Monk, this is not a public place, I don't want to censor, I just moderate. I tried to explain how to behave and it does not work, so I delete. You saying that deleting message will achieve nothing is making me losing time explaining and bringing the discussion in a not useful place. I hope you understand.
I like what you say about fixing and freezing. I would like to do this since no dev would be happy to leave something wirh bug. I don't know how many men months we can still use to reach this status. Priority should be put on things that could also impact future releases.
When you say we don't have a good approach, it is a wrong approach, nearly insulting. Thanks not to go there.
The Situation in ShootMania
Moderator: English Moderator
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
In regards to bugs in the game; I usually get the feeling when i encounter a bug that it is so obvious and i more often then not don't bother to report it.
Like UI problems, animation issues etc.
But also more subtle once like the sling hook. After 4.1 you're no longer able to use two slings at the same time.
This is just an example, but i find it to be too much effort for me to post this on the forums.
But if there was an in-game feature that let you report minor bugs like this it would really help both you and the players to easier report such small bugs. What do you think of this idea Hylis?
Like UI problems, animation issues etc.
But also more subtle once like the sling hook. After 4.1 you're no longer able to use two slings at the same time.
This is just an example, but i find it to be too much effort for me to post this on the forums.
But if there was an in-game feature that let you report minor bugs like this it would really help both you and the players to easier report such small bugs. What do you think of this idea Hylis?
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Shootmania is the best FPS out there at least for me, and I really enjoy playing it.
There was nothing similar in the 5 years I've been playing and probably never will be.
So I am very interested in future development of Shootmania and I want it to have a good future.
I am struggling with bugs, too and I'm sad that many players left although in Speedball we have a great community and are doing cups every week
Discord really helps to bring the community together.
Although I create content by building maps the last few updates didnt bring anything that was really important for me personally I just encountered more bugs and this was kind of frustrating. Its just like mp2 was much more stable than mp4.1
I really hope you can fix some of these issues in a short time, I think thats also what you want Hylis.
I'll keep supporting the game by playing whenever I can and building maps especially in speedball mode and I really hope there will be a new release at some point maybe when sm and tm are split up and we can attract many more new or old players than we have now.
I believe in the concept of Shootmania very much and when done right and then advertised, it will have a good future
I will never give up on it and I appreciate the ongoing work from nadeo team I hope it turns out good. Community and Nadeo have to work together.
There was nothing similar in the 5 years I've been playing and probably never will be.
So I am very interested in future development of Shootmania and I want it to have a good future.
I am struggling with bugs, too and I'm sad that many players left although in Speedball we have a great community and are doing cups every week
Discord really helps to bring the community together.
Although I create content by building maps the last few updates didnt bring anything that was really important for me personally I just encountered more bugs and this was kind of frustrating. Its just like mp2 was much more stable than mp4.1
I really hope you can fix some of these issues in a short time, I think thats also what you want Hylis.
I'll keep supporting the game by playing whenever I can and building maps especially in speedball mode and I really hope there will be a new release at some point maybe when sm and tm are split up and we can attract many more new or old players than we have now.
I believe in the concept of Shootmania very much and when done right and then advertised, it will have a good future
I will never give up on it and I appreciate the ongoing work from nadeo team I hope it turns out good. Community and Nadeo have to work together.
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Ok, to address what i meant with deleting. Moderating is fine and all, but it is important to let people say stupid/mean/insulting things. By deleting a message whatever was written is lost, no matter how insignificant. Of course, some messages were meant to provoke, but some are just people who can't express themselves very well. Still, i believe it is important to leave all those messages public. That way we show that we are above what was said. Another thing to note is that we all have emotions and are easily hurt by words from others, then we go to an emotional state and write messages that are aggressive and insulting. The way to handle this is not by deleting the messages and showing we were affected by them.Hylis wrote: ↑30 Jan 2019, 19:09 Monk, this is not a public place, I don't want to censor, I just moderate. I tried to explain how to behave and it does not work, so I delete. You saying that deleting message will achieve nothing is making me losing time explaining and bringing the discussion in a not useful place. I hope you understand.
I like what you say about fixing and freezing. I would like to do this since no dev would be happy to leave something wirh bug. I don't know how many men months we can still use to reach this status. Priority should be put on things that could also impact future releases.
When you say we don't have a good approach, it is a wrong approach, nearly insulting. Thanks not to go there.
Regarding the supposed "insult", i didn't mean anything insulting. I was just stating what i learned from by experience. I also work as a developer and the bug on the product have different severity levels. Ones that are critical have to be taken care of in 24h period. Others are in a backlog and no one knows when they will be attended to. But those ones are usually request types, all bugs that affect the performance or usability have to be taken care of accordingly. Still, a video game is not the same type of product and it can have minor performance or usability bugs. Though when major ones pop out, i believe that ignoring them is not a wise choice.
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Two wrong things here Monk
"but it is important to let people say stupid/mean/insulting things"
"showing we were affected by them."
I have left the idea to be affected by negative posts since a long time. It is just that we can have other players or people at the studio that does not have to go through this natural, but bad behavior. It is not forbidden in public area to insult or hit people. So, it's better be in our very own forum, don't you think?
About what you said, I am just trying to keep people out of the area of judging. If there is an issue, we can discuss on it. If people starts to say that we do things wrong while they know quite nothing about it, it's useless. It's not because that your development is done in one way that ours can be done the same way. I hope you see it could be insulting to tell somebody that he is doing his job in the wrong way, even more when you don't know what are the real constraint. Ask a chef burger in 1 minute, you can try. Saying they don't know how to do it, since McDonald can and tell him he is not doing his job properly would be bad. I don't think I am the chef here btw, I am more in the McDonald stuff ^_^
Now, resuming to something more useful.
Keeth,
Your idea seems better than having a full time tester, since making the report more easily would prevent from having somebody launching the game in all the modes, with all the settings, in multiplayer ôO, all day long to see if last update by an engineer did not broke something would not be really efficient.
The priority is somewhere else. We do not really need more bug reports, but more time to fix them OR also having a clearer vision of them would help.
For example, on the 16th of January, I sent personally a message to ask for the cross hair setting bug to be fixed. Two weeks later, he told me he was not able to reproduce it. We have so many things to do, that's it's complicated to sometimes figure our what exactly is the issue and how to reproduce it. So, when an internal deadline arrive (like we had two since then) we move to something else. I am presenting internally the roadmap of Shootmania next Monday ^_^ So I have a lot of a job to do.
Monk is right that when there is a very important bug, we should fix it on the fly. I was more talking about "list of bugs"
4.1 seemed less important for players, but it was a key milestone for the studio. At least, the engineers were happy, since we were able to merge the branch of the last year with current Maniaplanet. It is doomed to generate more bugs, but also a necessity to reduce them in future releases. I believe it was a too big move with small time (but it was already very long internally) to reach a situation were only low level bugs remain.
"but it is important to let people say stupid/mean/insulting things"
"showing we were affected by them."
I have left the idea to be affected by negative posts since a long time. It is just that we can have other players or people at the studio that does not have to go through this natural, but bad behavior. It is not forbidden in public area to insult or hit people. So, it's better be in our very own forum, don't you think?
About what you said, I am just trying to keep people out of the area of judging. If there is an issue, we can discuss on it. If people starts to say that we do things wrong while they know quite nothing about it, it's useless. It's not because that your development is done in one way that ours can be done the same way. I hope you see it could be insulting to tell somebody that he is doing his job in the wrong way, even more when you don't know what are the real constraint. Ask a chef burger in 1 minute, you can try. Saying they don't know how to do it, since McDonald can and tell him he is not doing his job properly would be bad. I don't think I am the chef here btw, I am more in the McDonald stuff ^_^
Now, resuming to something more useful.
Keeth,
Your idea seems better than having a full time tester, since making the report more easily would prevent from having somebody launching the game in all the modes, with all the settings, in multiplayer ôO, all day long to see if last update by an engineer did not broke something would not be really efficient.
The priority is somewhere else. We do not really need more bug reports, but more time to fix them OR also having a clearer vision of them would help.
For example, on the 16th of January, I sent personally a message to ask for the cross hair setting bug to be fixed. Two weeks later, he told me he was not able to reproduce it. We have so many things to do, that's it's complicated to sometimes figure our what exactly is the issue and how to reproduce it. So, when an internal deadline arrive (like we had two since then) we move to something else. I am presenting internally the roadmap of Shootmania next Monday ^_^ So I have a lot of a job to do.
Monk is right that when there is a very important bug, we should fix it on the fly. I was more talking about "list of bugs"
4.1 seemed less important for players, but it was a key milestone for the studio. At least, the engineers were happy, since we were able to merge the branch of the last year with current Maniaplanet. It is doomed to generate more bugs, but also a necessity to reduce them in future releases. I believe it was a too big move with small time (but it was already very long internally) to reach a situation were only low level bugs remain.
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Will you share the roadmap for SM in public at some time? Or is it just internally?
And I have a suggestion for the next SM (or however its called):
It would be really nice if you invite many creators at an early state (all creators of custom modes, map creators, mod creators, …). It will help to work more together and bringing out one game at launch.
And I have a suggestion for the next SM (or however its called):
It would be really nice if you invite many creators at an early state (all creators of custom modes, map creators, mod creators, …). It will help to work more together and bringing out one game at launch.
No risk, no fun!
"Now, we should focus on making things."
"Now, we should focus on making things."
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
We can not share for three main reasons : marketing, disappointment if they change and that we believe being an innovative studio.
We do more than inviting players, we provide tools to do their own maps, modes and stuff. Of course, knowing what tools they need would help more, but it's also link to what we do after releases. What we decide before release is link to deep core technologies or ambitious step to reach wider audiences that are the ones that we don't see enough around. People that already like Shootmania should be the priority, but we can not do only that.
We do more than inviting players, we provide tools to do their own maps, modes and stuff. Of course, knowing what tools they need would help more, but it's also link to what we do after releases. What we decide before release is link to deep core technologies or ambitious step to reach wider audiences that are the ones that we don't see enough around. People that already like Shootmania should be the priority, but we can not do only that.
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Thanks for allowing us a continuation of the discussion, Hylis!
You are doing lot of stuff also based on community requests, and this is great!
But I see a dilemma. You cannot do all tests at your side, because a game cannot really be tested with automatic testing methods.
So you rely on the community for tests, at least at some periods of time.
But the community cannot test everything either, or has a different focus.
Every player has a slightly different impression of a feature, so you often get many interpretations and improvement requests.
How do you make sure that a new feature is tested well? And how do you define that a feature is well enough?
So, you should not rely too much on the community?
One more thing:
Some players are frustrated because things are not working like they should, or rather say, not working like the players think they should.
Some players still believe that any of the Maniaplanet games is finished and in a playable condition.
Most players here in the forum should know by the time that the development is ongoing, sometimes in phases, sometimes with sudden changes.
But on other platforms, like Steam, the anger is much bigger. People expect some value for their money (even if they got the game keys during sales).
There should be some kind of disclaimer, clearly telling that Maniaplanet in its current shape is in development.
And like you did with the Maniaplanet 3 frozen, everyone should have the chance to play with a rather stable version (within some time span like years until the next very stable version is released), even if this means some restrictions (like playing on servers with the same version only).
You are doing lot of stuff also based on community requests, and this is great!
But I see a dilemma. You cannot do all tests at your side, because a game cannot really be tested with automatic testing methods.
So you rely on the community for tests, at least at some periods of time.
But the community cannot test everything either, or has a different focus.
Every player has a slightly different impression of a feature, so you often get many interpretations and improvement requests.
How do you make sure that a new feature is tested well? And how do you define that a feature is well enough?
So, you should not rely too much on the community?
One more thing:
Some players are frustrated because things are not working like they should, or rather say, not working like the players think they should.
Some players still believe that any of the Maniaplanet games is finished and in a playable condition.
Most players here in the forum should know by the time that the development is ongoing, sometimes in phases, sometimes with sudden changes.
But on other platforms, like Steam, the anger is much bigger. People expect some value for their money (even if they got the game keys during sales).
There should be some kind of disclaimer, clearly telling that Maniaplanet in its current shape is in development.
And like you did with the Maniaplanet 3 frozen, everyone should have the chance to play with a rather stable version (within some time span like years until the next very stable version is released), even if this means some restrictions (like playing on servers with the same version only).
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
On Steam, Shootmania has 85% of favorable opinion while Trackmania Turbo has 62% One is unstable, unfinished somehow and far from perfect. The other one, is closed, polish and stable.
I think that the best is to have both, but Maniaplanet is too wide right now to do all this. We have worked this summer and end of 2018 on 4.1 to increase the level of polish. Buddies plug in for example FTW. There is a limit to what we can do. A disclaimer could be something to tell.
Bug reports are always great in private forums. In public, it is more important. Maybe we should nominate some trustful players to be able to sort out bugs in some key area like creative or competitive, which are two pillars of Nadeo games.
I think that the best is to have both, but Maniaplanet is too wide right now to do all this. We have worked this summer and end of 2018 on 4.1 to increase the level of polish. Buddies plug in for example FTW. There is a limit to what we can do. A disclaimer could be something to tell.
Bug reports are always great in private forums. In public, it is more important. Maybe we should nominate some trustful players to be able to sort out bugs in some key area like creative or competitive, which are two pillars of Nadeo games.
Re: The Situation in ShootMania
Thank you Janfo. Many people at the studio think that Shootmania is the best game in the world 
And we love it. And it makes us sad that there is not more people or that there are bugs. We would like it to be good & popular; but we also know that we need to improve tons of things to get there. We also want to add things. So, this is maybe less frustrating for us, because we can work on it. It is SO long!
And we love it. And it makes us sad that there is not more people or that there are bugs. We would like it to be good & popular; but we also know that we need to improve tons of things to get there. We also want to add things. So, this is maybe less frustrating for us, because we can work on it. It is SO long!Who is online
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