In Forsaken, we get this a lot. The community is die-hard on having vehicles and iron-sights in game but we believe it doesn't fit into the world. The point is to take their suggestions, discuss it, and maybe have a little test version with one weapon in the game. If you feel it doesn't mesh well with the entire feel after going this far you have to be willing to put your foot down. You don't know how many times I've gotten some pretty nasty messages from community members because I have had to shoot down their ideas... it really is a fine line between making the game that you guys dream of and the game that they want.
We've also had some issues on keeping our internal alphas from being leaked out. Forsaken has taken the standpoint of gameplay first, polish later. Whilst our popularity isn't outstanding by any means, we do have a few core members that annoy us everyday about the progress of the mod. We had to tell the person, in good faith, to just delete the installer and not run it. It's at a point where it'd just ruin it unless you can play against a decent amount of others. Not to mention that a lot of features are still in early testing/balancing. Forsaken has also run into some issues with team reliability. This is just a factor of any mod as you have to work it around your work, school, personal life, etc. There have been a couple of months where no work on Forsaken was done at all, and then suddenly a large spurt of work was done. I think this is something that a lot of mods suffer from, and it's nothing to be surprised about. If you can be patient and still work on other portions of the mod whilst other people are away attending to work or personal matters then you need to. The problem is when you get people taking a leave of absence and that leaves your mod truly hanging, a showstopper if you will. That's when you start needing to evaluate what to do about the mod at large if this continuously happens and if you should remove that person from the team. There have been times in Forsaken where the team has started to get large, but we've cut a lot of people who weren't contributing enough. Since the SDK has been released there have only been ~4-6 dedicated team members contributing... and I believe this is how we are going to stay. We don't have to worry about team bloat (which I believe Insurgency is having to deal with to a LARGE extent) and we don't have to worry about any communication issues. By leaving our team small we can work even more closely together to develop something that we truly have a shared vision for. I hope that helped someone :) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jason Houston Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 2:48 AM To: hlcoders@list.valvesoftware.com Subject: Re: [hlcoders] Successful mod team tips and warstories? -- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] Sorry, going backwards a little here, but about realism. I tend to stay away from that sort of gameplay, it bores me alot. Recently on the BG2 forums I have been fighting to keep anal realism out of what is generally a rather arcadish game. The topic is iron sights, which is strange considering the guns didn't have sights and the soldiers were trained to just point and shoot at a clump of enemies and hope it hits(excluding skirmishers of course). I guess what I'm getting at here, is has your community ever zerged a crappy suggestion into your mod? has there ever been such overwhelming support for something you don't like but have felt obliged to add? I can see both sides, your players want you to make their game, while we want to make ours. Do tell. -- Draco -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
