I will clear up a few misunderstandings that occurred.
First of all the administration of the GrangerPub/GrangerClub servers hosted by the GrangerHub site, the GrangerHub website/forum staff, and GrangerHub development are three separate and different projects, even though there are some people who participate in the management of more than one of those projects. As such decisions for each of those three projects are made separately (although their interrelation is considered in decisions where interaction occurs). For anything that concerns a particular server that is utilizing the GrangerHub website, GrangerHub members can go to the specific server’s category. For anything related to GrangerHub development, GragerHub members can go to the Tremulous category. For anything related to the GrangerHub site in general there is the GrangerHub meta category.
The immediate goal and highest priority of GrangerHub development is to finish the next version of Tremulous which includes a new client and a new “vanilla” server, for players, server owners, and modders to use/modify. There are many reasons the playerbase of Tremulous has drastically depleted, and GrangerHub development’s efforts have been and will be focused on addressing those major issues. GrangerHub development is not making a mod, and is not only thinking of one or a few servers that happens to be hosted by GrangerHub, but also of future Tremulous servers that will be hosted by server owners and modded by modders independently from GrangerHub development.
The code GrangerHub developers are working on is currently for the most part unreleased, and private until the initial release. When the initial release occurs, that code would be available publicly for anyone to continue to contribute/modify/use, and GrangerHub Development will continue to contribute to the Tremulous code as well, and have subsequent releases.
The GrangerHub site is and will continue to be available for all Tremulous modders, server owners, mappers, clans, and players to utilize for those who choose to do so. The GrangerHub website is also where GrangerHub Development is hosted, and what GrangerHub Development uses for interacting with the players in terms of suggestion, questions, comments, concerns, feedback, and constructive criticisms that the players may have.
GrangerHub development decided to make use of a dedicated development server to test new major features and enhancements. GrangerPub/GrangerClub will not have implemented any of the designed features/enhancements that have not first been thoroughly tested in public games on test7341, with the results and input from the community fully considered, and leading to further development, testing, input, and considerations. Not only that, it is not planned to implement any new major features/enhancement on GrangerPub/GrangerClub before the initial release.
Some of the features/enhancements that have been and will be implemented on the test7341 server have been or will be privately and extensively designed by GrangerHub developers before initial public testing. Other features/enhancements that have been or will be implemented on the test7341 server have been or will be discussed publicly before initial public testing. But all features/enhancements that will ultimately be included in the initial release will be rigorously tested publicly on the test7341 server, and thoroughly discussed with the Tremulous community. The results from the development games, and the input from the community will be extensively considered for the initial release.
GrangerHub developers highly value the input from the Tremulous community, as the work the GrangerHub Developers are performing is for the future of Tremulous, and for the Tremulous community. So it is very important that the Tremulous community participates in the development games, and in the discussions on these forums. As always, feel free to post questions, comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms.
I meant to respond in depth to this post hour after you posted it, but I went to sleep, and have been feeling somewhat ill the past few days, so most of what I wanted to say will be said later on in this post. However, this one sentence remind me of a lecture I once gave you in spec chat one game a few months ago. If I recall correctly, in that conversation, you had told me that I was imagining things when I said Tremulous was dead, which sparked my lecture. In that lecture I told you something that I firmly believe is still true: the belief that Tremulous is not dead, not dying, or that somehow Tremulous can come back to life is nothing but a wish, a dream, a fantasy. There is no “thriving” for Tremulous anymore. It is already to less than a tenth of what it was in its golden age, and it lacks a steady or even unsteady flow of new players. Any new players are driven away by the ridiculous learning curve that Tremulous has built due to the ever-increasing skill of top players. Off the top of my head, I can only name two players who are even somewhat new to Tremulous, and one of them was tutored by a top player who had convinced them to try it in the first place. If you want a game that isn’t on death’s row, you’ll need to either make it from scratch yourself or find a new, thriving game, because Tremulous has been on the verge of death since 2011 and it’s a fucking miracle that the master server hasn’t gone down yet.
Being more respectful has never changed the fact that the administration ignores the players on a regular basis. And that’s infuriating.
I completely agree with DarkMicrobe here, but it feels like the administration doesn’t, especially seeing as they ignore all of our logical thinking and refute it with their fantasizing about wonderful radical changes that will benefit everyone.
Again, a sentiment I agree with. Throughout this thread, and throughout every conversation I have ever had with them, I feel like the administration routinely sweeps my concerns under the rug simply because I don’t fully understand the tiniest details about their planned features, even though I don’t need to know everything to determine if something is better than the current process. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to picture what effect a big change would have, but it does take an unbiased mind. The only ideas I’ve had that the administration took to heart were about the rotation, but Sparky has gone back to doing whatever he wants to it regardless of what the people want (i.e. having atcs_2015 and atcsR in rotation because OMG PRETTY NEW MAPS even though the majority of players prefer default atcs for gameplay and performance).
Which further brings into question why any of the other level 9s have any say in the decisions that affect the server and gameplay of the users when they remain so detached from the people their decisions will affect.
romdos’ post is the post I will focus on replying to in my post.
Your response has done nothing but confirm my disillusionment with the administration of this project and server.
This is effectively the same thing as map rotation, except instead of editing the map rotation, players can one-time-only insert a map into the map rotation. You are trying to sugarcoat the entire feature by making it seem like something wonderful and new that lets the community have even more of a say in what maps are played. However…
Let me rephrase this entire passage.
In effect, the admins have decided that they do not like that certain Tremulous maps are played more frequently than others, and they have decided to restrict the decisions of the people to specific maps that the admins determine are good (instead of letting the players decide for themselves which maps they want to play). They do not care that the players like some maps more than others, they want players to experience the full “Tremulous experience”, complete with a variety of maps and gameplay, in spite of the majority of maps being complete shit for actual gameplay.
The admins, in their closed circle of secrecy, then also restrict maps by the number of players on the server, regardless of the fact that that number of players may not still be on the server when the map pops up. (Three maps in queue can be upwards of two full hours later, which is more than enough time for the player count to be halved or doubled. With 30 people on the server, I could /playmap specula_b4, and then only 5 people play it three hours later.) In spite of the fact that half of the admins don’t even really play Tremulous, they arbitrarily decide how many people each map can support.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the admins will also decide how frequently a map can be played. However, when the queue size can be as long as the number of players on the server, this limit could be extended drastically because people cannot add it to the queue until the time limit has passed, yet it won’t be played for hours after that anyways. Furthermore, admins can choose to restrict popular maps to longer times or less popular maps to shorter times in their attempt to homogenize the community into a well-rounded society of terrible players who are forced to play all kinds of terrible maps without being able to decide if they want to play those maps.
This seems to be a common theme coming from the administration of GrangerHub, and yet I have seen no true reason why votes are bad. Votes are intended to let the people decide what they want. Do they work for that purpose? Yes. Yes they do. The administration has refused to give any reason why votes suck besides “they are hard to see”. Sparky has provided idiotic rhetoric about how a gaming experience must “wow” the players, ignoring that this game is over a decade old (from 1.0) and fails to “wow” anybody due to its old age and shit graphics. Has anybody from the community said that map votes are bad? Has anyone complained about them? If you actually cared about what the community wanted, enough to ask them, they would tell you that map votes are perfectly fine, even a good thing.
I don’t see how you can compare Quake to Tremulous. They are completely different. Quake matches usually follow standard time limits, such as 10 or 20 minute matches for TDM. Tremulous, on the other hand, has matches ranging from as small as 1 minute to as long as an hour. This system of having a “playlist” of maps simply does not work when it is entirely unpredictable how long or short those maps will last. Furthermore, Quake DM maps are much more fair and balanced than Tremulous maps, perhaps primarily because it’s easier to make a balanced deathmatch map with random spawns than a balanced map where you need good base locations, hallways and rooms that are fair for both teams, etc.
In other words, you don’t care at all about the concerns and worries of the populace, too stuck in your own dream world where you are always right and everything will work out perfectly. This one sentence convinced me more than anything in your post that the administration doesn’t give half a flying fuck in the world about what the people want. The administration only wants to maintain control over the people, and if the people have dissenting opinions, that’s just tooooo fucking bad for them. It doesn’t help that none of the administrators in this thread have even replied to half of the complaints or opinions, focusing on the small few that are easy to sweep under the rug as being entirely untrue or incorrect assumptions.
[quote]“You have over simplified both warmup and playmap, neither of which are in their complete forms.”
“That is an inaccurate over simplification of playmap.”
“Criticisms can’t be constructive if the criticizers don’t have a good understanding of what they are criticizing. A good way to have such a better understanding is to actually study what you want to criticize in action.”
“Also it is a good idea to understand GrangerHub’s community guidelines before posting so that you can maximize the contribution of your post.”
“This assumption is wrong.”[/quote]
None of these are helpful things to say. They simply brush off our concerns by saying “Oh don’t worry, you just don’t understand, everything will work out perfectly, you’ll see.” and “Your concerns are unfounded because you got this one tiny thing wrong.” The administration refuses to actually address our concerns, and I don’t understand why. All we get in response is “You’re wrong, this is how it works. It’ll work fine.” when what we are asking for is the “why?” and the “who cares?” and any other actual explanation for why our opinions are so completely and utterly invalid. And then we get told “oh you’re not being helpful because you’re attacking the person and not the ideas” and “please read our guidelines about being a helpful contributor” when we’re only being dicks because it is fucking infuriating when it feels like the only people who have any power give zero fucks about you and your opinions and the opinions of the people they claim to care about.
Playmap seems to conceptually be a method of restricting the majority of players’ decisions while letting the minority have a bigger say, especially insofar as the minority’s view goes against the majority’s view. This punishes experienced players by lessening their Tremulous experience just so the small trickle of new players (which doesn’t even seem to exist) might remain in the stream rather than splitting off. In effect, it feels like an attempt to drive off the serious portion of the Tremulous community and indoctrinate the casual portion into believing that Tremulous is a wonderful experience full of possibilities. Which it isn’t. Those possibilities have been explored. The experience isn’t a fraction of what it could be, and it pales in comparison to any popular modern game. It feels like GrangerHub is just becoming more and more of an oligarchy of out of touch fantasists. The few who seem to have the most power among the administrators are also the few who have no clue what the right thing to do with that power is: using it to help the players.
Directly on topic, I am still yet to see a single reason given as to why TremStats could not be implemented temporarily in lieu of GrangerTracker. The only reason given is that the statistics about maps would not be valuable due to the process (which I still disagree with), but that is only a tiny portion of TremStats. All of the other features provided by TremStats are just as important to me and I think the community as a whole would be enriched by having these statistics.
I apologize if there are any typos or unfinished thoughts in this post, as I really jumped around from thought to thought and worked on responding to multiple quotes at once. I’m sure I left something out, but I’ve wasted enough time and effort on something the administration will probably never even read in full.
Two things you need to understand before making these kind of claims:
Development on test7341 is NOT a community-driven or open project. Many of the ppl working on it (privately) are not pub or club admins.
New features being developed are TOTALLY OPTIONAL (when you run your own server).
Okay now re-read both of those and see how your statements hold no water.
You claim that trem is dead. Sure, it has been dying since it stopped being a quake 3 mod (and quake 3 has died too… especially since quake live came out).
But then you turn around and claim that what we’re doing is somehow hurting the community. SO: how can we hurt something that is dead??
I feel you have a right to complain about map rotation on Pub/Club but that is YOUR OPINION and you alone do not represent the voice and desires of all players.
Furthermore, where does my opinion and desires factor into this?? I didn’t spend months of time building a site, admin team, and even learned c programming to do what YOU want. Trem is (and always has been) open source so why don’t you put your money where your mouth is, and run your own server?
I’m not trying to blow you off but Jesus Christ man, learn to pick your battles.
To be honest romdos, i have nothing against anyone on the admin / dev team, and honestly i don’t care about your private little project, menace and i might bring up that we think the project will split the community etc, but deep down, i know it won’t. And that’s because i’m pretty sure the project will fail, every predeccesor you’ve had has claimed to be different, but wasn’t. But at least most other mods were half-honest. New-Edge took criticism and did something with it, whether you liked the mod or not, at least it stood for something. But you admit in the above statement that frankly, you don’t give a shit about the community’s desires, and you know what? That’s fine with me, make it your own little project that is doomed to fail, have fun for a couple of months, then kill it off, drink some beers, laugh it off. But why IN THE NAME OF GOD does sparky keep talking about caring about" constructive criticism" from the community. (Constructive Criticism is overvalued and overused, btw) Everyone knows that once someone has coded something the other devs aren’t going to tell the guy that they aren’t going to implement something he’s been working on for months. So yeah, either you start listening to the community like you’ve promised, or you don’t make promises, simple as that.
“We value your opinion.” - some dev talking about GrangerHub.