I just want to point out that in the game that you could have transcended any time - why not rush through the three turns or whatever it takes, doing nothing that doesn't speed the build, for the sake of sweetening your audience's experience? It's minutes of effort,
BOOM! there goes one of my concerns.
AARs are stories, y'know
An hour, really?
ISTR that you're not much for hab domes and populations over 16
I like to grow all my cities as big as they can get with a bunch of Sky Hydroponics (and Nessus and Orbital),
and crawler my capital
-made a super science city because zero inefficiency
all the way up to pop 127 which is the limit before a rollover bug kicks in
I play on transcend on normal maps -because much bigger is too tedious for even my blood to fill up with bases-
and use every exploit known to man and at least one I seem to be the discoverer of.
One of my games tends to take about five days of doing very little else, well over 12 hours play a day, so I don't have to tell you it would take well over a month writing it up in any detail to speak of.
Oh, and protip: in a recent game, you seemed to have gotten all the com frequencies first, and then raised EC selling some of them around. I'd counsel you not to do that, as com frequency money is peanuts, and you enabled one of the others to call an election before you were ready.
The stuff is crack to our kind of personality, isn't it?
I discovered CivII after SMACX, and though it's primitive by that comparison, lacking the faction personality/story and features like terraforming, it's a solid little game of which I am quite fond, and has burned many weeks worth of my life. It's the civ game other than SMACX I'd most like the forum to get into kicking around.
BTW, after I posted that, I realized it was only 1997 when I was obsessively playing the demo - found the full game in a $5 bin late in the year, and I still have that copy. I'm super-cheap, but it was a sawbuck well, well-spent...
If you are negative and have a callous attitude in an AAR or LP, why would a reader want to hang with you?
But even the mechanical players want SOME resolution to the game other than "I just blew it of... Oh well..... time for AAR #55 that I will blow off too!!!!"
That is the elephant in the room.
That, and release schedule. Where do you find time? That's a lot of unfinished AAR threads. I managed to do around 7 or so.
I think if I did more, people would get tired of my drunk, crud spamming arse and boot me off the forums.
-Just throwing that out there, 'cause I really would like to see some action in the public forum and build a writers' community...
b, that's at least two other people besides me who've volunteered that they agree all the quitting is problematic.
-Just throwing that out there, 'cause I really would like to see some action in the public forum and build a writers' community...
Yeah... the problem is that for serious writing, needing an audience isn't just "nice to have" for me anymore. It's mandatory. The last free writing anyone got, was my fanfic about what would happen if Bilbo had died in Smaug's cave. I don't expect anyone to "bow down" to me, but I've been told by several people that it's a good piece of writing. Hmm, now I can't even find it on Reddit anymore. That's weird, I wonder if they actually delete old posts in /r/WritingPrompts? In which case, I'm beyond having no audience, it was totally drowned by other prompts even when I wrote it. Took a look at all the accompanying spam, and it was like trying to sell literature in a flea market! It impressed upon me the difficulties of gaining a real audience, let alone monetizing it. I have several writer friends who are excellent but still haven't pulled it off.
Getting people on the innerwebs you've never met to do things is more an art than a craft,
Have you got debate training? To say simply that I believe the opposition has failed to make its case and sit back down is considered a valid -if risky and therefore showy and pick your shots very carefully- tactic. I do not invoke that in this case -though there's the temptation- because I've moved on; our conversations have other topics we can profitably pursue. -BUT, wow, this IS going to come up again if anyone takes an interest enough to do some serious reading in here and bothers to express an opinion, high-confidence projection.b, that's at least two other people besides me who've volunteered that they agree all the quitting is problematic.
My view on that: it bothers someone. It bothers 3 of you, for instance. One can presume there are other people on the internet who are bothered by it. However the internet is a large place, with a lot of diversity of opinion on what's good or bad. It is not generally speaking the metric of an author to make sure that everyone is satisfied, in all the ways they wish to be satisfied. Audiences do sort themselves out. Traffic arguments are an experiment, measured by page hits, not an a priori certainty. 3 people may think it's the end of the world, 7 people may like it just fine, or vice versa.
Authors and game designers also take "objections" from audiences with grains of salt. Audiences are often not articulate about what exactly their problem with a work is. They know something is bugging them, but they don't usually do a good job of separating out what the problem really is. For instance in the present instance, it took some time to sort out that negativity is the bigger problem, as opposed to quitting. Those concerns are interrelated, but they're also separable.
Let's say I wrote an AAR that was all filled with happy sauce. Just ponies farting rainbows everywhere, Chairman Yang's genejacks dancing mad happy about how much they were contributing to the Recycling Tanks. Totally worthy of a Placator merit badge, soma to spare. And I didn't finish it, in the same 99.9% sense that I've not finished a lot of my games. Knocked the king over, "mate in 2 moves". If I had totally pumped sunshine up your skirt the whole time, how difficult do you imagine it would be to swallow my AAR?
Let's say I did the opposite. Pissed and moaned about what a lousy game SMAC is, the whole !@#$@# time. How boring it is to push the units around, oh I'm being griefed by a market crash again, etc. yadda yadda. But by gum it was a long writeup and I hit the "I WIN" buttons like a good little Completionist.
Which do you want on your HOME page? I hope the point is abundantly clear. Negativity is a far bigger problem than quitting. I think we already agreed on this some time ago, and that was the basis for us moving on. Negativity is something that, past a certain point, I do take seriously. That's why this thread exists.
Did you know the Huffington post does not pay writers?
- A lot of the writers, particularly the gaming world, all know each other. They were in the same voice chat in the right guilds. They went to the same conventions. They think alike and are the same types of people.
- If you want tons of readers, you need a more mainstream stuff. And it's time dependent.
AC is too, too niche for that, if that is your goal. If not... continue forward.
EA is a problem for any SMAC2, alas, apparently an insurmountable one. -And I daresay if the rights could be untangled, Firaxis has to work through 2K and --- my experience with THOSE guys does not take my hand and wander sweetly over to the optimism tree.
People historically have noted the thanklessness of Grognards in wargaming as well
I do wonder about the healthiness of working on the 4X TBS genre at all. Definitely people have noted the thanklessness of it. People historically have noted the thanklessness of Grognards in wargaming as well. On the other hand, the fact that nobody did better than SMAC, or even matched it frankly, smells like a market opportunity for the right individual. If you're the wrong individual or team though, you get killed in 4X TBS. The recent study on that would seem to be Star Drive 2. Apparently they got some critical success, but they subsequently folded up shop for some reason. I haven't finished postmorteming them. They had an active developer in the Reddit /r/4Xgaming for some time. Some people would complain at him, and I wonder at the time expenditure of allowing people to do that.
That said, when wargamers do rage, they go off in anal-retentive nerd rage glory.
You see, a great majority of AAR readers (that are lurkers) never play the game. They want stories.
Dwarf Fortress is a great example. 1980 called and wanted it's interface back, yes. Then again, many of the games of the 1980s had better interface. Most people don't have the time nor inclination to sit through a play session. BUT - they love the stories.
Can't ignore that. Why turn down the views?
What does one get from views? Money? Career status? Business partners?
if you don't see your self-interest in having enough cool people here making comments and conversation,
Heh, I have declined to write "the public monetized ballad of a homeless guy living out of his car with his dog", obvious though that may have been to do. I doubt there can be any serious money in it, and it would be a lot of work for a pittance. There's also the problem of being inauthentic: any kind of success, ends the reason to write! Unless one lies. All I've actually cared to write, are treatises on "how to do this same as me", for those motivated enough to figure such things out. I went to Reddit's forums on this sort of thing recently, and dumped the contents of my brain for awhile. It's all there in the archives now. So if someone has the minimum discipline of searching archives, instead of asking the same old questions every day, they can get the answers.
The community itself proved to have no other value to me. For one thing, I came to realize that the overall environment of Reddit towards women is toxic and I'll never get a date from those van/car dweller forums. Women lurk and flee as a matter of survival. For another thing, those places are overrun by rich people who do expensive builds. Glory hounds on YouTube, typically. They don't live like I do, they aren't practical with "any vehicle you have, any life skill you already have, any money you don't have". Finally, even with people who are living like I do, I'd just get in fights wtih them about stupid things. Differences of personality, some jerk who's handling his self-image problems by declaring everyone on food stamps to be the scum of the earth, people with obsessive fears about the image of homelessness... low consciousness stuff. Should I be shocked? No, I shouldn't be, but there wasn't a sense of shared value there, so I moved on.