Posted 04 July 2013 - 12:01 AM
It’s unlikely anyone in FS would be doing their part just for the sake of it (like, say, (badly) playing guitar for your own amusement, without anyone else even knowing that you do). It’s a game; no matter what some of the developers may claim, their work would be absolutely meaningless without the players, and the motivation of seeing it appreciated is a large part of the reason people put untold amount of hours into this.
And this is why a single “omg u fagerts lrn2 maek gaems†can have such impact. Gods know that I have my own issues with FS, but I would never go out of my way to call someones else’s freely available work worthless in their face. Anybody who’s had some taste of what it feels like to put your newborn baby out there and have it deemed crap knows that it hurts on a very personal level. You can’t just shrug it off, especially if you don’t actually consider all those people “trollsâ€, as BRAVO so eloquently put it. It sure doesn’t help that the majority of people gathering to a game like this would be teenagers, the “I’m perfect and you all suck†crowd for whom understanding the amount of dedication required to pull this off would be something of an epiphany… (Continuing my ode to Seven of Nine, his prodding of the developers to talk and answer questions is invaluable in allowing them to be seen as actual human beings who might have *gasp* reasons for their actions and decisions, rather than just extremely buggy plugins for Radiant, Max and Photoshop. There can never be too much human interaction between them and us.)
On topic: Tidus’s complaints how the game is looking even more like ass than it used to are largely true, whether you consider all his examples valid or not. (Maps getting darker and more gaily colored is, I assume, a manifestation of the very same artistic vision that’s lacking by his account:-P) 4.2, having been thrown out of the It’s Just Beta ghetto twice at this point, surpassed 4.1 in most regards around .008 by my own count and has been getting better all the time, but it started out looking sloppy and has remained so. Just the most obvious example: the game has made do for 11 months and 13 point releases with, yes, those animations that everyone agrees are broken. (Weapons clipping into player models even in the first person view is just part of this problem.)
It bears repeating that HD does not exist. It may, one day, but right now 4.2 is the game you insist is best for your players, and the game you’re allowing to represent yourselves.