It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 9:24 am


Post a new topic Post a reply Page 8 of 8   [ 110 posts ]
Go to page Previous 14 5 6 7 8
Author Message
PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 1:21 pm 
Site Admin
User avatar

Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2006 4:07 pm
Posts: 1760
I'm not ignoring the rest of your post, i'm just going to say your retelling is inaccurate and I lack the time to pull the logs to refute it properly. yes i keep the logs still. its amusing reading the bullshit people spouted during bank ganks in 2006. Maybe one day i'll trim the chatlogs and put the up for nostalgia's sake.

Quote:
If Bob can't put the time in to do things that need to be done, he should hand it off to the next person that is willing --==that's what Broadband did==--. Myself and others would get on again and it could be a successful game if there was an active staff.
Correction:
Broadband did not hand it off to the next person that was willing. If that was the cause, you'd be under Eudaimonia, or Thassius, or any of the numerous staff who came before me, during the long years of broadbands wane. As i've already retold the story many times(go find past posts), I didn't want the shard at the time, and got sort of blackmailed into it.

The hour or few i spend on it nowadays per month are about the most i can do, and that keeps it running, as well as slowly pushing us towards 56D, but thats still a ways away.
I want to hand it off.

Several people have tried to take it over, echo spent months tryign to train up new staff. Here's the problem:
PEOPLE LOSE INTEREST.

There's a TON of absolutely boring work that needs to be done to keep a game running that constantly falls apart, and to fix something as busted as obsidian's old scripts.
Everytime someone comes to me and goes, "Hey I want to script, I can take it over", the following set of conversations happens almost every time without exception:

Me: Great, what do you want to tackle.
Them: Oh, whatever, i'll do anything. (First point off, if you aren't invested enough to have at least an idea of what you need to fix, how well will you prioritize without me?)
Me: Ok, well, here's the current to do list, in order to migrate to 56d which fixes a lot of bugs(including the itme bug we're STILL beholden to), we still have a lot of the old 51a and earlier scripts that need cleaning and purging.
Them: Ok, i'll get to work on that.
a few weeks pass with nothing but crickets.

There have been 7 people with some scripting capability who have come to me over the past 7 years saying "Let me takeover".
There have been 3 people who had no ability but I spent time to teach because they had drive.
Two people besides blinkers, cybervic, jorus, and bb and myself have had direct script access.
Three more had FTP access that auto-sync'd scripts to the staging folder.


Do you know how many times i've given out the same piece of script detailing a (relatively simple for obsidian's mess) bug in the housing code, and gotten nothing back?

Seriously.
I get it, people want the shard active. I'd like that too. But here's the thing.

We still get players. I promised to broadband that as long as we even get a single player, i'll pay out of pocket to keep the shard up.
We actually get around 20+ unique players most months, each popping in for a bit, then vanishing. We have a few weekly or daily players.
Most enjoy the roam through nostalgia lanes. I try to catch them when i can and chat with them.
Some people hop on with their kids, because they now have them old enough to play the game that they enjoyed when they were kids.

Right now, the shard exists, it runs (poorly), and I have enough time to keep things from (mostly) decaying.
Yes, it decays. I generally have to spend an hour every month fixing crap breaking down either in the server, or within the shard, for example if frostfell got eaten again. Once a year I have to hound broadband to make sure the dns gets paid for. And I have to clean the webserver every month or few when it gets infected.
I've gotten behind, I know. Is it because we have crap scripts? Yep. They were never meant to go this long without being tended. Some are temporary scripts put in to stopgap issues and permanent scripts never got made. Obsidian is a house of cards using scripts from <50i all the way through 56b, all at once. and its ugly.

But thats just to keep things at the status quo. And those are the most tedious parts of it.

If I am going to hand it off, and everyone who's applied hasn't even gotten through the scripting part, what makes you think they will be able to last through the rest of it, which is even MORE BORING than scripting?
Hell I had to blow half a weekend earlier this year fixing the site and patcher because we both got infected, and the new lockdowns the host had blocked out the patcher's access thinking it was malicious. You'd be surprised how much time is spent that produces no result except keeping things running as they should.

At least while I have it, i can keep it running for those people to revisit their nostalgia.
If I hand it off, and it dies because someone tires of it 8 months later...
then its gone.

All the hours people put into their houses, their guilds, their characters.
The memories of the bullshit of the rune chamber, or the idiotic first times necromancy was put in.
etc. etc.

So understand, I want to hand it off. All I ask is commitment, and effort.
But so far no one's been able to keep it up enough.
Is that selfish of me? A little bit, I think. And I'm ok being selfish if it preserves the memories everyone built.
I'd love for obsidian to become vibrant again. But i don't think that's worth risking it getting destroyed.

In 2010, I built a list of things that if someone knows, and does, then I know the shard will be in good hands.
These aren't super obscure things from my viewpoint. Most of them are just "basic" things to show the bare minimum required to run keep obsidian running such as "Knows what 17 items should never be deleted in obsidian and why", "Ports at least 5 script sections from 51a code so they understand what a broken house of cards some parts of obsidian is", "Finds, diagnoses, and fixes a single bug on their own", "Deals with a bad situation the hard way rather than banning at least once", etc.
These aren't things that every gm has to know, but the one who is going to be the architect should have. There's a reason I haven't banned people, because if there's disagreement its usually because there's some core of the argument I could change and do better, even if they're phrasing it badly.

That list has gotten a little shorter each year, as I remove things from it because i've fixed them/simplified them, or because they're things that no longer matter, such as the patcher.

But it still is there, and it still has 7 things on it.
You find me a person who is willing to work through that list, to put in the effort to show they aren't just going to get the gm cloak, run rampant, then get bored in 3 months, and I will hand them the shard the second they finish it.

Hell, a certain person got my hopes up just last month, i was excited to restore their ftp (again, having previously given it to them years ago), and yet again, enthusiasm waned and only a single script got done as of today. But hey, that's one more script than we had before they tried, so that's still progress and I thank them for their contribution.

TL:DR - Obsidian's a fuckton of work that accomplishes nothing visible just to keep it running, not candy and lolipops and people get bored and quit because its work.

Actually, in typing all this out, it reminded me of something, and a thought that maybe one of the requirements is no longer important. I have a phone call to make.


Top
 Offline   
PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 7:22 pm 

Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2008 2:55 pm
Posts: 14
I mean, this post from Bob sounds like a ranting lunatic. Is it that people lose interest, or they just don't want to work with you?

_________________
Characters
Death Angel[L.A] - Tank
LegendProdigy - GM Tamer
Giorgio Armani - GM Tailor


Top
 Offline   
PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:58 pm 
Site Admin
User avatar

Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2006 4:07 pm
Posts: 1760
Quote:
I mean, this post from Bob sounds like a ranting lunatic. Is it that people lose interest, or they just don't want to work with you?
It is a rant, no argument there. But i'd hardly call my keeping the shard up lunatical. Merely that it still serves a population, so i keep it running.

Ignoring the fact that you're being intentionally antagonistic, the simple answer is regardless of which it is, they burned out.
And I will point out that the teams echo trained up in a vacuum also had a similar issues for attrition.
As did the team thassius trained up.
As did the group cv had.
Now you may say me and echo are similar, but most people would agree me and thassius were oil and water in our approaches, and CV was tangential to all of us.

It's a thankless job everyone thinks they can do better, but everyone underestimates how much work it is, especially the "non-visible" portions in the background.


Whether they burn out in only a month due to a lack of being able to work with the team, or whether its because of the work, the simple answer is they still burn out.
Many many staff haven't particularly seen eye to eye over the years. Personally I see that as a strength. A team that's homogenous generally has more problems than one that is varied and has a healthy amount of conflict. Because there's no yes-men and there's always someone willing to have a fight if they think something's a bad idea, which are the two things that ruin projects in the long term.


Top
 Offline   
PostPosted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 7:14 am 

Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2003 5:37 pm
Posts: 64
Hey folks,

I played Obsidian close to 15 years ago. Had several GM full build chars and was a Seer for a couple years when Broadband was around.

Just wanted to give my two cents on my noobie experience from the past couple of weeks. Skill gains are slow but I just switch chars every now and again to keep my sanity. Some of the blow your brains out boring skills like anatomy and meditation could use a little tweek. I've been mining for weeks and don't mind the grind. Fighting skills (aside from Parrying) seem to gain well. All in all, pretty much the same as when I left. The most frustrating thing since coming back is getting around the map. I can stand killing skeletons and orcs in cove for 7 days straight, but i'd love a change of scenery. When did NPCs stop selling horses? If we don't want NPCs to sell horses, then make it easier to get around the map using the moongates or have more horse spawns around the map, especially near the noobie areas. As for the moongates, keep it random like it is, just take the damn timer off. Also, not sure whether there are still active quests or treasure hunts? Bonus Smithing glove quests still a thing?

_________________
You be dead!


Top
 Offline   
PostPosted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 9:54 am 

Joined: Fri Sep 10, 2004 6:34 am
Posts: 2670
Bot Check: GAMER
Location: Boston
Quote:
Hey folks,

I played Obsidian close to 15 years ago. Had several GM full build chars and was a Seer for a couple years when Broadband was around.

Just wanted to give my two cents on my noobie experience from the past couple of weeks. Skill gains are slow but I just switch chars every now and again to keep my sanity. Some of the blow your brains out boring skills like anatomy and meditation could use a little tweek. I've been mining for weeks and don't mind the grind. Fighting skills (aside from Parrying) seem to gain well. All in all, pretty much the same as when I left. The most frustrating thing since coming back is getting around the map. I can stand killing skeletons and orcs in cove for 7 days straight, but i'd love a change of scenery. When did NPCs stop selling horses? If we don't want NPCs to sell horses, then make it easier to get around the map using the moongates or have more horse spawns around the map, especially near the noobie areas. As for the moongates, keep it random like it is, just take the damn timer off. Also, not sure whether there are still active quests or treasure hunts? Bonus Smithing glove quests still a thing?
kilorious u should come on discord and share some of your thoughts with all of us!

https://discord.gg/XpKjKhV

_________________
Quote:
lol I see now... we don't change monster spawns to suit pkers who get owned by them, sorry.


Top
 Offline   
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post a new topic Post a reply Page 8 of 8   [ 110 posts ]
Go to page Previous 14 5 6 7 8


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  


Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
twilightBB Style by Daniel St. Jules of Gamexe.net