Thread: a few thoughts

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  1. #1
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    Default a few thoughts

    Just a few thoughts on a few things. Some are more a response to what other people have suggested others are the same shit I've been saying for a while now.

    Tutorial - as much as the more competent of us dislike such things, it must be added. I have single handedly given at least 500 different players walkthroughs on various subjects of the game throughout my years of playing. I'm not even the most helpful person so think about what the more helpful people in this game have done to ease newbies in? It shouldn't be a players responsibility to try to keep people in game, but that's exactly what it has been for years now.

    Player slots - Yea, Pluto was fun back in the day sure, when hundreds of people played this and you didn't NEED to do everything yourself. What happens nowadays if you don't have a resser/cster/imper? You can sometimes end up waiting for hours, and that was true even when server pop was hovering around 10-13% steady. 4 slots is perfectly fine, if anything for the time being the Imp skill should be removed and you should be able to go to a terminal to slap implants in. Game is just too empty right now for that shit.

    GM/dev team involvement - You guys need to start fucking talking to us. The majority of us are adults and can take any information you give us without flipping out and throwing a temper tantrum. What will cause a grown man to throw a temper tantrum, however, is someone attempting to belittle him by claiming he wouldn't understand the situation if you tried to reason it out.

    GM/dev team involvement 2 - This goes to the "it shouldn't be left to the players to keep people in game" bit. You guys need to do some fucking events. Yes I understand in the past there have been AWFUL GM's in place(or still there, Ivory I'm looking at you) Who have clearly shown favoritism and helped/given items etc. That's a no no by all means, however doing a GM run event where the prize is just some trophies or some such... Nothing game breaking in the least. How could a few roach trophies or a cave spider carcass break the games economy? It can't. You guys need to get off your asses and take part in the community if you want it to continue on. Otherwise you can continue letting it slowly die. I attempted to contact a few diff NST members and threw many idea's and suggestions out even willing to volunteer however much of my own time would be needed to help with it but as always with the NST no proper response was given besides a "Yes we encourage events".


    GM/dev team involvement 3 - There are a few players who have played for a while who for some reason enjoy helping the community and enjoy forming events etc. If the main bulk of the NST is unable to get involved with the community, why not 'promote' so to speak, a few people? Give someone maybe a status below GM or some such? Perhaps just a standard player but with 9999999resist armor and a weapon that can insta kill? IDK what kind of systems you can in place but the point is to make someone kind of like an assistant GM just to run events/quests for players. Give them a load of trophies, carcasses or other such non game breaking items that people like, and simply let them run events/quests. I understand part of this game is the whole pvp everywhere etc etc etc and although I'm fond of that, most of the gaming community nowadays can't help but break down sobbing if someone comes in and wrecks their parade. You can argue all sorts of ways about this but at the end of the day why is it fair that 3 bored people are allowed to act ina griefing way that can drive off 10+ newcomers to the game? Clearly those griefing people don't actually care about the state of the game as they are attempting to drive people off rather to cultivate a new crop to play with later.




    Neocron is fairly sandboxy, which is nice, but the problem with sandboxes is once the playerbase begins to dry up there's simply less and less to do. If you want any chance at retaining the few, ridiculously loyal, players you have left, you need to step up your game. Talk to us, tell us what you're actually doing, and if you're not working on the game fuckin share that too. Stop trying to treat this like some top secret project, you guys are nowhere near skilled enough to be taking this 'holier than thou' stance on this. Also, for the love of god stay in touch with the actual game. When the population is fuckin nill and not even the GM's or devs ever poke in, it gives it a very shitty ghost town vibe. Why would you stick around in a new game if the population is so low and the staff gives off a "I don't give a shit" aura?



    Add cash shop, let people spend $5-10 to wear a tank pa skin on your monk pa. I'll buy it. Other people will buy it. You'll get the much needed funds to improve this game. That not an option? Open a donations page on paypal or some shit. Donate $5 or w/e with the name of your character, have a GM contact said character and give them a gift for being so kind. That's legal, people who host rust, dayz and other games like that servers do that shit and it seems to be completely legal.



    There are so many things you guys could do to help improve the game in the immediate. I don't know if you guys just don't ever sit and think about it or you're lazy or low self esteem so you think your idea couldn't work.... IDK, what I do know though is you guys could do a lot more with very little effort.

  2. #2

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    No, they never give up their spare time to think of the future of Neocron, sigh.

    They're volunteers and until you get a clue about game development, I'd refrain from calling them lazy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nikabolokov View Post
    No, they never give up their spare time to think of the future of Neocron, sigh.

    They're volunteers and until you get a clue about game development, I'd refrain from calling them lazy.
    Volunteers, yes, see I've volunteered for things before when I was younger too. I volunteered at a no kill shelter for stray dogs. I volunteered at a ranch for abused horses. I've also volunteered at a convalescent home. I was not paid for any of these, I did the volunteering at the shelter and ranch because I love animals and I did the volunteer work at the nursing home because my grandma was staying there at the time and I kind of got guilted into the thing...


    The point I'm trying to make with this is throughout the three times I volunteered my time for no benefit to myself, I worked hard. I didn't just 'volunteer' sit on my ass and claim I was doing things, or say that I was too busy to do it. If you do not have the time to volunteer, don't fucking volunteer. It's an insult.



    Also pretty much all of the suggestions I have ever given regarding NC wouldn't require any change to the code or any additional coding. It would just require that the "volunteers" volunteer a little bit of time to do something.

  4. #4

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    Lazy ? yeah those guys are really lazy .........

    you might want to check out this page :
    (only NST-patches are listed)

    http://www.neocron-game.com/patch-notes

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    I had another wall of text typed out but going through it I could see I was a tad too harsh against some people, so let's just shorten that up a bit.

    Nice patch notes page, if it wasn't for the fact that those are for 3 years worth of patches I might reconsider my position. But hey, 3 years for the same kind of patch that Rust puts out in a week, mind you Rust patches are done by 4 people total. Sure it might be their job so they can put more time into it, but my point stands, three years for that isn't impressive nor does it in any way change my opinion of most of the NST being lazy cunts, as I said there's 2-3 of them that I think legitimately care about this game and aren't in it just for some kind of shitty power trip/nostalgia.

    Now back to my lazy comment. I understand they're volunteers, but as I've said many times before you can't claim you're a volunteer, then do fuck all in terms of work, then continue to claim you're volunteering. Volunteering means you're actually doing work without pay. Volunteering DOES NOT mean that you claim to work without pay but you're not really working. You might wonder why I'm upset even though someone is keeping the game alive? It's because this is shit, there were 4 different groups that I knew personally(how many people wanted it that I didn't know?) who wanted to purchase the rights to Neocron and they would have done a hell of a better job at patching and modernizing this game. Instead it got given into the very uncapable hands of the NST who continue to claim they're working hard when in reality it's most likely under an hour a week that they actually put in. Even when amazing idea's are given to them by different members of the community they completely ignore it, that's just fucking insulting.

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    At the end of the day it doesn't really matter though, sadly this game is just going through a long drawn out death.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    It's because this is shit, there were 4 different groups that I knew personally(how many people wanted it that I didn't know?) who wanted to purchase the rights to Neocron and they would have done a hell of a better job at patching and modernizing this game.
    Source or GTFO.


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    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Tutorial - as much as the more competent of us dislike such things, it must be added.
    The new player experience has never been great and as of today it is shocking compared to modern standards. We know this is a significant problem area and it is something we want to address when we have the resources to do it. At the moment our only frequently available programming resource is Zoltan, his current focus is fixing all the underlying issues which make attempting to address balance a ridiculous task.
    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    I have single handedly given at least 500 different players walkthroughs on various subjects of the game throughout my years of playing. I'm not even the most helpful person so think about what the more helpful people in this game have done to ease newbies in?
    We're incredibly grateful to those who spend their time helping others in the community. We always welcome any support that folks can give to the continuation of Neocron.
    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    It shouldn't be a players responsibility to try to keep people in game, but that's exactly what it has been for years now.
    There's no way for me to respond to this, without getting more flack for it. So i'll just say I agree that to a certain extent the game should have the features to cater for this itself, unfortunately as above it is lacking in those areas and we know we need to improve there. For now we have to regrettably continue to rely on the good graces of the community to be supportive in that area, those who are just as passionate about Neocron's continued survival as we are.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Player slots - Yea, Pluto was fun back in the day sure, when hundreds of people played this and you didn't NEED to do everything yourself. What happens nowadays if you don't have a resser/cster/imper? You can sometimes end up waiting for hours, and that was true even when server pop was hovering around 10-13% steady. 4 slots is perfectly fine, if anything for the time being the Imp skill should be removed and you should be able to go to a terminal to slap implants in. Game is just too empty right now for that shit.
    I'm not sure what you're getting at about the number of character slots? As for lower pops making it difficult to get stuff done, we know as it's always been the case, we're working on things we hope will address the low population.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    GM/dev team involvement - You guys need to start fucking talking to us. The majority of us are adults and can take any information you give us without flipping out and throwing a temper tantrum. What will cause a grown man to throw a temper tantrum, however, is someone attempting to belittle him by claiming he wouldn't understand the situation if you tried to reason it out.
    I'm not sure of the exact situation you're referring to when you mention belittling? Can you elaborate? Perhaps I can then shed some light on that particular situation. Most of the stuff we don't talk about publicly is the stuff we can't, as we have no right to do so. Things like the ownership of the IP are simply none of our business until they directly affect us and we could only start talking then as we'd actually know the details - as of now, we don't know any further details than "we don't own the IP, Kirk does".

    As for talking, yeah, our communication peaks and troughs and can be pretty terrible sometimes. We've admitted that several times in the last three years - we have tried to improve that, in recent months it's sucked due to my own terrible availability. Thankfully that is improving, so communication will hopefully improve again too. I've had the time to write this lengthy response for example. Sometimes though it's because there is literally nothing to report.

    Falchion very recently put together a great summary of the problems we had at the beginning of 2015. Between January and April there was literally no development carried out toward Neocron, as we feared the worst - it hurt like hell, on more than one occasion we were writing goodbyes and hovering over the big off switch. We're in a better place as a team now and have had some positive grumblings from the powers that be, the worst has left our radars for now and will hopefully stay off them for some time.

    Since late April when development resumed, there have been 13 different patch days for Vedeena. Though the patch notes are often short for these releases, the work that has gone into those few lines of notes is not insubstantial. Zoltan has put a lot of hours into those patches, he frequently spends at least 6 hours of his evening digging through and re-implementing code. In the past he has often put in a lot more than that, too.

    A lot of his time also goes into creating and adjusting new tools so other folks on the team can do their jobs. Zoltan is an absolute work horse, I will never stand by and let anyone call him lazy or attempt to devalue the amount of dedication his has to this project.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    GM/dev team involvement 2 - This goes to the "it shouldn't be left to the players to keep people in game" bit. You guys need to do some fucking events.
    Yes, we do. There are many banked ideas for the continuation of the storyline, too. We can hopefully get some of the folks who used to take care of that back in action in the not too distant future.

    Regarding your comment about a member of our team that is not worth quoting. BlackIvory is an absolute asset to our small team. She has been with Neocron for about 15 years and has had to put up with some utterly awful treatment over those years for simply being the voice at the end of the support mailbox. Generally most of the issues she gets abuse for have nothing to do with her, she is simply the rock that takes all that crap and still provides help to the players we have. Without BlackIvory, we simply would not have email support. I don't know anyone who would take 15 years of abuse and STILL login like clockwork every day for more, simply for the love of the game.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    ...doing a GM run event where the prize is just some trophies or some such... Nothing game breaking in the least. How could a few roach trophies or a cave spider carcass break the games economy? It can't.
    Correct. Hopefully we can get back to doing that in the future. It's an odd balance to try and strike, spend the few hours you have working on implementing a new mission or fixing bugs or one of the other items on the never ending list of ten minute jobs - or spend them organising and running an event. I'd love to see more of both sides of that balance to be honest. We need more people with more time to achieve both though.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    I attempted to contact a few diff NST members and threw many idea's and suggestions out even willing to volunteer however much of my own time would be needed to help with it but as always with the NST no proper response was given besides a "Yes we encourage events".
    Can you send some of those my way, please? Yes, we do encourage runner events. Yes, we will provide prizes and assistance and policing for those events. The lighter touch we need to provide however, the more time we can do other things too. We do need to do more things on both sides of that balance though. We always feel like we need to.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    GM/dev team involvement 3 - There are a few players who have played for a while who for some reason enjoy helping the community and enjoy forming events etc. If the main bulk of the NST is unable to get involved with the community, why not 'promote' so to speak, a few people? Give someone maybe a status below GM or some such? Perhaps just a standard player but with 9999999resist armor and a weapon that can insta kill? IDK what kind of systems you can in place but the point is to make someone kind of like an assistant GM just to run events/quests for players. Give them a load of trophies, carcasses or other such non game breaking items that people like, and simply let them run events/quests.
    If we have people out there that have the time and self driven attitude to do this stuff, i'd love to see the event team reinforced with people like this.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    I understand part of this game is the whole pvp everywhere etc etc etc and although I'm fond of that, most of the gaming community nowadays can't help but break down sobbing if someone comes in and wrecks their parade. You can argue all sorts of ways about this but at the end of the day why is it fair that 3 bored people are allowed to act ina griefing way that can drive off 10+ newcomers to the game? Clearly those griefing people don't actually care about the state of the game as they are attempting to drive people off rather to cultivate a new crop to play with later.
    I don't really know what point you're trying to make here. However no it is not fair that griefing players can ruin things for others. This is often an issue in official events where we have to have 4-5 invisible GMs present (who then cant spend that time doing other things) just to keep the trouble makers from spoiling the fun for those who want the event to unfold as intended.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Neocron is fairly sandboxy, which is nice, but the problem with sandboxes is once the playerbase begins to dry up there's simply less and less to do. If you want any chance at retaining the few, ridiculously loyal, players you have left, you need to step up your game.
    We're hoping that with the next patch we will fix many frustrations that will allow player numbers to swell again.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Talk to us, tell us what you're actually doing, and if you're not working on the game fuckin share that too.
    Zoltan has been pretty open with his progress and what he is working on since development re-started in April/May. What else can we do to improve that sort of communication? We've tried development updates, blogs and diaries in the past but they largely seem to go ignored after taking quite some time to write, proof read and translate to/from German.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Stop trying to treat this like some top secret project, you guys are nowhere near skilled enough to be taking this 'holier than thou' stance on this.
    We have to keep some things under-wraps. At the end of the day we're working on someone elses IP. We try to be as open as possible, I've touched on this a bit above but can go into more detail if needed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Also, for the love of god stay in touch with the actual game. When the population is fuckin nill and not even the GM's or devs ever poke in, it gives it a very shitty ghost town vibe. Why would you stick around in a new game if the population is so low and the staff gives off a "I don't give a shit" aura?
    I'd hope those of us who have the time to be around often (I certainly do not count myself here) do not give off those vibes. It really sucks if we do though. You're right though, hopefully what Zoltan has been working on for a while will improve the population situation.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Add cash shop, let people spend $5-10 to wear a tank pa skin on your monk pa. I'll buy it. Other people will buy it. You'll get the much needed funds to improve this game. That not an option? Open a donations page on paypal or some shit. Donate $5 or w/e with the name of your character, have a GM contact said character and give them a gift for being so kind. That's legal, people who host rust, dayz and other games like that servers do that shit and it seems to be completely legal.
    We don't often post links to the donate page (data is from 2014 when we last asked for external donations) as members of the team past and present very kindly put forward cash to keep the servers online. It's still a grey area unfortunately. As for those other games, I'm afraid I don't know what model they operate on but from other game hosting i am familiar with, generally there is a specific TOS or there is something in the EULA which permits such activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    There are so many things you guys could do to help improve the game in the immediate. I don't know if you guys just don't ever sit and think about it or you're lazy or low self esteem so you think your idea couldn't work.... IDK, what I do know though is you guys could do a lot more with very little effort.
    What sort of things do you have in mind? Things are generally a bit easier to do these days but it's often more effort than you may assume to alter many facets of Neocron. We're open to ideas though. Generally is all comes down to time. We have a single programmer who can only do so much in the time he has available. We need to update the team page for sure though, as we're a much smaller group than indicated on there right now.

    Quote Originally Posted by Nikabolokov View Post
    No, they never give up their spare time to think of the future of Neocron, sigh.

    They're volunteers and until you get a clue about game development, I'd refrain from calling them lazy.
    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Volunteers, yes, see I've volunteered for things before when I was younger too. I volunteered at a no kill shelter for stray dogs. I volunteered at a ranch for abused horses. I've also volunteered at a convalescent home. I was not paid for any of these, I did the volunteering at the shelter and ranch because I love animals and I did the volunteer work at the nursing home because my grandma was staying there at the time and I kind of got guilted into the thing...


    The point I'm trying to make with this is throughout the three times I volunteered my time for no benefit to myself, I worked hard. I didn't just 'volunteer' sit on my ass and claim I was doing things, or say that I was too busy to do it. If you do not have the time to volunteer, don't fucking volunteer. It's an insult.
    Not everyone on the NST can give a lot of time, some can only spare an hour or two a week (!) but they continue to do so because they care about the game. It would be great if they could give more but at least they're able to give something. Without the few hours some of those folks can give, we'd be even further back toward where we've come from. To be brutally honest, if we had folks who could give large amounts of time, we may not need some of the folks who can't. However as it stands we have what we have and we're grateful for that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Also pretty much all of the suggestions I have ever given regarding NC wouldn't require any change to the code or any additional coding. It would just require that the "volunteers" volunteer a little bit of time to do something.
    Can you provide some examples? Generally when we get new people on the team they're full of enthusiasm and eager to get going, until they realise just how long it can sadly take to do the simplest of tasks. I am not attempting to downplay your comment but it would be good to understand from both angles I think.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    I had another wall of text typed out but going through it I could see I was a tad too harsh against some people, so let's just shorten that up a bit.

    Nice patch notes page, if it wasn't for the fact that those are for 3 years worth of patches I might reconsider my position. But hey, 3 years for the same kind of patch that Rust puts out in a week, mind you Rust patches are done by 4 people total. Sure it might be their job so they can put more time into it, but my point stands, three years for that isn't impressive nor does it in any way change my opinion of most of the NST being lazy cunts, as I said there's 2-3 of them that I think legitimately care about this game and aren't in it just for some kind of shitty power trip/nostalgia.
    There's no need to be quite so offensive in your critique, I appreciate you're frustrated because you care but reading things like that will make anyone wonder why they bother to given up any of their time at all. I can't really come up with anything to respond to your Rust comment. Hopefully the next patch will work a way to addressing your frustration a bit.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    Now back to my lazy comment. I understand they're volunteers, but as I've said many times before you can't claim you're a volunteer, then do fuck all in terms of work, then continue to claim you're volunteering. Volunteering means you're actually doing work without pay. Volunteering DOES NOT mean that you claim to work without pay but you're not really working.
    Generally it's only ever the team that we refer to as a whole and that team fluctuates in size and availability. At the moment we're probably the smallest we've been since we first took over in 2012. Those who can work, are working toward a better Neocron. There's just not a huge number who can at the moment.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    You might wonder why I'm upset even though someone is keeping the game alive? It's because this is shit, there were 4 different groups that I knew personally(how many people wanted it that I didn't know?) who wanted to purchase the rights to Neocron and they would have done a hell of a better job at patching and modernizing this game. Instead it got given into the very uncapable hands of the NST who continue to claim they're working hard when in reality it's most likely under an hour a week that they actually put in. Even when amazing idea's are given to them by different members of the community they completely ignore it, that's just fucking insulting.
    I am lost in your definition of insult since you've spent so many words insulting people who do genuinely care.

    Who owns the Neocron IP is not our (the NST's) decision. If the owner did not wish to sell, that is their decision and their concern. We're simply privileged we're able to keep the game alive and online, mainly at our expense, for fans of the game to at least know it is here for them to enjoy in at least some form. A form that those on the team who can, do put a lot of effort in to improve.
    Last edited by Trivaldi; 04-08-15 at 03:13.
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    Let's imagine that there are 4-5 people in an office.
    They talk all the time, they can walk over to each others desks, they have meetings and they are there every day for 7+ hours work time. They have deadlines and know where everyone is regarding work, etc, etc. If a problem arises they can let others know in a matter of moments.

    Now let's take those 4-5 people and move half of them to two other countries, with different native languages and time zones.
    Now separate everyone so that they live in different cities, or even the bum-fuck middle of nowhere.
    Then get them to work during their out of work hours, where, unlike at work, there is more than one task at hand - children, spouses/partners, pets, phoning the parents/bank/insurance company/whatever, making food, etc.
    Then imagine that they have different work hours, different commute durations.
    Add in the different socialising routines - I play petanque for example, this basically means I am not around on a Tuesday evening.
    Add in secondary jobs - I work a few extra hours at the local pub, this means I am not around for most of Wednesday and Saturday evening.
    Maybe someone moves house, not something that might not affect their work life at all, but kill any free time.

    So you sit down and you have a few hours to work.
    Except because of one or more of the things above, you to need to wait for someone else to finish something before you can start. Can you do something else? Maybe.
    Volunteering in a charity shop/sports club/whatever for a few hours on a weekend with the same people is quite different from the same number of hours of your free time.

    Something that in an office environment might take half a morning can drag for months. Especially if the person you are waiting on has higher priority tasks to do. Everything is ready to go, but as you are not a team of 50, it simply isn't going to happen.
    Case in point: The weapon balancing. I can whip up a preliminary set of changes in a couple of hours, and have been able to do so for a long time. Then we discover just how mangled the original code really is. Ham-fisted band-aid after ham-fisted band-aid after inane hardcoding of mechanics that the underlying system could already handle.

    Then imagine that all you have done might be for nothing, all the behind the scenes work, all the theorising, idea generation, everything, could be ditched tomorrow without any chance of influence on your part. You are powerless and it could end in a moment or maybe in a month. Uncertainty kills the motivation. And even if it doesn't kill yours, it might kill someone else's, and that person might be the person you were waiting for in the first place.
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    Before I respond let me just say that I did say some things initially without actually looking around. You guys have more recently given a lot more information about what you're doing, thank you for that and I apologize for the attack without checking beforehand. Also this is going to be messier than my usual walls, blame the whiskey, I'll try to get all the relevant thoughts out there.


    Although new player experience may be better than ever, it's still horrid. I'm sorry but it's the truth.


    Character slots bit was in regards to seeing a few people playing saying that they should swap from 4 to 2 or 1. It wasn't a comment towards you guys but rather those who felt people should be even more limited on what they can do in a dying environment.


    By belittling I mean, and I only saw this happen twice, when a GM logged on to neocron(Zoltan and Bifrost) and someone asked about the work being done to NC the response was more or less along the lines of "you wouldn't understand anyways".


    Yes, I know Ivory has been with Neocron for a long time, I also recall many a scandalous events around her, which is why I was honestly shocked to receive a mail in response to a ticket I put in a bit back. I know personally of 4 different times reports and screenshots of people doing some dubious shit were simply abrakadabra'd and the people in question never received so much as a slap on the wrist. Now maybe I'm wrong, it might not be ivory who goes through things like that, but considering it was always ivory doing the responding it felt like it was her doing. Apologies if it was another GM or some such who done it.



    It was always Zoltan whom I'd bug about things regarding NC and he was the most active in IRC. I also offered on several occasions to try to get w/e needed to be done for me to become a GM on a trial basis to host events, that one never got a response and I sent him PM's about it 3 different times. Now perhaps my temper in this case would put you off but I can assure you was quite civil before as I loved neocron and spent quite some times playing as the only person on the server before you guys resurrected it.


    As I said more recently yes there's been a lot more openness about what you guys are doing. I didn't dig around much before so again, I apologize for jumping the gun on that.


    Finally most of my other criticism's can be explained simply by the fact that for some, not all, but some of the NST it seems as though they do this for the 'popularity' rather than because they care to do it. Kind of like that weird substitute teacher that wanted the kids to think she/he was cool. If you're wondering who just check out the twitter pages and look through the tweets, they'll stick out.



    To Bragi, all I can respond to your statement is that with proper organization, living in other countries/timezones etc wouldn't really be an issue. The language barrier might be a bit of an annoyance... idk... No common tongue?

    Then imagine that all you have done might be for nothing, all the behind the scenes work, all the theorising, idea generation, everything, could be ditched tomorrow without any chance of influence on your part. You are powerless and it could end in a moment or maybe in a month. Uncertainty kills the motivation. And even if it doesn't kill yours, it might kill someone else's, and that person might be the person you were waiting for in the first place.
    That's essentially life though, you could get struck by lightning or a stray gunshot or a car or any other thousands of things. You go through with what you go through not because you want to reach a goal, there is no goal in life man. You do it for the journey and if you can't enjoy the journey you're on you need to find a new journey that you can enjoy.





    Once again back to Trivaldi, I can see you care, otherwise you wouldn't have given a shit to even read past the first sentence, so I hope you don't feel insulted. You're fine by me, it's a few of your fellow volunteers who chafe my ass wrong.

  11. #11
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    I'll continue playing NC(off and on of course) until the day it dies, it just upsets me that while it's dying there's a big group of people who claim to care and only a few among them who actually care.

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    Forgot to slip this in initially and now I don't know where to put it so it can go here I guess.


    As for making neocron more attractive immediately without needing to code new shit in etc. This connects to my comment on events/bringing people into the NST for the sole purpose of running events. Though to be completely honest now that the population is a rousing 5-30 people on average.... I don't think that would do anything to help anymore.

  13. #13

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    Forgive me, but since Trivaldi already posted a detailed answer I'm only going to respond to two things.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aerocytes View Post
    This connects to my comment on events/bringing people into the NST for the sole purpose of running events. .
    We have actually tried to do this multiple times in the past.
    New people were invited into the team and events were planned and pushed to the server.
    After some weeks, those people realised that it's not just about spawning some mobs and shouting in the chatchannels but that a lot of work, organisation, and time is involved.
    Guess what happened ? I've never seen them again.

    e.g.:
    this is where a new event team started their first (and only) event-line.
    http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...pcoming-events

    We are always looking for dedicated players who would like to join the (event and content) team!

    I attempted to contact a few diff NST members and threw many idea's and suggestions out even willing to volunteer however much of my own time would be needed to help with it but as always with the NST no proper response was given besides a "Yes we encourage events".
    Yes, we encourage events!
    And also yes, those events actually happen/ have happened in the past.

    Only two weeks ago, bmurph101 organised a pvp-tournament.
    http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...nament-Results!
    When he asked for some assistance and advertisement, we announced the event ingame via serverwide admin-channel (before and during the event) and also added some decorations/strippers to the eventlocation. (that's all he asked for and what was needed, since the location had already been setup by a runner).

    At the end of last year, Sgt. Gonzo organised a great scavenger hunt.
    http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...-neocron-event
    He sent me an email and asked for assistance and we started discussing about what would be possible.

    In the end, we setup several event location in the wastelands, scripted special NPCs for the scavenger hunt and also info-npcs, added an advertisement to the official launcher-page and also flooded the ingame adminchannel.

    As you can see, runner organised and team supported events do happen and will hopefully happen in the future too.

    Please feel free to contact me anytime via email 'baldur at neocron-game.com' if you are planning an event and I will see what we can do to help and support.
    Baldur
    Management - Content Development
    Neocron Support Team
    N E O C R O N - G A M E . C O M

    »Ut sementem feceris, ita metes«

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    The main point about events and why I believe a proper GM should be doing it is because there is a huge difference in the message sent to the community as a whole when a player sets up an event in comparison to when the people managing the game set up an event. A GM created event does a lot more to raise morale than a player created event, to be honest.


    If population picks up after the patch you guys are cooking up is released I will definitely be pestering you, Mr Baldur, about an event I've wanted to set up for a while now.

  15. #15

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    NST is OP as far as I'm concerned. I can actually say that the first time I ever booted up in the game, Baldur found me lost in the middle of outzone and personally took over an hour showing me the ropes of the game. He took me to the Wastes, Pepper Park, Plaza and Viarossa sectors, even got me hooked up with a guy who crafted me a bunch of dumpster swords so I could level in the sewers.

    I need help organizing my Hunger Games event. Some kind of announcement to get it out there. I also need a boatload of starter rifles, pistols, melee weapons, and heavy weapons. I don't know if there are starter/noob psi abilities.

    PSS. Obviously the most immediate thing you guys need to do is implement a 2 handed WoC Lightsaber

    Edit: Also, posting videos/content that your community makes on your Twitter/Facebook to show that people still actively play is always a plus.

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