tain.totalcodex.net

...that the 'good' we ascribe is a subjective perception. I think your example of masses vs. experts having different views of whether something is 'good' or how good something is reinforces my point - that change itself is not inherently good or bad, it is the subjective evaluation of the change which makes one think the change is one thing or another. In your example, different groups of people may have differing views on how 'good' a wine is, but that is a subjective evaluation based on at least different criteria between the groups as to what constitutes 'good' (or 'quality' in your wording).

I can't subscribe to the idea that 'good' or 'quality' is entirely subjective. Instead, I allow experts - people who can identify, understand and describe the nuances of a given thing - to define the criteria of quality. I won't entirely disregard the opinion of the masses, but I do believe, The masses, particularly in first impressions, can be entirely - objectively - wrong about quality.

For the sake of clarity, lets take my wine example to an extreme, and put piss in a bottle. Slap a nice label on it, serve it in a fine establishment, or whatever else it might take to warp the perceptions of one of the "masses" and they're going to drink it and think, "mmm, good wine". Experts will not be fooled because they are too "attuned" to wine to have their perceptions easily warped.

You can argue that all that matters is the perception, and that if someone perceives piss as good wine, then, subjectively, it is good wine. But it's not good wine, it will never be good wine, in fact, it's not even wine - it's piss. Give the fooled person a bottle to take home, and later when he's not distracted, he'll eventually realize, "This isn't fine wine! OMG, I've been drinking piss!".

Often, change can also have its quality objectively defined. And quite often, people will react negatively to something new, even if it's good, because when it comes to things we're not experts on, our perceptions are easily fooled. One person starts a rumor about a new Myth patch claiming it makes dwarf bottles dud too often. The next person, overhearing this and worried it might be true, experiences a random, normal dud, and is convinced the patch is a bad change.

This can be argued every which way, and we both know, no matter what, you're not going to suddenly realize your perception of the quality of the inventory feature was wrong all along. I mean, what if someone doesn't even like wine? What if they like... milk. How good a wine is irrelevant to them, right? But that's not that point.

Should great wineries halt their efforts to advance the quality of wine because someone prefers milk? Or should they maybe try to make wine that also tasted like milk as a compromise to make everyone happy? Of course not. I'm sure you agree wineries should be allowed to pursue their art without worrying about people who don't even appreciate wine. And I'm sure you agree I should have been allowed to make Mazzarin's Demise the way I did without worrying about the people who don't like inventory.

BUT should the wineries start genetically altering cows to try and make all milk taste more like wine? That's exactly what a lot of people thought Project Magma was doing with Myth - changing their milk.

Lets be clear about this: Project Magma never, ever changed a single thing about Myth II 1.3. Not one digital bit was altered; 1.3 is still there on your Myth II CD, entirely unchanged.

What Project Magma changed was the community. The community changed by playing something new and different. You might not like the fact, but it's pointless blaming Project Magma for it. You may as well blame Bungie for being too successful with Halo, selling out and not making Myth 3, or Blizzard for luring a portion of the Myth community over to WoW, or even Intel for making faster chips that make more modern computer games possible.

And here's my point: the change initiated by Project Magma was an objectively good one because it sparked and prolonged interest in an otherwise dying game. It evolved the game and that evolution far outweighed the benefits of sticking with 1.3. Re-reading this thread made me realize that there may have been even more evolution if it hadn't been for the warped perceptions some people had about the patches and all the time they made the programmers waste. And by the way, the most common usage of the word evolution is to mean positive progress.

ChrisP. I think there is some confusion over the concepts of 'good' and 'quality', I feel like I am arguing about 'good' and you are arguing about 'quality' - not mutually exclusive concepts granted, but in the context conversation I was having in my mind they are quite different. Hope it's enough to say, that I don't disagree with your comments on quality though I think I would place less stock in what the 'experts' say in terms of accepting other people's evaluations of 'quality' - the hardcore gamers you mention in your other example could arguably be considered the 'experts' who you might not agree with in terms of what is 'good' or 'quality'.

I agree completely about how frequently people's (incorrect) perceptions can be taken as reality. I've seen it enough in life to firmly believe that for practical purposes perception=reality. I worked on massive software project once way back in the pre-gui days of computer interfaces and I worked as part of the interface team. We came up with less-error prone ways of data entry (things common in the internet world like dynamic contextual pop-up selection lists, filling in valid values from the first few letters typed, etc) that were MUCh easier to do than the old 'type everything into a static 80 column by 24 row ascii 'form'. But when users tried out the new way of say 'Adding a new customer to the database' they said they didn't like it, that the popups and autocomplete took longer than just typing it. The primary complaint was that the new system was that it took so much longer to do anything. this meme rapidly spread and was accepted as reality even though we had timed people on the old system they had been using for 10 years and on the new system after having only used it for 30 minutes and the old way consistently took 2-3x as long as the new way.

Yes, I completely agree you should have been free to make Mazzarin's Demise any way you wanted, regardless of what ANYONE else might wish. For the record - I rarely have time to sit down and play multihour solos (and even less frequently can find anyone willing to play alongside me that long) so I am not an expert at Mazz by any stretch, but Mazz was not one of the examples I was thinking of when I was thinking of maps that overuse inventory to the point they don't feel mythlike. Imo, other then the uniqueness (at least at it's time of creation) of the completely-over-the-top insane amount of enemies you have to face in Mazz, Mazz feels very mythlike.

Also, not sure if you were speaking specifically to me - but I don't believe I've ever 'blamed' Project Magma for anything. at least I hope not. I have the utmost respect and appreciation for the people actively working and creating to keep Myth alive.



Of course all that said, I'll put on my tinfoil hat and SWEAR there are some physics related behaviors that changed between 1.5 and 1.6.

Also, not sure if you were speaking specifically to me - but I don't believe I've ever 'blamed' Project Magma for anything.

No, of course not. Most of what I wrote are sort of afterthoughts to Igmo's eloquent OP and 2004 proposal to cease all modifications of Myth. It was an emotional subject for many back then, and now, years later, I feel I have the hindsight and... wisdom(?) to better express why Igmo's proposal was about as brilliant as filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen.

Nothing in your replies was remotely offensive and I apologize if I gave the impression of being offended (my wife tells me my enthusiasm often comes across as anger). On the contrary, I enjoyed this dialogue - and a great many others we've had over the years - because you are a thoughtful, logical and worthy debater. Besides, not many others have the patience to sit through my epic posts.

Till the next time we disagree, or perceive we disagree when we really don't...

/bow

ChrisP wrote:Till the next time we disagree, or perceive we disagree when we really don't...

/bow

Chris stop RPing

ChrisP wrote:Nothing in your replies was remotely offensive and I apologize if I gave the impression of being offended (my wife tells me my enthusiasm often comes across as anger).

Really? Nothing I wrote was even REMOTELY offensive? I'll have to try harder next time.

btw, I found your apology really offensive, it is a perfect example of change that is not good, of change that does not = life. In fact, I blame this change of tone for killing this conversation. ergo, change=death.

Just to put my 20c in, as one of the main instigators of change in Myth for better or worse:-

Looking back on it, our intentions were great but we really didn't go about it very well. We needed to get alongside expert myth 2 players - we had some of those on board the test team, but not very many & they were outweighed by TFL experts, which is understandable given that Magma was historically a TFL mapmaking group.

We did not, as some believed, try to turn Myth 2 into TFL. We wanted to keep them totally seperate, hence the invention of vTFL. We did not, as some rumoured, introduce tons of mapmaking features at the detriment of normal Myth 2 play. Yes, there were many new mapmaking features but they had no affect at all on standard Myth (and still don't).

We failed in two other areas.

Firstly in 1.4 we tried to do way too much in one hit, which resulted in many things not done at all well. Much of the 1.4.x and 1.5.x development was aimed at properly finishing or debuging changes in 1.4. We should have limited the scope of 1.4 and put many of its changes in subsequent versions, ensuring they were done properly.

Secondly, some saw us as enemies of Myth (or of Playmyth) and did everything possible to denigrate the patches & our reputation in the community (see the above rumours). We did not succeed in countering this - those who were attacking us had the ears of the community and we did not - so we didn't win the PR battle. This attack really came out of left field for us & by the time we realised what was going on it was too late. This brings me back to my original point - if we'd brought in the most expert & respected Myth 2 players to help test & guide any changes then we would have not only avoided many bugs, but also been in a good position to survive the attacks.

All that said I'm still amazed at how well its all turned out, and Myrd has really picked up the ball and run with it since

Iron, to be totally honest, the people who were trying to sully Project Magma for trying to fix bugs and add improvements are people who didn't belong playing this game.

I've been around since TFL was out, and from then until today, I've never ONCE been impacted negatively by a Myth patch. If anything, I've only noticed the improvements, which I think is the goal all along for developers.

The only people I can see bitching about change are the rank whOres who wanted to have their little edge and ePeen kept intact, and those who just didn't like MythDev at all, and could never be pleased.

Everyone has/is done a great job at keeping Myth alive as long as it has, especially being owned by a company that doesn't even acknowledge it's existence.

GodzFire wrote:Iron, to be totally honest, the people who were trying to sully Project Magma for trying to fix bugs and add improvements are people who didn't belong playing this game.

Not necessarily bad people, just ill informed.

The Elfoid wrote:Not necessarily bad people, just ill informed.

No they ARE bad people. Bad Evil People who should be shunned like the Feh Feh Pi Goh they are.

Do we really have nothing better to do than bring back 25 posts that just start debates/arguments over nothing? Coulda Woulda SHoulda Shouldnt Have.... story of everyones life *heads to addictinggames.com*

Continue on....

Iron, first, hi! Second, while I don’t necessarily totally disagree with any of your points, I think you give them far too much weight.

To start with, being an expert at playing a game isn’t the same as being an expert at making (or improving) a game - no more than eating a lot makes you an expert on food. Expert food tasters (yes, the job exists and apparently requires years of training) can take a bite of a new food product and describe the flavors on over a dozen scales, list the ingredients, and often where the ingredients came from. Self-fashioned cola experts (I’m a diehard Coke drinker myself) can usually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests if you give them one of each. But give them three samples, two Pepsi and one Coke, or vice versa, and ask them which one is not like the other two, and the success rate is just over a third, or about the same as a random guess. I believe we saw a lot of similar phenomenon among the “Myth expertsâ€

$100 Million+ a month -- no way... per year mb, but not per month -- that'd be $1.2 billion a year!

If it's true, then heck -- let's start one of those companies!

I agree with ChrisP that you might be giving them too much weight, Iron. Anybody remember how 1.7 began? Some "expert" started a thread on the MWC forums about how Magma ruined Myth and stuff. Saying that Magma introduced a certain bug that apparently messed a game he was playing. And that some updates were made for the benefit of mapmakers only. People from different sides joined the thread and either tried to claim it was true or that it was false. He even wondered why no one from Magma had come to the thread and said anything.

But the fact was that some of you guys did. This "expert" never had a magma forums account nor knew of any of the screen names the programmers go by, so he had not noticed Iron and Myrd post in that thread. He didn't trust Myrd. I guess he wanted some sort of resume to know if Myrd knew enough about coding stuff. Myrd wasn't interesting in proving himself, I imagine. After talking to Iron privately I imagine Iron told that guy of Iron's programming resume. Then and only then, did he trust Iron. Iron did some testing, and turned out the bug had been there since Bungie's 1.3. So after a long thread that started with insults, Iron got encouraged to work on 1.7. Then Iron kinda got busy shortly there after and disappeared again.

No he didn't, he's right here

ChrisP, great to see you posting here again! I beg to differ a little re the old PR war - I wasn't a "general" as I was way too busy working on the code to be able to fight those battles. You were far more active than I was

I understand what you're saying with WoW, but I don't think we could have risked making those kind of changes with Myth, nor could we now.

The reason being that WoW is still on sale, its Blizzard's flagship product for years to come with a subscription-based revenue model, and its still growing. New players come in that don't know about old changes & hence past things are forgotten. Most existing players are hooked, so even if there's changes they hate they're likely to play on through it.

Myth, otoh, was no longer being sold & had a mostly static player base with few noobies and had already gone through enough disruptions with the closure of b.net. If we'd changed things too much either the patches would have been rejected by the community or we'd have caused such fragmentation that the game would have died. Anyway, the mapmaking tools give incredible scope for new ideas without messing with the gameplay of the original units.

Unlike WoW, Myth's future looks pretty bleak simply because its a closed commercial product that's no longer for sale. Were it open source it could be advertised everywhere & bring in a steady stream of new players. I just can't see any way that's going to happen, so sad as it seems Myth will continue to dwindle until one day its no more.

Btw I didn't really mean getting a stack of new "expert" players, rather getting a few of the very best Myth II equivalents of Shaister on board. We didn't do that at the time - we didn't know who they were even. Our bad

iron wrote:No he didn't, he's right here

Hehe, I meant back when 1.7 started production in 2007, it seemed like you disappeared after the first beta.

iron wrote:I understand what you're saying with WoW, but I don't think we could have risked making those kind of changes with Myth, nor could we now.

I think ChrisP was using that as an example not that he was implying to make such drastic changes to Myth gameplay. He just meant that in comparison, it doesn't seem reasonable for people to be so against the Myth updates when they don't do great changes like in WoW.