Jun 6, 2018, 3:58 AM

@apos said in Earning stuff:

I think that this stuff comes down to tradeoffs and just what staff are willing to deal with, and more importantly, what they enjoy doing. Like I worry that we'd drift into talking about design in a way of best practices, when a well run sandbox game with no metaplot could be infinitely better than a plot driven game that just isn't run well, and I think because of people's experiences on good games they might be more inclined to say, 'this is the best way to do it' when really it was just colored by that particular approach being well done.

Adding to this, some players are just looking for something completely different from other players. It's why the 'more games is better' principle is one I still believe in pretty strongly. It's why I worry when there's too many loud voices pushing for a 'one true way' all games must be in some respect or another, whatever that is. It could be: metaplot, y/n? sandbox y/n? heavily coded economy? y/n? -- it really could be anything. And for every one of those things, there are people who like that thing and people who don't.

I would rather see fifty games with 12-30 people having a blast on each of them than five with 200 trying to please everyone. And having a mix there is fine, too! We sorta have that now, but a lot of the smaller projects get smashed by the loud voices making 'one true way' demands. These people should be making their own projects in their 'one true way' and leaving the people wanting something else, or even wanting to just try something else, to do so in peace to sink or swim; criticism or inquiry is fine and dandy, but the non-stop bashing of other ideas starts to have some eerie parallels to the 'only I can be special' problem. Namely, 'If someone else is doing it differently, they are simply wrong and bad and should feel bad!', or 'If someone else is doing it differently, the very act of them doing it differently is making the claim that I'm doing it wrong! It's working fine for me, so they're obviously wrong! I must defend my way by attacking them!' This is pretty dang toxic, and it's a big ol' bootheel ground into the face of trying new things, or even things that are not currently loud-voice popular.