Goonhub
09-20-2021, 03:56 AM
Hi, as the Main Person In The Admin Team Who Did Human Resprite Stuff I can weigh in on some of the particulars there. I've seen similar points and arguments brought up (sometimes in the form of a question) so I think it'd be useful to display my reasoning here for more people to see. As such this post isn't representative necessarily of the opinions the greater admin teams have on the game, just me.
This has been partially explained in this thread already, but to further elucidate: Having the sprites be a toggle is functionally impossible to put into play. It sounds like an 'All size fits all' sorta solution, but it's not quite that. Sprite artists making new assets that revolve around the human base would have to make two; one for the new one, one for the legacy sprites. You can't just make one since they're not the same shape, including in-hands even. This adds an excessive amount of work to future spriting endeavors and I feel the amount of people who would actually use the setting doesn't balance this out. It's a big trade-off and sadly isn't feasible pretty much.
The resprite thread was open early in the project and it wasn't a hidden thing whatsoever on discord or github especially. There's 118 separate PRs for the resprite, not counting post-resprite adjustments. The whole thing took around five months to complete. I tried my hardest to accumulate and understand what people were saying about the resprite during this time, often searching the discord for 'Resprite' in any posts to try and get feedback that I didn't specifically ask for, since I think that tends to be a very candid source. Even after the resprite I worked on various fixes and tweaks to try and address some specific issues players had, and there was also a period of (non-server-wide) playtesting which caught a *ton* of broken looking things before the initial launch. Perhaps it could've been advertised more aggressively in-game so that even more people could have had vocal opinions on it, but I don't think it's particularly fair to say that it was a left-field thing that was meant to jump out to people or that there was no attempt to gather input. I tried pretty hard though advertising something like that in-game somehow could be useful, genuinely.
I absolutely understand that some people don't like it, but just because people don't like it and it got through doesn't mean that nobody was listened to. I think negativity bias makes it easy to forget that a significant amount of players really like the resprite, not just coming from before the resprite went live but also after. Once the project was started it was always going to upset somebody to push through, but I, judging from my perspective as an admin, see the positive gained from the resprite as very very very worth it. There was no way to please everyone with it which I was cognizant of even starting. Also, from an artistic integrity standpoint, I feel like the work I did was good and valuable and made the game better, it wasn't perfect, but I'm proud of it, and proud of everyone who helped make it.
Less specific to the resprite, I think the player turnover argument is a bit off. The playerbase has shifted a lot, but it didn't *start* doing that recently. People who played in 2012 talk about it too, how the players they started playing with are gone and left and haven't been around for half a decade. I don't see it as primarily an issue of people being unhappy with the game direction and leaving (though this does happen for sure), I think there's a variety of reasons for this sorta cycle. People just lose their free time, or burn out, or move onto something else. I don't see that as a giant flaw, I see that as part of the game. It's kinda somber though for sure.
I also think negativity bias factors in pretty heavily here. Everyone remembers the balance changes that they didn't like, but big feature additions like ranching, small feature additions that add a lot to the game like the QM money scanner thingy, small sprite updates that make the game look cleaner, audio improvements that make the game all around much nicer on the ears, documentation work that makes contributing easier, community projects like the semi-sometimes-monthly contests that are meant to try and create fun and let people leave personal impacts on the game itself, accessibility orientated changes with the intent to make the game more playable for more people, code optimization that makes the game run faster than it ever did before, and bugfixes of varying degree that makes the game much more playable are easy to dismiss since they don't leave as much of an impact as the bad things. I'm probably leaving stuff out too, but my point is: A lot of people do a lot of different skilled work to try and make the game better. Booting up the 2016 code reveals just how far the game has come on basically all fronts. I was there for 2019 Goon and tons of stuff has been added and improved and I'd never go back personally. As such it's very hard for me to personally take on the perspective of like, the game going downhill and watering itself down. I'm also very involved in the game so I see a lot of that improvement pretty directly, optimizations and bugfixes in particular tend to be pretty invisible but highly impactful changes but can't really be stuck in a changelog because they'd mean little to most players.
That said, I don't really wanna escalate or imply you're like... 'bad' through this post. My input here isn't so much to 'debunk you in a game of wits akin to chess or tennis' more as it's meant to just be like, my particular personal perspective as one admin who contributes often to the game. In abstract I can say that it sucks that you don't like these changes to the game, but of course if we reverted those changes more people would be unhappy since they were positively received by some people, so it can be kinda tricky. I'm hoping sincerely this post comes off as a 'why I like being here and contributing things I think are good and don't feel the same way' and not a debunk. Hope my post is helpful or interesting.
Quote:Icons got changed without any attempt (that I know of) to ask the players if they wanted any change, or to offer choosing between the classic icons and the new ones.
Obviously I don't want to be be at all negative towards whoever put in the time, effort, and clear care for the new icons- but to have the change thrust on me without any input came off as needlessly top-down.
This has been partially explained in this thread already, but to further elucidate: Having the sprites be a toggle is functionally impossible to put into play. It sounds like an 'All size fits all' sorta solution, but it's not quite that. Sprite artists making new assets that revolve around the human base would have to make two; one for the new one, one for the legacy sprites. You can't just make one since they're not the same shape, including in-hands even. This adds an excessive amount of work to future spriting endeavors and I feel the amount of people who would actually use the setting doesn't balance this out. It's a big trade-off and sadly isn't feasible pretty much.
The resprite thread was open early in the project and it wasn't a hidden thing whatsoever on discord or github especially. There's 118 separate PRs for the resprite, not counting post-resprite adjustments. The whole thing took around five months to complete. I tried my hardest to accumulate and understand what people were saying about the resprite during this time, often searching the discord for 'Resprite' in any posts to try and get feedback that I didn't specifically ask for, since I think that tends to be a very candid source. Even after the resprite I worked on various fixes and tweaks to try and address some specific issues players had, and there was also a period of (non-server-wide) playtesting which caught a *ton* of broken looking things before the initial launch. Perhaps it could've been advertised more aggressively in-game so that even more people could have had vocal opinions on it, but I don't think it's particularly fair to say that it was a left-field thing that was meant to jump out to people or that there was no attempt to gather input. I tried pretty hard though advertising something like that in-game somehow could be useful, genuinely.
I absolutely understand that some people don't like it, but just because people don't like it and it got through doesn't mean that nobody was listened to. I think negativity bias makes it easy to forget that a significant amount of players really like the resprite, not just coming from before the resprite went live but also after. Once the project was started it was always going to upset somebody to push through, but I, judging from my perspective as an admin, see the positive gained from the resprite as very very very worth it. There was no way to please everyone with it which I was cognizant of even starting. Also, from an artistic integrity standpoint, I feel like the work I did was good and valuable and made the game better, it wasn't perfect, but I'm proud of it, and proud of everyone who helped make it.
Less specific to the resprite, I think the player turnover argument is a bit off. The playerbase has shifted a lot, but it didn't *start* doing that recently. People who played in 2012 talk about it too, how the players they started playing with are gone and left and haven't been around for half a decade. I don't see it as primarily an issue of people being unhappy with the game direction and leaving (though this does happen for sure), I think there's a variety of reasons for this sorta cycle. People just lose their free time, or burn out, or move onto something else. I don't see that as a giant flaw, I see that as part of the game. It's kinda somber though for sure.
I also think negativity bias factors in pretty heavily here. Everyone remembers the balance changes that they didn't like, but big feature additions like ranching, small feature additions that add a lot to the game like the QM money scanner thingy, small sprite updates that make the game look cleaner, audio improvements that make the game all around much nicer on the ears, documentation work that makes contributing easier, community projects like the semi-sometimes-monthly contests that are meant to try and create fun and let people leave personal impacts on the game itself, accessibility orientated changes with the intent to make the game more playable for more people, code optimization that makes the game run faster than it ever did before, and bugfixes of varying degree that makes the game much more playable are easy to dismiss since they don't leave as much of an impact as the bad things. I'm probably leaving stuff out too, but my point is: A lot of people do a lot of different skilled work to try and make the game better. Booting up the 2016 code reveals just how far the game has come on basically all fronts. I was there for 2019 Goon and tons of stuff has been added and improved and I'd never go back personally. As such it's very hard for me to personally take on the perspective of like, the game going downhill and watering itself down. I'm also very involved in the game so I see a lot of that improvement pretty directly, optimizations and bugfixes in particular tend to be pretty invisible but highly impactful changes but can't really be stuck in a changelog because they'd mean little to most players.
That said, I don't really wanna escalate or imply you're like... 'bad' through this post. My input here isn't so much to 'debunk you in a game of wits akin to chess or tennis' more as it's meant to just be like, my particular personal perspective as one admin who contributes often to the game. In abstract I can say that it sucks that you don't like these changes to the game, but of course if we reverted those changes more people would be unhappy since they were positively received by some people, so it can be kinda tricky. I'm hoping sincerely this post comes off as a 'why I like being here and contributing things I think are good and don't feel the same way' and not a debunk. Hope my post is helpful or interesting.