy (and cost nothing) to have directed conversations over either forums or careful surveys to see what people do and don't like and do and don't have trouble with.

Not to mention there are plenty of studies, textbooks, blog posts, talks, conference proceedings, etc, by real big-name devs about gameplay and usability that agree with how important this is, and detail all kinds of interesting and non-obvious things that could lead to improvements in any game.

And, honestly, I'll take John Carmack, or Gabe Newell, or the guys at Bungie's comments on how useful community feedback is more than Jeff Vogel, just sayin'. (Particularly Carmack's "I used to be an ass and not listen to anyone until I learned that they have useful things to say" comments.)

Quote:

In scientific research it is probably easier to say something is right or wrong, or works/doesn't work respectively.

That was just an example, this happens in tons of professional fields.

Quote:

In a story-telling environment this very easily shifts to 'it doesn't work for me' or even to 'I don't like it very much'.

Other devs, not to mention writers of novels, scripts, etc, seem to have no problem doing this. Also, this isn't really applicable because I'm talking more about gameplay and "user experience" issues than story ones.

Quote:

We are talking about various aspects of how the game may be improved but so far there doesn't even seem to be a unanimous vote on how that's got to be achieved.

Because there's no reason to carefully discuss it when the developer goes out of his way to say he doesn't listen to you.

[Lilith]

jeff used to post on the forums more than he does. it often turned out poorly. i'm just sayin'.

[Randomizer]

Jeff listens to his beta testers, but he doesn't like what we say. Just because the early testers are all power gaming min/max insane .....

 

They are very good at catching bugs and exploiting the game engine in ways that Jeff really doesn't want. It was much better before he got so many saved games and explanations about how his poor bosses were getting destroyed.

[Student of Trinity]

"Random [doctoral] students and post-docs" who show up at conference talks ARE an extremely self-selected audience. Any of them who might actually interact at all with the speaker, even much more so.

[Locmaar]

I don't know that Jeff has a formal review environment, nor do I know that he hasn't. I do know how hard it can be for people to submit themselves to review processes, though. I personally remember it being a steep learning curve, especially if you have to be blunt while at the same time wanting to maintain good manners - that seems to be of little value in some fields of peer review as I have come to learn. I have learned listening to criticism, but I have also learned when to stop listening, which is usually if some loudmouth wants to be right, no matter what.

 

What you fail to take into account, though, is this: when you submit your work to a review environment it's usually to get help to get it ready to market (whatever market this may be) - if Jeff manages to do that without our preferred review environment who are we to argue with that?

[Aoslare]

I'm not a huge fan of the remarkable staticness of game elements either. However, those are that way because that's how Jeff wants them, and no amount of feedback is going to change that. I think you're overestimating the guaranteed impact of testing feedback: not its potential impact, but its guaranteed impact.

 

Locmaar put it well:

Originally Posted By: Locmaar

What you fail to take into account, though, is this: when you submit your work to a review environment it's usually to get help to get it ready to market (whatever market this may be) - if Jeff manages to do that without our preferred review environment who are we to argue with that?

Thus I think the one Spiderweb game that really would have benefitted from more feedback, early on in the process, was Blades of Avernum: "this scripting language you are developing, while cool for me, will be lost on the vast majority of players, something that was not true of BoE's parallel parts" and "oh man, this editor interface is abominable, and I usually like your interfaces" could have made a difference. Or maybe not: maybe that was just not meant to be.

 

Here's another comparison. Basilisk games, while much younger than Spiderweb, produces a similar product. Basilisk is WAY more present in their forums and, at least after their first game, made changes based on a LARGE amount of user feedback on the forums. From what I can tell, these changes seem to have amount to about 3 to 6 months of work, and resulting in a second game that has improved play controls and some other added goodies, but nonetheless looks and feels almost exactly like the first game. Jeff's output average is about 1 game per year. If he's going to delay a game by 3 to 6 months, he'd need to increase sales by 25 to 50%. The changes that I suggest, even though I know they would make the game better, would not result in such an increase.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

"Random [doctoral] students and post-docs" who show up at conference talks ARE an extremely self-selected audience. Any of them who might actually interact at all with the speaker, even much more so.

Yeah, can't imagine he gets many ecology postdocs asking questions, or anywhere near the building the talk is in.

[Alorael at Large]

I'll get on the review bandwagon too. Jeff has beta testers. You can see the list in each game, and while it's not huge, it's also not tiny. Considering how few sales he gets and how the testers are probably also the most likely purchasers, they're a sacrifice. Big game outfits actually pay for beta testing, which Jeff can't; he does the best he can with what he has.

 

Could he get more feedback from asking for it from the community at large? Sure. But it's likely to be a lot of information, a lot of it incoherent or contradictory or just plain wrong, and it's a lot of effort, by time and by mental fortitude, to go through it, take the good, and not take the bad to heart.

 

—Alorael, who in any case thinks Slarty hit the nail on the head. Jeff can only make small, incremental changes because large changes take a lot of coding and a lot of testing, and Spiderweb can't actually afford to take a lot of time. For comparison, look at how many games by major companies are shipped buggy, or with large parts of the story cut before completion, or with other problems. Jeff's games, for all their faults, are always complete, and they very rarely have game-breaking bugs. He's making the living he wants, so it's working well enough for him.

[Randomizer]

I did some beta testing for Basilisk Games and the process is significantly different. Jeff likes to keep testers isolated so he can get unfiltered opinions on his games and not have a few testers influence the group.

 

Basilisk Games has a separate testers forum where the testers can post bugs and discuss the game as it evolves to make major changes in how things work. Beyond this isn't working or there's a typographical error, there are discussions on how the game is played and how to make it better. This slows down game development since beyond the time spent recoding the game, there is additional time to retest the entire game to see how it changes for instance when the regeneration rate for health and mana is increased. Some major changes were made only a month before release and after release the versions added more changes based upon player's requests.

 

While Basilisk Games probably listens more to its players especially when the ideas are neatly listed by category so they can be easily viewed, Jeff has made several improvements to Avadon over the earlier games that show he has been reading the forums to answer complaints.

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Jeff has made several improvements to Avadon over the earlier games that show he has been reading the forums to answer complaints.

So did he change the numpad enter from not working to do the same as the main enter? if not then nevermind, maybe next avadon I'll remember on time.

[Masked Man of Inscrutability]

Ha! Returning to Spiderweb's forums is always this weird timewarp where it is always the same people doing saying the same things.

 

I love you!

 

To stay on topic, I, too, drifted away from Spiderweb games because they just felt too similar. I think my last Avernum purchase was 5, my last Geneforge purchase was 4. I finished Geneforge 4, but never finished Avernum 5. Don't get me wrong - I don't dislike them - but I liked them more like I sometimes fondly remember an old movie or song I used to be into. I like them from a distance, but with no real desire to experience them again. But hey, for every person like me who moves on to other things, there is some newbie who takes my place.

 

The comment about Blades of Avernum, for me at least, really hit the nail on the head. BoA was primarily marketed as a "Build your own RPG!" type game. The scenarios were never the attraction. But you cannot release a game like that with such difficult scenario editing tools. The documentation, too, was abysmal. The tutorial only shows you how to place things on a map, but never explains dialogue making etc. And telling the user to just open up random files and it will eventually make sense is a cop out. Part of me thinks Jeff knew it, or he wouldn't have released the editor as open source (thus giving him a convenient excuse for why it was decidedly not ready from prime time). The reviews were, predictably, cool. The game bombed from a financial standpoint.

 

Compare the BoA experience to the BoE experience. BoE was a success, despite looking more out-of-date when released than BoA did. And despite the technical limitations. And despite having no established community of designers.

 

I don't mean to rip on Jeff here. But you're so right that BoA, above all others, could have used serious player input. It had large structural problems that would have surfaced very quickly. And the real tragedy of BoA's business failure is that it seems to have turned Jeff off from ever making another scenario development game again.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that I understand Jeff's stance toward interacting with his customers, but it seems too extreme. He doesn't need to turn into an Alorael-level engaged forum dweller, but more wouldn't be bad.

[cfgauss]

Todd Howard (of Oblivion, Morrowind, etc) used to read all of the posts on the Morrowind forums when they were small enough to do that: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/01/13/road-to-skyrim-the-todd-howard-interview.aspx

[Kelandon]

As a scenario designer who quit because of the sheer amount of ill-conceived hate that I found on forums when I released my work, I understand Jeff's position all too well. As I have said before and will say again, my favorite ill-conceived criticism of Exodus was something like, "I really didn't like all the religious allegory. It seemed out of place." In a scenario called Exodus, the essential plotline of which is that a prophet leads his chosen people out of perdition and into the promised land, which he begins by parting the Red Sea, uh, I mean, a river.

 

I could just quit when player comments got overwhelmingly stupidly negative. What would Jeff do? Starve? Flip burgers?

[Masked Man of Inscrutability]

Kel, your situation is sort of interesting to me given your experience. What, in particular, was so bothersome that made you want to stop designing scenarios? I ask because I want to understand what aspects of the criticism, from a designer's perspective, went into the destructive category. I mean, it seems like TM just always hated your scenarios no matter what, so I cannot imagine that was it.

 

Also, did the criticism drive you away from scenario design, or just the forums?

 

EDIT: Is it true that Exodus includes a reference to the Cult of Richard White? If so, that's *almost* enough to get me to reinstall BoA.

[Tirien]

Originally Posted By: Masked Man of Inscrutability

EDIT: Is it true that Exodus includes a reference to the Cult of Richard White? If so, that's *almost* enough to get me to reinstall BoA.

I recently played Exodus, so I can tell you that yes, it does. I just wish Kelandon had continued designing. His were my favorite scenarios, partly due to the length of them, and partly due to having a plot that didnt make me bang my head against the wall.

[Kelandon]

Originally Posted By: Masked Man of Inscrutability

Kel, your situation is sort of interesting to me given your experience. What, in particular, was so bothersome that made you want to stop designing scenarios? I ask because I want to understand what aspects of the criticism, from a designer's perspective, went into the destructive category. I mean, it seems like TM just always hated your scenarios no matter what, so I cannot imagine that was it.

It's not so much that the criticism wasn't constructive as that that's all there was. No one ever said anything good, or if they did, it was so backhanded and buried in loads and loads of negativity that I got frustrated with it all. It was almost never the case that anyone said anything that actually made sense and that I could do something about.

I cite the example of "I didn't expect religious allegory in Exodus" as the most extreme case of criticism that doesn't make sense, but what about all the stuff that was fairly normal? One of the common criticisms was that the outdoors were big and empty. Well, they're big, sure. But that's the idea: it's a big scenario. Are they empty? Well, not completely. I have at least one interesting interaction in every single section, usually two or three. Sometimes you have to travel over a long distance to get from place to place, but that's the idea: you're making a vast trek (an exodus) across hostile/untamed territory. I like how the outdoors are designed. So criticism of the outdoors as "empty" is just as worthless to me as criticism of the religious allegory.

And nearly everything fit into that category. It's not so much that anyone was criticizing in bad faith (well, some people were), but that it was so rare for anyone to say anything good about my main scenarios (neglecting the HLPM, LP, and 9Var), and the bad things were so frequently either things that didn't make sense in the first place or that I disagreed with, that it lost its point.

Originally Posted By: Masked Man of Inscrutability

Also, did the criticism drive you away from scenario design, or just the forums?

EDIT: Is it true that Exodus includes a reference to the Cult of Richard White? If so, that's *almost* enough to get me to reinstall BoA.

Well, it certainly didn't drive me away from the forums. And I did make Nobody's Heroes later. I just didn't make Homeland, the third scenario in the series.

And yeah, if you want to know the final fate of Richard White (who vanished somewhat before Exodus was made), you have to play Exodus.