German PlaneShift Community and "spoilers"

[Dajoji]

Players are listened to Kaityra. They really are. And I didn't mean to say you specifically were complaining about everything, only that your suggestion was not the most efficient way to go about this problem because reviewing all dialogs will take an awful lot of time (which can be spent developing new content). On the other hand players/testers can be of great aid in this because it is their interaction with NPCs that needs to be fluent. A dev may review everything ten times and still not foresee what players will say. Besides, there's an average of 100-150 players online and if only 10 of them reported the problems they find while talking to NPCs here and there, there would be a lot more progress in that department. It's not difficult, really. Contact a GM, file a petition, go on IRC, check the thread about NPCs, or even PM or email someone you think might help in this and it will be looked into. The channels are there to be used.

[Kaityra]

If players weren't listened to, then there would be no public forums.  Re-think your statement please.

Having a public forum doesn't prove anything, only things players suggest and which find their way into the game do. And this is were the real problem of this game lies: Limited resources to transform the ideas, wishes, bug reports, etc. into the game.
As I have already stated in one of my previous comments: The forum and the bug tracker contain enough for the devs to work on, to keep them busy for the next couple of years. But we hear "Give us more." and so we do but all we get is that we "complain about everything". You can believe me I know how hard the life of a developer can be, as I'm one myself, but I think it is about time that the developers become aware how frustrating it is for the players, too, to report and report, just to see, how little can find its way into the game with the next version.
Please don't get me wrong, I really like this game and I really appreciate the work that went into it and I really do thank each person working on this game by heart...but please, I don't see any sense in just giving you more and more work without any chance to see it come around. With limited resources you have to approach a project very differently. You have to start with very small integral parts and not with the whole picture.
Please consider my words again before jumping at me as I do not mean ill but I have to speak out if I think something is wrong.

So, now I'm ready to be torn apart.

[Nikodemus]

A dev may review everything ten times and still not foresee what players will say.

And for a player it will take ten times more time than it would for a dev to identify the problem, so that a dev can fix it.
Everyone knows that there are things only hundreds of different players can track.
People use to say that, only players can find out different things. It is because they are different people are have different methods and abilities to reach their goals. I'm a kind of person who find it very ineffective to use petition (because there is not even a copy&paste option in game) composing a bugreport is taking too much time with all you need to do for that. Make better use of the auto logging system.  I player advice it to you, i think it is pretty much clear request? I can't give details, because i dont know how it exactly works, because I'm a player. Understand the player point of viev.
Understand it.
Now i sound like some kind of player rights freedom fighter, lol
I can only repeat that

If an NPC mentions a person, an item, a place, etc, one should be allowed to tell the NPC "tell me about <[person|item|place|...]>"

Is what in appearently many players oppinion is what the devs have to focus on. It is developing the new content. IMO a dev browsing through NPCs answers to create new onese from these is taking exactly the same amount of time as looking through petitions or bugreports. Seriously.
But then again, coz I'm a player, i don't know details, but if we are told to do otherwise, it is nice to explain them to us, so we are convinced, because most of all, we are People, dev or not.

[Caarrie]

IMO a dev browsing through NPCs answers to create new onese from these is taking exactly the same amount of time as looking through petitions or bugreports.

We have 463 bugs [open that i can see at this point] No one reviews all bugs each day, we review bugs as new ones are reported so that takes very little time overall. GM's only get a handful of petitions each day, they dont have to review what other gms did with closed petitions over the last month or week. Settings devs have 200 or more quests with many steps and answers for them to review them all would take MONTHS as they have other work to do and not all setting devs work directly with quests that are already loaded on laanx,

[Dajoji]

@Kaityra: Please note that it's not enough to report and report. Quality of said reports matters. Just like you said there is a lot of work piling up so whenever you point something out, being specific helps a great deal. Sometimes fixes for these NPC things can be minor and quickly done but only if they are easy to find and that's where the players can help. They don't have to do anything different in the way they play the game, they just need to report what they find. And again, if you say "check everything", it is not as helpful as you might think.

@Nikodemus: If you don't like to use the BT or file petitions use /tell to ask a GM to look into it or go on IRC or send PMs/emails. Copy/paste works in all of the out-of-game channels.

[Prolix]

Off Topic (strictly speaking)

Hmm I do not have much trouble with the bug tracker. I have made a dozen or two reports and most of them have been fixed. Some are still pending of course and others not as fixed as I would like but all of them have been given some consideration by the development team. It is not particularly hard to use the bug tracker, the biggest difficulty lies in deciding which component the report is made about but this is a bit deceptive because if you get it wrong someone will change it to whatever is appropriate. It is all good to me.

There are other venues for offering suggestions and they also seem to work pretty well. I have made suggestions on the forum and through pms that have generated clearer dialog from npcs and additions to their repertoire.

For the most part, if I find something I think is a bug and do not see it on the bug tracker I go on #planeshift-build and ask if anyone there knows about it or if it seems likely to be expected behavior. If the response is negative, they haven't heard of it or feel it is unexpected I then post it to the tracker. If I am in doubt as to how to post it I can ask in that channel for advice. This may not work for everyone but if you politely approach the channel with a bit of caution you might just learn something.

Do not be annoyed if your report is closed with nothing done. It happens. Sometimes you have not made clear what was wrong and you will need to explain better. Other times it may be a philosophical difference of opinion. You can press your point of view within reason but it is the developers that have the last say. If you alienate them you may well be ignored in the future. They are all generally reasonable but anyone can have a bad day. If you keep your arguments about the game and not about the people involved with it you should get along fine. There does come a point, though, were further argument is useless. If you find you are making the same argument over and over and you are not getting anywhere it is time to give it up or join the developer team where your opinion will carry more weight or you will be able to get a more complete discussion of why it cannot be so. Some things cannot be shared unless you are covered by a non-disclosure agreement. It has never come to that for me so it needn't come to that for you either.

One more thing: very few people have direct access to the database and that is why they depend on reports about npc dialog and why it sometimes takes a while for things to change.

[Nikodemus]

We have 463 bugs [open that i can see at this point] No one reviews all bugs each day, we review bugs as new ones are reported so that takes very little time overall. GM's only get a handful of petitions each day, they dont have to review what other gms did with closed petitions over the last month or week.

I fail to see how it proves anything i asked about, how does the auto questions logging system works?

Settings devs have 200 or more quests with many steps and answers for them to review them all would take MONTHS as they have other work to do and not all setting devs work directly with quests that are already loaded on laanx,

Um, so because it would take MONTHS, they won't try to fix it, because they have to create new stuff (which will be done in probably the same fashion, it is subject for filling the holes)
You know, if everyone reported everything what is there for fixing, fixing that would take exactly these MONTHS.
We are trying to point it out there since a while, or you still dont agree? I would be happy to know why you think it would take less than these MONTHS is players would really report like mad.

@Nikodemus: If you don't like to use the BT or file petitions use /tell to ask a GM to look into it or go on IRC or send PMs/emails. Copy/paste works in all of the out-of-game channels.

Do you really think that /tell for a GM, IRC, PM/email is really working better than bugtracker??
Seriously, i'm not a moron, not that you treat me like one, but i dont know, maybe there are some people who find these ways faster than bugtracker. ;s

[Dajoji]

@Nikodemus: If you don't like to use the BT or file petitions use /tell to ask a GM to look into it or go on IRC or send PMs/emails. Copy/paste works in all of the out-of-game channels.

Do you really think that /tell for a GM, IRC, PM/email is really working better than bugtracker??
Seriously, i'm not a moron, not that you treat me like one, but i dont know, maybe there are some people who find these ways faster than bugtracker. ;s

No. I'd rather have players use the BT but for those who don't like it or simply find it complicated to use, there are other channels available both in and out of the game to report bugs and inconsistencies with NPCs and quests.

So, not reporting these issues and using spoilers result in NPCs not getting any smarter.

[Caarrie]

We have 463 bugs [open that i can see at this point] No one reviews all bugs each day, we review bugs as new ones are reported so that takes very little time overall. GM's only get a handful of petitions each day, they dont have to review what other gms did with closed petitions over the last month or week.

I fail to see how it proves anything i asked about, how does the auto questions logging system works?

Settings devs have 200 or more quests with many steps and answers for them to review them all would take MONTHS as they have other work to do and not all setting devs work directly with quests that are already loaded on laanx,

Um, so because it would take MONTHS, they won't try to fix it, because they have to create new stuff (which will be done in probably the same fashion, it is subject for filling the holes)
You know, if everyone reported everything what is there for fixing, fixing that would take exactly these MONTHS.
We are trying to point it out there since a while, or you still dont agree? I would be happy to know why you think it would take less than these MONTHS is players would really report like mad.

I am assuming you did not read what i was replying to, there is NO way to compare what the devs/ testers/gms do. We all do different things and have different ways of doing it. All setting devs have other things to do outside of the game, and not all think the same way and not all setting devs get to review all the quests before they get ingame to add replies to them. I dont see your point. The npc question reporting system only works if and when devs have time to get ingame and check, the system does not tell them if the question was in a quest or a general question, with so many npcs ingame in quests and not, it is hard for them to figure this out.

IMO a dev browsing through NPCs answers to create new onese from these is taking exactly the same amount of time as looking through petitions or bugreports.

We have 463 bugs [open that i can see at this point] No one reviews all bugs each day, we review bugs as new ones are reported so that takes very little time overall. GM's only get a handful of petitions each day, they dont have to review what other gms did with closed petitions over the last month or week. Settings devs have 200 or more quests with many steps and answers for them to review them all would take MONTHS as they have other work to do and not all setting devs work directly with quests that are already loaded on laanx,

I WILL NOT REPLY AGAIN YOU DONT SEEM TO SEE MY POINTS, any dev willing to back me on what i have said???

[Nikodemus]

The npc question reporting system only works if and when devs have time to get ingame and check, the system does not tell them if the question was in a quest or a general question, with so many npcs ingame in quests and not, it is hard for them to figure this out.

So a dev has to go in game to see the log? If so, thats madness. They should have an option to browse them in notepad, filtered so that it is readable. A table where they can see what was the last informative NPC response the player is most likely asking about and where the dev can read all answers of the NPC, quest responses, so they can know why players asked these questions and by this add proper triggers.
If there is only a list of sentences the npcs didn't understand without even the npc name they was asked to and it is available only after logging in game, it is connecting to our so unstable server... This feature is near useless

This pretty much explains why you and others insist people make bugreports and use other methods.

But here is a fact, if the logging system wont start to have a use, there won't be any progress. People will continue to behave as they are and you will receive the same amount of reports. This is how it works. This thread will maybe motivate a few people to make some reports, but there wont be any breakthrough, which will allow the devs to fill the NPCs dialog holes on much greater scale.

If a setting dev can't even look though the npc dialogs to see what things from it lack an explanation, without logging into the game... this is efficiency tragedy, seriously, it must be terrible.
It is the devs who should have easy access for these, because it is they who can viev and edit them in an efficiet way. It is not a player with a tiny chatwindow and 10 fps and who can't focus purely on the problems, because they have to play a mind game first of guessing if the NPC really doesnt know what is asked about and alike.

[Karyuu]

That's nonsense. No one from settings needs to log into the game to view actual dialog.

[neko kyouran]

If so, thats madness.

[Nikodemus]

If so, i'm in dead point, no conclussions, so the same oppinion.

Haha, good one Neko!.

[Caarrie]

That's nonsense. No one from settings needs to log into the game to view actual dialog.

the command /badtext unless the webconsole has been updated only works ingame to find out bad replies said to npcs. Quests can be read and fixed in the console bye those with access. It also looks like /badtext only shows the last 10 bad text lines, so it could miss much.

[Fyre]

Some of the correct dialogue needed for solving is so remote, so impossible to guess without assistance, that making a big deal over any 'spoiler' seems foolish to me.

Provide Rizin with some examples. Watch what happens. Be part of the solution: don't proliferate what you see as a problem.

Heck, provide US with some examples. I'd love to see what you consider illogical.

First allow me to clarify.   I did not say that the quests were illogical, but unable to be solved based on logic alone.  For example,  in 'Gorbiak wants to speak better', after starting the quest, the next step is to speak a statement in '[removed]'...something not available from other than someone else passing the information on to you.  Or 'Sierann is Waiting'...one has to know to ask him '[removed]' to get things started....the only quest that starts in this manner as far as I know.  Or Kilas' Test of Education...not sure where those answers came from, unless in some obscure book in the library. 

It is true that most quests can be completed based on the information presented in them, but not all.  For some, it seems you simply have to get help from somewhere.  That is the point I was referring to.

I appreciate the efforts of all who have put this project together, and admire your talent and creativity.  I do wish that the defensive tone which I have noted in these forums could be eliminated...there is nothing wrong with members expressing their opinions.  Just disagree...as is your right.