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.
Let me turn this around on you: You don't get a medal for staying in the game. You chose to join, you choose to stay, and if we tell you, "This part isn't going to change, so why are you still arguing about it?" then it just seems silly to me to continue to argue over it.
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.
No, I'm not. The fact that I disagree with what you're saying here and now does not mean that I, and Tom, and the rest of the dev team, do not regularly take suggestions, feedback, and complaints from the forum to heart.
This is a dangerous kind of trap to fall into, that I have taken to calling "the mayonnaise problem." I'm sure it has a proper logical name, something similar to "confirmation bias."
My wife gets mad at me when I leave the mayonnaise out on the counter after making a sandwich to bring for my lunch. She says, "You
always leave the mayonnaise out!" But the problem is, when I
don't leave the mayonnaise out, she doesn't even know I've made a sandwich. So even though I only leave the mayonnaise out, say, once out of every ten times, she thinks I leave it out every time.
In this case, you see that I'm dismissing this particular argument (and several from the D-list of old) as a vocal minority, and because this argument means something to you and you believe I'm wrong to dismiss it, that leads you to believe that I dismiss good arguments with the bad. But that's a fallacy, because it just means that
in this case, you happen to be part of the minority.
Is a vocal minority always wrong? No. We have taken their suggestions and complaints sometimes, too.
But neither does the fact that you are part of this one mean that it's right.
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?
I challenge you to find anywhere in this thread (or any other) where I have even suggested that I know what the Zuma's purpose is. So far as I know, only Tom and the Zuma GM really know what the purpose of the Zuma is.
I don't pretend to know what it is, I just know that Tom put them there for a reason, and until he decides to change that, I don't see them being a serious problem. Their presence is causing a ruckus, yes. But 99% of that, now, is not because of anything they are doing, saying, or attempting to do. It is because people like Vellos and Gustav Kuriga are fanning the flames of anger against them deliberately. You've seen Vellos admit outright that he's now deliberately provoking the Zuma just to get them to cause more trouble.
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.
That's an understandable, but mistaken interpretation.
All SMA was ever intended to mean was "Your characters need to act as though they are actually medieval nobles, not 12-65 year old Internet users sitting at computers in the early 21st century." It was never intended to indicate anything about the environment they would be put in—just how they were required to react to that environment.
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.
And I don't believe that. Nor have I ever told someone to piss off who hadn't degenerated into purely ad hominem-type idiocy in their arguments.
But you are dearly mistaken if you believe that, merely because you play BM, you get to dictate anything about the direction of the game's development. You get to make suggestions, criticisms, and yes, complaints and whines. But we have the right to ignore you completely if we believe that is what is best for the game as a whole.
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.
And this is an ongoing process. The people BattleMaster wanted to appeal to in 2004 is a quite different group than who it wants to appeal to in 2012. Part of BattleMaster's problem has always been that it's a pretty unique kind of game: it doesn't have the kinds of fancy graphics some games have, it doesn't permit the sort of micromanagement of people's real lives required for super-efficient armies, it doesn't permit you to create 100 accounts to boost your realm like some games do...
We are doing our best, and (and this is the important part)
we do not expect every part of BattleMaster to please all of its players. There are six different continents for a reason. And Dwilight is big enough to be two continents all by itself. So there's plenty of room for pretty much every type of player that BattleMaster attracts.
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.
This is absolutely true, and we are well aware of this, and trying to focus on pleasing our players with the changes we have been making, like the removal of TMP and the simplified food system.
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.
Again, I refer you to the mayonnaise fallacy. You come on here and see me responding in the way that I do in these last few posts (and while I can at least understand where "arrogant" might be coming from, since I am, indeed, speaking from a position of power, I'm really not sure about "smug"...perhaps you're reading my occasional flippancy and humor as smugness?), and you assume that I view all player input with smug, arrogant, contempt.
This could not be farther from the truth.
The truth is that I
am a bit jaded, due to the number of players who have come on the forum or the D-list whining about this or that when the consequences were obvious, or demanding that their pet feature be implemented when there is no way it would work well, or moaning about a Titan decision that was obviously correct, or bitching about how another realm is owning theirs, and something
has to be done to stop this. It gets frustrating and aggravating, and some days, yes, I'm too harsh on people and I say things that might not be the most diplomatic.
But I have also seen some fantastic ideas come from the players. And, well, I'm a player myself. ("I'm not just the president, I'm also a client!") I see many of the things that go wrong in the game—and I also see how much of it goes
right. I can't be everywhere, of course, but I do have four active characters, one each on EC, BT, FEI, and Dwilight.
I want to know what people think about the game. I want to know what people love about the game. I want to know what people hate about the game.
What I don't want, Scarlett, is for people who have been all but told flat out, "What you have been asking for is not going to happen," to continue to ask for it.
The Zuma are not going to be removed. They are not going to have their CS nerfed. They are not going to be turned into a purely RP group. It is not going to be made possible to turn one against another.