Commandline poll

[Olrox]

Olrox, but it is causing misunderstanding...
...I do want this fix.

You know, at this point, I'll refrain from repeating myself. Think what you will, I only wanted to say what I think, and I'm not even from the staff, I'm not even "official", so I don't have the duty of explaining anything to you - nonetheless, I've tried to, apparently in an unsuccessful way.

At last, I think that you really should be sure about what you say, or at least make it clear when you're not sure - feel free to trash this piece of advice, if you want to. This comment is not about this particular post, but rather about your posts overall. My opinion is worth exactly "1 opinion", don't go around thinking that it is worth more than that (please don't feel depressed because of it ).

~Olrox

[Zarel]

Then when someone can't agree on the ML or IRC or staff forums, then they make the issue more public to get more support in hopes of convincing everyone else to allow this fix, and I do want this fix.

Which is not what's going on here. As far as I know, the team doesn't want decisions like these to be made by popular support. Hence why all I'm doing is explaining what's going on because I was questioned, not asking for feedback.

P.S. You could've told us you changed your name from Flank4. Took me a while to figure that out..

[Olrox]

P.S. You could've told us you changed your name from Flank4. Took me a while to figure that out..

-2 internets for you, Crymson

~Olrox

[Crymson]

P.S. You could've told us you changed your name from Flank4. Took me a while to figure that out..

-2 internets for you, Crymson

~Olrox

I thought it was obvious I was flank4.
Just where should I have announced that anyway?

Which is not what's going on here. As far as I know, the team doesn't want decisions like these to be made by popular support. Hence why all I'm doing is explaining what's going on because I was questioned, not asking for feedback.

I am too confused to what is going on then.
The poll is asking for feedback.

[Olrox]

I thought it was obvious I was flank4.
Just where should I have announced that anyway?
(...)
I am too confused to what is going on then.
The poll is asking for feedback.

Changing usernames always causes confusion... You have no avatar, and you are relatively new, which makes things worse for anyone to reach the conclusion that you've only changed your name. What can we use to identify you? Go into an advanced search and remember all your posts and deduce that the author had changed?

You could've created a topic in the lounge saying that you've changed your username, it would be polite to do so, before acting like it's obvious.

And I thought it was obvious that the poll's question is "Do you want to use a command line to launch Warzone?" and not "Should the devs remove support for X to implement Y?" - Zarel already said that many times. The poll is simple, nothing confusing about that - what is confusing is the misunderstanding that occurred, and that's why I think that any further discussion about this is only going to make things worse.

I'm sorry if I was the one to make arise questions about the origin of the discussion that Zarel wanted to illustrate a point for.

~Olrox

[Zarel]

-2 internets for you, Crymson

Be nice, Olrox. Crymson's done nothing wrong here...

I thought it was obvious I was flank4.
Just where should I have announced that anyway?

/shrug/ Lounge?

It was obvious after a while, but not immediately so.

I am too confused to what is going on then.
The poll is asking for feedback.

Remember way back in page 1 of this thread? When I said:

• For like the seventeenth time, this poll is not about that.
  
  I made this poll because I wanted to know how many people used the command line. No more, no less. Why I wanted to know that is completely irrelevant for the purposes of answering the question, and knowing it could introduce bias.

Well, for like the twenty-fifth time, this poll is not about that.

Changing usernames always causes confusion... You have no avatar, and you are relatively new, which makes things worse for anyone to reach the conclusion that you've only changed your name. What can we use to identify you? Go into an advanced search and remember all your posts and deduce that the author had changed?

Eheh. Using search was how I figured it out. And only because I saw the rank icon, which meant that he'd made quite a few posts, but I didn't remember anyone with that username making that many posts.

[Olrox]

-2 internets for you, Crymson

Be nice, Olrox. Crymson's done nothing wrong here...

But... it was a joke... OK, this board isn't for fun, sorry

~blargh

[Safety0ff]

Just where should I have announced that anyway?

Sometimes people put a note in their signature.

As for this poll, I don't really see the point.

[stiv]

- Note that no actual bugs have been found in my code; they're just really paranoid that there might be one (which is possible, but I doubt it will be worse than the outright crashing that currently happens, nor will it be difficult to fix).

It is a little early to be claiming there are no bugs in your patch. You just committed it this morning. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Adding new features in the middle of a beta is bad software development practice. Especially in a case like ours where the code is extremely brittle and we know for a fact it is difficult to make changes without breaking something. How many times, for example, has the "build on burning oil" bug been squashed only to reappear? Feel free to come up with other examples.

Our goal is to get a product out the door. We have been trying to do that since January or so without success. That we are approaching beta 15 without being able to release a working WZ is simply appalling. No one is advocating killing off mods. All we are trying to do is impose a little discipline on our development process so we can release version 2.3. We all want a complete working mod system. Right now, that is a target for 2.3.1.

[Zarel]

It is a little early to be claiming there are no bugs in your patch. You just committed it this morning. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I never said I was sure of it, or that I could guarantee it. Just that I believe that it's fairly unlikely to have bugs, and extremely unlikely that the bugs would be worse than the problem it fixes.

Adding new features in the middle of a beta is bad software development practice. Especially in a case like ours where the code is extremely brittle and we know for a fact it is difficult to make changes without breaking something. How many times, for example, has the "build on burning oil" bug been squashed only to reappear? Feel free to come up with other examples.

There's a difference between adding major features (which is what is usually cautioned against) and fixing a crash. I'm sure if you asked people "Is it a good idea to fix a crash in the middle of a beta?", pretty much everyone would say yes.

The problems with the "build on burning oil" fixes that they didn't always work. Most importantly, though, they didn't introduce any new bugs, so they aren't really a good example of the flaws of fixing too many bugs during a beta.

[Kreuvf]

I'm sure if you asked people "Is it a good idea to fix a crash in the middle of a beta?", pretty much everyone would say yes.

It's easy to get support from "everyone" if you choose the questions carefully enough.

[stiv]

When it comes to statistics, web-based polls are simply entertaining noise. In addition to the difficulty of choosing good, unbiased questions, there are problems with your sample being self-selecting and no controls on voting multiple times.

[Zarel]

It's easy to get support from "everyone" if you choose the questions carefully enough.

True, which is why the rest of my post, and my other posts in this thread, lay out detailed reasoning for why it's a good idea.

It's easy to find one "unsubstantiated" claim in my posts if you ignore the part that substantiates it, isn't it?

I don't mean to flame you, but it's frustrating when someone replies to my statements out of context, in a situation where the context matters.

[Kreuvf]

I don't mean to flame you, but it's frustrating when someone replies to my statements out of context, in a situation where the context matters.

I do not see where this is out of context. It's a general statement, just like my reply is a general statement.

[Zarel]

This statement:

I'm sure if you asked people "Is it a good idea to fix a crash in the middle of a beta?", pretty much everyone would say yes.

It's easy to get support from "everyone" if you choose the questions carefully enough.

can either be taken at face value, in which case it is a completely off-topic statement (in a "yes, and the square root of 36 is 6, but neither statement has any relevance to this thread" kind of way), or there is subtext here:

The core of what we are discussing is whether or not to fix a crash in the middle of a beta, which is widely agreed to be a good thing. (The context here is that I talk about mitigating factors such as the possibility of bugs in the crashfix in the rest of my post.)

You're ignoring mitigating factors such as the possibility of bugs in the crashfix.

You'll notice that your subtext, when directly written out, is a false statement.