While We Wait: The Next Generation

[Azale]

Fair enough. How would one measure NES quality?

Update quality, which is a bit subjective, but you can tell the difference between something a mod scrapped together to shut his players up in 30 minutes and something someone agonized over for 5 hours to create a masterpiece.

Also, the feeling that the moderator genuinely cares about fairness to his players. I don't mean letting one guy win because he always loses, but I mean informing a player why something happened or at least trying to maintain some idea of realism so the player feels he/she has some control over the actions. Not that the whole NES is just them moving pieces, only to have the moderator move them somewhere else to fit his own grand design. If that doesn't make sense, I'm not articulating myself well and I need to start over

Update quantity is important, but not nearly as much IMO. I personally am much more likely to join an NES with sparse but great quality updates versus one with weekly updates that are trash Monthly updates are too much, at that point the NES might as well go into hibernation because I can't remember what I was doing. I have PMs saved from early 2008 for some NES'.

Stats and rules mean little to me. They are extras. I'm a simulationist type I suppose, so I love things that would let me micromanage, but I always fear for the mod's workload. So far we've had no examples of successful simulationist NES', and they take an assload of time to build up too. If the update quality is up to par, the rules can look like Chinese calculus (aka unintelligible) and I won't care (ex. BirdNES1).

This is just some of my rudimentary musings on the subject.

 

[carmen510]

Well, my tale of woe:

CarmenNES01: Space Colonization- Garnered some interest at start, and went on for a painfully long time, as my modding skill increased the player count decreased, although more people joined near the end, before the Ural Federation nuked the entire world.

CarmenNES02- Was a world fresh start on SCC, but died due to my lack of interest. Although it was slightly more decent, it had a very small player base.

CarmenNES03: Kaiserreich- Much better overall, but due to lack of interest in setting, only a select few joined and even fewer stayed.

CarmenNES04- The outlook seems much more hopeful, with more player interest and a decent ruleset. Hopefully will not die off due to lack of interest.

 

[Kozmos]

Gah!

Watched Return of the King again, and now I want to take part in an epic game of absolutes, good vs evil, control of the world. Waves of Horsemen crashing down on my puny enemies, and elephants too big to exist crushing all before them.


*grumble*

Update NK!

Somehow I have the feeling you'd be on the evil side, ordering hordes of weak infantry to their deaths.

 

[Kentharu]

People think music and art have quality yet they disagree on what that quality is. They cannot define that quality. Trying to do this is like saying something is red and not knowing how to define red.

You yourselves say that this "quality" quality of update or whatever, would vary between persons therefore how does one determine what this quality is. Across the board. Qualities subjective nature makes it only a phenomenological definition, thus making it useless.

 

[Azale]

People think music and art have quality yet they disagree on what that quality is. They cannot define that quality. Trying to do this is like saying something is red and not knowing how to define red.

You yourselves say that this "quality" quality of update or whatever, would vary between persons therefore how does one determine what this quality is. Across the board. Qualities subjective nature makes it only a phenomenological definition, thus making it useless.

Compare a CrezthNESI update to a North King update of any sort. Try and tell me NK's update is not substantially better than the former. Try and tell me 99% of people won't agree with that.

I think between categories like good or bad, update quality is easy to distinguish. I'm not inventing a 10 scale here for update quality, just saying that update quality directly correlates to the quality of the NES moreso than any other factor.

 

[Kentharu]

If 100% of people don't agree with it then it is useless because 100% don't agree. The very fact that it is a personal judgment, taste, opinion, removes any objectivity from it and therefore removes the point of having it.

 

[Terrance888]

I am



Elves were evil, didn't give the orcs a chance, stuck up ********

You evil little Ork!

 

[Azale]

If 100% of people don't agree with it then it is useless because 100% don't agree. The very fact that it is a personal judgment, taste, opinion, removes any objectivity from it and therefore removes the point of having it.

Dear goodness, what is your point? No one should strive to do anything better because there is no "better"?

Having what exactly? All I'm saying is, you can have a pretty good general sense of what is good and bad when it comes to NES updates and NES' themselves. It is certainly not useless just because 100% of people don't agree on everything. Simply put,

A Bad NES' problems are that quality is depleted to the point where it's hard to be immersed.

A Good NES' problems are that the effort required to maintain the quality makes it harder to maintain that quality consistently.

My conjecture is that a good NES is what all mods should strive for. The problems of this forum are to find the balance between quality/effort and time consumed so that it becomes easy enough to maintain a good NES.

Otherwise, you have reactionary stuff like the RTOR's that are not good by any measure but expediency for those tired of waiting. This is the fault of the failed good NES' and their mods (of which I am included). I don't blame the players for playing them or the mods for modding them, they just wanna play a damn game and not wait half a year. I understand that.

Do you disagree with any of this? Or are you just trying to smack down some invisible elitism your smelling? Trust me, I'm anything but elitist, I'm just hoping this talking and talking will finally result in some action.

Sorry if I was a bit rambling, this is really my first real delve into articulating my thoughts on this

 

[Kentharu]

Quality has nothing to do with being "better" or getting "better". Quality is a description of the state of a "thing". It also has nothing to do with elitism. I wasn't talking about elitism nor would i care about it TBH. The fact of the matter is that in order to Define a good NES, or a good anything, you have to ascribe good and bad values to that thing. Those good and bad values are Subjective and hence unreliable as a general measurement of what is truly good or bad.

 

[Azale]

Quality has nothing to do with being "better" or getting "better". Quality is a description of the state of a "thing". It also has nothing to do with elitism. I wasn't talking about elitism nor would i care about it TBH. The fact of the matter is that in order to Define a good NES, or a good anything, you have to ascribe good and bad values to that thing. Those good and bad values are Subjective and hence unreliable as a general measurement of what is truly good or bad.

So in your opinion, there is no such thing as a good or bad NES? Seriously? All NES' are created equal?

 

[Dreadnought]

So we shouldn't waste our time reading movie reviews? Most critics seem to agree that a movie is either good or bad; since their opinion is subjective though, those reviews are unreliable? 99 out of 100 critics say that Movie X is the worst movie they have ever seen; as such, Movie X is generally considered downright horrible in articles, magazines, etc. Though, according to your logic, their reasoning is unreliable. Hmm...sorry, your reasoning sounds illogical at best.

 

[Kentharu]

You are totally missing the point.

Because you cannot Define a good or bad NES then saying something is good or bad is pointless. If you can't define red, then you can't say something is red. If you call a red dog then what exactly do you mean? If red has no definition then you mean absolutely nothing by saying red dog.

 

[Dreadnought]

I think you are missing the point. Yes, you can have your own opinions about a NES. However, if many people tend to view it as an excellent NES, then yes, you can assume it is good. And by what logic can you not define a good or bad NES? By that logic, you can't define a good or bad movie, a good or bad book, a good or bad game, etc. Hence my post above:

So we shouldn't waste our time reading movie reviews? Most critics seem to agree that a movie is either good or bad; since their opinion is subjective though, those reviews are unreliable? 99 out of 100 critics say that Movie X is the worst movie they have ever seen; as such, Movie X is generally considered downright horrible in articles, magazines, etc. Though, according to your logic, their reasoning is unreliable. Hmm...sorry, your reasoning sounds illogical at best.

 

[Azale]

You are totally missing the point.

Because you cannot Define a good or bad NES then saying something is good or bad is pointless. If you can't define red, then you can't say something is red. If you call a red dog then what exactly do you mean? If red has no definition then you mean absolutely nothing by saying red dog.

I defined my parameters for a good and bad NES on the top of the page. I don't think your understanding that I don't care about the good-bad delineations debate, I think it's rather ironclad what separates good from bad. And there is a separation. I will not argue this at length.

I just care about making the mods job easier. To this end, I'm working on a project that can hopefully serve as a model for modding good NES'!

 

[bombshoo]

Bad is harder to identify. We can usually say when something is sweet (To at least other people) but we don't all seem too know when something sucks.

 

[Kentharu]

Yes but those parameters are YOUR parameters.

Perhaps those reviews would be a good predictor of a successful NES.

 

[Azale]

Yes but those parameters are YOUR parameters.

Perhaps those reviews would be a good predictor of a successful NES.

Meh, if someone disagrees with me then they are on another planet as far as I'm concerned. I think it's rather undebateable that a good NES depends on quality of updates, and that quality of updates depends on comprehensiveness of the writing and inclusion of the player through an application of fairness directly related to their actions, not mod desires.

 

[LightFang]

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Lots of NESes can be bad for various reasons; the good NESes tend to, even if their subject matter differs, contain pretty much what Azale said. A sense of fairness, quality updates, all that. I won't rehash it. But that's just what I think! Who knows if it's totally applicable...

Kentharu, although you make a good point, that doesn't mean there can't be some quality that's outside of people's impressions.

For example, and this may seem kind of off-topic, but bear with me, we have the problem of induction. We saw the sun rise every day; however, we can't know that it will rise tomorrow. This is also known as the black swan problem, because people thought all swans were white until they found black swans (I hear they were quite ugly too.)

We've seen the sun rise enough (every day of our lives) that we can assume we know, pragmatically, that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, even if we can't be 100% sure due to the problem of the inductive leap. The same sort of thing, I believe, applies to quality in art. If a lot of people like it, it has a good chance of being good, even if it might not actually be.

 

[Dreadnought]

Yes but those parameters are YOUR parameters.

Perhaps those reviews would be a good predictor of a successful NES.

Now I am starting to believe that you are arguing for the sake of argument.

 

[Adrogans]

I think the argument here is less so that there is good and bad NES and more about how quantitatively one can measure said good and bad. And that you can use these measures to create a "good" NES.

Personally you cannot say if something subjective like NES/Movie was good or bad until you have seen the finished product, and as the NES is a work in progress until it dies...

Anyway this all sounded more coherent in my head.