So... I asked a bunch of questions earlier that could be mistaken for expressing an opinion...
I'm new(ish) here, so I doubt my view carries much weight, but under the assumption I might not be the only one thinking it, I should probably explain -
My questions didn't come from some dogmatic desire to avoid change to the original, but instead an attempt to form a view as to whether the change is likely to be good or bad - a cost/benefit/risk assessment, if you will. For that I needed data.
MIH-XTC wrote:I understand there is a sense of attribution and respect for original authors but that doesn’t mean things shouldn’t be changed.
Is that really the primary motivation behind objection to change, or is it more often something more real-world than that? I'm sure purists with such abstract motivations exist, but I'm sure a lot of objections to change come from elsewhere. For example - me - a number of recent changes have made the game worse, not better, thus it's about past experience rather than lofty goals or attachments. The point is, we shouldn't make assumptions.
Also - speculating - the current exercise to convert (or fix the conversion of) the campaign to jscript might be clouding the issue. Its stated objective is to convert the wzscript campaign essentially without change, but that doesn't mean to say there shouldn't be any change, ever (just not for that exercise), but as it's got focus at the moment it might seem that way (?).
MIH-XTC wrote:If we can make the campaign missions more interesting then do it… improve the game and make it better.
I agree. But only if it is genuinely better. The problem is "better" is subjective. e.g. 3.2.x was, presumably, released because someone or group of people thought it was better than what came before, but many people still play on the 3.1.x series (as I understand it) and so presumably don't agree. So either you need a way of getting input on it, at a detailed level, from a large enough subsection of the user base (a lot of work) or you end up carrying a lot of risk (and some of the "villainy" and "outrage" may be end up being with good reason).
MIH-XTC wrote:We act like this is heresy.
Maybe for some, but I doubt true for all. It could be just objections to individual changes, or a desire to avoid opening the pandora's box of what constitutes "better" (i.e. just not go there in the first place), or something else entirely. The danger of making assumptions about motivation is it risks dismissing counter arguments as heresy too, which would be just as bad.
Anyway, it's certainly not where my thoughts are coming from, which are, after some reflection:
My concern is this seems complicated to get right - that pandora's box, if you will, with a high risk of unintended consequences making the end result worse than what we have today, despite best intentions. Which, in itself, wouldn't be enough of a reason to not attempt it, but -
- it should be optional - a mod, as suggested above - that way you'd avoid the worst of the risk and let Darwin decide instead
- what would be the objective anyway? How valuable is that objective? I agree with @Berg's point - if that's the answer - but it feels like a "nice-to-have" rather than a "critical", which leads me to wonder...
- is it the right priority? Because of the aforementioned complexity, I imagine it'd take a considerable time input to get right and I constantly hear about how limited everyone's time is (it's certainly true of me). I think there are more important things that need to be looked into ahead of this.
- might be going off-topic here but if there is a strong desire to spend time on this sort of thing, what would be involved in creating an entirely new campaign (to complement the current one)? No pandora's box with something entirely new, and even a small, modest set of scenarios might be of more interest to most than time spent tinkering with the old. Just a thought... don't shoot me for having it...