Perhaps you consider that you are responding rationally to an annoying, vocal minority. This is typically the logic used to dismiss forum posters, and it's why I always assumed BM never had forums for so long. But here we are. You don't get a medal for doing this in your spare time. You agreed to do it. If that's such a burden, stop doing it, or at least stop coming here to talk about it if you're going to dismiss anything that comes across in this forum anyway. Most BM players, good or bad, have better things to do than post in the forum -- BM advertises itself as lightweight, after all. I don't really care if you dismiss what Vellos says or what I say, but you're dismissing the entire platform as beneath you.
If you don't even
know what the Zuma's purpose is, what on earth are you doing here talking about it as if you do? If all we're doing is guessing about Tom's intentions, why waste the time? You're defending something you don't even understand and telling off people who apparently don't understand it any better than you do.
It is a difficult process, however, because everything needs to be carefully balanced, fun, and reasonably historically accurate (pretty much in that order).
That is one of the reasons and the changes I've seen have been spectacular. The system was only half the problem, though. The attitude was the other half.
I'm not sure what would have been required for you to consider SMA to have "panned out." It was never, in any way, shape, or form intended to mean, "Dwilight will be exactly like medieval Europe."
I interpreted it literally: that a serious effort would be put forth to build a medieval atmosphere. Instead it's even more fantasy than the other islands and even less medieval because of the low populations and huge travel times. That's a different discussion, though.
SMA is a guide for how to play your character, nothing more.
The 'A' in 'SMA' presumably is for 'atmosphere,' which I take to mean 'the environment of the game.' There are already guides on how to play your character. I was around when SMA was hatched, as were you, and the discussion was focused on emphasizing the feudal oath and medieval power structures. The code changes have done far more for that than Dwilight has.
For SMA to 'pan out' I would want to go to the dozen or so players with whom I was most involved five years ago and tell them to give BM another look because it's got that medieval sauce that was always a little bit on the thin side. It's not just RPers, though many are. You don't need to write tons of RP to go for the intrigue, the scheming, the medieval politics. The folks who 'got it' were frustrated by the bugs and they were frustrated by the attitude of the people in charge. You are dearly mistaken if you believe that, merely because BM is free, you can tell people to 'piss off' with no consequence.
BattleMaster cannot cater to just one group.
Obviously not, but it can decide to whom it is catering, whether that is two or nine groups. Every new realm goes through a process that BM needs to go through. New people take over and they kick out or marginalize the people they most associate with the old problems. They then promote and encourage the people they most associate with the kind of realm they want. You can make the best structure and write the best code for any game like BM out there, but at the end of the day you've got nothing without dedicated players to make your atmosphere. The kind of players who will put in just as much time as you do writing wiki pages, welcoming new players, and arranging the blobs of text that make up BM into something that feels alive and organic rather than a collection of database queries.
I do recall the bitchfests of yore. The reason I left the d-lists was because of smug, arrogant posts like yours. I put in my time as a titan and a wiki presence and eventually got tired not of the players bitching or the system (which doesn't bother me as much as it bothered some) but of attitudes like yours. Gratitude and accommodation are two way streets. You shrug off input from the handful of big guns BM has left and then you expect them to be grateful that you only suggested rather than outright said that they could piss off. The more time I spend reading posts like yours and reading about the Zuma -- whose summary seems to be 'you have NO IDEA how cool they could be, you are ignorant! oh and so am I, all hail Tom' -- the more I am blown away that the discussion here never got past the kid stuff we had on the d-list.
It sounds like you want a suggestion box, not a discussion forum.
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