constructive critique on the development process

[Trivaldi]

Righty, thanks for your patience. Busier weekend than anticipated but I didn't want the community to think something like this was being ignored.

Hello

I'm thankful for the Team's Job and I do my best to contribute.

Thanks!

I would like to bring some constructive critique concerning the development process forward however.

- We can’t tell what you work on.
- We can't tell if you make any progress.
- This is frustrating.

You're spot on with this observation, particularly the frustration. In the past we've tried a few things to make things more transparent. Generally we see the best way of doing this is with interaction, rather than huge posts, in and around the community and via things like Twitter. Most of our team have their own Neocron focused Twitter account which they're free to use as a platform for talking about some of the details of what they're working on.

This tends to happen in bursts though which isn't great as it's all dependent on when our limited resources have time to work on Neocron. For a lot of us that has been very limited up until the last few weeks. I'd like to think with things like input from Xortag in the art thread and my own posts across the last few weeks we're not quite the blank wall we've been in 2016 so far.

I suggest A Development Roadmap with fixed update dates (every 3 or every 4 months) so when we look at the website at these particular dates we can get some insight on what’s going on.

We've tried this in the past. Generally these take a lot of effort to organise, write, rewrite and publish. In the past we've released these to the community with almost silence in response. While they serve as a good vehicle to dump an update out of the team, the effort involved in creating them outweighs the impact.

With much smaller updates and interactions we tend to get more engagement with much less effort. Any effort saved can be put to use doing something else. Important where resource is thin on the ground.

DANGEROUS: THIS PART IS A RANT!

Especially considering Implant and Armor changes: Please start using some Kind of Visualisation for Changes and a Change Log: An Excel Sheet with multiple Tables, SQL Dumps, an Arab riding a Donkey giving out Stone tables, i don't give a shit, just stop with this:

- Change every Implant in the Game
- Ask people to test the changes
- Ignore Requests for a comprehensive collection of the fucking Data

YOU CAN FEEL SAFE AGAIN THE RANT IS OVER

Bare in mind there's a light theme and a dark theme on the forum - the color tag is evil

You're looking for a before and after comparison of every change made to the game? Generally we provide a gauge onto the changes made, the valuable results come from knowing how broken your setup now is or any of the other effects to gameplay. Pushing out a pile of numbers seems like it would only produce results like "that looks to high" with no basis on these things being trialed.

Can you go into more detail of what data you what, why you'd want it and how that would help you produce meaningful test results.

For example:

Quarterly Development Update

Titan

- No major Bugs
- Infrastructure Update on the XX.XX.XXXX

Veedena

Weapon Damage Balancing
Zoltan

- Weapon Balancing (90%)
o Fix “Stellschrauben” (100%)
o Fix mayhem created by fixing “Stellschrauben” (100%)
o Weapon A, B, C need another look at (50%)
- Low TL Weapon normalizing (0%)
o Need to set a project goal (suggestion Thread in the Forums is here: [link]) (0%)
o Need to figure out the Calculations (5%)
o

Implant / Armour revamp
Bragi

Implant

A Full list of Implants as they currently are on Veedena and a Change History you can find here:
[Link to Forum]

- Coma Values are removed (100%)
- Hacking INT implants implemented (100%)
- Barter INT Implants implemented (100%)
- Gloves for more than Tradeskills? Need to set a project goal (suggestion Thread in the Forums is here: [link]) (0%)
- More Bones? Need to set a project goal (suggestion Thread in the Forums is here: [link]) (0%)
- etc.

Armor

A Full list of Armor as they currently are on Veedena and a Change History you can find here:
[Link to Forum]

- Coma Values are removed (100%)
- Pistol Tank PA’s implemented (50%)
- H-C PE PA’s implemented (50%)
- Etc.


New objects and textures

- CityCom (50%)
- Gogo Guardian (50%)
- Some Alphas not working in the Wasteland (80%)

Don’t work with ETA’s but give use a percentage Value of how you see yourself with the
Work.

Or don't. Just write what you're working on and what you can complete. Just some kind of regular Update (which we can expect) would be much appreciated!

This looks like a reasonable format to collect information while avoiding the long drawn out process of creating a text based update. I'll have a think on this and discuss with some of our key team members to see what the feasibility of doing this is.

Additional Question

What is the General purpose of Veedena?

An environment to create a completely fixed out Neocron 2, with all the implant and armor changes, the new textures, the weapon balancing all ready for one big patch?

Or an Environment for small Iterations to be made which hit Titan regularly (there would be a feeling of progress and you can implement and fix certain themes one at a time. (best example: Body Zone removal and the necessary adjustment of armor resist values across the board).

Vedeena is a test staging ground prior to Titan.

As a whistle stop tour to how we do things: We test our changes on a server we can build on the fly which isn't something we can achieve with public servers right now. To ensure all of our incremental and more agile changes will play nice on Titan, we build a traditional patch and release it to Vedeena to make sure it doesn't melt. At this point we ask the community to test specific things. Once we believe there's nothing world ending in the patch (we tweak it a few times) we release it to Titan.

Unfortunately we're at a bit of a stale mate at the moment, which is why there's not been a Titan patch in a very long time. There have been a number of fundamental changes to the inner workings of the game, these changes must all be delivered together. Some of these changes have roadblocks (the alpha problem causing trees to stop being transparent is a tool-chain issue) or certain elements of interdependencies still need to be finalised (PSI weapons and drones have their own cryptic Ouija, we're standardising where possible and building the specific stuff into a more manageable set of additional components) before we can release "the whole package".

As balance relies on a lot of these new fundamental changes, we cant implement better systems for guns, implants and armour until we finish the foundation work. Things are moving again though after an extended period of low motivation across the entire team. Hopefully with increasing levels of interaction with the community, we can stoke the fires of motivation and get the last pieces of the puzzle put into the place. This will open the gates for all the changes on Vedeena to come to Titan as a big bang patch, we can then rebase Vedeena as a clone of Titan (we do this every few patches) and start making smaller, incremental patches again based on our new foundation.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions, I'm sure it doesn't answer all of them.

[Odimara Orca]

Hello Trivaldi

Thank you very much for the comprehensive answer.

I'm very happy that you are all still alive and kicking (or crawling through the code... probably depends on position, eh? ;-))

You're spot on with this observation, particularly the frustration. In the past we've tried a few things to make things more transparent. Generally we see the best way of doing this is with interaction, rather than huge posts, in and around the community and via things like Twitter. Most of our team have their own Neocron focused Twitter account which they're free to use as a platform for talking about some of the details of what they're working on.

This tends to happen in bursts though which isn't great as it's all dependent on when our limited resources have time to work on Neocron. For a lot of us that has been very limited up until the last few weeks. I'd like to think with things like input from Xortag in the art thread and my own posts across the last few weeks we're not quite the blank wall we've been in 2016 so far.

I think this type of interaction is great to get the community involved and to get feedback on specific issues.

As an orientation of where the project is going, the information is just spread to far across the different channels.

We've tried this in the past. Generally these take a lot of effort to organise, write, rewrite and publish. In the past we've released these to the community with almost silence in response. While they serve as a good vehicle to dump an update out of the team, the effort involved in creating them outweighs the impact.

With much smaller updates and interactions we tend to get more engagement with much less effort. Any effort saved can be put to use doing something else. Important where resource is thin on the ground.

It does not have to be in such detail.

I really liked the way Zoltan managed it in his updates about weapon damage.

He put up a list of the stuff to do and whenever he got one thing done, he stroke it through.

With a quick note of the date when the work was completed, there’d be an easy to maintain, easy to follow list of things you guys work on.

This would require you to define some specific goals for each project though.

In this regard Bragi has the worst card. Overhauling everything is just a mammoth work with many specific tasks to accomplish.

This looks like a reasonable format to collect information while avoiding the long drawn out process of creating a text based update. I'll have a think on this and discuss with some of our key team members to see what the feasibility of doing this is.

Keep it a short keyword list on the forums, stroken through and noted with the completion Date when you finished it.

The previous announcements and Blogposts are very comprehensive and filled with information indeed.

They were also a pleasure to read, these were very well done.

But you can make us happy with way less 

Bare in mind there's a light theme and a dark theme on the forum - the color tag is evil

You're looking for a before and after comparison of every change made to the game? Generally we provide a gauge onto the changes made, the valuable results come from knowing how broken your setup now is or any of the other effects to gameplay. Pushing out a pile of numbers seems like it would only produce results like "that looks to high" with no basis on these things being trialed.

Can you go into more detail of what data you what, why you'd want it and how that would help you produce meaningful test results.

This opens Pandoras Box for me, so bear with me through the next few paragraphs.

The first part:

If we talk about the Implant and Armor revamp there is a very specific need for a tracked collection of the changes.

There were a few defined Project Goals as I understood them:

Implant

- No more coma values
- No more useless Implants
- No more secondary choice implants
- Possibilities for different Setups (Trader Implants (HCK, BRT, IMP, RES), Pistol Tanks, Heavy Combat PE’s, etc.)

Gauging the current setups doesn't work in this case.

As I understand it Bragi is in the process of innovating and opening up new playstiles.

Just telling you how gutted the current cookiecutter setups are won’t work.

Else the Patch hits Titan and 2 Weeks later people have figured out some OP shit which was not intended at all.

To find these cookiecutter setups and play with Ideas I need the list of the values.

I don’t go ingame and pop implants in my Head for 20 hours to get all the variations down.

I do it in 20 Minutes in Excel and then I test it ingame!

And seriously you guys must have some tracking tool yourselves.
If you don’t then who the hell still has an overview?
Especially if you need to start comparing cross class armor depending on different Requirements? (Say STR: Req Armor with PSI: Req Armor?).

Armor

- No more useless PA’s
- Armor not depending on body zone anymore.
- No more secondary choice PA’s
- Possibilities for different Setups (Droner PA, Strength PE PA, etc)

First let me get this out of the way: Armor not depending on body zone anymore.

What the hell happened to this? The current Armor values on Veedena would be insanely high if this ever came to the game!

So either this was trashed somewhere along the way without telling anybody or everybody will have full body 300 energy resist in the future.

With the rest it’s the same as above. If I want an overview over the new playstiles I’ll do it first on paper and then ingame.

For this I need the values.

And if Bragi changes values because of feedback or because he implements something new:

I also need to know what changed for the same reason!

Vedeena is a test staging ground prior to Titan.

As a whistle stop tour to how we do things: We test our changes on a server we can build on the fly which isn't something we can achieve with public servers right now. To ensure all of our incremental and more agile changes will play nice on Titan, we build a traditional patch and release it to Vedeena to make sure it doesn't melt. At this point we ask the community to test specific things. Once we believe there's nothing world ending in the patch (we tweak it a few times) we release it to Titan.

Unfortunately we're at a bit of a stale mate at the moment, which is why there's not been a Titan patch in a very long time. There have been a number of fundamental changes to the inner workings of the game, these changes must all be delivered together. Some of these changes have roadblocks (the alpha problem causing trees to stop being transparent is a tool-chain issue) or certain elements of interdependencies still need to be finalised (PSI weapons and drones have their own cryptic Ouija, we're standardising where possible and building the specific stuff into a more manageable set of additional components) before we can release "the whole package".

As balance relies on a lot of these new fundamental changes, we cant implement better systems for guns, implants and armour until we finish the foundation work. Things are moving again though after an extended period of low motivation across the entire team. Hopefully with increasing levels of interaction with the community, we can stoke the fires of motivation and get the last pieces of the puzzle put into the place. This will open the gates for all the changes on Vedeena to come to Titan as a big bang patch, we can then rebase Vedeena as a clone of Titan (we do this every few patches) and start making smaller, incremental patches again based on our new foundation.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions, I'm sure it doesn't answer all of them.

The Second Part.

Alright but in this case the Armor, Implant and Weapons revamp are just too early and they should not be discussed or experimented on.

How should we test the behavior of the underlying changes if the overlying system changes at the same time?

How about doing Small Iterations instead trying to do everything at once instead:

1) Fix the underlying issues.
2) As a Goodie remove the Integer values on the items with the next patch (let’s get this shit out of the way already guys, come on: Low hanging fruits, for fucks sake I can’t understand why this was not done 3 months ago).
3) Bring it to Veedena the way it is supposed to hit Titan.
4) Test it on Veedena.
5) Fix it on Veedena.
6) Bring it Live.
7) Fix remaining issues (which always exist ;-)!)
8) ??
9) Profit.

And then when you’re ready start a new Cycle with the focus on the revamp.

First you adjust existing system

1) Remove Body Zones
2) Adjust Armor values to reflect this change
3) Bring it to Veedena the way It is supposed to hit Titan
4) Test it on Veedena
5) Fix it on Veedena
6) Bring it Live
7) Fix remaining issues
8) ??
9) Profit

Implement new Systems

1) Implement new Implants
2) Adjust Implant values to reflect this Change
3) Bring it to Veedena the way it is supposed to hit Titan
4) (You know the rest)

Then in the NEXT Iteration

1) Implement new Power Armor
2) Adjust Armor values to reflect this Change
3) Bring it to Veedena the way it is supposed to hit Titan
4) (You know the rest)

Then you move through the specific project goals one at a time.

As it stands now things are just a mess.

Regards and Thanks for reading

Odi

[Ivan Eres]

[...]Unfortunately we're at a bit of a stale mate at the moment, which is why there's not been a Titan patch in a very long time. There have been a number of fundamental changes to the inner workings of the game, these changes must all be delivered together. Some of these changes have roadblocks (the alpha problem causing trees to stop being transparent is a tool-chain issue) or certain elements of interdependencies still need to be finalised (PSI weapons and drones have their own cryptic Ouija, we're standardising where possible and building the specific stuff into a more manageable set of additional components) before we can release "the whole package".

As balance relies on a lot of these new fundamental changes, we cant implement better systems for guns, implants and armour until we finish the foundation work. [...]

Hi Triv,

first I want to thank you and the team too for working so much for the community and the game over the last years.

If the described problem above is stopping the process atm then wouldn't it be possible to make Vedeena the new Titan II ?

Technically it would mean to clone it, move it, and make it the new live server.

And after the current Vedeena environment has been cloned to the new live system Titan II and stabilized, then it could be cloned again to be the new test and development system Vedeena II, as planned.

People are craving for these changes. And even if there are some things missing like PSI stuff I'd rather have all changes online because many other things do work.

The first step would be to check the technical possibilities and to ask the community about a new Titan II.

I would even give up my 2 accs full of chars and stuff on Titan if I had to, to start all over again. We did it already when we moved to Titan from Terra.

Regards
Ivan

[Trivaldi]

Hi Triv,

first I want to thank you and the team too for working so much for the community and the game over the last years.

If the described problem above is stopping the process atm then wouldn't it be possible to make Vedeena the new Titan II ?

Technically it would mean to clone it, move it, and make it the new live server.

And after the current Vedeena environment has been cloned to the new live system Titan II and stabilized, then it could be cloned again to be the new test and development system Vedeena II, as planned.

People are craving for these changes. And even if there are some things missing like PSI stuff I'd rather have all changes online because many other things do work.

The first step would be to check the technical possibilities and to ask the community about a new Titan II.

I would even give up my 2 accs full of chars and stuff on Titan if I had to, to start all over again. We did it already when we moved to Titan from Terra.

Regards
Ivan

Thing is, Vedeena is virtually unplayable right now because of those issues. We're not happy with a lot of the Vedeena status quo, i'm referring to finishing changes by removing roadblocks. Rather than those roadblocks stopping us from patching Titan. We could patch Titan to the Vedeena state tomorrow but we'd lose a lot more players than we'd gain as a few things are half baked.

For example the new fundamentals built under 'regular' weapons means that Drones and PSI are essentially entirely broken as their old foundation no longer really exists. We're a bit stuck in the middle. We need to get these changes finished so we can have all weapon types working on new foundations. Only Zoltan can give you more detail on that though.

[Hell-demon]

ZOOOOOLLLLLTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*shakes fist*

[Odimara Orca]

ZOOOOOLLLLLTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*shakes fist*

SUMMON THE DEMON

ZOOOOOOLLLLLTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!

*sacrifices goat*

[RogerRamjet]

Dinklebeeeeeerrrrrgggggggggggggg

[eNTi]

i think balancing changes should be incremental and not be done on verdeena. neocron once HAD a "fun" balancing (hybrids anyone?). that's one of the reasons why so many people have fond memories of that time. it sure wasn't perfect but it was better what followed after wards. every iteration made balancing worse it seemed. now it is so bad and convoluted (due to a few pointless additions like nanintes) that you had to start from scratch and that's why it is a mess. the whole idea of all those broad sweeps (removing comma values e.g.) seem like logical steps but the ramifications can already be seen in the stagnation of the development and the motivation of the team. there is no silver bullet to this problem.

i'd suggest you keep tweaking the balancing on titan with the help of active community feedback and only use verdeena to test the changes you do technology wise. balancing is never done and will always need feedback of as many people as possible. changes you do based on pure number tweaks (be it with the help of a tool) most likely will be a disaster.

the biggest problem is that everything should seem fair enough to most people and yet not everything should be the same. only a large enough use base can give you that feedback. some "numbers" will be much stronger or weaker in certain peoples' hands so doing it "by the numbers" will not lead to a satisfactory outcome. just remember that balancing was once "fun" even with the commas or maybe just because of them. i would leave them in. drop nanintes and give everyone back some psi. look for stuff people like, what makes them feel powerful. if you are at a place where almost everyone feels powerful and is able to win a fight on even terms you are doing good. i just don't think you can really quantify balancing by only looking at a spreadsheet. leaving the people factor out of the equations might look good on paper, but it will destroy the fun. you need op stuff as well either to give noobs the chance to compete despite their skill or to give very skilled players that prefer a more rounded play style more challenge across the spectrum of all players. changes only need to be made if suddenly everyone jumps a certain bandwagon like we had in monkocron and most of the time these change need not be too big. quite often the nerf hammer is swung too hard in such cases.

as for the idea with changing the engine to ue4... i'm all for it. vulkan and native linux ftw! at least experiment with it and see if you can import the assets or can write a tool / make the community write a tool for importing them.

[eNTi]

Unfortunately we're at a bit of a stale mate at the moment, which is why there's not been a Titan patch in a very long time. There have been a number of fundamental changes to the inner workings of the game, these changes must all be delivered together. Some of these changes have roadblocks (the alpha problem causing trees to stop being transparent is a tool-chain issue) or certain elements of interdependencies still need to be finalised (PSI weapons and drones have their own cryptic Ouija, we're standardising where possible and building the specific stuff into a more manageable set of additional components) before we can release "the whole package".

As balance relies on a lot of these new fundamental changes, we cant implement better systems for guns, implants and armour until we finish the foundation work. Things are moving again though after an extended period of low motivation across the entire team. Hopefully with increasing levels of interaction with the community, we can stoke the fires of motivation and get the last pieces of the puzzle put into the place. This will open the gates for all the changes on Vedeena to come to Titan as a big bang patch, we can then rebase Vedeena as a clone of Titan (we do this every few patches) and start making smaller, incremental patches again based on our new foundation.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions, I'm sure it doesn't answer all of them.

You are becoming oddly specific without telling us how those things are connected and who is actively working on which part. The word tools and tool-chain is rather generic again. We've got a glimpse of the tools involved from the "task" posts but this still doesn't exactly tell us how they block certain vital elements of the development (like balancing). We do not know those interconnections and would like to know how you plan on unraveling them to further the process. Yet this information is always absent so I get the feeling you just don't know yourself. How is the alpha of a tree a problem in regards of changing around numbers in weapon damage? Since you can't and won't give us specific road maps we'd like to know the blockers that could potentially be resolved by a community effort. If we get more insights into those inner workings we could in turn develop an understanding of the difficulties you are facing.

What is this foundation work... is this the stuff you talked about before in your example? Why is this relevant to implement better systems? Because the resources (programming man hours) are missing?

In this instance the vagueness stems from a mixture of too much and too little information at the same time. I for one can't get a clear picture of what and especially why you are having difficulties. I do think it is better to use your time on the development rather than telling us the specifics. The flip side is that we can't know what we can do about it... if anything. I can get more examples if you like. This is just one instance were I read a lot of text and wasn't much the wiser after wards. You just said in a lot of words that it will take time and that missing resources prevent you from proceeding.

I think the task approach is what works best for me. I know what needs to be done and can try to help. It just needs a little more organization.

[Odimara Orca]

Shots fired.

I am still and will be in the future VERY thankful for the great Job you do guys.

Might I suggest:

The Golden List of the next things to implement

To expect first) Weapon Balance (or whatever ;-)) - Bragi
Hardcode Roadblocks
-PSI Module Damage -Zoltan
-etc
-etc
Tool Roadblocks
-etc
-etc
-etc
Feedback Roadblocks
-Bones
-MC5
-etc

same for what to expect second and third

Come on guys give your tasks some structure

And Balance should absolutly be prio 1

[Odimara Orca]

I mean atm it's like: "uhh.. we're doing lots of stuff and uhh.. we got lots of problems"

Well then fix one thing at a time ;-)

[JustVisiting]

Sat here quietly idling.

If you want the community to do stuff then spend 10 minutes to write a job spec including input vars etc and output vars and any specification for the content ie: if its a gui tool to create an outputted LUA script you can just hook to an npc so anyone can write missions etc without knowing any coding.

Thats great writing a tool like that takes about 10 minutes in pretty much any language great. but unless you give us an idea of how the variables / inputs are passed to the lua in the first place and the format you want the lua in ie: data structures and then how you require the output handlers.

so is it a single script to handle multiple npc's, or is it a script per npc and there's some kind of environmental state we need to be aware of on the player object to track the quest status/position of that player vs position in quest and which npc's are next. We need more data before we can do it. Give us proper spec's and information we can work with and we can do it.

Same with the exporter for blender? input output requirements, what exactly isn't working is it just the api changes deprecated previously method being called so is there now in the new api a replacement/equivilent of the old methods or have they been completely removed. where are the test models we can use for experimenting with you've asked us to write a model conversion script but not given us a model to test against it that is working as you intend it to work so we have no way of testing our work.

Again the script is pretty short and if its just a method update between api version changes its probably only a few days work at most as I doubt the logic has changed in to the handling of the bones etc.
What features are missing / new features do you want. Many of us have been professional coders for years we'd love to help but you can't vaguely say "do this" without giving us actual specs or at very least "we need something to do this and output in this format from this input format"

You're your own worst enemies when it comes to getting our help.

As for keeping us informed all your excuses are bullshit. Its not difficult for you to once a month say for example.

"Zoltan is working on xyz, he hit a road block caused by old KK code in YYY so he has to go fix that first so xyz is now on hold"
"bragi is doing UUU but he also has to finish HHH and III first"

then next week post something like
"Zoltan resolved YYY so has gone back to xyz" or "while fixing YYY we found another bug in the inventory system leading to item duplication so zoltan has gone off to fix that after he's completed YYY"

you could spend 5 minutes a week asking each dev what they're doing, what issues they've encountered and just post that here and everyone would be happy as they know you're actually doing something. you don't have to provide ins and outs of a cats arse in details just tell people at a high level what you're doing its not difficult and is coding team best practice anyway if you're professional coders depending on your methodologies you'll be doing this daily or weekly in your day jobs anyway!

[eNTi]

Sat here quietly idling.
...

well said... and put all the info in an appropriate thread in an appropriate sub forum.

[William Antrim]

This is probably the best thread I have seen in years. Genuinely.

However 3 of the posters need to seriously calm down, take a breath and actually READ what is being put because you guys are being counterproductive currently.

There is no such thing as emotion when you read text on a screen. Stop trying to infer that there is.

Be thankful your questions are being responded to and start thinking up ways you can help solve the problems listed.

Also please stop looking at the current picture with such a one-sided view. Bringing back old players will not save the game, new ones are the lifeblood. The newby experience is a core element to the game. The kids need to get hooked on the 'crack early so that they stay and pvp at the end.

Recruit them, grow them and then pk them at the GR.

Dont bash on posts when questions get answered because they arent in the minutiae you wanted, politely ask for more detail and you will be surprised how much more helpful you can be. I have been one of the most critical people on here at times and for good reason but things ARE looking up currently, dont piss all over that please.

The game seems to me like it needs a project manager and a spokesman at the moment - to deliver feedback to you guys here on the forum. If it had that (triv youre doing a great job so far) then things would be easier in my mind.

I would suggest lifting the good points out of this thread - the information from DEV side - and posting it into a new thread in Community English as i stumbled across this one accidentally and it is a gold mine of good info.

The forum could be better managed in all fairness and communication IS key but by itself it is a full time job. We need Nidd back.

[eNTi]

Recruit them, grow them and then pk them at the GR.

As we have stated lots of times... you can't grow them if they leave in frustration after they find out that the core game is broken. That is the reason why we push so hard in this particular direction. At least that's my motivation.

Also... there's a some rare traction in the community that will all but die down the very moment we stop posting our emotional responses. Maybe these emotions are a good way to a healthy relationship. Just like in a good ol couples therapy session.

I haven't posted in years and I see this as a rare opportunity before everything goes back into hibernation.