CM wasn't pushed intentionally towards being a TDM in the last few years. No Head-Dev on the team said "hey, lets move CM towards a deathmatch game and remove RP".
Instead what happened was a result of poor leadership and a decentralized management position on the staff team.
Rather than having strong leaders who push staff towards a goal the team has a bunch of developers work on whatever they want and do whatever they want. There hasn't been any cohesion to develop CM further beyond QoL and mapping updates.
I said this at the Townhall meeting the other day, the only way CM will drastically improve is if Management on the team change the policies on the staff team to be more centralized. This ideology that "we cant force developers to work on stuff they don't want to" is complete and utter bullshit. CM was the most efficient Development team and server from 2014-2018, there is no excuse in existence to justify how development power has declined so rapidly over the last few years.
Honestly, I don't even really understand why anyone even bothers with this whole RP element of CM anymore. I've spent the last couple of years bitching about how poor the game has become in terms of roleplay and I just finally accepted that this version of CM is a deathmatch game. However, almost like clock-work the Staff team states their trying to improve RP and return to old standards every few months while simultaneously doing nothing major to make that change.
Changing a few rules and tightening enforcement for a month won't change the state of CM. Yet the major change required to CM won't happen because the "Old Guard" is all sitting around in "Emiritus" positions still on the Management remaining perpetually AFK from the game.
To summarize, it's far harder to create an action roleplay game than it is for a shooter deathmatch game. By removing leadership, cohesion and team direction CM ended up devolving into it's most basic form... a shooter game.
Last edited by Fewher; 01-16-2022 at 08:37 PM.
I'd actually argue that Open-Source weakens a game like CM significantly.
In simple terms - it discourages developers to work together towards a common goal and encourages individualism which is counter intuitive to a game like CM which is RP and Lore based.
Open source further siphons away good developers, rather than joining the team officially they can develop at their own leisure and work on projects that they're solely interested. There's nothing wrong with this since it's volunteer, but it severely impacts the quality of content.
If you look back over the last few years the team has been completely de-centralized, with solo developers working on projects that interest them only. Once they leave, or abandon the project they've been working on, the content is stuck in limbo or just straight up removed because no other developer cares to work on it. (SS14 conversion, Intel, MOBA mechanics etc are examples). Where as when you're working together on a single project, if one person leaves it doesn't cause the entire project/content to be abandoned as everyone feels equally entitled to it's development.
The aspect to open-source that is often overlooked is the impact on the games mystery as well. With the players able to look up variables and content that's in testing phases you lose a lot of surprise additions to the game. This is furthered even more so with players who power-game the absolutely shit out it. These are little things, but all add up when players are essentially spoiling their own game for themselves unknowingly or you've got Chad McFuck power-gaming his tits off because he's reading variables in Notepad+
I'd find it VERY hard for those to argue who played during my era of closed-source to say that since CM went open-source the content and development power has been better. CM use to be known for pioneering new mechanics, content, graphics and absolutely dominating other servers when it came to development abilities. Truthfully, other than the legal shit (which was all Apop bs) we never needed to go open-source because we were so efficient with our development team we didn't need the assistance or few benefits that open-source offered us. Arguably CM has fallen so far behind in terms of development power that it would be the perfect example of why open-source is actually terrible for a RP/Lore based game like CM.
I think it's important to understand why SS13 really embraced Open-Source from it's initial conception. Simply, many years ago there were only servers with max 30-40 players and the player base was incredibly low but dedicated. Servers just didn't have the ability or developers to work on their servers so they all shared content across off eachother with their own spin.
As SS13 expanded new servers emerged, with new ideas, completely opposing concepts and in general these servers didn't (and don't) benefit from open-source as much as a server like Paradise or Goon have.
CM has never and will never benefit from an Open-Source development model, it's counter-intuitive to it's game direction (RP/Lore based) and the only benefit is getting a few occasional updates/free labor from the community. In my opinion, sacrificing team cohesion, linear goal development and player influence on development has clearly not worked for the last years since CM went open-source.
I believe there is a time and place for Open-Source, such as SS13 years ago all sharing content among each other. However even now, the divergence is so extreme that open-source has gone from a GAME wide development, to SERVER specific development which is counter-intuitive to unique servers.
I find it very difficult for the player-base to understand the inner workings of development and this clarifies my reason for opposing open-source.
Last edited by Fewher; 02-18-2022 at 05:54 PM.
Haha.
Surely making a deal with the devil, giving away your firstborn son and selling yourself to slavery of being CM dev during closed source was such a "good" thing.
Closed source where some asshole orders bunch of code grease monkeys to do whatever he wants surely encourages team-work.
Are we talking about devs like its a fucking resource? Boo hoo, I can't bind good devs with chains to CM, what a tragedy.
Oh, I really, really miss mysteries like marine armor without visible shoulder pads having no arm armor, or "lethal" mode on smartgun doing more damage.
With closed source, people still just figured out the stuff anyway, it took a bit longer, but it was still a thing, acting like just because there wasn't a notepad file available, there were no powergamers is silly. Instead of making CM actually powergaming-proof, just lets hide every piece of information, job done *pats on the back*
Are we talking about the same RP and Lore in CM that just few months ago had only two companies in their universe, one of which was a pizza delivery service and the other was W-Y producing everything?
Lore (and RP) in old CM was just a big masquerade. Pretend you don't know about aliens for x1000 time, call runner a "red dog", call crusher a "rhino", "whats that in the vents? Rats?". All of that was just a baloon pumped and pumped, pretending to be big, but in reality, having nothing but air inside.
Freelances working on their own projects is a "free labor", while CM code slaves in closed source got payed? And how open source is sacrifacing player influence on development? Isn't that the opposite? Even shmuck like me was able to actually try to change CM code-wise (and it would be probably successfull if only CM dev didn't just immediately stepped in with his own rework of the same thing).
It could be easly changed, by going outside the box. Fuck "alien" lore as a whole, replace them with xenoids, scrub Weyland-Yutani, add some other big corporation, fuck USCM, make it United Americas Colonial Marines, then open donations, pay contributors with cash you made this way, make the game powergame-proof. Here, open-source CM that would combine all benefits of closed and open source, with 0 of their drawbacks.
Predators are already no longer "predators", but "hunters". Trying to eat the cake and have a cake.
Last edited by CABAL; 02-18-2022 at 07:40 PM.
I'm not going to entertain you with a factual or logical debate as your entire response is literally an opinion piece with no first-hand experience with development or the staffing inner workings.
But I will respond with my own opinionated reasoning as to why you're full of shit.
To remind you, your opinion doesn't look towards the big picture but rather what "you" want and often ignores the benefit for others simply because you're "bored of it".
ie; //showthrea...9670#post79670
Your holy and sorrow argument that you're trying to parade around about our developers in the past being slaves and forced to work for CM is just a "Straw man" argument towards closed-source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
However to address it - we had the largest development team, we often gave our developers gift-cards for their work, people intentionally left other servers to join our team and no one was ever fired for not working on something. For added democracy, we had weekly meetings about the direction of the game and things the development team wanted to add, everyone got a say and everyone worked together to accomplish those goals. I think the irony of your argument for "developer rights and freedom!" is that you don't actually give a shit. You never advocated for the developers in the past and you don't advocate for developer improvements even now, as long as they keep providing you a free game you'll be here to use them as a poor excuse simply because you don't like me.
This hurts to read, Roleplay in all forms being tabletops, video-games, textually and live action is all a big masquerade. Everything about Roleplay is made up, it's a person's creativity, a communities imagination and a creators guidance which is all hot air inside fundamentality because Roleplay is all about a person wanting and making an effort to make Roleplay happen.
I can't believe you don't even understand what constitute roleplay at this point man.
Last edited by Fewher; 02-18-2022 at 09:00 PM.