The extent to which the people involved with the Zuma or with the devs have the attitude of the exasperated babysitter is remarkable. This is typically a sign of a death spiral in any campaign. You're talking to Vellos like he's a child when he's the guy who is most directly concerned with the Zuma as he lives next door. Maybe he doesn't have to like the Zuma, but who, exactly, do you think you are serving? Yourselves? Some nonspecific players who are reveling in all this? What is your mission as GMs and developers, and how do you measure the success of that mission?
I serve Tom.
He put the Zuma on Dwilight for a purpose. I don't know what that purpose is, but until he decides to change or remove them, they're there and they are what they are.
And you would not believe some of the bitchfests we've had in the past. Seriously, this is a calm and reasoned discussion by BattleMaster standards. And the vast majority of the time, it's a vocal minority doing the complaining about a particular feature or event. And the vast majority of the time, the resolution is that said vocal minority finally gives up and just gets on with the game. (Note: not "said vocal minority realizes they were wrong"; that almost never happens. Once people have formed an opinion on a particular topic of this nature, and especially once they've argued it for days on an email list or forum, they're not generally likely to back down and say, "Sorry, no, I was wrong," even if there's no credible evidence to back up their position and mountains of it to back up the other guy's. And yes, I have been on both sides of this
)
(checks Scarlett's player page)
Actually, you've been around long enough that if you ever followed the old discussion list, you might believe the bitchfests
Either way, my point here is that just because you get a long argument/flamewar on a particular topic—even if there are a half-dozen people on the side of "We need to change X about the game"—it doesn't mean that they're right, and it doesn't mean that they're going to get what they want.
I don't have a pony in this show. I don't care at all about what happens to my Dwilight toon, but this entire thread consists of people registering varying degrees of legitimate complaints and then being told how wrong they are for complaining. I understand how frustrating dealing with players can be, but at some point it seems to me that it doesn't matter if you think they're all morons if what you are doing is not having the desired effect.
First: whether the complaints are legitimate is precisely what is at issue here, so you just coming in and stating it as if it's a decided fact is pretty much begging the question.
Second: when you say "...what you are doing is not having the desired effect," I'm unsure as to whether you mean what the Zuma are doing in-game, or what all our arguing is doing on the forum. However, in the former case, if what the Zuma are doing was not having the desired effect (whatever that happens to be), I'm reasonably sure Tom would tell them to change it or remove them. And in the latter case, as I've already stated, this is an argument on the Internet. It's not going to go anywhere by its very nature. We're not going to convince Vellos and Gustav Kuriga (and the others), and they're not going to convince us, because we're coming at it from completely different premises.
Two out of every four good players playing within my bm-o-sphere in 2007 and 2008 left when the game terms were being dictated by region maintenance and TMP.
We know about this, and over the past several months, we have been working to make changes that undo the damage to the game that was caused by the old estate system and TMP. It is a difficult process, however, because everything needs to be carefully balanced, fun, and reasonably historically accurate (pretty much in that order).
Another one out of four left after SMA never panned out on Dwilight, with its enormous distances, low population, and tremendous travel times.
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."
SMA is a guide for how to play your character, nothing more. True, some people understand it and follow it better than others, but if you find someone to be consistently breaking the serious medieval atmosphere on Dwilight, you are encouraged to report them via the SMA Report link on the Messages page (though, as a warning, it may be moving somewhere else in the not-too-distant future).
I am not sure that BM knows what kind of player it wants, but like the Zuma, I wish it would decide already and start catering to at least one group.
BattleMaster cannot cater to just one group. If it were to do so, it would cease to be BattleMaster. Yes, we could probably pull in more people by catering specifically to, say, high-powered strategy players, and abandoning the RP angle altogether—but would that be BattleMaster? (And frankly, if we were to cater specifically to the roleplay players, we might as well close up BattleMaster and return to its play-by-post roots, because you'll never be able to make game mechanics to fit everybody's favorite roleplay. Not to mention there's nowhere near enough of them to sustain the game.)
Players have the luxury of bitching without providing solutions or whining for no reason at all. Developers and GMs do not. You run a service. I suggest you examine why.
We run a free game. In our free time. At, in fact, Tom's personal expense.
Yes, you have the luxury of bitching without providing solutions or whining for no reason at all.
And you know what we have?
The luxury of telling you to piss off.
Fortunately for you, we are not exercising that luxury. We are telling you why your arguments are useless, incorrect, or irrelevant. We are engaging with you. We are, in fact, trying very hard to make this game better.
But making the game better does not—
cannot—mean bowing to every loudmouthed whiner on the forums. If we were to adopt a policy of doing that, it would lead within months to the utter ruin of the game.