a matter of etiquette

by shmutz on 04/21/2008 22:46, 11 messages, last message: 04/22/2008 20:29, 3585 views, last view: 04/30/2024 18:49

sometimes it seems people forget about what projects like Sauerbraten, CSL and alike take to realize.

for some reason i cant forget it and although i woulnd't even have dreamed i'd write a post like this one day - but i believe it is necessary.

projects like Sauerbraten and CSL are free for us all to use, because there are people that spend their whole spare time in developing something that is actually quite something. they do it partially because they like to code stuff, but a big part is the idea to create something that gives you an hour in your life that you forget about your real life stuff and worries and just frag like theres nothing else in the world. in my opinion i have to admit that they (of course!) do not perfect on everything - but they do pretty damn well! better than I ever could and longer and more continuously than I´d ever be willing to invest. actually they do so good that i became pretty addicted, which in my case means something. i didnt become addicted to FPS when i was young although i played them all: doom/quake/duke nukem- but with sauer and at the age of 27 i did.

now what seems for me a big lot out of tune are these comments from people that pretty much seem to forget who they are talking to. I really dont ask you to love the devs, but you could respect them for what they do or at least be friendly and use neutral words. it is not what you write usually (because some of your ideas are quite good actually) but the way how you write it. i just dont see the reason why some people verbally spit at those devs. dont you see, that the devs do pretty and for the rest just can´t do better as they are just a hand full (at max) that do it in their free time and not full-time and its a huge project?

sometimes i feel like id like to take your IPs from the forum and ban you from the TC (the-conquerors) servers so you 'd go on after a while of missing out the party and complain somewhere else. i might even feel better if i did: you are worth nothing to me, but verbally attack the devs give me a very nice game with new feautures and stuff almost every half a year. but i won´t do that. why? well. i believe even you deserve to be treated fair just like they do. you might have had a bad day, or beeing a noobie player in sauer wont have satisfied you yet very much.

i hope you just spend a second thinking before you write in the future. the devs ar not your employees. this forum is not some companys complain-hotline.

this a game, donated to you. if you dont like it or have some good ideas: place them here, easy instructive and with few coding realizable and combine it with friendly words. thats all it takes. for your own sake. or do actually believe the ones coding that stuff read what you write if you write it offensively? do you believe they will do what you say? why the hell should they?

and if you just want to complain please do me a personal favour piss at someone like bill gates. hes giving you buggy piece of crap, maintains his monopoly and even makes you pay for it, to get his next billion dollars by copying features that not rarely have been invented by open source projects at the very beginning.

well what remains for me is to say that i really fucking love this game and all the other stuff connected to it like CSL. i have many minor things that are not the way i´d do them if it was all just my game - but i just cant forget the big picture. i love to play this game and with CTF coming up, its gonne get even more intense.

thank you for Sauerbraten! Thank you for CSL!
thanks to all others who help this game to be what it is.

i know this all might sound a little exaggerated. but i really just want you guys to know and always know: there those people like me who appreciate what you do, even in those cases you do it different from what i'd personally wish. i know you probably dont even care anymore about those comments, but this makes me even more say want it out loud.

well and anyone in here who agrees with what i said feel free to just reply with a: ^^

and all other again 2 words to remind you what that is you do: inappropriate & useless.

   Board Index   

#1: ..

by shmutz on 04/21/2008 22:54

^^

:-)

reply to this message

#2: ..

by Finale on 04/21/2008 23:19

(^_^)

just remember that sauer is a game, and the kids who play will always want everything they cant have (vehicles, over-powered rifles)...

its just ignoring the unhelpful comments and using the productive suggestions.

reply to this message

#3: ..

by tman_elite on 04/21/2008 23:25

^^ i guess

reply to this message

#4: ..

by shmutz on 04/22/2008 00:04

i do remember that. i dont even mean it that harsh.

and actually there are not that many bad comments - but they keep coming. i just want them to end. i know the vast majority in here are not like that. nd i felt like saying that i dont like to see that stuff aven though i dont have the time to start to argue with everyone that is see doing such a kind of a critique.

i just wanted it to be said. as i said. might sound exaggerated, but i can live with that rather than the opoosite. :-)

reply to this message

#5: ..

by yoopers on 04/22/2008 01:19

^^

At 29 years of age, Sauer is the first FPS I've ever gotten into. I work in the IT industry and people would always ask:

"So, what games do you play?"

To which I would respond, "None."

Now I enthusiastically say, "Sauerbraten!"

Then they sorta look at me weirdly and I explain the glory that is this game. ;D

reply to this message

#6: ..

by CoYoTe on 04/22/2008 02:02

^^

When I see this project running... i simply fall in love =)

Sauer is... in essence.. a great idea, a great work and a great job done. And it's always moving, improving, growing... and always in a positive way. Like all GPL projects, it has a "friends" taste. Thanks all who gift this game to us. Your great work is really appreciated.

Greetingd

reply to this message

#7: Re: ..

by SheeEttin on 04/22/2008 02:07, refers to #5

What, not even Nethack? ;)

reply to this message

#8: ..

by _mIscreant on 04/22/2008 02:14

Well said, schmutz. ^.^

Anonymity makes some people jackasses, and unfortunately there\'s nothing you can do about it but to ignore them. I played counter strike for awhile, and...well...let\'s just say sauerbraten has a long way to go before it gets THAT bad. :P

reply to this message

#9: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/22/2008 11:59

Not to destroy all of your illusions but as a side effect of a product being more well known and more popular and attracting more users, one does attract more ppl of "less preferred" cathegories.

Some of those "less preferred cathegories" are better managed by simply embracing them as part of the community and seeing them as a sign of the game being popular and touching a nerve. As an example of the latter are all enthusiastic (and generally polite albeit sometimes naive) requests expressed for adding various features like vehicles, ammo clips, ragdoll physics etc. Regarding those cathegories of players and forum posters as a problem which should be fought (by sarcasm etc) is a bad idea for a number of reasons. Instead politely reply that their requests are noted but that they probably won't be implemented right now (if at all) given the scarce development resources and the preferences of the developers. Yes, in spite of all technical complexities and challenges for different features and functions in the game, it is often a matter of preferences which features to include or not. And when discussing something that at the end of the day is just a matter of preferences, then everyone involved in the discussion HAS to be polite... no other attitude is justified, trust me. Then of course, being volunteers, it is the developers and maintainers FULL RIGHT to let such a trivial thing as personal preference decide what features (and associated technical challenges) to work on and what features to not implement. The latter is not only the beauty of a open source project with volunteers, it is a requirement. If the devs and maintainers had to work with features they personally did not prefer their motivation would take a hit, probably to the point they abandon the project and spend their time on something else.

(And yes, a LOT of FPS players considers the presence of vehicles in a FPS with infantry combat to ruin the game completely and yes, there is a lot who has the opposite preference, that considers the ABSENCE of potent, destructive vehicles that mow down infantrymen to ruin the game. Just a matter of personal preferences. And one of the reasons why request for vehicles come up quite often, and to physics as well, as the latter often is useful for vehicles).

Then we have the other "unpreferred cathegories" of community members. Those who are arrogant, snarky, immature etc and have a generally horribly behaviour. Exactly how to handle them as the game's popularity increases is tough to tell, even if "embracing" them is far more difficult as it basically is a matter of them to learn to behave (quickly) or to somehow get them out of the community or at least prevent them to spread too much bad energy.

(Of course I hope that the IMHO perverse tactic of trying to limit a game's popularity in order to avoid the "wrong" kind of players increasing in numbers is out of the picture for everyone...)

reply to this message

#10: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/22/2008 15:22

I understand the shortage of development resources and that a lot of administrative overhead is required for the website and forums which takes time away from the actual development of the product (and I've never had any illusion that the situation is different). A few more points though:

Whether or not a feature suggestion is utterly pointless depends on a number of factors. If the person suggesting the feature actually expects the official Sauerbraten to add "yet another feature to the queue of suggested features to perhaps consider implementing sometime in the future distant", then yes, we are talking of a feature suggestion which has little value to the actual product itself. However, assuming that the suggestion is OK otherwise (that is, politely formulated even if it might be naively unrealistic), then it does at least have ONE grain of value: if for nothing else, it's (yet another) indication that the product so far is good enough to gear up a user's creative mind.

If the suggestion however is not necessarily intended to be included in the official sauerbraten but instead either be included in a mod based on Sauerbraten (an existing mod or a new mod) or the suggestion is more a thought experiment than an actual suggestion, intended for a general discussion of what could be good to include and how to implement it then it might still have a point. Even if a discussion does not result in a feature added to Sauerbraten (or any mod thereof) the discussion related to the hypothetical feature can be stimulating for participants and others.

Regarding how to handle the suggestions coming in that are intended for the official Sauerbraten, I can understand that they can be frustrating to receive, given the lack of time to even read them, but can they be managed without resorting to hostility or sarcasm intending to "frighten off" or "punish" suggestors? I sincerely hope this is possible, especially as the majority of the suggestions are, at the end of the day, an acknowledgment that someone liked Sauerbraten.

I don't know if this helps (I would not be surprised that if you already had tried this but still), one thing that can be done to relieve this situation is to create some web page (perhaps on the wiki) where you simply express the current situation regarding available workload, number of already pending features to implement and where you explain why you don't even have time to comment on the actual feature being suggested. Once the web page is there, you (or others acting on your behalf, as that happens at times) one can use just an URL to that page as a reply to suggestions that you don't have time to even read or consider.

Getting the message "Thanks for your suggestion but please read this URL" might put eager fans off at first, but if they read the web page, understand your situation with the development resources vs the already present workload (including real life duties, adminstrative stuff for the website and forum) and understand that you do ignore their suggestion because you've run out of time (badly!) and not necessarely because of some other reason, I think they should accept your reply (a reply which hopefully means you don't have to let the suggestion take up too much of your time in general).

The author of the network monitoring programs MRTG, RRDtool and Smokeping has a quite nice email template which he use to politely convey the message of "I'm sorry but it is not possible for me to help you" when he get's mails where strangers ask him for help. The mail starts with the phrase "This is a recorded message", as a nice hint that it indeed IS a email template and that it has to be one due to time efficiency reasons.

I really don't want to offend anyone with this post but I think the work you have done and do with Sauerbraten is outstanding but at the same time, I think the new users coming up, even the naive ones with starry suggestions are valuable as well. It would be a shame if these two things would be mutually exclusive.

Again, thanks for a great engine!

reply to this message

#11: Re: ..

by schmutz on 04/22/2008 20:29, refers to #10

what i intended to address was the tone which some people use to \"request\" things in here and in the related projects. part of that was that i wanted to tell people (by this post itself in case they don`t know) that there is a shotage, which i believe just like you will already solve half the problem. i didn`t intend to make that sound aggressive, but just upright, straight and direct. if with that i failed, i´m sorry.


well - although you are right in almost every point (especially that the readers should know how small their chanches are that ideas will be realized) i doubt that your suggestion will solve the problem. setting up a wiki would probably not fit in the devs\' (or better dev\'s) time schedule ;-) the suggestions would not get less than if the readers got told in here, i assume. i think it would just cost even more more human ressources to administrate a wiki than to go on like now and skip some messages ie. just browse through them instad of actually reading them. but thats just my opinion and in yoour words my personal preference, and besides nobody prevents you from building up that wiki independently so that it just filters but does not require any work by the dev\'s.

mausi for example does that, although in a different way: she runs sauerbratenfan.de which answers a lot of questions and stuff especially for noobies in german. many others do so too. the sauerbraten community is in general very friendly and helpful. i din\'t even slightly intend to touch that or hchange that. just wonder why there are these few that i talk about that dont seem to get the big picture.

but maybe let\'s not discuss all that to the bitter end - many of thepeople i talk about know now that the ressources are limited and some might use a different tone. and: the vast majority doesn\'t have to take this this post personally as they know both: about the ressources and how to adress things properly.

reply to this message

   Board Index