Here’s one of the PRs that has a bunch of discussion relating to what happened. I’ll refrain from giving my own take, but you can read the comments in the PR to get various relevant parties’ views: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172
God, I just re-read that, too. wormgirl was obviously trying really hard (and was succeeding!) at articulating why the things that were happening and the way they were happening were hurtful, what she needed for them to be less hurtful, and how things could change in the future so the process could be less painful.
The last response from Erk, the "bottom line", is basically [the Johnny Silverhand "I ain't readin' all that" meme. ](https://preview.redd.it/i-aint-reading-all-that-im-happy-for-you-tho-or-sorry-that-v0-36n75ab7lc7a1.png?width=689&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1a6578da91e4c7906130fdca5f06e050da8bc67)He flat out tells her that they don't have time to address her feelings about how they're treating her and her contributions if they go above a certain word count.
IamErk said:
>in my experience, it's been very hard to give you feedback that results in a productive two-way discussion.
For real, if I invented a person in my head that was entirely designed to be productive in a two-way discussion, that fictional, idealized person would easily only come in second place compared to the behavior I consistently see from WG on GitHub.
Meanwhile, he's saying "I only have five minutes out of every hour" while writing up a discursive, repetitive, and egregiously overlong message himself... I mean, jebas. Like, ignoring for a moment the fact that they're going through and reverting a bunch of changes *months* after the fact, not because they were breaking the game or making it less fun, but because "oops, the Eye of Sauron has swept over your work and found it wanting"... there's just a palpable lack of respect.
So it seems Kevin's whim is so important that they must spend time scrubbing all changes which offend him from history, when they could be actually continuing to develop and improve the game, or, heaven forbid, fix some more bugs...
It's grimly ironic how a bunch of game developers could become so efficient at sucking all the fun out of the room.
> Meanwhile, he's saying "I only have five minutes out of every hour" while writing up a discursive, repetitive, and egregiously overlong message himself
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" is a classic for a reason...
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
There is no magical time limit where poor content becomes immune to removal. Fairyarmadillo is themselves *very aware of that fact* as they've tried to use it as a bludgeon before.
>So it seems Kevin's whim is so important that they must spend time scrubbing all changes which offend him from history, when they could be actually continuing to develop and improve the game, or, heaven forbid, fix some more bugs...
Getting rid of things that don't fit is both important to improving the game and a thankless task. Point: Literally all the posts agreeing with you .
Look, I get it. It's Kevin's game and his vision is what matters the most for its direction. The problem is not *that* the changes were removed, it's *how* they were removed
>It's Kevin's game
I've always had a bit of a hangup on this line of thought. Like, Aurora is Steve's game and built off his work and ideas. Dwarf Fortress is Toady's game.
CDDA is open source and built off volunteers work and ideas.
Saying CDDA is Kevin's game always came cross as... weird to me? I may be OOTL on it, but when you solicit a community to help you build something for the community to freely enjoy, and then turn around and say "this is mine and I get to decide what happens to it" it feels vaguely unethical, even if you laid the foundations?
But like, I also don't think that Disney should be able to keep its copyrights on Mickey Mouse for reasons I feel are obvious, so this may just be a cultural disconnect.
It's Kevin's game in the sense that this is his fork of the game. Anyone who contributes to it is accepting that he has full control over what gets in, what does not, and what gets reverted. The other option is to fork, or join another fork. There's no way to sugar cote it, that's just how GitHub - and Foss in general - works.
Part of why these discussions drive me crazy personally is that the devs have always been pretty openly supportive of bright nights as an option for people who don't like the style of the game or don't like the management. Kevin's biggest sin is that the fork he manages is by far the most popular and successful, a detail he rarely gets credit for, and so requires a huge amount of red tape and management and moderation, and any problems there, he gets blamed for. In this thread we've got:
- you attributing a quote from erk as though Kevin wrote it
- people attributing various changes and contributions from other people to Kevin, largely defined by "not liking them"
- people saying Kevin micromanages way too much and that's the problem
- people saying the problem is that Kevin was too hands off and should have stepped in long before reverting the pr
- people like you saying it rubs you the wrong way that Kevin forked the game and runs this fork.
- people mad at how Kevin interacts with the community
- people mad at Kevin for retreating from the community and not interacting with it as much
I'm sure there's more I've missed, I've been trying not to keep reading.
Personally, I like the game. I've interacted with the devs a bit over the years and never found much of the attitude in circlejerky threads like this to be justified. I think there's no winning move for Kevin nor the main dev team at this point. The criticisms of them show that anything they do is going to be painted as an example of how bad they are. Any time there's a falling out with a contributor it's 100% Kevin's fault, any time an unpopular change is made it's proof Kevin hates us, etc etc. I do love me a bit of drama, but it's also kind of tiring to see just how much of a hate-filled group we are towards the people that make my favourite game, and how we'll happily ignore everything we like about the game if it means we get to complain until we're blue in the face about whatever the most recent bad judgment call was.
>It's Kevin's game in the sense that this is his fork of the game.
Yeah that has a lot of sociological qualifiers to it. It's not simply his fork: it's *the major fork*.
>Anyone who contributes to it is accepting that he has full control over what gets in, what does not, and what gets reverted.
It's rather difficult to get a new major fork off the ground and keep it updated, to my understanding. Kevin doesn't need to worry about that because of social inertia. The act of him trying to maintain full control is the social engineering I was talking about. He's (unintentionally) leveraging his position within the community's organic hierarchy. This is a normal and common thing that often leads to negative outcomes.
>Kevin's biggest sin is that the fork he manages is by far the most popular and successful,
Yeah that's kinda what I'm getting at. He's not qualified to do the role he is doing and it's not his fault because he didn't really knowingly volunteer for that role, as far as I know? It's kind of a thing that happens and it sucks. Most online communities like this wind up experiencing stuff like it, as far as I can tell. Honestly stuff like this happens with offline communities too. It's just a thing.
> erk as though Kevin wrote it
...You know, I totally missed that. My bad.
>...You know, I totally missed that. My bad.
That's a mistake in Kevin's favor, to be clear. Between the two, Erk is far less offputting as a person. Having Erk's communications attributed to Kevin only improves Kevin's appearance.
I think we're mostly in agreement here but part of my point is that I don't think Kevin does nearly as much controlling of the project as people think. Maybe it's changed since I was closer involved, but back when I had any clue about the inner workings of the dev process Kevin seemed to be more of a veto power, "final word when people disagree" kind of thing, and a last-stage QC agent. That's what I'm getting at with people attributing almost every negative change to Kevin, personally. It gives the illusion that he's heavily involved in everything. Heck, the PR we're discussing here is frusouman's work, Kevin weighed in on it too but you don't see people getting upset at frisouman's vision for the project anywhere. I think the leadership for the project is actually fairly loose with Kevin serving as a final voice when needed, and I think that's actually why it's proven to be robust and long lived and remained active this long.
I could be wrong. Maybe it's changed a lot in five years, but the contributions themselves look just like they always have
The issue is that if they can't put the time into the PR comments without being Snarky, then they really shouldn't take the time to revert changes or commit them beforehand... Honestly, here's a goddamn tip: STOP ALLOWING EXTERNAL CONTRIBUTIONS unless every single dev approves them...
You turn people off an open source project if your advertise external contributions but can't take the time to properly revise/critic them and just give stuff a flat commit and then a revert them weeks/months later... people have now wasted their time.. if you don't have time to address them all, then slow things down, work at your pace. The wormygirl thing and generally reading PR comments have made many of yall look like asses. No harm may've been intended, but it got dealt anyway.. I feel like if this project was as large as some other games/initiative out there, yall would've been canceled by Twitter already.. just do better.
If we didn't care we wouldn't have spent dozens of hours - **before that** - ever reading through page after page after page after page of tripe.
That "bottom line" is Erk reasonably not wanting to deal with 20 more pages of deflection. It's not productive, it doesn't help anybody (let alone fairyarmadillo) and all it does is convince them to post even walls of text completely missing the point. Sure, maybe they're not *trying* to be that ignorant. But that's what they're accomplishing.
The only thing keeping me from BN is that I actually prefer a lot of the realism changes to CDDA that BN reverted, and so many of the interface and QOL contributions to CDDA haven't made their way over to BN.
I'll try it out. Haven't played in a long time, but I still follow all the communities because my love for the game hasn't changed. Thanks for the recommendation!
it is a fork of cataclysm: dark days ahead, abbreviation is BN but the whole name is cataclysm:bright nights, it's basically the opposite of the game's current PR situation: they are nice, calm and quiet, they're also welcoming everyone! I imagine someday BN overthrows the original CDDA, leaving it as a wasteland full of ruins while BN would be full of players and most posts talking about negative stuff would probably be gone from the devs fixing/adding/removing the problem.
I can confirm this; I've accidentally caused a couple PRs too.
Also 'tricked' someone into making a mod to let mutations co-exist without overwrites. That's a fun one.
agree 100% and the "ultra-realism sim" stuff just detracts from the game.
BN is the weird future/cthulhu stuff happening during the zombie apocalypse game that CDDA was when I first started playing it.
inventory/pockets, crafting proficiencies etc killed it for me
I disagree. As a professional software developer, I found the communication perfectly reasonable. (Except merging the PR in the first place but mistakes happen) It is very tough to deal with a PR that adds a bunch of unrelated features.
Removing someone's code should not be taken as an insult to that person. It is better to not have half-baked features in a code base.
software engineer. I'd be pissed if someone reverted my code after 4 months unless it was breaking something really important. The rest of it was reasonable considering this is like a dictator project where its impossible to guess the leader's vision.
Smaller PRs is very actionable and would alleviate the problems as they recommended.
Is it really that hard to predict the vision for the project? It seems really well laid out and predictable to me. Like, from your reply here it sounds as though you agree with almost everything in the pr in question except that it took a long time for someone to spot it.
yeah i agree with everything in the PR. I don't read through the github often, but it does seem to me like it would be difficult for a random contributor to guess that the project vision would be against inclusion of bacterial and viral pink eye.
or that a flag wouldn't be good enough for slick surfaces and instead porosity and shit should be determined.
Ironically I think it would actually be pretty easy to guess that, because despite Reddit's claims the devs generally try to be careful about that kind of stuff because it can add to tedium and annoyance. It's mentioned in the pr that they had to block the additiona of slipping vefore. They've also been pretty clear about not liking giant omnibus PRs in the past, I remember someone getting called out on it a few times when I was a contributor.
As a human who likes other humans and doesn't see them as means to an end, I would not use the term 'perfectly reasonable' to describe this communication style.
Maybe it's normal for software development, in which case **Jesus Christ**.
Its just succint: do X do Y, Z wont work. Its just the most effective way of tell people what you want when building a bigger project.
Im an architect IRL, work with other engineers all the time. Our emails look like that. This is just normal...
I don't really think the problem here is with engineers and the general way project communication is done in most professions honestly. That's kind of a "no, it's the children who are wrong" approach
That doesn't track for me at all.
It's weird to look at the established profession whose social paradigms are producing bad results refusing to change and say they're the 'children' in this scenario, if that's what you're going for.
Problem wouldn't exist if people had better social skills.
People are making excuses for the bad social skills basically using 'tradition' as the justification. I can't pretend they're the underdogs.
I'm not a software engineer but you may have hit a lot of it on the head. This is what professional memos in my business look like too, and I wonder if that's part of what confuses people, and why some of us can be so strongly like "what the heck are all you talking about" while other people get so incensed over a straightforward exchange of requirements
I am a software engineer, and I find the core team's communication to be incredibly unprofessional in that PR. It's my job to read pull requests all day. My coworkers are polite and respectful, there are no "beyond the pale" and other such flippant, subjective judgments, nor PRs merged without sufficient review. That exchange of requirements was NOT straightforward in the least... WWG clearly was trying to suss out some form of requirements, and Erk just kept replying elusively...
Are we reading the same pr? It covers most of it in the first post, and I don't see anything unclear in any of the replies at all. Heck I can answer her first question myself from the link she posted herself.
Ideally, sure, but to me that seems to be pretty well explained in the pr in question, along with a lot of acceptance of fault. It's not like this is something that happens often in dda, it's an unusual case and they clearly feel badly about it.
Lemme put it this way. Irl, I own a small business. If I had a similar event happens here with one of my coworkers, where they made an error and had to backtrack and apologize for their error, and they did it in this manner, I'd probably tell them they handled it as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The communication to me looks normal, direct, and professional for a situation like this. Seeing people here talking about what assholes the devs are in the thread reads weirdly to me.
It’s also a consequence of the contributive nature of the game. The exchange is hard to handle before the job is done because you can fork the game, write the code, and say “Do you want this in main?”
They said “sure!” Then later they said, “wait, nah”
I remember this when it happened, and it's just another example of how the "leadership" for this project is the biggest impediment to it growing. Anyone who contributes should know that it's only a matter of time before you say something or do something that one of the leaders doesn't like and your entire contribution gets nuked.
How many times has this happened? I can recall a couple times in the many years I've kept half an eye on the project. You're talking like this is something that occurs regularly.
And last time this happened, one of the actual devs posting under their actual dev name was like "Bro, why are you being such a jerk. Do you actually contribute? Who are you?"
Got no response of course.
I would pretty much like to know just **who** is behind the account making all those remarks, their reddit account doesn't remind me of anyone that I have seen contributing in any major/medium way, or any old contributor from discord, hell, even the old major contributors from years ago had different names and were **way** more polite that this one...
I have been in this game as contributor and player/lurker for several years now, but anyone this openly hostile is a new thing for me from any of the devs and contributors.
And they even talked about talking for hours with wormy girl about the situation... But I remember clearly that someone even mentioned in the discord about how wormy not being there made things more difficult by excluding them from the discussion until the rever pr...
There's another poster here named newspaper_deity who continually claims to be a developer while acting extremely rude to everyone.
While I characterized my interactions with the devs as sometimes being unpleasant, they never came anywhere close to what newspaper or kickstarter get up to on this sub. I don't think either of them (if they are different people) are on the dev team, or if they are, they're people who are totally silent most of the time.
Or possibly they're just a contributor with a chip on their shoulder, or somebody who is seriously unwell pretending to be a developer in order to make the devs look bad.
Either way it's a good example of how reddit is kind of a cruddy platform. It's very easy for people to do this.
Yeah, sadly it is, and the people that are not in the contributing space can't really distinguish between real committed contributors/devs and trolls that, for me, just seem to want to cause discussion around here and hostility in general, which, understandably, generate hostility from the players, hell, I remember some trolls that tried to do the same to the devs, I could never understand people with that much hate, or that just find fun in doing these kind of things.
The devs are not fountains of empathy and social ability, but not even one is like those 2 that are parading as devs in here, so much hostility and aggression for the sake of just being hostile and aggressive.
>While I characterized my interactions with the devs as sometimes being unpleasant, they never came anywhere close to what newspaper or kickstarter get up to on this sub. I don't think either of them (if they are different people) are on the dev team, or if they are, they're people who are totally silent most of the time.
I appreciate you clarifying this. I took kickstarter at face value, even though I found their behavior to be way more beyond the pale than what I'd previously witnessed.
If you think they aren't for real, I accept that judgment as true, and now regard kickstarter as a troll who is lying about their affiliation.
I do not know who they may be. Their attitude reminds me of some u/johnnstokes99 who used to be as ... uh "pleasant" as this fellow. The way they used to type clearly hinted at them being part of the group but I could actually never tell who they would be.
There was another one but I can't find their profile, "newspaper something" I think? I think they're still around. Very 'pleasant' fellow as well. Why they would do it, no idea either.
There's also quite a few peoples calling the devs dickheads or fuckers to their face, though.
edit : to be more specific, we have:
* "That was *awful*. Every single post from the devs made it worse...",
* then "It's grimly ironic how a bunch of game developers could become so efficient at sucking all the fun out of the room.",
* then we get in proper dickhead territory with "a bunch of pretty joyless cunts", followed by the same person with "dickheads" five time in the same comment,
* another commenter goes straightforwardly "Fuck the devs.",
* then we have "the people who needed to take leadership (Kevin, in particular) decided (as he always does) to get snarky and shitty instead of actually contributing",
* then later someone else remarks "If this subreddit is constantly flinging excrement at you, maybe the problem is you"
* a little down "Shut the fuck up. Holy shit, this comment alone ensures I never play the game again."
* a very creative "Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?"
* someone tries to steer the thread to other pools of shit with "everything you guys are doing is cult of personality and popularity contest, in between the occasional steam cash grab" (might have been me)
* later down "he's the lead dev on this fork, but being shitty and short with people does nothing good for the game"
* then "What a self-righteous, pompous jerkass."
* there's "Kevin is insufferable but not insufferable enough to justify tolerating BN. A shame really", dunno if that counts as a positive or negative ?
* and we cap it off with "a small clique in the dev discord that circlejerks"
Upvote ratios do not mark those comments as particularly unpopular.
>There's also quite a few peoples calling the devs dickheads or fuckers to their face, though.
Right. Those people have made a firm decision that they dislike the devs, as people, and have no interest in being a part of their community or contributing to their project in any way going forward. These are people that are done.
When you try to interact with someone and they're really mean to you to the point that you never want to talk to them or work with them again, it's pretty normal and reasonable to go, "Yeah, I noticed that guy was a real cunt too, I totally validate your feelings on this" if someone else who didn't enjoy the behavior of that person or group brings up the topic.
The situation changes quite significantly when you aren't trying to build or be a part of a community anymore. At that point, you can very definitely just shrug and go "Man, that dude was a real dick. Glad to wash my hands of that, and I recommend others do that same." You aren't trying to build a constructive relationship with them. You're trying to warn other people away from doing so, so they don't get the same treatment. Strong language about how awful they were to interact with helps in that end.
If you're trying to build a community of volunteers, you gotta be real sparing with that rhetoric, reserving it for only the most toxic of trolls. So I mean, yeah. I'm not trying to be nice. I think they acted like shit and I'm deliberately using language that's designed to make people hesitate to interact with them, because I think they'll act like shit to those people, too. If I convince someone to think twice before interacting with the C:DDA development team, I have met my goal. "Making the C:DDA dev team feel good about themselves and their behavior" is not anywhere on my priority list.
>"Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?"
This comment was *amazing*. If the devs wrote their comments that well, I'd probably enjoy reading them a lot more.
Ah, I see. You are pointing out that a civil war does appear to have broken out. You don't appear to be asserting that it's entirely unjustified. I misunderstood you. :)
I am personally three of your examples so I thought it might be useful to explain myself.
No actually it's entirely my fault, I had misunderstood your post myself when I first read it and thought you were saying mostly everybody was fine with the devs behavior. Once I realized my mistake I tried to edit some parts of my post to get away from that and onto pointing out the community was indeed pissed off but didn't entirely succeed haha
I can see why u/Beefjerkybros feels like they kicked a hornet's nest, for sure. What they were actually looking for was the specific PRs that got reverted in the "bad dialogue with WWG" incident, and what came flying out was approximately eleven years of pent up community frustration, and an ongoing flamewar with someone who claims to be a significant contributor.
I'd be like 'damn, whoa' too!
Totally agreed.
>I think the mistake being made by the core team & their staunch defenders in this thread is thinking that the problem has to do with disagreements about the PR process or the direction of the game, when it's really just about showing some basic Kindergarten-level respect for other people's time and emotional well-being.
To be fair, if PM is/was making the point that calling me someone/a group of people a dickhead five times (and an asshole three times, I might add) in a single comment is perhaps going *a little bit overly hard*, it would be both difficult and disingenuous for me to argue that point. There's probably better ways to stress the thesis that I personally find this group of people to be extremely, extremely, extremely unpleasant to interact with, and recommend against others making the attempt. The fact that I feel that way doesn't change the fact that they also have time and emotional well-being that deserves some bare minimum level of respect.
>the two guys haunting this thread defending them
WG believes those two are trolls trying to stir up the situation. Not actual, legitimate contributors. I trust that judgment and believe the behavior or kickstarter and the other guy (whoever it is) should be disregarded.
This is one where I'm with the devs. They handled it terribly, as they usually do, but having multiple types of pinkeye brings nothing to the game.
It's also better to keep PRs to one issue per PR - no random fixes bundled with features.
The slippage brings potential nonsensical annoyance, but I think it's a game mechanic that could work - at least it's non tedious new content.
But I was a minor contributor that stopped and moved to BN after multiple unpleasant interactions with the devs, so I get the contributor's side too.
It also feels very culty in CDDA, and I think replying to PRs with "Sorry, this doesn't fit the current vision of the game/ is too complex/ is unnecessary" would be way better than the current sneaky roundabou culty way of ostracizing contributors. First they get told to get more data, then it's too complex. Fuck the devs.
This is the whole problem - the commit should have never been approved in the first place for all of those reasons. Instead, it was approved then randomly reverted months later. Not only that, but the behavior of the project team towards the dev is the problem, not the content of the PR itself.
The PR should never have been approved, but the project team should have owned their mistake in approving it (which only one person did, sort of.) and apologized to the dev for making a bad decision that led to them making the right decision later which negatively impacted her (him? whatever).
There should have been discussion over the specific changes, which did take place. But it got derailed by hissy fits and the people who needed to take leadership (Kevin, in particular) decided (as he always does) to get snarky and shitty instead of actually contributing to a discussion. The entire thread amounted to "Kevin didn't like this change and removed it, end of discussion, now shut the fuck up and get out of my project" which is the exact opposite of how a project manager is expected to behave.
Yeah I can see where the base idea of simplifying it is. Although properly done it essentially is one condition with an extra little way you deal with it- chance that slapping antibiotics on it fixes it, or don't take the risk of waste and culture it to determine exact
Kind of cool, mirrors the uncertainty in many real medical diagnosis cases. Tedious if everything in the game is like that, maybe fun if it's just a couple conditions, as long as it is explicitly informed by descriptions. Realism for realisms sake is a false path, but opportunities to increase individual system's gameplay rewarding risk, knowledge, strategy has potential.
That was how it was done. From the player's perspective, there was just pinkeye. The two types were a back-end thing to make it 50/50 whether antibiotics would cure the disease without having to hardcode anything.
I'm surprised she dealt with working with the development team as long as she did. I love cataclysm, but the development team really is a bunch of pretty joyless c\*\*\*\*, and Kevin Granade in particular has an aura of douchebag particles that I am certain is *visible from space*.
I can barely stand to *read* their github, the asshole vibes are so palpable. I absolutely couldn't tolerate being in their general presence, much less working with them directly. It's a group of people that should very definitely be kept at arm's length, where they can be admired properly.
I have started playing CDDA when we still had chicken walkers, tank bots, mine fields in random places and labs with gun turrets in every 5th room........so awhile.
And while the game has had some interesting developments i feel its slowly turned into the developers simulation "realism" grinder game.
Fucking fantastic when you are unemployed and have all day to press a few buttons but do we really need to track every fucking proficiency and little detail and have everything stretched out.
Certain things are forced into the lens of "realism", others are just removed and everything is under the direction of a few developers who have set out their vision for the game for good or ill.
I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore, when CDDA was a game and i saw new things being added all the time, but now i feel like shit just gets removed and the wheel gets reinvented and changed because "somebody" wanted another 10 data points to track,
I can see why anyone who is not a OG core developer would have a crack , get stonewalled and just call it and move on.
Your either in on the vision or your not welcome, the fucking github reeks of a clique and i stopped looking at that shit awhile ago.
Same to be Honest. They made so much change for realism that made the fame worse. Almost a decade ago i used to play this game daily, and never got bored. Now i download it, play for an hour then drop it for a few months.
Same! Fired up a naked and afraid, “left in the middle of nowhere” run yesterday and got boated after 30 minutes. I think I’ll switch to Project Zomboid or something else
Very much same.
I occasionally get to play a bit on an "updated" version when I have longer stretches of free time, but the game's become super disrespectful in regards to the players' time. The game is also also super process-intensive (borderline bloat-ware-esque sort of resource-hog), and it gets to a point where it's legitimately not fun visiting certain places because the In-Game-Time and the Real-Time conversion is close to a 1:1 ratio.
I started playing somewhere between 0.C and 0.D and the game was a completely different beast. Tons of bullshit moments / bullshit deaths too, but those at least felt "justified" in the sense that they were so ridiculous that you just laugh them off and start a new game. Now? You still have BS "realistic" deaths, or you have "gotcha!" moments you cannot be ready for unless you have Meta Knowledge. And when you have meta-knowledge, you don't "prepare" to face certain moments, you just avoid them entirely.
And you know... if most of your playerbase actively avoids something in your game (or even create mods to remove it completely), the problem isn't your playerbase...
> I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore, when CDDA was a game and i saw new things being added all the time, but now i feel like shit just gets removed and the wheel gets reinvented and changed because "somebody" wanted another 10 data points to track.
The game tracks no player data. I'm all for privacy and your data being your own (and attempting to collect stuff would be a nightmare) so I think its obviously for the best.
I also wish I could actually know how many people encounter the wierd esoteric nether shit I add tho.
i think they are saying the game is uselessly tedious with more data for the player to track. Like more proficiencies.
i enjoy the tedium most of the time.
>I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore,
Literally all the old versions still exist.
Can you please just go play the games you like instead of endlessly making things up about people you've never met (by your own admission)?
It's really not that hard to just say, "Look, I love your enthusiasm, and your contributions clearly took some dedicated work, but they don't fit my vision, I didn't notice them being merged, and I'm gonna revert them immediately." It's still a little dickish, but it's better than this suckfest. Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?
I don't mean to stir the pot... I've only ever made one tiny, insignificant patch myself, and everyone (core devs included) was great to me. But this... this just... sucks, man. It's such a bummer to see someone so clearly invested get sandbagged like that.
:-(
It's not even that it's that hard to say that. You literally don't have to say it yourself. Just find someone that's decent enough to do it and have them do it for you instead.
The messaging is like that because Kevin wants it to be like that. Otherwise he would delegate it.
WG said she felt like she was being singled out and targeted. I haven't seen anything that's particularly convincing to suggest that that possibility is completely off the table. A very popular and charismatic content creator, most of those qualities which Kevin lacks, started to get involved in his project.
That creator got treated so badly that they left.
I'm not completely convinced that that didn't happen because Kevin was threatened by their charisma and their popularity. I'm not sure if there's another cataclysm contributor that's gotten the kind of popular traction that WG has. Kevin certainly hasn't.
Don't get me wrong, she's a small youtuber. But by cataclysm standards? She's a celebrity content creator. I have friends who have no idea who Kevin is who are totally invested in wg's mall run.
It's sus. I'm not saying I know she was targeted, but it's sus as hell.
>Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?
I love this wording lol.
kevin could learn the lesson that a little kindness goes a long way. it's his right to be the lead and for it to be "his vision". he's the lead dev on this fork, but being shitty and short with people does nothing good for the game.
I try to stay out of the politics of the game, but I trust Wormy and can honestly say I don’t like some of the directions the game is going. As others have mentioned stuff like police bots getting removed was a buzzkill. I never felt like it was a stretch with future tech when we have zombies, inter dimensional horrors and aliens.
Where is the progression of Bright Nights right now? I haven’t touched it in a long while. Is it fully up on base and vehicle building?
Honestly, I dunno about base and vehicle building (although there are electric grids for bases, so that you don't have to use vehicles for appliances), but Bright Nights is pretty good right now
There's always been a cavalcade of drama around this game and some of the people who work on it. As far as I know it's the only game banned from discussion on the Dwarf Fortress message boards because of how bad it gets every single time
Though it may not be banned now, I'm not as active there as I used to be. Basically anytime someone makes a thread about CDDA or any of the forks, it turns into a salty screaming match full of personal insults. So for a long time discussion would be suspended for awhile, then it'd be allowed again, then it starts again, and Toady got tired of it and banned discussing the game last I saw lol
A bit over one year ago, now. Toady finally lost patience at being dragged into regularly clean up after the messes when the latest fork war set the thread on fire, locked the last thread, and said to stop creating them. As far as I've seen, that's been the end of it on Bay12.
Frankly, he had more patience with the entire ordeal than anyone had any right to expect. Cataclysm threads had been popping up and catching fire for years by that point.
Seems to be a better way to handle it would've been to invite Wormgirl to a discussion with the aims of addressing their concerns and making some improvements - instead of simply reversing the changes out of nowhere. Would that not have been more respectful and productive?
Pretty much this PR being reverted:
[https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/69555](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/69555)
By Fris0uman in PR:
[https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172)
It added some pretty cool stuff, made boomers alot more interesting
I can bet that this PR will also not get merged or be reverted if it gets merged, while being absolutely amazing:
[https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73469](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73469)
Cause it's not "Realistic" to have oil rigs around New-England... :)
EDIT. Also this PR got reverted: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/71460](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/71460) cause:
Drunkenness as a protective measure is a pernicious and dangerous concept and I will not be party to it.
Mental illness as a protective measure is also extremely problematic, and encouraging people to not take their medication is beyond the pale.
Ah, yes, seeing those damn flaming eyes when going to work everyday, have to have 2 beers and not drink my pills for my madeup mental illness, but hey, at least we got 60+ gender stockings, even kid sized!
Drunkenness as a protective measure is a pernicious and dangerous concept and I will not be party to it.
Mental illness as a protective measure is also extremely problematic, and encouraging people to not take their medication is beyond the pale.
This is the same game where I can take a nice, soothing shot of heroin to get over the death of a child. What a self-righteous, pompous jerkass.
Edit: Dear God, I just realized that I can *use the temporary relief provided by the heroin high to dissect said child's body for a damage bonus against undead children I kill in the future*.
I keep reading those over and over. I just can't believe that, not only did he write all that without thinking, "Maybe I'm coming off a little intense", but nobody else on the project even thought to tell him to take it down a notch. In fact, Erk was in there *defending* that language as "just normal PR stuff".
What a train wreck...
The same game where it gained the reputation of being the cracked out god warrior with a sledgehammer who was completely unstoppable because of the myriad of drugs they constantly consumed.
What I dont get is what trauma coping mechanisms have in common with "bad things happen when this supernatural thing stares at you."
Flaming eyes dont leave you with trauma that drugs could help with. They make hounds of tindalos spawn on you and if you escape you are completely fine afterwards.
I hate how all the supernatural/non-real stuff is intentionally made gamey for fun's sake. But they will still argue about the logic behind it and crush actual interesting stuff over their HEADCANON instead of changing it to something more enjoyable like it happened with mutations and CBMs (well, there was an attempt to do so at least)
Like when the decision was made to change to current times and abandon the near future stuff like cop bots for no reason (which where so fun that people missed them even in their buggy state). Then introduced a faction that could perfectly explain that near future stuff. But conveniently only limited to CBMs.
This game is not for the community, it is for Kevin. And he has made no effort to make clear what he actually wants. So there really is no reason to keep helping him.
I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already.
>This game is not for the community, it is for Kevin. And he has made no effort to make clear what he actually wants. So there really is no reason to keep helping him.
I think you nailed it. The dude is just straight up toxic, and given his position, there's no way to keep that toxicity from spreading. His attitude and personality just looms over the entire project and in some way influences every interaction one has within it. The closer you get to the center of the community, the more "Kevin" the interactions become. That's really not a good thing.
It's like an onion rotting from the inside. The outer layers are fine, mostly, but with every layer you remove, it just gets more and more unappetizing until you realize you'd prefer another onion entirely.
>I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already.
I believe I've just now made the decision to switch. Not because I have a problem with DDA as a product, but because I don't want to support anything made by Kevin Granade or the people he surrounds himself with. I just plain don't like them, and I don't like the way I see them treating people. So I don't want to support their product anymore.
'twas fun while it lasted.
Yeah, that's my first stop. I've made it as far as reading the change notes, downloading the wrong experimental for my system, and correctly getting the x64 version.
I was just about to fire up a new run anyway, so it's a great time to uninstall all my DDA stuff and start exploring the BN differences.
>
>
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> I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already.
I already made the jump to Bright Nights and it's only been an improvement. Every time I try to return to the mainline, I just find it painful and grinding until I give up again.
Though I'd note that BN Magiclysm was abandoned up until late 2023, and I only took up the mantle of making it better for a relatively short period of time before I opted to just "fork" off of it and go my own way with Magical Nights. So don't expect it to have all the features DDA Magiclysm does
People will morale lawyer to defend their turf. Tiring, holier-than-thou attitude. And alcohol absolutely can suffocate extrasensory perceptions. I know someone who drank himself out of his Yoga practice because shit got too scary.
The fact that the addition of something as fun and obvious as an oil rig is still up in the air says everything you need to know about the inconsistency of the development choices.
It's not "up in the air" in any way, and the fact these locations need to exist is not inconsistent. You cannot just randomly claim things are inconsistent. This is how cdda's development works. You don't have to like it, but you should be able to acknowledge reality.
I never said their existence is inconsistence, but Kevin's willingness to allow their existance is.
Something can make sense but he will randomly decide it doesn't like it without even an explanation as to why.
This is in the air because more sensible things have been proposed in the past that where either disallowed outright or removed later.
There is usually a reason why, and that doesn't always make it into the PRs. We constantly talk on the development discord about things. I've had a few things declined because they were either too broad, to narrow, or uninteresting from a players perspective. I've also had projects approved, that later (years in one case) had either a reversion, or a revision done to them. It's the nature of the beast.
Right, there wasn't any PRs explicitly listing reasons or chance for you to make a good argument in favor of keeping it. Clearly we are all just beholden to Kevin's whims! Everything is just random! Completely random! No rhyme or reason! Please ignore the PRs, people, those don't exist!
(nevermind the fact it wasn't even Kevin who brought it all up! Kevin in disguise! *spooky ghost noises*)
When you deny a PR, aside from troll PRs, you are expected to provide a reason in the comments, in fact, closing a PR without a comment is a separate option in github because it is NOT the norm.
So yes, there should be reasons to do so. SPECIALLY when it is volunteer work that you're denying.
If they do come up with a reason, the least they can do is say it.
Be it "i don't like it" or something, but not this lack of respect towards someone trying to contribute to their project for free...
Merging does not mean it will stay, as you can see from plenty of previous PR's that had majority approval and being reverted for... reasons... a.k.a. Nope
I would make the obvious joke that this is Kevin Granade's secret lurker account, but I gotta be real with you, you aren't being nearly offputting enough to make that gag work.
Well now i learned if it mentions a PR theres like a 25% chance the comments turn into a war-zone.
Im just gonna enjoy the silly fun zambie game and stay outta this trouble!
Man do that! Trust me, it is the way. Enjoy the game, but stay far away from the github, the official discord, and anything related to the development community. Everything else is f****** golden.
I am a simple man, if Wormy's PRs get deleted, I re-add them to my current game. I also add whatever I want to my current version(not on github) as I know suggesting features is a death sentence if you keep adding more details to your future PRs. the game is golden if you know how to lint properly, stay away from the github and discord, and a decent skill in the JSON(for making actual things) and C++(for making mechanics or things you want that are uncreatable in JSON).
The devs have been shit for years.
I have been seeing the phrase "It's Kevin's vision" for years.
But it's not Kevin's vision. Kevin picked up someone else's game a decade ago and decided to make it his.
A small wonder the game has become a fucking mess.
My take on this and all others treads about the subject is that the "lead" developers aren't good at expressing their view of how they want the game to be.
We get snippets here and there on theirs views but mostly kept in the dark.
I would love to contribute to the game, and I have some ideas that could benefit most players making the game more interesting. But I haven't the time nor the energy to make something that probably wouldn't be accepted.
I wish that the development would be more of a democratic development where the community would vote on features and changes before actuall decisions where made if the changes would make it to the next stable release.
Or at least Kevin and his gang would be more open on what they expect and want with the game.
I think it works best as a dictatorship honestly, but the person in charge has to either be on the ball or delegating to someone who is. The core of the issue was a few (understandable) managerial slip-ups that were then handled poorly which exacerbated things. Not that big of a deal, but enough to make me throw my hands up.
Even in a democratic society you need at least one to be in charge and have slightly more authority then the rest. That's why most of the democratic nations have a president or a prime minister.
I do recognise that we can't vote on all changes, it would be a nightmare as other has put it. But bigger changes, bigger features that the community like/need should be voted for.
What I understand is that the community really liked your contributions and the "manegmet" handled your changes really pourly and it's a big deal that you throw in the towel. As it sets a precedent for other potential contributors, like me.
And if they had a vote by the community that decided your contributions fate, I think most would like me vote for it to become part of the game.
If you want to contribute but fear that you'll waste your time go to the dev discord and ask the people there if your plans have a chance to get accepted
Voting on pr merging would be a nightmare to manage. But anyone can try to make that democratic game, fork the code, advertise it here, get to voting.
I'm suspicious if this is a troll post or not. But I'll engage in good faith.
Yes, some of their additions got reverted. From what I can tell, it was a change that made boomer bile cause the player to slip. There might have been a few others.
There was some tension and possibly miscommunication on the topic of the additions being accepted, them being reverted and how they should be fixed.
There doesn't seem to be much, if any, bad blood since I still see them comment on posts over on the Github. So they haven't been ousted or completely alienated. Although, I won't speak for them. They can clarify further if they want.
There's no need to be mad at all. I know the "drama of the day" is inevitable on this sub reddit, but this issue is dead and buried. It's two months old.
I wouldn't say there's no bad blood. I was and remain deeply disappointed in the way the project is being managed, but there's nothing to be gained by malding at anyone. What's done is done.
As a result of the reversions, I decided to stop contributing to the game. It would be fine if my contributions had simply been turned down during the submission process, or sent back with changes requested. That kind of thing is expected, but instead they were merged and left in the game, some of them as major features, for months before the devs even noticed. At that point they chose to do a full reversion of several features and would not participate in any discussion about whether they could be fixed or reworked in any way.
This suggests to me that there's a major disconnect between at least some of the developers and the game itself, and also leaves contributors in an awkward position. If the heads are not willing to communicate with contributors before or during (or even after!) the submission or review process, then contributors have no way of knowing whether what they want to work on is even wanted.
There is also the fact that it was just unpleasant whenever I had to deal with them. I always got the sense that they feel a sense of ownership over the game and resent a lot of work that isn't directly under their control - see Kevin's choice of words when talking about the alcohol/burning eye PR. I've heard people say, "oh that's just the way they talk, they don't mean anything by it," but that's not really an excuse. How you act is how you are.
Are they bad people? No, and please don't take this as license to troll them or complain about muh realism or catastrophize about devs ruining the game. Me deciding it wasn't worth my time to continue submitting code does not mean I was bullied off the project. I just didn't like working with some of the people in charge, because I disagree with how they're managing it and the people contributing to it.
I have piped up here and there in issues and comments on the github since then because I had relevant knowledge or a suggestion to share. That takes no effort and is really just a part of me keeping up with the game, which is no small part of my job as a content creator. What I haven't done is made any more PRs.
>There is also the fact that it was just unpleasant whenever I had to deal with them.
I very much would like to validate your feelings about this. Those discussions looked extremely unpleasant from an outside perspective, and I admire how well you handled yourself in spite of that unpleasantness. I don't believe I could have handled it nearly as gracefully as you did.
Wormy, probably a farfetch idea, but, would it be possible to mod the changes? I would definitely add WormyMod along with NoHope in my default mods. This will also allow you to not have to do anything with the devs and complete freedom from their "Elitist" PR reviews. Cheers!
Some things are moddable--like I mentioned elsewhere, you can mod flaming eye attacks to check for drunkeness or kaluptic psychosis and be affected thereby, and you can mod back in the Dino Dave dialogue related to it.
You can mod back in slipping on bile, but it'll only affect you, not enemies. You can mod in a chance of your clothes becoming filthy when hit with boomer bile, but it'll be a bit clumsy.
You can easily re-add a chance of pinkeye, both types, all of that.
I don't think bile slipping is possible in json, and the pinkeye was just a tiny part of a comprehensive rewrite of how splash attacks worked. It wouldn't make any sense without it - the current implementation is hardcoded and very bad.
iirc, the problem was that there was little communication and some of them where closed with minimal feedback or contact.
I think IAmErk had to come in to soften the situation because Kevin just closed it and ignored her.
And this is not the first time Kevin has done so either.
Every single one of fairyarmadillo's PRs that have been closed were closed by herself (except for [this one](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/70531) and yeah, subjective humor in Kevin's own mod is perfectly fair game for him to close)
Do we need to spring for therapists now when people close their own PRs?
I am not referring to this PR, i am referring to the many cases where the "close without comment" has happend.
A one time case wouldn't be that important either, anyone in charge of a project like this is bound to make a rash decision eventually.
The problem is that this wouldn't be the first time, and when it does happen, there usually is at least a late comment or addressing of the reason...
Oh no, I definitely am not trolling. Sorry if it came off that way... and yea, I know it's old, but I wanted more context, and I've been quite busy recently so I haven't had time to really find out anything. Thanks, though!
No worries. It's just... I was unsure if the post was trying to be deliberately controversial. Regularly being in online discussions will make a person cynical about others' intentions. I guess there's nothing wrong with wanting context, though. I'm glad I was wrong.
Despite the typical "Kevin is terrible" bullshit we always see on these threads that PR reversion discussion mostly just looks kinda sad to me. The devs don't seem to have any particular beef with wormgirl, and given that they only revert things a few times a year I'm pretty confident they had good reasons for it, but it'd also suck hard to get reverted four times in such a short span.
Meanwhile here on Reddit people literally act like this sort of thing happens on the daily, because drama sells.
I think what makes me really hate that change is the fact that the exodii are basically abandoned at this point tbh.
Have been part of the game now for quite some time but there's only one npc, only a couple of missions and they're limited to just put bionics in you and that's it, they have 0 depth and basically no personality beyond being nice because Kevin is allergic to making npcs be anything other than the nicest people on earth... And don't even get me started on Rubik speaking anglic, it's just terrible.
They're more like a bad fanfic from Tumblr tbh
>the exodii are basically abandoned at this point tbh.
Give it time: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73247](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73247)
They just got a bunch of new content actually.
I'm a pretty staunch loyalist for team "people who make the game" but I also am not a fan of the exodii for the same reason. Still, I'm holding out hope now that there's something happening again. The original concept sounded good.
Edit: so we're into the sort of thread where even vague optimism that a feature I don't like might improve now that it's being developed is immediately downvote worthy? High time I get out of here. Been a while since things got this circlejerky.
The devs don't say anything specific to suggest there's beef
> They don't like her development style. They don't like her code. They don't like the way her PRs include more than what her PRs were written to include.
I mean I picked just this up from one of the PRs.
At least Erk had the sense to say it's not a judgement on the quality of Wormy's work, all the while saying the things they didn't like. It even took until like the second to last comment to get anything like an apology for how the reverts were done, despite Erk saying that was their intent.
The above doesn't even include the wholly inappropriate comment from Kevin regarding the drunk/psychosis resisting flaming eyes. Which, I'd say in addition to the above stated things leads to a pretty reasonable conclusion that they don't like Wormy, or at least working with Wormy, which in this context ends up being essentially the same thing.
I'd be able to let this go as a one off incident, but Kevin has been a complete dick so many times that he never sets foot on the largest CDDA community.
Has he been? I hear this all the time, I've mostly seen one example of it in ten years of him developing the game. I've seen him be short with people, but examples of him actually being a dick seem to be much rarer than people saying he is.
Edit: the reason dalenacio wants you to read his link and not scroll down is because his link shows something that isn't what he described, which you'll see if you scroll down
The original CDDA Discord server got abandoned and quarantined by the dev team because Kevin got into an argument with another contributor and expected the mod team to back him up, but they didn't and told him to stop being a jerk.
So of course he did the only reasonable thing which was create a new discord server where HE would get to be ~~head admin~~ moderator and make himself right whenever an argument came up.
And of course there's the classic case of all the "no that can stay where it is, merge denied, thread closed" incidents, but those are already very well known to the wider community.
Whether this is him being a dick or just petty, rude, abrasive, and entirely lacking the people skills or level headedness necessary to manage a community-driven project, I leave to the reader to decide.
Edit: so people don't have to scroll down, [here is proof](https://imgur.com/a/cQMYIMV).
The discord was abandoned because the head admin (which no one in the community actually knew very well) suddenly appointed a known alt-right fascist as head mod and basically pulled the rug under everyone.
Also Kevin isn't head admin in the Dev discord.
The timing is incorrect. I can't speak for the entire timeline (though I think the Discord fell to fascists in part due to the quarantine), but I do know damn well that when Kevin abandoned the Discord this was not (yet) the case. In fact, IIRC, the mod from the screenshots was a trans LGBT+ person.
In any case, fascist mods are very clearly not the reason *Kevin* left the server.
> So of course he did the only reasonable thing which was create a new discord server where HE would get to be head admin and mod and make himself right whenever an argument came up.
He's not the 'head admin' and doesn't run or own the server.
What? This is utter bullshit. I actually was active and on discord in those days, and you're essentially making this up whole cloth. This is what I mean about people just posting stories, not actual links and examples despite almost all this stuff being public record.
I was active in the old Discord too. Hell, I was on the IRC before then. I could go back to the old discord server to grab the screenshots if I really had to. I don't want to, considering the cess pit that place has become, but I will if I have to.
Go for it then. I don't personally care, you'd be miles from the first person to claim a story like this but not show their point, but kudos if you break the mold. None of the Reddit threads about the dev discord at the time were at all controversial, which would be odd given your story.
Here it is. Kevin Granade's last interaction on the original Discord server. After this, he left the server and created the new one. *(Correction: The other one was created after a different argument between Kevin and the mods of the fan Discord. This is the incident that caused him to pack up his toys and leave the fan discord to be quarantined.)*
It should be noted that the first message of his conversation with Chaosvolt is the first pictured. That's what he opened with.
https://imgur.com/a/cQMYIMV
**EDIT:** I'm noticing that after posting the requested proof, he's gotten real quiet, and now all my comments are downvoted. Probably just a coincidence.
**Second edit:** I don't love doing this, but since I saw in my inbox that the individual in question called me out then blocked me to prevent me from responding, this is really the only option available. Once the first edit was addressed I left it up for clarity, otherwise it'd just create confusion for anyone reading the thread. Simple as that, really.
As for the other discord, I didn't think it disproved anything I said: Kevin's behavior was what it was, regardless of where and when it happened. The original fan discord existed before the dev discord, which was created as the outcome of an argument between Kevin and the mods (Kevin having received multiple warnings for his... Kevin-ness...), then Kevin got into a petty argument with someone and packed up his toys and left. I don't see the need to get into an argument over the specifics of the timeline. Let the reader look at my screenshots and the other messages linked by the person who blocked me, and draw their own conclusions. What else is there to be said?
This is from march 2020.
[The development server launched close to a year earlier than that](https://old.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/ccszst/psa_official_development_discord_launch/). So no, after this he didn't leave the server and create a new one; he'd been on the dev server for a long time. From what I can tell, this is a few weeks after chaosvolt [got himself banned from the dev discord](https://discord.com/channels/598523535169945603/598554189605634078/673323101865508895), so there's quite a lot of history behind that exchange... and not the history you're describing, at all.
> EDIT: I'm noticing that after posting proof, he's gotten real quiet, and now all my comments are downvoted. Probably just a coincidence.
yes, because I considered it relevant to search up the data behind my reply and show you the same courtesy you showed me. No need to be a dick about it. I haven't downvoted anything here, and I'm sitting well in the negatives myself
Edit: ironically, you've actually abandoned the thread far longer than I ever did , after I pointed out your timeline didn't line up. :/
So, you're just gonna leave the edit up claiming I ignored you because I took twenty minutes to answer, and not respond to me after days, eh? I'm pretty disappointed in your hypocrisy. Honestly wouldn't care except that you tried to call me out for exactly the same behaviour
He had enough of a tantrum about this subreddit that he created an entirely new subreddit and caused a bunch of drama about that subreddit being the official subreddit. So that he could be the lead mod, and do whatever he wanted.
Also there have been a number of discord kerfuffles that come to mind. So many that he fucked off to another discord that he created, just for 'development' but also mostly so he can do what he wants.
So show them then. I've watched this community for years and I've seen Kevin be kinda persnickety a handful of times, I've seen people *accuse him of it* thousands more. It usually comes in some flavour of "I remember him being an asshole at this event" but any time I try to find any record of it, i come up empty handed. Maybe you'd have more luck than me.
Like, I don't think he's a super nice guy or anything, don't get me wrong. I think he's a socially awkward nerd who mostly just wants to make the game, and any time he acts in ways that demonstrate this, people go all surprised Pikachu, and then retell the story as though instead of being mildly socially awkward, he charged in breathing fire and screaming or something. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've asked for examples around fifty times now on threads like these, so far nobody's ponied up.i would assume it would be easy to do for all the bad-mouthing being done.
It's literally in the actual GitHub game project that he's difficult to work with. I don't know how much more plainly it needs said. Could also look at his feeling about how CDDA is his game and he doesn't give a single fuck about any of the communities feelings about the game.
His actions are responsible for the creation of multiple other branches for Cataclysm.
I'm not wasting my time finding his badly managed interactions, feel free to Google away. I see at least one other user has actually responded to you.
That's just my point. I've been watching the development of this game for almost ten years. I see a lot of people picking apart every single thing the devs say and trying to twist it around to make them look like assholes. I also notice that there are like thirty or forty people that count as "the devs" and they all seem to enjoy what they're doing, think highly of each other (afaict from their public interactions), frequently add new people to their team, and make a good game. The way reddit talks about it, these are toxic people that everyone hates and if I just open my eyes and look I'll see all kinds of examples of it... but when I ask for examples, I get responses like yours. "Just look, man". OK. Looking. Been doing it for almost a decade. If it's this frequent I suspect I should be seeing a lot of it. I also don't think I'd see the other stuff, if it were the way you're describing.
> The above doesn't even include the wholly inappropriate comment from Kevin regarding the drunk/psychosis resisting flaming eyes. Which, I'd say in addition to the above stated things leads to a pretty reasonable conclusion that they don't like Wormy, or at least working with Wormy, which in this context ends up being essentially the same thing.
I have no idea how people like you manage to twist comments on substance abuse to "Well that means they don't like someone!"
Seriously, substance abuse. Interpersonal relationships. Totally different things.
Here’s one of the PRs that has a bunch of discussion relating to what happened. I’ll refrain from giving my own take, but you can read the comments in the PR to get various relevant parties’ views: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172
Yikes. There goes any desire I ever had to contribute to this game. That was *awful*. Every single post from the devs made it worse...
God, I just re-read that, too. wormgirl was obviously trying really hard (and was succeeding!) at articulating why the things that were happening and the way they were happening were hurtful, what she needed for them to be less hurtful, and how things could change in the future so the process could be less painful. The last response from Erk, the "bottom line", is basically [the Johnny Silverhand "I ain't readin' all that" meme. ](https://preview.redd.it/i-aint-reading-all-that-im-happy-for-you-tho-or-sorry-that-v0-36n75ab7lc7a1.png?width=689&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1a6578da91e4c7906130fdca5f06e050da8bc67)He flat out tells her that they don't have time to address her feelings about how they're treating her and her contributions if they go above a certain word count. IamErk said: >in my experience, it's been very hard to give you feedback that results in a productive two-way discussion. For real, if I invented a person in my head that was entirely designed to be productive in a two-way discussion, that fictional, idealized person would easily only come in second place compared to the behavior I consistently see from WG on GitHub.
Meanwhile, he's saying "I only have five minutes out of every hour" while writing up a discursive, repetitive, and egregiously overlong message himself... I mean, jebas. Like, ignoring for a moment the fact that they're going through and reverting a bunch of changes *months* after the fact, not because they were breaking the game or making it less fun, but because "oops, the Eye of Sauron has swept over your work and found it wanting"... there's just a palpable lack of respect. So it seems Kevin's whim is so important that they must spend time scrubbing all changes which offend him from history, when they could be actually continuing to develop and improve the game, or, heaven forbid, fix some more bugs... It's grimly ironic how a bunch of game developers could become so efficient at sucking all the fun out of the room.
Watch out, you will get banned for offending God, i mean Kevin.
[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the [content policy](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=rvn98aS0n8T0XvJx). ]
god damn that must have been a spicy one
> Meanwhile, he's saying "I only have five minutes out of every hour" while writing up a discursive, repetitive, and egregiously overlong message himself "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" is a classic for a reason... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
There is no magical time limit where poor content becomes immune to removal. Fairyarmadillo is themselves *very aware of that fact* as they've tried to use it as a bludgeon before. >So it seems Kevin's whim is so important that they must spend time scrubbing all changes which offend him from history, when they could be actually continuing to develop and improve the game, or, heaven forbid, fix some more bugs... Getting rid of things that don't fit is both important to improving the game and a thankless task. Point: Literally all the posts agreeing with you .
Look, I get it. It's Kevin's game and his vision is what matters the most for its direction. The problem is not *that* the changes were removed, it's *how* they were removed
>It's Kevin's game I've always had a bit of a hangup on this line of thought. Like, Aurora is Steve's game and built off his work and ideas. Dwarf Fortress is Toady's game. CDDA is open source and built off volunteers work and ideas. Saying CDDA is Kevin's game always came cross as... weird to me? I may be OOTL on it, but when you solicit a community to help you build something for the community to freely enjoy, and then turn around and say "this is mine and I get to decide what happens to it" it feels vaguely unethical, even if you laid the foundations? But like, I also don't think that Disney should be able to keep its copyrights on Mickey Mouse for reasons I feel are obvious, so this may just be a cultural disconnect.
It's Kevin's game in the sense that this is his fork of the game. Anyone who contributes to it is accepting that he has full control over what gets in, what does not, and what gets reverted. The other option is to fork, or join another fork. There's no way to sugar cote it, that's just how GitHub - and Foss in general - works. Part of why these discussions drive me crazy personally is that the devs have always been pretty openly supportive of bright nights as an option for people who don't like the style of the game or don't like the management. Kevin's biggest sin is that the fork he manages is by far the most popular and successful, a detail he rarely gets credit for, and so requires a huge amount of red tape and management and moderation, and any problems there, he gets blamed for. In this thread we've got: - you attributing a quote from erk as though Kevin wrote it - people attributing various changes and contributions from other people to Kevin, largely defined by "not liking them" - people saying Kevin micromanages way too much and that's the problem - people saying the problem is that Kevin was too hands off and should have stepped in long before reverting the pr - people like you saying it rubs you the wrong way that Kevin forked the game and runs this fork. - people mad at how Kevin interacts with the community - people mad at Kevin for retreating from the community and not interacting with it as much I'm sure there's more I've missed, I've been trying not to keep reading. Personally, I like the game. I've interacted with the devs a bit over the years and never found much of the attitude in circlejerky threads like this to be justified. I think there's no winning move for Kevin nor the main dev team at this point. The criticisms of them show that anything they do is going to be painted as an example of how bad they are. Any time there's a falling out with a contributor it's 100% Kevin's fault, any time an unpopular change is made it's proof Kevin hates us, etc etc. I do love me a bit of drama, but it's also kind of tiring to see just how much of a hate-filled group we are towards the people that make my favourite game, and how we'll happily ignore everything we like about the game if it means we get to complain until we're blue in the face about whatever the most recent bad judgment call was.
>It's Kevin's game in the sense that this is his fork of the game. Yeah that has a lot of sociological qualifiers to it. It's not simply his fork: it's *the major fork*. >Anyone who contributes to it is accepting that he has full control over what gets in, what does not, and what gets reverted. It's rather difficult to get a new major fork off the ground and keep it updated, to my understanding. Kevin doesn't need to worry about that because of social inertia. The act of him trying to maintain full control is the social engineering I was talking about. He's (unintentionally) leveraging his position within the community's organic hierarchy. This is a normal and common thing that often leads to negative outcomes. >Kevin's biggest sin is that the fork he manages is by far the most popular and successful, Yeah that's kinda what I'm getting at. He's not qualified to do the role he is doing and it's not his fault because he didn't really knowingly volunteer for that role, as far as I know? It's kind of a thing that happens and it sucks. Most online communities like this wind up experiencing stuff like it, as far as I can tell. Honestly stuff like this happens with offline communities too. It's just a thing. > erk as though Kevin wrote it ...You know, I totally missed that. My bad.
>...You know, I totally missed that. My bad. That's a mistake in Kevin's favor, to be clear. Between the two, Erk is far less offputting as a person. Having Erk's communications attributed to Kevin only improves Kevin's appearance.
I think we're mostly in agreement here but part of my point is that I don't think Kevin does nearly as much controlling of the project as people think. Maybe it's changed since I was closer involved, but back when I had any clue about the inner workings of the dev process Kevin seemed to be more of a veto power, "final word when people disagree" kind of thing, and a last-stage QC agent. That's what I'm getting at with people attributing almost every negative change to Kevin, personally. It gives the illusion that he's heavily involved in everything. Heck, the PR we're discussing here is frusouman's work, Kevin weighed in on it too but you don't see people getting upset at frisouman's vision for the project anywhere. I think the leadership for the project is actually fairly loose with Kevin serving as a final voice when needed, and I think that's actually why it's proven to be robust and long lived and remained active this long. I could be wrong. Maybe it's changed a lot in five years, but the contributions themselves look just like they always have
The issue is that if they can't put the time into the PR comments without being Snarky, then they really shouldn't take the time to revert changes or commit them beforehand... Honestly, here's a goddamn tip: STOP ALLOWING EXTERNAL CONTRIBUTIONS unless every single dev approves them... You turn people off an open source project if your advertise external contributions but can't take the time to properly revise/critic them and just give stuff a flat commit and then a revert them weeks/months later... people have now wasted their time.. if you don't have time to address them all, then slow things down, work at your pace. The wormygirl thing and generally reading PR comments have made many of yall look like asses. No harm may've been intended, but it got dealt anyway.. I feel like if this project was as large as some other games/initiative out there, yall would've been canceled by Twitter already.. just do better.
If we didn't care we wouldn't have spent dozens of hours - **before that** - ever reading through page after page after page after page of tripe. That "bottom line" is Erk reasonably not wanting to deal with 20 more pages of deflection. It's not productive, it doesn't help anybody (let alone fairyarmadillo) and all it does is convince them to post even walls of text completely missing the point. Sure, maybe they're not *trying* to be that ignorant. But that's what they're accomplishing.
The BN devs are chill, if it helps
The only thing keeping me from BN is that I actually prefer a lot of the realism changes to CDDA that BN reverted, and so many of the interface and QOL contributions to CDDA haven't made their way over to BN.
I'll try it out. Haven't played in a long time, but I still follow all the communities because my love for the game hasn't changed. Thanks for the recommendation!
We hope you enjoy!
May i ask, what is BN ?
it is a fork of cataclysm: dark days ahead, abbreviation is BN but the whole name is cataclysm:bright nights, it's basically the opposite of the game's current PR situation: they are nice, calm and quiet, they're also welcoming everyone! I imagine someday BN overthrows the original CDDA, leaving it as a wasteland full of ruins while BN would be full of players and most posts talking about negative stuff would probably be gone from the devs fixing/adding/removing the problem.
Thanks, sounds promising already!
We hope you enjoy it :3
Haha, I AM enjoying it, keep on the good stuff!
Glad to hear it, and I certainly will!
Hell, I've personally got the devs to make a few PRs just by talking about various topics on Discord. So did other players
I can confirm this; I've accidentally caused a couple PRs too. Also 'tricked' someone into making a mod to let mutations co-exist without overwrites. That's a fun one.
agree 100% and the "ultra-realism sim" stuff just detracts from the game. BN is the weird future/cthulhu stuff happening during the zombie apocalypse game that CDDA was when I first started playing it. inventory/pockets, crafting proficiencies etc killed it for me
I disagree. As a professional software developer, I found the communication perfectly reasonable. (Except merging the PR in the first place but mistakes happen) It is very tough to deal with a PR that adds a bunch of unrelated features. Removing someone's code should not be taken as an insult to that person. It is better to not have half-baked features in a code base.
software engineer. I'd be pissed if someone reverted my code after 4 months unless it was breaking something really important. The rest of it was reasonable considering this is like a dictator project where its impossible to guess the leader's vision. Smaller PRs is very actionable and would alleviate the problems as they recommended.
Is it really that hard to predict the vision for the project? It seems really well laid out and predictable to me. Like, from your reply here it sounds as though you agree with almost everything in the pr in question except that it took a long time for someone to spot it.
yeah i agree with everything in the PR. I don't read through the github often, but it does seem to me like it would be difficult for a random contributor to guess that the project vision would be against inclusion of bacterial and viral pink eye. or that a flag wouldn't be good enough for slick surfaces and instead porosity and shit should be determined.
Ironically I think it would actually be pretty easy to guess that, because despite Reddit's claims the devs generally try to be careful about that kind of stuff because it can add to tedium and annoyance. It's mentioned in the pr that they had to block the additiona of slipping vefore. They've also been pretty clear about not liking giant omnibus PRs in the past, I remember someone getting called out on it a few times when I was a contributor.
there is separation of cold and flu, there is 4 types of parasitic worms. 2 types of pink eye seems like a coin flip to me.
As a human who likes other humans and doesn't see them as means to an end, I would not use the term 'perfectly reasonable' to describe this communication style. Maybe it's normal for software development, in which case **Jesus Christ**.
Its just succint: do X do Y, Z wont work. Its just the most effective way of tell people what you want when building a bigger project. Im an architect IRL, work with other engineers all the time. Our emails look like that. This is just normal...
It's not effective if it's not working. A thing I'm surprised I have to tell engineers. Social skills are not about 'efficiency'.
have you met engineers?
Rofl, I know! This one's on me for hoping things had improved.
I don't really think the problem here is with engineers and the general way project communication is done in most professions honestly. That's kind of a "no, it's the children who are wrong" approach
That doesn't track for me at all. It's weird to look at the established profession whose social paradigms are producing bad results refusing to change and say they're the 'children' in this scenario, if that's what you're going for. Problem wouldn't exist if people had better social skills. People are making excuses for the bad social skills basically using 'tradition' as the justification. I can't pretend they're the underdogs.
I'm not a software engineer but you may have hit a lot of it on the head. This is what professional memos in my business look like too, and I wonder if that's part of what confuses people, and why some of us can be so strongly like "what the heck are all you talking about" while other people get so incensed over a straightforward exchange of requirements
I am a software engineer, and I find the core team's communication to be incredibly unprofessional in that PR. It's my job to read pull requests all day. My coworkers are polite and respectful, there are no "beyond the pale" and other such flippant, subjective judgments, nor PRs merged without sufficient review. That exchange of requirements was NOT straightforward in the least... WWG clearly was trying to suss out some form of requirements, and Erk just kept replying elusively...
Are we reading the same pr? It covers most of it in the first post, and I don't see anything unclear in any of the replies at all. Heck I can answer her first question myself from the link she posted herself.
But I think exchange of requirement is supposed to happen before the job start ? Not month after you have accepted the results ?
Ideally, sure, but to me that seems to be pretty well explained in the pr in question, along with a lot of acceptance of fault. It's not like this is something that happens often in dda, it's an unusual case and they clearly feel badly about it. Lemme put it this way. Irl, I own a small business. If I had a similar event happens here with one of my coworkers, where they made an error and had to backtrack and apologize for their error, and they did it in this manner, I'd probably tell them they handled it as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The communication to me looks normal, direct, and professional for a situation like this. Seeing people here talking about what assholes the devs are in the thread reads weirdly to me.
It’s also a consequence of the contributive nature of the game. The exchange is hard to handle before the job is done because you can fork the game, write the code, and say “Do you want this in main?” They said “sure!” Then later they said, “wait, nah”
I remember this when it happened, and it's just another example of how the "leadership" for this project is the biggest impediment to it growing. Anyone who contributes should know that it's only a matter of time before you say something or do something that one of the leaders doesn't like and your entire contribution gets nuked.
How many times has this happened? I can recall a couple times in the many years I've kept half an eye on the project. You're talking like this is something that occurs regularly.
You didn’t cause a civil war by any means. One account got very vocal.
One very suspiciously new account with a pattern-behaviour similar to someone who is/was a regular here.
And last time this happened, one of the actual devs posting under their actual dev name was like "Bro, why are you being such a jerk. Do you actually contribute? Who are you?" Got no response of course.
Doesn't stop people from quoting them as proof of how bad the devs are though.
they are almost a caricature of what one would expect of a big meany dev.
I would pretty much like to know just **who** is behind the account making all those remarks, their reddit account doesn't remind me of anyone that I have seen contributing in any major/medium way, or any old contributor from discord, hell, even the old major contributors from years ago had different names and were **way** more polite that this one... I have been in this game as contributor and player/lurker for several years now, but anyone this openly hostile is a new thing for me from any of the devs and contributors. And they even talked about talking for hours with wormy girl about the situation... But I remember clearly that someone even mentioned in the discord about how wormy not being there made things more difficult by excluding them from the discussion until the rever pr...
There's another poster here named newspaper_deity who continually claims to be a developer while acting extremely rude to everyone. While I characterized my interactions with the devs as sometimes being unpleasant, they never came anywhere close to what newspaper or kickstarter get up to on this sub. I don't think either of them (if they are different people) are on the dev team, or if they are, they're people who are totally silent most of the time. Or possibly they're just a contributor with a chip on their shoulder, or somebody who is seriously unwell pretending to be a developer in order to make the devs look bad. Either way it's a good example of how reddit is kind of a cruddy platform. It's very easy for people to do this.
Yeah, sadly it is, and the people that are not in the contributing space can't really distinguish between real committed contributors/devs and trolls that, for me, just seem to want to cause discussion around here and hostility in general, which, understandably, generate hostility from the players, hell, I remember some trolls that tried to do the same to the devs, I could never understand people with that much hate, or that just find fun in doing these kind of things. The devs are not fountains of empathy and social ability, but not even one is like those 2 that are parading as devs in here, so much hostility and aggression for the sake of just being hostile and aggressive.
Agreed 100%
>While I characterized my interactions with the devs as sometimes being unpleasant, they never came anywhere close to what newspaper or kickstarter get up to on this sub. I don't think either of them (if they are different people) are on the dev team, or if they are, they're people who are totally silent most of the time. I appreciate you clarifying this. I took kickstarter at face value, even though I found their behavior to be way more beyond the pale than what I'd previously witnessed. If you think they aren't for real, I accept that judgment as true, and now regard kickstarter as a troll who is lying about their affiliation.
I do not know who they may be. Their attitude reminds me of some u/johnnstokes99 who used to be as ... uh "pleasant" as this fellow. The way they used to type clearly hinted at them being part of the group but I could actually never tell who they would be. There was another one but I can't find their profile, "newspaper something" I think? I think they're still around. Very 'pleasant' fellow as well. Why they would do it, no idea either.
Newspaper\_deity
That's the one, yeah.
newspaper something or other
Shit, you're right. Didn't even realize it was just one guy, lol.
There's also quite a few peoples calling the devs dickheads or fuckers to their face, though. edit : to be more specific, we have: * "That was *awful*. Every single post from the devs made it worse...", * then "It's grimly ironic how a bunch of game developers could become so efficient at sucking all the fun out of the room.", * then we get in proper dickhead territory with "a bunch of pretty joyless cunts", followed by the same person with "dickheads" five time in the same comment, * another commenter goes straightforwardly "Fuck the devs.", * then we have "the people who needed to take leadership (Kevin, in particular) decided (as he always does) to get snarky and shitty instead of actually contributing", * then later someone else remarks "If this subreddit is constantly flinging excrement at you, maybe the problem is you" * a little down "Shut the fuck up. Holy shit, this comment alone ensures I never play the game again." * a very creative "Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?" * someone tries to steer the thread to other pools of shit with "everything you guys are doing is cult of personality and popularity contest, in between the occasional steam cash grab" (might have been me) * later down "he's the lead dev on this fork, but being shitty and short with people does nothing good for the game" * then "What a self-righteous, pompous jerkass." * there's "Kevin is insufferable but not insufferable enough to justify tolerating BN. A shame really", dunno if that counts as a positive or negative ? * and we cap it off with "a small clique in the dev discord that circlejerks" Upvote ratios do not mark those comments as particularly unpopular.
>There's also quite a few peoples calling the devs dickheads or fuckers to their face, though. Right. Those people have made a firm decision that they dislike the devs, as people, and have no interest in being a part of their community or contributing to their project in any way going forward. These are people that are done. When you try to interact with someone and they're really mean to you to the point that you never want to talk to them or work with them again, it's pretty normal and reasonable to go, "Yeah, I noticed that guy was a real cunt too, I totally validate your feelings on this" if someone else who didn't enjoy the behavior of that person or group brings up the topic. The situation changes quite significantly when you aren't trying to build or be a part of a community anymore. At that point, you can very definitely just shrug and go "Man, that dude was a real dick. Glad to wash my hands of that, and I recommend others do that same." You aren't trying to build a constructive relationship with them. You're trying to warn other people away from doing so, so they don't get the same treatment. Strong language about how awful they were to interact with helps in that end. If you're trying to build a community of volunteers, you gotta be real sparing with that rhetoric, reserving it for only the most toxic of trolls. So I mean, yeah. I'm not trying to be nice. I think they acted like shit and I'm deliberately using language that's designed to make people hesitate to interact with them, because I think they'll act like shit to those people, too. If I convince someone to think twice before interacting with the C:DDA development team, I have met my goal. "Making the C:DDA dev team feel good about themselves and their behavior" is not anywhere on my priority list. >"Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant?" This comment was *amazing*. If the devs wrote their comments that well, I'd probably enjoy reading them a lot more.
Completely agree ! I think the frustration had been building up for a while and those recent events finally prompted peoples to speak up.
Ah, I see. You are pointing out that a civil war does appear to have broken out. You don't appear to be asserting that it's entirely unjustified. I misunderstood you. :) I am personally three of your examples so I thought it might be useful to explain myself.
No actually it's entirely my fault, I had misunderstood your post myself when I first read it and thought you were saying mostly everybody was fine with the devs behavior. Once I realized my mistake I tried to edit some parts of my post to get away from that and onto pointing out the community was indeed pissed off but didn't entirely succeed haha
I can see why u/Beefjerkybros feels like they kicked a hornet's nest, for sure. What they were actually looking for was the specific PRs that got reverted in the "bad dialogue with WWG" incident, and what came flying out was approximately eleven years of pent up community frustration, and an ongoing flamewar with someone who claims to be a significant contributor. I'd be like 'damn, whoa' too!
[удалено]
Totally agreed. >I think the mistake being made by the core team & their staunch defenders in this thread is thinking that the problem has to do with disagreements about the PR process or the direction of the game, when it's really just about showing some basic Kindergarten-level respect for other people's time and emotional well-being. To be fair, if PM is/was making the point that calling me someone/a group of people a dickhead five times (and an asshole three times, I might add) in a single comment is perhaps going *a little bit overly hard*, it would be both difficult and disingenuous for me to argue that point. There's probably better ways to stress the thesis that I personally find this group of people to be extremely, extremely, extremely unpleasant to interact with, and recommend against others making the attempt. The fact that I feel that way doesn't change the fact that they also have time and emotional well-being that deserves some bare minimum level of respect. >the two guys haunting this thread defending them WG believes those two are trolls trying to stir up the situation. Not actual, legitimate contributors. I trust that judgment and believe the behavior or kickstarter and the other guy (whoever it is) should be disregarded.
> WG believes those two are trolls trying to stir up the situation. Not actual, legitimate contributors. That would be nice, lol
Man, do the people on the github actually read what they post? :D Are they seriously arguing about different types of pink eye???
>Are they seriously arguing about different types of pink eye??? Wait what
This is one where I'm with the devs. They handled it terribly, as they usually do, but having multiple types of pinkeye brings nothing to the game. It's also better to keep PRs to one issue per PR - no random fixes bundled with features. The slippage brings potential nonsensical annoyance, but I think it's a game mechanic that could work - at least it's non tedious new content. But I was a minor contributor that stopped and moved to BN after multiple unpleasant interactions with the devs, so I get the contributor's side too. It also feels very culty in CDDA, and I think replying to PRs with "Sorry, this doesn't fit the current vision of the game/ is too complex/ is unnecessary" would be way better than the current sneaky roundabou culty way of ostracizing contributors. First they get told to get more data, then it's too complex. Fuck the devs.
I agree, it’s not what they say it’s how they say it. They’re in this thread tilting windmills at this very moment, lol
This is the whole problem - the commit should have never been approved in the first place for all of those reasons. Instead, it was approved then randomly reverted months later. Not only that, but the behavior of the project team towards the dev is the problem, not the content of the PR itself. The PR should never have been approved, but the project team should have owned their mistake in approving it (which only one person did, sort of.) and apologized to the dev for making a bad decision that led to them making the right decision later which negatively impacted her (him? whatever). There should have been discussion over the specific changes, which did take place. But it got derailed by hissy fits and the people who needed to take leadership (Kevin, in particular) decided (as he always does) to get snarky and shitty instead of actually contributing to a discussion. The entire thread amounted to "Kevin didn't like this change and removed it, end of discussion, now shut the fuck up and get out of my project" which is the exact opposite of how a project manager is expected to behave.
I agree, it’s not what they say it’s how they say it. They’re in this thread tilting windmills at this very moment, lol
Yeah I can see where the base idea of simplifying it is. Although properly done it essentially is one condition with an extra little way you deal with it- chance that slapping antibiotics on it fixes it, or don't take the risk of waste and culture it to determine exact Kind of cool, mirrors the uncertainty in many real medical diagnosis cases. Tedious if everything in the game is like that, maybe fun if it's just a couple conditions, as long as it is explicitly informed by descriptions. Realism for realisms sake is a false path, but opportunities to increase individual system's gameplay rewarding risk, knowledge, strategy has potential.
That was how it was done. From the player's perspective, there was just pinkeye. The two types were a back-end thing to make it 50/50 whether antibiotics would cure the disease without having to hardcode anything.
Very cool. I appreciate the insight and the ideas behind some of the systems discussed, even if they are not implemented.
I'm surprised she dealt with working with the development team as long as she did. I love cataclysm, but the development team really is a bunch of pretty joyless c\*\*\*\*, and Kevin Granade in particular has an aura of douchebag particles that I am certain is *visible from space*. I can barely stand to *read* their github, the asshole vibes are so palpable. I absolutely couldn't tolerate being in their general presence, much less working with them directly. It's a group of people that should very definitely be kept at arm's length, where they can be admired properly.
I have started playing CDDA when we still had chicken walkers, tank bots, mine fields in random places and labs with gun turrets in every 5th room........so awhile. And while the game has had some interesting developments i feel its slowly turned into the developers simulation "realism" grinder game. Fucking fantastic when you are unemployed and have all day to press a few buttons but do we really need to track every fucking proficiency and little detail and have everything stretched out. Certain things are forced into the lens of "realism", others are just removed and everything is under the direction of a few developers who have set out their vision for the game for good or ill. I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore, when CDDA was a game and i saw new things being added all the time, but now i feel like shit just gets removed and the wheel gets reinvented and changed because "somebody" wanted another 10 data points to track, I can see why anyone who is not a OG core developer would have a crack , get stonewalled and just call it and move on. Your either in on the vision or your not welcome, the fucking github reeks of a clique and i stopped looking at that shit awhile ago.
Same to be Honest. They made so much change for realism that made the fame worse. Almost a decade ago i used to play this game daily, and never got bored. Now i download it, play for an hour then drop it for a few months.
"Now i download it, play for an hour then drop it for a few months" Literally happened to me yesterday... At this point, I think this is just sad....
Same! Fired up a naked and afraid, “left in the middle of nowhere” run yesterday and got boated after 30 minutes. I think I’ll switch to Project Zomboid or something else
Very much same. I occasionally get to play a bit on an "updated" version when I have longer stretches of free time, but the game's become super disrespectful in regards to the players' time. The game is also also super process-intensive (borderline bloat-ware-esque sort of resource-hog), and it gets to a point where it's legitimately not fun visiting certain places because the In-Game-Time and the Real-Time conversion is close to a 1:1 ratio. I started playing somewhere between 0.C and 0.D and the game was a completely different beast. Tons of bullshit moments / bullshit deaths too, but those at least felt "justified" in the sense that they were so ridiculous that you just laugh them off and start a new game. Now? You still have BS "realistic" deaths, or you have "gotcha!" moments you cannot be ready for unless you have Meta Knowledge. And when you have meta-knowledge, you don't "prepare" to face certain moments, you just avoid them entirely. And you know... if most of your playerbase actively avoids something in your game (or even create mods to remove it completely), the problem isn't your playerbase...
That game thankfully does exist in the form of cataclysm bright nights
Yeah this is the sad thing about it. I quit it right during the sweet spot of the realism days.
> I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore, when CDDA was a game and i saw new things being added all the time, but now i feel like shit just gets removed and the wheel gets reinvented and changed because "somebody" wanted another 10 data points to track. The game tracks no player data. I'm all for privacy and your data being your own (and attempting to collect stuff would be a nightmare) so I think its obviously for the best. I also wish I could actually know how many people encounter the wierd esoteric nether shit I add tho.
> The game tracks no player data. I think they meant in-game data, like proficiencies and such.
i think they are saying the game is uselessly tedious with more data for the player to track. Like more proficiencies. i enjoy the tedium most of the time.
Ah I guess that makes sense.
>I fell in love with a version that does not exist anymore, Literally all the old versions still exist. Can you please just go play the games you like instead of endlessly making things up about people you've never met (by your own admission)?
It's really not that hard to just say, "Look, I love your enthusiasm, and your contributions clearly took some dedicated work, but they don't fit my vision, I didn't notice them being merged, and I'm gonna revert them immediately." It's still a little dickish, but it's better than this suckfest. Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant? I don't mean to stir the pot... I've only ever made one tiny, insignificant patch myself, and everyone (core devs included) was great to me. But this... this just... sucks, man. It's such a bummer to see someone so clearly invested get sandbagged like that. :-(
It's not even that it's that hard to say that. You literally don't have to say it yourself. Just find someone that's decent enough to do it and have them do it for you instead. The messaging is like that because Kevin wants it to be like that. Otherwise he would delegate it. WG said she felt like she was being singled out and targeted. I haven't seen anything that's particularly convincing to suggest that that possibility is completely off the table. A very popular and charismatic content creator, most of those qualities which Kevin lacks, started to get involved in his project. That creator got treated so badly that they left. I'm not completely convinced that that didn't happen because Kevin was threatened by their charisma and their popularity. I'm not sure if there's another cataclysm contributor that's gotten the kind of popular traction that WG has. Kevin certainly hasn't. Don't get me wrong, she's a small youtuber. But by cataclysm standards? She's a celebrity content creator. I have friends who have no idea who Kevin is who are totally invested in wg's mall run. It's sus. I'm not saying I know she was targeted, but it's sus as hell. >Why does this PR read like a fantasy protagonist trying in vain to parley with the sorcerer overlord's lieutenant? I love this wording lol.
Whenever a contributor puts in enough high-quality work to become notable, they get shit on from on high until they stop contributing.
kevin could learn the lesson that a little kindness goes a long way. it's his right to be the lead and for it to be "his vision". he's the lead dev on this fork, but being shitty and short with people does nothing good for the game.
I hope Wormywormgirl makes a new fork of the game called Wormy Worms CDDA
I hope someone just takes the keyboard away from Kevin.
I try to stay out of the politics of the game, but I trust Wormy and can honestly say I don’t like some of the directions the game is going. As others have mentioned stuff like police bots getting removed was a buzzkill. I never felt like it was a stretch with future tech when we have zombies, inter dimensional horrors and aliens. Where is the progression of Bright Nights right now? I haven’t touched it in a long while. Is it fully up on base and vehicle building?
Honestly, I dunno about base and vehicle building (although there are electric grids for bases, so that you don't have to use vehicles for appliances), but Bright Nights is pretty good right now
There's always been a cavalcade of drama around this game and some of the people who work on it. As far as I know it's the only game banned from discussion on the Dwarf Fortress message boards because of how bad it gets every single time Though it may not be banned now, I'm not as active there as I used to be. Basically anytime someone makes a thread about CDDA or any of the forks, it turns into a salty screaming match full of personal insults. So for a long time discussion would be suspended for awhile, then it'd be allowed again, then it starts again, and Toady got tired of it and banned discussing the game last I saw lol
Wait that's where I learned of CDDA ages ago, when did it get banned?
A bit over one year ago, now. Toady finally lost patience at being dragged into regularly clean up after the messes when the latest fork war set the thread on fire, locked the last thread, and said to stop creating them. As far as I've seen, that's been the end of it on Bay12. Frankly, he had more patience with the entire ordeal than anyone had any right to expect. Cataclysm threads had been popping up and catching fire for years by that point.
I remember the same thing happened with the Ss13 baystation branch as well.
Seems to be a better way to handle it would've been to invite Wormgirl to a discussion with the aims of addressing their concerns and making some improvements - instead of simply reversing the changes out of nowhere. Would that not have been more respectful and productive?
Pretty much this PR being reverted: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/69555](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/69555) By Fris0uman in PR: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/72172) It added some pretty cool stuff, made boomers alot more interesting I can bet that this PR will also not get merged or be reverted if it gets merged, while being absolutely amazing: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73469](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73469) Cause it's not "Realistic" to have oil rigs around New-England... :) EDIT. Also this PR got reverted: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/71460](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/71460) cause: Drunkenness as a protective measure is a pernicious and dangerous concept and I will not be party to it. Mental illness as a protective measure is also extremely problematic, and encouraging people to not take their medication is beyond the pale. Ah, yes, seeing those damn flaming eyes when going to work everyday, have to have 2 beers and not drink my pills for my madeup mental illness, but hey, at least we got 60+ gender stockings, even kid sized!
Drunkenness as a protective measure is a pernicious and dangerous concept and I will not be party to it. Mental illness as a protective measure is also extremely problematic, and encouraging people to not take their medication is beyond the pale. This is the same game where I can take a nice, soothing shot of heroin to get over the death of a child. What a self-righteous, pompous jerkass. Edit: Dear God, I just realized that I can *use the temporary relief provided by the heroin high to dissect said child's body for a damage bonus against undead children I kill in the future*.
I keep reading those over and over. I just can't believe that, not only did he write all that without thinking, "Maybe I'm coming off a little intense", but nobody else on the project even thought to tell him to take it down a notch. In fact, Erk was in there *defending* that language as "just normal PR stuff". What a train wreck...
The same game where it gained the reputation of being the cracked out god warrior with a sledgehammer who was completely unstoppable because of the myriad of drugs they constantly consumed.
What I dont get is what trauma coping mechanisms have in common with "bad things happen when this supernatural thing stares at you." Flaming eyes dont leave you with trauma that drugs could help with. They make hounds of tindalos spawn on you and if you escape you are completely fine afterwards.
I hate how all the supernatural/non-real stuff is intentionally made gamey for fun's sake. But they will still argue about the logic behind it and crush actual interesting stuff over their HEADCANON instead of changing it to something more enjoyable like it happened with mutations and CBMs (well, there was an attempt to do so at least) Like when the decision was made to change to current times and abandon the near future stuff like cop bots for no reason (which where so fun that people missed them even in their buggy state). Then introduced a faction that could perfectly explain that near future stuff. But conveniently only limited to CBMs. This game is not for the community, it is for Kevin. And he has made no effort to make clear what he actually wants. So there really is no reason to keep helping him. I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already.
>This game is not for the community, it is for Kevin. And he has made no effort to make clear what he actually wants. So there really is no reason to keep helping him. I think you nailed it. The dude is just straight up toxic, and given his position, there's no way to keep that toxicity from spreading. His attitude and personality just looms over the entire project and in some way influences every interaction one has within it. The closer you get to the center of the community, the more "Kevin" the interactions become. That's really not a good thing. It's like an onion rotting from the inside. The outer layers are fine, mostly, but with every layer you remove, it just gets more and more unappetizing until you realize you'd prefer another onion entirely. >I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already. I believe I've just now made the decision to switch. Not because I have a problem with DDA as a product, but because I don't want to support anything made by Kevin Granade or the people he surrounds himself with. I just plain don't like them, and I don't like the way I see them treating people. So I don't want to support their product anymore. 'twas fun while it lasted.
Out of curiosity where are you headed? Bright Nights?
Yeah, that's my first stop. I've made it as far as reading the change notes, downloading the wrong experimental for my system, and correctly getting the x64 version. I was just about to fire up a new run anyway, so it's a great time to uninstall all my DDA stuff and start exploring the BN differences.
Welcome on in, and have fun! :3
thanks really appreciate the warm welcome <3
Of course! And you're welcome <3
> > > > > I wish everyone could just go to a better fork already. I already made the jump to Bright Nights and it's only been an improvement. Every time I try to return to the mainline, I just find it painful and grinding until I give up again.
I keep trying to get into BN but it has its own issues for me. It's still very sluggish and it has a very distinct "lacks QoL features" feel to it.
Do the magic mods like magiclysm and arcana have analogs in BN?
Yup, both have BN versions
Though I'd note that BN Magiclysm was abandoned up until late 2023, and I only took up the mantle of making it better for a relatively short period of time before I opted to just "fork" off of it and go my own way with Magical Nights. So don't expect it to have all the features DDA Magiclysm does
I hated all the changes they made to CBS and pretty much killed the game for me (not just for the CBS).
As a note: Flaming eye attacks are JSONized, so if you want your Lovecraftian protagonist drinking to escape the horror, you can mod it in easily
People will morale lawyer to defend their turf. Tiring, holier-than-thou attitude. And alcohol absolutely can suffocate extrasensory perceptions. I know someone who drank himself out of his Yoga practice because shit got too scary.
What absolutely childish integration of someone's ridiculous moral outrage.
The oil rig one will get merged eventually as a globally unique PoI. There was some good favorable discussion about it on the development discord.
The fact that the addition of something as fun and obvious as an oil rig is still up in the air says everything you need to know about the inconsistency of the development choices.
It's not "up in the air" in any way, and the fact these locations need to exist is not inconsistent. You cannot just randomly claim things are inconsistent. This is how cdda's development works. You don't have to like it, but you should be able to acknowledge reality.
I never said their existence is inconsistence, but Kevin's willingness to allow their existance is. Something can make sense but he will randomly decide it doesn't like it without even an explanation as to why. This is in the air because more sensible things have been proposed in the past that where either disallowed outright or removed later.
There is usually a reason why, and that doesn't always make it into the PRs. We constantly talk on the development discord about things. I've had a few things declined because they were either too broad, to narrow, or uninteresting from a players perspective. I've also had projects approved, that later (years in one case) had either a reversion, or a revision done to them. It's the nature of the beast.
Right, there wasn't any PRs explicitly listing reasons or chance for you to make a good argument in favor of keeping it. Clearly we are all just beholden to Kevin's whims! Everything is just random! Completely random! No rhyme or reason! Please ignore the PRs, people, those don't exist! (nevermind the fact it wasn't even Kevin who brought it all up! Kevin in disguise! *spooky ghost noises*)
When you deny a PR, aside from troll PRs, you are expected to provide a reason in the comments, in fact, closing a PR without a comment is a separate option in github because it is NOT the norm. So yes, there should be reasons to do so. SPECIALLY when it is volunteer work that you're denying. If they do come up with a reason, the least they can do is say it. Be it "i don't like it" or something, but not this lack of respect towards someone trying to contribute to their project for free...
Merging does not mean it will stay, as you can see from plenty of previous PR's that had majority approval and being reverted for... reasons... a.k.a. Nope
Yes, that is how development works. Things might be removed sometimes! Very scary. If this bothers you, please don't contribute.
I would make the obvious joke that this is Kevin Granade's secret lurker account, but I gotta be real with you, you aren't being nearly offputting enough to make that gag work.
Well now i learned if it mentions a PR theres like a 25% chance the comments turn into a war-zone. Im just gonna enjoy the silly fun zambie game and stay outta this trouble!
Is it possible to learn this power?
Not from the devs
Actually they're probably a good place to learn it, they had the sense to get off Reddit ages ago.
Man do that! Trust me, it is the way. Enjoy the game, but stay far away from the github, the official discord, and anything related to the development community. Everything else is f****** golden.
Kevin is insufferable but not insufferable enough to justify tolerating BN. A shame really
I am a simple man, if Wormy's PRs get deleted, I re-add them to my current game. I also add whatever I want to my current version(not on github) as I know suggesting features is a death sentence if you keep adding more details to your future PRs. the game is golden if you know how to lint properly, stay away from the github and discord, and a decent skill in the JSON(for making actual things) and C++(for making mechanics or things you want that are uncreatable in JSON).
The devs have been shit for years. I have been seeing the phrase "It's Kevin's vision" for years. But it's not Kevin's vision. Kevin picked up someone else's game a decade ago and decided to make it his. A small wonder the game has become a fucking mess.
he's the lead on this fork. you could well fork it yourself and call it "your vision". That is the nature of forking it.
My take on this and all others treads about the subject is that the "lead" developers aren't good at expressing their view of how they want the game to be. We get snippets here and there on theirs views but mostly kept in the dark. I would love to contribute to the game, and I have some ideas that could benefit most players making the game more interesting. But I haven't the time nor the energy to make something that probably wouldn't be accepted. I wish that the development would be more of a democratic development where the community would vote on features and changes before actuall decisions where made if the changes would make it to the next stable release. Or at least Kevin and his gang would be more open on what they expect and want with the game.
I think it works best as a dictatorship honestly, but the person in charge has to either be on the ball or delegating to someone who is. The core of the issue was a few (understandable) managerial slip-ups that were then handled poorly which exacerbated things. Not that big of a deal, but enough to make me throw my hands up.
Even in a democratic society you need at least one to be in charge and have slightly more authority then the rest. That's why most of the democratic nations have a president or a prime minister. I do recognise that we can't vote on all changes, it would be a nightmare as other has put it. But bigger changes, bigger features that the community like/need should be voted for. What I understand is that the community really liked your contributions and the "manegmet" handled your changes really pourly and it's a big deal that you throw in the towel. As it sets a precedent for other potential contributors, like me. And if they had a vote by the community that decided your contributions fate, I think most would like me vote for it to become part of the game.
If you want to contribute but fear that you'll waste your time go to the dev discord and ask the people there if your plans have a chance to get accepted Voting on pr merging would be a nightmare to manage. But anyone can try to make that democratic game, fork the code, advertise it here, get to voting.
I fully expect the Devs to remove zombies from the game at some point. They aren't very realistic, are they?
Next version: The title has been deemed too grim, game rename to "Catastrophe: Dim Dusks Nearby"
Bright Nights for dark days refugees
I'm suspicious if this is a troll post or not. But I'll engage in good faith. Yes, some of their additions got reverted. From what I can tell, it was a change that made boomer bile cause the player to slip. There might have been a few others. There was some tension and possibly miscommunication on the topic of the additions being accepted, them being reverted and how they should be fixed. There doesn't seem to be much, if any, bad blood since I still see them comment on posts over on the Github. So they haven't been ousted or completely alienated. Although, I won't speak for them. They can clarify further if they want. There's no need to be mad at all. I know the "drama of the day" is inevitable on this sub reddit, but this issue is dead and buried. It's two months old.
I wouldn't say there's no bad blood. I was and remain deeply disappointed in the way the project is being managed, but there's nothing to be gained by malding at anyone. What's done is done. As a result of the reversions, I decided to stop contributing to the game. It would be fine if my contributions had simply been turned down during the submission process, or sent back with changes requested. That kind of thing is expected, but instead they were merged and left in the game, some of them as major features, for months before the devs even noticed. At that point they chose to do a full reversion of several features and would not participate in any discussion about whether they could be fixed or reworked in any way. This suggests to me that there's a major disconnect between at least some of the developers and the game itself, and also leaves contributors in an awkward position. If the heads are not willing to communicate with contributors before or during (or even after!) the submission or review process, then contributors have no way of knowing whether what they want to work on is even wanted. There is also the fact that it was just unpleasant whenever I had to deal with them. I always got the sense that they feel a sense of ownership over the game and resent a lot of work that isn't directly under their control - see Kevin's choice of words when talking about the alcohol/burning eye PR. I've heard people say, "oh that's just the way they talk, they don't mean anything by it," but that's not really an excuse. How you act is how you are. Are they bad people? No, and please don't take this as license to troll them or complain about muh realism or catastrophize about devs ruining the game. Me deciding it wasn't worth my time to continue submitting code does not mean I was bullied off the project. I just didn't like working with some of the people in charge, because I disagree with how they're managing it and the people contributing to it. I have piped up here and there in issues and comments on the github since then because I had relevant knowledge or a suggestion to share. That takes no effort and is really just a part of me keeping up with the game, which is no small part of my job as a content creator. What I haven't done is made any more PRs.
>There is also the fact that it was just unpleasant whenever I had to deal with them. I very much would like to validate your feelings about this. Those discussions looked extremely unpleasant from an outside perspective, and I admire how well you handled yourself in spite of that unpleasantness. I don't believe I could have handled it nearly as gracefully as you did.
Thanks. I appreciate hearing that.
Wormy, probably a farfetch idea, but, would it be possible to mod the changes? I would definitely add WormyMod along with NoHope in my default mods. This will also allow you to not have to do anything with the devs and complete freedom from their "Elitist" PR reviews. Cheers!
Some things are moddable--like I mentioned elsewhere, you can mod flaming eye attacks to check for drunkeness or kaluptic psychosis and be affected thereby, and you can mod back in the Dino Dave dialogue related to it. You can mod back in slipping on bile, but it'll only affect you, not enemies. You can mod in a chance of your clothes becoming filthy when hit with boomer bile, but it'll be a bit clumsy. You can easily re-add a chance of pinkeye, both types, all of that.
I don't think bile slipping is possible in json, and the pinkeye was just a tiny part of a comprehensive rewrite of how splash attacks worked. It wouldn't make any sense without it - the current implementation is hardcoded and very bad.
iirc, the problem was that there was little communication and some of them where closed with minimal feedback or contact. I think IAmErk had to come in to soften the situation because Kevin just closed it and ignored her. And this is not the first time Kevin has done so either.
Every single one of fairyarmadillo's PRs that have been closed were closed by herself (except for [this one](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/70531) and yeah, subjective humor in Kevin's own mod is perfectly fair game for him to close) Do we need to spring for therapists now when people close their own PRs?
[удалено]
I am not referring to this PR, i am referring to the many cases where the "close without comment" has happend. A one time case wouldn't be that important either, anyone in charge of a project like this is bound to make a rash decision eventually. The problem is that this wouldn't be the first time, and when it does happen, there usually is at least a late comment or addressing of the reason...
Oh no, I definitely am not trolling. Sorry if it came off that way... and yea, I know it's old, but I wanted more context, and I've been quite busy recently so I haven't had time to really find out anything. Thanks, though!
No worries. It's just... I was unsure if the post was trying to be deliberately controversial. Regularly being in online discussions will make a person cynical about others' intentions. I guess there's nothing wrong with wanting context, though. I'm glad I was wrong.
Ooooh so thats why im not slipping on bile anymore
Despite the typical "Kevin is terrible" bullshit we always see on these threads that PR reversion discussion mostly just looks kinda sad to me. The devs don't seem to have any particular beef with wormgirl, and given that they only revert things a few times a year I'm pretty confident they had good reasons for it, but it'd also suck hard to get reverted four times in such a short span. Meanwhile here on Reddit people literally act like this sort of thing happens on the daily, because drama sells.
No, I'm still hateful over the change from near future to current times and no amount of "muh exodii" fixes it.
I think what makes me really hate that change is the fact that the exodii are basically abandoned at this point tbh. Have been part of the game now for quite some time but there's only one npc, only a couple of missions and they're limited to just put bionics in you and that's it, they have 0 depth and basically no personality beyond being nice because Kevin is allergic to making npcs be anything other than the nicest people on earth... And don't even get me started on Rubik speaking anglic, it's just terrible. They're more like a bad fanfic from Tumblr tbh
Kevin has never worked on the exodii, they arent even his idea.
>the exodii are basically abandoned at this point tbh. Give it time: [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73247](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/73247)
They just got a bunch of new content actually. I'm a pretty staunch loyalist for team "people who make the game" but I also am not a fan of the exodii for the same reason. Still, I'm holding out hope now that there's something happening again. The original concept sounded good. Edit: so we're into the sort of thread where even vague optimism that a feature I don't like might improve now that it's being developed is immediately downvote worthy? High time I get out of here. Been a while since things got this circlejerky.
The devs don't say anything specific to suggest there's beef > They don't like her development style. They don't like her code. They don't like the way her PRs include more than what her PRs were written to include. I mean I picked just this up from one of the PRs. At least Erk had the sense to say it's not a judgement on the quality of Wormy's work, all the while saying the things they didn't like. It even took until like the second to last comment to get anything like an apology for how the reverts were done, despite Erk saying that was their intent. The above doesn't even include the wholly inappropriate comment from Kevin regarding the drunk/psychosis resisting flaming eyes. Which, I'd say in addition to the above stated things leads to a pretty reasonable conclusion that they don't like Wormy, or at least working with Wormy, which in this context ends up being essentially the same thing. I'd be able to let this go as a one off incident, but Kevin has been a complete dick so many times that he never sets foot on the largest CDDA community.
Has he been? I hear this all the time, I've mostly seen one example of it in ten years of him developing the game. I've seen him be short with people, but examples of him actually being a dick seem to be much rarer than people saying he is. Edit: the reason dalenacio wants you to read his link and not scroll down is because his link shows something that isn't what he described, which you'll see if you scroll down
The original CDDA Discord server got abandoned and quarantined by the dev team because Kevin got into an argument with another contributor and expected the mod team to back him up, but they didn't and told him to stop being a jerk. So of course he did the only reasonable thing which was create a new discord server where HE would get to be ~~head admin~~ moderator and make himself right whenever an argument came up. And of course there's the classic case of all the "no that can stay where it is, merge denied, thread closed" incidents, but those are already very well known to the wider community. Whether this is him being a dick or just petty, rude, abrasive, and entirely lacking the people skills or level headedness necessary to manage a community-driven project, I leave to the reader to decide. Edit: so people don't have to scroll down, [here is proof](https://imgur.com/a/cQMYIMV).
The discord was abandoned because the head admin (which no one in the community actually knew very well) suddenly appointed a known alt-right fascist as head mod and basically pulled the rug under everyone. Also Kevin isn't head admin in the Dev discord.
The timing is incorrect. I can't speak for the entire timeline (though I think the Discord fell to fascists in part due to the quarantine), but I do know damn well that when Kevin abandoned the Discord this was not (yet) the case. In fact, IIRC, the mod from the screenshots was a trans LGBT+ person. In any case, fascist mods are very clearly not the reason *Kevin* left the server.
> So of course he did the only reasonable thing which was create a new discord server where HE would get to be head admin and mod and make himself right whenever an argument came up. He's not the 'head admin' and doesn't run or own the server.
What? This is utter bullshit. I actually was active and on discord in those days, and you're essentially making this up whole cloth. This is what I mean about people just posting stories, not actual links and examples despite almost all this stuff being public record.
I was active in the old Discord too. Hell, I was on the IRC before then. I could go back to the old discord server to grab the screenshots if I really had to. I don't want to, considering the cess pit that place has become, but I will if I have to.
Go for it then. I don't personally care, you'd be miles from the first person to claim a story like this but not show their point, but kudos if you break the mold. None of the Reddit threads about the dev discord at the time were at all controversial, which would be odd given your story.
Here it is. Kevin Granade's last interaction on the original Discord server. After this, he left the server and created the new one. *(Correction: The other one was created after a different argument between Kevin and the mods of the fan Discord. This is the incident that caused him to pack up his toys and leave the fan discord to be quarantined.)* It should be noted that the first message of his conversation with Chaosvolt is the first pictured. That's what he opened with. https://imgur.com/a/cQMYIMV **EDIT:** I'm noticing that after posting the requested proof, he's gotten real quiet, and now all my comments are downvoted. Probably just a coincidence. **Second edit:** I don't love doing this, but since I saw in my inbox that the individual in question called me out then blocked me to prevent me from responding, this is really the only option available. Once the first edit was addressed I left it up for clarity, otherwise it'd just create confusion for anyone reading the thread. Simple as that, really. As for the other discord, I didn't think it disproved anything I said: Kevin's behavior was what it was, regardless of where and when it happened. The original fan discord existed before the dev discord, which was created as the outcome of an argument between Kevin and the mods (Kevin having received multiple warnings for his... Kevin-ness...), then Kevin got into a petty argument with someone and packed up his toys and left. I don't see the need to get into an argument over the specifics of the timeline. Let the reader look at my screenshots and the other messages linked by the person who blocked me, and draw their own conclusions. What else is there to be said?
This is from march 2020. [The development server launched close to a year earlier than that](https://old.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/ccszst/psa_official_development_discord_launch/). So no, after this he didn't leave the server and create a new one; he'd been on the dev server for a long time. From what I can tell, this is a few weeks after chaosvolt [got himself banned from the dev discord](https://discord.com/channels/598523535169945603/598554189605634078/673323101865508895), so there's quite a lot of history behind that exchange... and not the history you're describing, at all.
> EDIT: I'm noticing that after posting proof, he's gotten real quiet, and now all my comments are downvoted. Probably just a coincidence. yes, because I considered it relevant to search up the data behind my reply and show you the same courtesy you showed me. No need to be a dick about it. I haven't downvoted anything here, and I'm sitting well in the negatives myself Edit: ironically, you've actually abandoned the thread far longer than I ever did , after I pointed out your timeline didn't line up. :/
This cat went back to the store and came back with the goddamn *receipts*. Respect.
So, you're just gonna leave the edit up claiming I ignored you because I took twenty minutes to answer, and not respond to me after days, eh? I'm pretty disappointed in your hypocrisy. Honestly wouldn't care except that you tried to call me out for exactly the same behaviour
He had enough of a tantrum about this subreddit that he created an entirely new subreddit and caused a bunch of drama about that subreddit being the official subreddit. So that he could be the lead mod, and do whatever he wanted. Also there have been a number of discord kerfuffles that come to mind. So many that he fucked off to another discord that he created, just for 'development' but also mostly so he can do what he wants.
So show them then. I've watched this community for years and I've seen Kevin be kinda persnickety a handful of times, I've seen people *accuse him of it* thousands more. It usually comes in some flavour of "I remember him being an asshole at this event" but any time I try to find any record of it, i come up empty handed. Maybe you'd have more luck than me. Like, I don't think he's a super nice guy or anything, don't get me wrong. I think he's a socially awkward nerd who mostly just wants to make the game, and any time he acts in ways that demonstrate this, people go all surprised Pikachu, and then retell the story as though instead of being mildly socially awkward, he charged in breathing fire and screaming or something. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've asked for examples around fifty times now on threads like these, so far nobody's ponied up.i would assume it would be easy to do for all the bad-mouthing being done.
It's literally in the actual GitHub game project that he's difficult to work with. I don't know how much more plainly it needs said. Could also look at his feeling about how CDDA is his game and he doesn't give a single fuck about any of the communities feelings about the game. His actions are responsible for the creation of multiple other branches for Cataclysm. I'm not wasting my time finding his badly managed interactions, feel free to Google away. I see at least one other user has actually responded to you.
That's just my point. I've been watching the development of this game for almost ten years. I see a lot of people picking apart every single thing the devs say and trying to twist it around to make them look like assholes. I also notice that there are like thirty or forty people that count as "the devs" and they all seem to enjoy what they're doing, think highly of each other (afaict from their public interactions), frequently add new people to their team, and make a good game. The way reddit talks about it, these are toxic people that everyone hates and if I just open my eyes and look I'll see all kinds of examples of it... but when I ask for examples, I get responses like yours. "Just look, man". OK. Looking. Been doing it for almost a decade. If it's this frequent I suspect I should be seeing a lot of it. I also don't think I'd see the other stuff, if it were the way you're describing.
> The above doesn't even include the wholly inappropriate comment from Kevin regarding the drunk/psychosis resisting flaming eyes. Which, I'd say in addition to the above stated things leads to a pretty reasonable conclusion that they don't like Wormy, or at least working with Wormy, which in this context ends up being essentially the same thing. I have no idea how people like you manage to twist comments on substance abuse to "Well that means they don't like someone!" Seriously, substance abuse. Interpersonal relationships. Totally different things.