Townhall meeting this weekend!

[Zamujasa]

(game direction)

I agree, and this is something that we'll need to work on. Like you mentioned in Discord, it's often just like a free for all, which doesn't really work out. We're hoping to address some of these issues with coder guidelines and additional policies. It's definitely a work-in-progress type thing though, so I don't exactly have anything tangible to offer you at this point. 

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I don't think most gameplay changes require the permission of the wizards, as they generally deal with more internal and community stuff (from my understanding and limited experience). However, you're right that if you have clout with people, you can make things happen. I'm not sure what we can really do about that, besides maybe being more transparent about the circumstances of new features and such? 

i'm curious where the direction with coder guidelines is going to go. from my limited experience, it seemed to be okay as it was. better explanations of changes in commits would be appreciated, but i think part of it is that the current method for updating the changelog is tedious and prone to being forgotten about. (there's also, obviously, no way for players to see the changes that are only in commit logs.)

part of it is that i think, in general, being able to experiment and create new things 'out of nowhere' is cool and good. but having a better way to collect feedback about changes and things is needed. i was considering something like an in-game comments box and/or a button in the top right for sending feedback messages, akin to adminhelp but... not help? the forums are quiet and a lot of people aren't on discord.

You're right that there are large disconnects. For instance, I don't actually read anyone else's code; only their commit messages. Sometimes, I won't be aware of a new thing until I see it in the changelog or ingame. As I mentioned earlier, hopefully our new coder guidelines can provide us a bit more structure and accountability.

a good guideline for this would be (manual) enforcement of writing decent commit messages. you can't really automatically enforce this because there's honest cases where you're just gonna dump in "fix typo" or "sdhfasgdkg" but things that actually impact stuff should be written out.

Code:

break economy by adjusting mineral prices

- all minerals have an innate 'value'
- quality increases or decreases this value when sold
- alloy values change based on the stats of the material used

this would be a good commit message, for example. done right, you could even potentially automate some changelog stuff out of it.

(to that end: the changelog could be auto-generated based off of commit messages and hosted on the wiki instead of being manually updated in the repo.)

A lot of socialization occurs in mentorchat as well - I've personally even experienced times of socialization where midway through we realized a particular person wasn't a mentor yet and couldn't participate.

mentor chat always seems like a chill place focused on sharing knowledge and being excellent to each other. the fact its a group specifically around helping people out helps, imo. discussions are always mutually beneficial.