Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Multiplayer Balancing

[Richard Kettering]

On Mar 15, 2005, at 9:21 PM, David White wrote:
> I think that we should act to leverage the experience of these players 
> -- who each probably play far more competitive multiplayer than any 
> developers -- and involve them in the development process.
A good idea, though I would warn that some of these people are very 
vocal and play up their expertise, and their play-time, for more than 
it is worth.
If I was going to trust anyone of the group on balancing, I would trust 
EP, since despite being vocally aggravating at times, what he says 
usually has some semblance of being based on fact.

Their advice would be very useful, but take it with a grain of salt.  
Remember when they speak that the majority of them are teenagers on the 
lower half of the decade. :P

> One possible way we could do this is open a sub-forum on multiplayer 
> discussions. Another way is to invite the players who we think have 
> valuable feedback to this mailing list. Yet another way would be to 
> open a new mailing list specifically for discussion of multiplayer 
> balancing and invite them to that (since they might not be interested 
> in technical discussions).

I really think adding them to a mailing list would be a bad, bad idea.  
At their age, I didn't even have an email account, let alone know what 
a mailing list was, but I regularly used the net.  A mailing list is 
for someone who has made a conscious decision to become a part of, and 
commit themselves to work on the project.  They just play it for fun, 
and posted out of worry that we were going to spoil that fun.  They 
haven't formally joined anything, they just came out of the shadows to 
pipe in their opinion - most of them were on their first ten posts...

It would especially be a bad idea to add them to *this* mailing list.  
We created this to reduce the noise, and well, uh...  I think that 
would run contrary to that interest.  :)

On the other hand, making a special sub-forum for multiplayer/(and 
general) balancing would be a *very good* idea.  Not only would it 
encourage such people to post those ideas, and to send all such 
material to one place, it would also pull all of that stuff out of all 
other areas of the forum, and dump it in one place.  Developers 
discussions could stop being the balancing forum, and could attend to 
all it's other legitimate uses

> Any thoughts on this? I definitely think that we need to add more 
> people who have experience playing multiplayer to the development 
> pool.
>
> David
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wesnoth-dev mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/wesnoth-dev