Difference between revisions of "User talk:Nickj"

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(Your TA:Spring Review!!!)
(Your TA:Spring Review!!!)
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: Thank you for your comments! I appreciate your candour, and I don't take offence at what you have said. The truth is that the review really ''does'' reflect my experience of playing the game. There was good stuff, and there was bad stuff. And some of the bad stuff, most especially the sync errors are killers; they destroy gameplay. Really getting into a game with 8 people, and then having that progressively fall apart until everyone is playing a separate game is just not fun. I agree that some of those things you get used to (like the mini-map not working, the key-bindings, the units that get stuck, the visual feedback, the keys that are different, the polish stuff). Those things you learn to workaround. However, having played this game at a LAN weekend where I could see people's reactions and discuss it with them first-hand, I have to say that these things '''did''' put people off, until at the end of the weekend some people were refusing to play TA:Spring because of these problems. So if I had asked them at that time to summarize their impression of the game, it would be overwhelmingly bad. Some people liked it however, so their impressions were overall positive. I've tried to strike a balance between those two extremes by saying what was good and what was bad. Of course it's personal impressions and personal impressions of others around me, so there is a definite degree of subjectivity - but I should mention that to make the "bad stuff" list, multiple people had to dislike it, thus I feel making it more objective. Anyway, I'm sure the game will get better with time (it certainly seems to be doing that so far) and I hope the bits that bothered me and others will be resolved - at which point I'll be happy to redo the review, or at least add a whooping great big notice that it's completely out-of-date. Thank you once again for your comments and thoughts. -- All the best, [[User:Nickj|Nickj]] 16:39, 25 August 2006 (EST)
 
: Thank you for your comments! I appreciate your candour, and I don't take offence at what you have said. The truth is that the review really ''does'' reflect my experience of playing the game. There was good stuff, and there was bad stuff. And some of the bad stuff, most especially the sync errors are killers; they destroy gameplay. Really getting into a game with 8 people, and then having that progressively fall apart until everyone is playing a separate game is just not fun. I agree that some of those things you get used to (like the mini-map not working, the key-bindings, the units that get stuck, the visual feedback, the keys that are different, the polish stuff). Those things you learn to workaround. However, having played this game at a LAN weekend where I could see people's reactions and discuss it with them first-hand, I have to say that these things '''did''' put people off, until at the end of the weekend some people were refusing to play TA:Spring because of these problems. So if I had asked them at that time to summarize their impression of the game, it would be overwhelmingly bad. Some people liked it however, so their impressions were overall positive. I've tried to strike a balance between those two extremes by saying what was good and what was bad. Of course it's personal impressions and personal impressions of others around me, so there is a definite degree of subjectivity - but I should mention that to make the "bad stuff" list, multiple people had to dislike it, thus I feel making it more objective. Anyway, I'm sure the game will get better with time (it certainly seems to be doing that so far) and I hope the bits that bothered me and others will be resolved - at which point I'll be happy to redo the review, or at least add a whooping great big notice that it's completely out-of-date. Thank you once again for your comments and thoughts. -- All the best, [[User:Nickj|Nickj]] 16:39, 25 August 2006 (EST)
  
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Hello,
 
Hello,
 
I suggest you use a screenshot of a map that is NOT speedmetal for your critique, if you want any ''real'' Spring players to pay attention to this at all.  Speedmetal results in games that are all basically identical; its gameplay results not from strategy, but rather from who is able to spam lvl 3 units the fastest.
 
I suggest you use a screenshot of a map that is NOT speedmetal for your critique, if you want any ''real'' Spring players to pay attention to this at all.  Speedmetal results in games that are all basically identical; its gameplay results not from strategy, but rather from who is able to spam lvl 3 units the fastest.

Revision as of 19:18, 3 September 2006

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discussion left

i have written your first discussion - that there's nothing to discuss! B

Homepage updated, so there is stuff to discuss now, B. -- Nickj 19:19, 7 February 2006 (PST)

Thanks

Thanks Nick for re-awakening my enthusiasm for skiing again -great commentary made it real! Cheers, janine kirkwood

Hi Janine, Glad that you enjoyed the skiing write-up, and I'm sure if you go to Japan that you'll love it. -- All the best, Nickj 10:21, 20 July 2006 (EST)

Your TA:Spring Review!!!

You claim to call it a review, but I think the more accurate word would be "Critique"

You did not actually discuss any of the depth and complexity of the tactics and strategy involved in the game. You did not discuss how enjoyable (Or not!) the experience can be. You did not outline at all what a multiplayer game of spring is actually like to play. All you did was state some facts concerning the engine and its capabilities, a few positive aspects of the game's design, and then you went on to criticize its many faults.

Thus you cannot truly call your writeup a "Review" as you failed to accurately depict the TA:Spring experience textually, and you failed to state what is truly good about the gameplay... Though you had no problem pointing out its many issues. If I were not already an experienced veteran of Spring then I would come away from reading your review of Spring thinking that it is a buggy mess and I would not bother playing it.

The fact is, I am an experienced Spring player and while it has its problems, the truly immense fun factor inherent in this game far far outweighs the problems which plague it... problems that can easily be overcome with a bit of time and practice. Your review does not seem to reflect this at all.

If you're going to point out exactly what problems exist in a game in a verbose and detailed manner, and counterweight that assessment with the vague and unspecified assurance that "It's fun," what do you feel readers are more likely to think?

This is not intended to be a flame, or to be insulting. Do not take offense. This is a critique of your review.

If you did not feel you knew enough about the game to comment on any of its other merits then perhaps you should have played it longer and gotten to know it a tad bit better. As it is you devoted far too much of your "Review" to pinpointing the game's issues and far too little of it to vaguely mention some of the game's strong points. This gives readers a highly jilted idea of what playing Spring is really like.


-aequabilitas

Thank you for your comments! I appreciate your candour, and I don't take offence at what you have said. The truth is that the review really does reflect my experience of playing the game. There was good stuff, and there was bad stuff. And some of the bad stuff, most especially the sync errors are killers; they destroy gameplay. Really getting into a game with 8 people, and then having that progressively fall apart until everyone is playing a separate game is just not fun. I agree that some of those things you get used to (like the mini-map not working, the key-bindings, the units that get stuck, the visual feedback, the keys that are different, the polish stuff). Those things you learn to workaround. However, having played this game at a LAN weekend where I could see people's reactions and discuss it with them first-hand, I have to say that these things did put people off, until at the end of the weekend some people were refusing to play TA:Spring because of these problems. So if I had asked them at that time to summarize their impression of the game, it would be overwhelmingly bad. Some people liked it however, so their impressions were overall positive. I've tried to strike a balance between those two extremes by saying what was good and what was bad. Of course it's personal impressions and personal impressions of others around me, so there is a definite degree of subjectivity - but I should mention that to make the "bad stuff" list, multiple people had to dislike it, thus I feel making it more objective. Anyway, I'm sure the game will get better with time (it certainly seems to be doing that so far) and I hope the bits that bothered me and others will be resolved - at which point I'll be happy to redo the review, or at least add a whooping great big notice that it's completely out-of-date. Thank you once again for your comments and thoughts. -- All the best, Nickj 16:39, 25 August 2006 (EST)

Hello, I suggest you use a screenshot of a map that is NOT speedmetal for your critique, if you want any real Spring players to pay attention to this at all. Speedmetal results in games that are all basically identical; its gameplay results not from strategy, but rather from who is able to spam lvl 3 units the fastest. -P3374H

JAMWiki

Thanks a ton for all of the bug reports on JAMWiki. I've got about half of them fixed now and will get to the others either later tonight or tomorrow. I've added your Fuzz Tester to the JAMWiki Roadmap as something that I very much want to start using before too long. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help out the Mediawiki project, as you guys have provided a great platform for me to model JAMWiki after, and I'm getting pretty excited about the future possibilities. -- Wrh2 15:57, 4 August 2006 (EST)

Also, your font on the account creation page blends into the background for me (Firefox 2.0b1) - there's my bug report reciprocation for the day ;) -- Wrh2 16:03, 4 August 2006 (EST)
Thank you Ryan! I think I've fixed the white-text-on-white-background problem now. The MediaWiki folks seem to be quite on-the-ball, and it seems to me that the best thing with MediaWiki (and life in general I guess) is just to pick an area you're interested in, and do that. For example, they're talking about formalizing the wiki sytnax so that different parsers can be written without having to try and reverse-engineer all the corner-case behaviour (something which may or may not interest you, having written a Parser implementation in Java), but progress seems slow - so if/when that happens I'd probably suggest keeping an eye on that (generally the wikitech-list is where stuff like this would be discussed). -- All the best, Nickj 15:12, 9 August 2006 (EST)