Goonhub
06-05-2021, 02:12 PM
To put things back on track, the narrative that one person/group (ab)using a feature is to blame for nitroglycerin and aerosol changes (or really any change) is inaccurate. It's an easy narrative to latch on to, but it's incorrect. It ignores the long history of adjustments and fixes made in an attempt to balance these features and focuses too much on the symptom (people abusing a feature's flaw) than the disease (a flaw in the feature). Moreover, it sort of implies nitroglycerin and aerosol's problems could be solved by driving certain people out rather than fixing the flaws in these features or gutting them out entirely.
(That said, I still believe we still should punish people who abuse exploits or promote such, especially if they make no attempt to fix things and/or actually make problems worse. But here the idea is to neutralize the harm caused by rules violations, not to fix the game's balance)
I think aft and cybertripping made extremely good points earlier: player feedback comes in a variety of forms. Pull requests and official feedback threads are definitely useful, but it's not the only way our devs get feedback and direction. As aft's said, you can learn a lot from just listening to conversations, even if they're casual discussion not meant to function as feedback, whether its players-to-players, players-to-admins, whatever. Same goes for watching others play (whether through streams, youtube videos, observing, etc.) or playing oneself. For example, MBC once watched a video of a newbie playing Goonstation and noticed how they were really confused that when more flames appeared on their sprite after trying to stop-drop-and-roll, and that partly motivated kyle to change how burning works. I know this idea has been said over and over before, but I think it's important and worth repeating.
(That said, I still believe we still should punish people who abuse exploits or promote such, especially if they make no attempt to fix things and/or actually make problems worse. But here the idea is to neutralize the harm caused by rules violations, not to fix the game's balance)
I think aft and cybertripping made extremely good points earlier: player feedback comes in a variety of forms. Pull requests and official feedback threads are definitely useful, but it's not the only way our devs get feedback and direction. As aft's said, you can learn a lot from just listening to conversations, even if they're casual discussion not meant to function as feedback, whether its players-to-players, players-to-admins, whatever. Same goes for watching others play (whether through streams, youtube videos, observing, etc.) or playing oneself. For example, MBC once watched a video of a newbie playing Goonstation and noticed how they were really confused that when more flames appeared on their sprite after trying to stop-drop-and-roll, and that partly motivated kyle to change how burning works. I know this idea has been said over and over before, but I think it's important and worth repeating.