Forum reorganization January 2010

[Rotonen]

So, things got shuffled around a bit. We might have tweaked the special forum ranks a bit too.

I hope this makes things more clear.

[feline monstrosity]

Much nicer! However I'm not authorised to find out how to help?

[John P]

Thoughts on reorganization:

It looks brilliant and the organization is fantastic. I only have two concerns.

First a minor one - Off Topic is above Player Talk which is misleading as to the forum's importance. Perhaps until there is a dedicated (and populated) TMW server, Player Talk can be a "General" forum for the time being.

Second - The development forums are too overlapped at the moment for separation in my opinion (Especially graphics). Where do requests from TMW developers go? In the eA development forums?

Sorry in advance if this was meant to be explained in the "How to Help" forum.

Also sorry for criticizing without solution. Its not usually my style.

[Wombat]

I like the look. "How to Help" needs to be available to all people to view. It is right now a "not authorized" forum.

About development forums: I like the changes in them and I'd think that as of this reorganization that the forums be treated according to their subject matter. "Technical Development" makes more sense than "General Development", the latter of which I thought was confusing with "Content Development". So anyways, If this means that people show their skill with eA before moving to mana, I find that acceptable. TMW's CR1 as a pioneering release while eA development is a sandbox for ideas, that kind of thing.

Not sure if this helps to clarify or confuses things more, but as far as content goes and to my understanding:
Jax - content manager (approves eA content for the server)
Rotonen - CR1 lead (approves CR1 project content)

If this is misleading, please correct me. If there are more developers involved in finalizing content, let me know

While I'm still learning git, by understanding it along with understanding how to make content, git can make content approval faster and more possible. Mix that with irc discussions on #tmw-content and #tmw-art and building content contributor teams is more possible. Building a team to tackle content desired to be in the game makes contributing more fun and easy.

IRC chat is also helpful in blowing off some steam if your forum post gets trolled without feeding trolls and to give encouragement if/when content is turned down. But that is just my experience. Just some thoughts.

[bcs86]

I'm flattered to be recognised as a contributor but there are some major changes to be made to these rankings to avoid confusion:

it feels very off for me to have the same board ranking as "i", he is more like a "lead contributor", when he speaks the graphics people listen. For this reason I think that "contributor" rankings must be their own subset of board rankings.

It is impossible to automatically rank people by contribution because the board rankings go by post count.
Also, it would not be practical to use "graphics contributor", and "lead graphics contributor" because contributors can be expected to hop around the various fields of game development.

What I'm really hoping to see is that my ranking is not the same as great contributors such as "i".

[Crush]

I fixed the problem with the restricted link to the "how to help" page.

[Rotonen]

First a minor one - Off Topic is above Player Talk which is misleading as to the forum's importance. Perhaps until there is a dedicated (and populated) TMW server, Player Talk can be a "General" forum for the time being.

The offtopic section is not tied to any server, it is just general offtopic about anything. As for the player talk sections, TMW will have a community section just as the eA server has now, once it actually has a public server online. The first sections in the TMW server community forum will be for dev.themanaworld.org and testing.themanaworld.org. Hopefully at some point this project gets to the point where we will have a player talk section too since then we'd actually also have players.

Second - The development forums are too overlapped at the moment for separation in my opinion (Especially graphics). Where do requests from TMW developers go? In the eA development forums?

Well, they are two entirely different content projects. eA has technical development on themanaworld.org since we still do that. For TMW, the technical development of the platform we're going to use for realizing the game is on the Manasource project. TMW is just one of the parties going to use the technology in question to build a game on top of it. I hope things will settle into their correct grooves rather fast. The overlap mostly comes from the confusion we've had for a long time. Just plain moving the topics from under eA to the correct read only section is one approach I'm considering here, but there must have been a reason why the artists in question put the topics there in the first place, so I'd like to have a chance to consult the artists in question first about how we proceed here.

Also the approach and goal of the two different art and content projects (game projects to say it simple) are different. Also the quality assurance and control schemes are different. For me the eA server is still the temporary pseudo content attractor for technical testers of the client technology, which overgrew its purpose into this community we have today. I hope all the best for it for the community's sake, but I don't want to participate in it: it's not why I came here in the first place.

With the TMW CR approach I'm going to go with a more closed and tightly knit team, which gradually builds up, but might be slightly harder to get into. Currently we have a huge demand for pixel artists in two open subprojects: the tileset and mapping subproject (AxlTrozz) and the playerset subproject (currently unclear who is leading it).

eA will most likely continue its "open for all submissions" approach. Hopefully with a bit more planning ahead for the content instead of the ongoing random approach. Especially designing content properly, putting it in game with existing placeholder graphics and then doing [REQ] topics for art to cover it seems like a rather nice approach for the current contributor base. We could even go as far as having one default placeholder piece of graphics to use on every type of art.

Sorry in advance if this was meant to be explained in the "How to Help" forum.

Also sorry for criticizing without solution. Its not usually my style.

The wiki article in question needs to be updated. I have a rough sketch in my userspace about how it should be split up. And yes, it is a blatant copy of the front page. This is my current urgent [REQ] for someone to go and explain it all in a very nice way. I can correct it if someone got something wrong, but I think I'd be too blunt and to the point and minimalistic when writing it initially.

http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/User:Rotonen

A solution is not always required of good critique. You are very welcome to express yourself more.

I'm flattered to be recognised as a contributor but there are some major changes to be made to these rankings to avoid confusion:

it feels very off for me to have the same board ranking as "i", he is more like a "lead contributor", when he speaks the graphics people listen. For this reason I think that "contributor" rankings must be their own subset of board rankings.

It is impossible to automatically rank people by contribution because the board rankings go by post count.
Also, it would not be practical to use "graphics contributor", and "lead graphics contributor" because contributors can be expected to hop around the various fields of game development.

What I'm really hoping to see is that my ranking is not the same as great contributors such as "i".

Basically what you do for the project currently is no different: you are working on a subproject of CR1 and neither of you is a leader of any subproject. Yes, iru is a big author on pixel art, which should be recognized somehow. He is indeed "one to whom you should listen to". Things are still a bit rough and all feedback is very much appreciated. I obviously have not yet thought of everything no matter how well I thought I planned and this.

Things can still easily change before we get too used to things and everything becomes routine. The time to speak up is now.

[John P]

The overlap mostly comes from the confusion we've had for a long time. Just plain moving the topics from under eA to the correct read only section is one approach I'm considering here, but there must have been a reason why the artists in question put the topics there in the first place, so I'd like to have a chance to consult the artists in question first about how we proceed here.

Specifically, I was referring to graphic CR1-[REQ] topics created to get more members of the community involved, which seems to work well get new things moving. Once the subproject is rolling, moving the topic into the CR forum is also solid.

I personally posted story contributions in open forum to get as much feedback as possible (I know this isn't popular for other content creation, but story and quest ideas can come from almost anybody) -- Even though only CR1 dev's seemed to respond anyway.

[Rotonen]

I'd personally prefer if the "how to help" wiki article would give a direct link to the TODOs of currently open subprojects of currently ongoing CR projects. In these todos you'd see what is worked on, what is still untouched and whom to contact if you are interested. For CR projects, I personally think this works better and replaces the [REQ] topics. We currently need a format for subproject wiki pages and we need to involve the subproject leaders in upkeeping them.

We could also have an open section too, yes. If we can have the right to start topics for only selected people and the right to post into topics for everyone, yes, we can make a second section there. I'm just afraid of losing things into the flood of mindless nonsense which manifests itself on open sections.

[bcs86]

A few devs listed as "eA developers", happen to be active in the development of manaserv.
Their role at Manasource may be different than what it is here. Be that as it may...
Since binary code is now handled by that separate project, we wont need any forums for it here. TMW Mantis would also be just for world development I assume.

Thanks for the organization of the board. This should prove to be easier. I have nothing more to say about it.

EDIT: It seems I'm not authorized to post in Off Topic. (yay).

[i]

He is indeed "one to whom you should listen to".

For the record: I do not need any special treatment. My forums rank seems to be ok. All I miss is access to Closed Development subforum.