This is the best place to be for NWN:EE news and information!
Telarius
Member Posts: 8
Reading through the forums, I've noticed occasional concerns regarding posts in the Steam discussions. I've been on Steam for a very long time, and as @JuliusBorisov has said, best to check here for the most accurate information and generally disregard many of the Steam discussions. Steam is a great platform for keeping one's game collection together, but the community leaves a lot to be desired at times.
One thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that when it comes to negativity on Steam, you'll always see the same names/handles showing up. No matter what the topic, such individuals will always try to incite an argument. I've found ignoring them to be the best policy. A troll will grasp at anything they can to create conflict, I've seen @JuliusBorisov shoot down quite a few. I applaud his patience, he has more than I do.
NWN has always been a VERY popular classic, and the more time passes, the more players will likely gravitate towards the enhanced edition. Just ignore the naysayers and negativity. In time, they'll fade away, go elsewhere, or perhaps go play out in traffic as my father always used to say
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For those of us who enjoy NWN, these forums and the Trello board are great resources for any questions one might have. I really enjoy Trello, as one is able to see what features others are interested in as well and allow the community to help drive the direction of the game. It is an exciting time to be an NWN fan!
One thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that when it comes to negativity on Steam, you'll always see the same names/handles showing up. No matter what the topic, such individuals will always try to incite an argument. I've found ignoring them to be the best policy. A troll will grasp at anything they can to create conflict, I've seen @JuliusBorisov shoot down quite a few. I applaud his patience, he has more than I do.
NWN has always been a VERY popular classic, and the more time passes, the more players will likely gravitate towards the enhanced edition. Just ignore the naysayers and negativity. In time, they'll fade away, go elsewhere, or perhaps go play out in traffic as my father always used to say
.For those of us who enjoy NWN, these forums and the Trello board are great resources for any questions one might have. I really enjoy Trello, as one is able to see what features others are interested in as well and allow the community to help drive the direction of the game. It is an exciting time to be an NWN fan!
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Comments
Sometimes people make the experience that their words and actions have no impact on the world around them, so they may as well do whatever makes them feel better, and lashing out at others serves to reassure us of our own strength. Volatility is generally more an expression of insecurity than anything else; I think that's why we, ironically, tend to violently reject others offering us reassurance when we're in that state, as that would mean having to acknowledge our own weakness, which we are trying to escape at least within the sanctuary of our own minds. Life's scary. We're all very very small and fragile things, and the entire situation is messed up and terrifying and we're all going to die and be forgotten. It's not pleasant to contemplate. Poor self-esteem can even lead to life-threatening self-harm. Making ourselves believe in our own worth and ability to navigate life is a life-and-death level matter of self-preservation.
And sometimes people come to believe that kindness is just a lie and a front and a facade people use to get their own way, and, frankly, they've got a point. The vast majority of people will be kind to you as long as they want something from you, or as long as you're providing them with something that benefits them (such as praise and validation, for instance). But if you don't have anything they want, you might as well not exist - see typical social treatment of beggars and welfare recipients. A lot of people experience broken romantic or familial relationships, having been promised True Love (TM) and Forever And Always (TM), only to be thrown away without a second glance over minor points of conflict, often resource-motivated. The "We're all a big happy family!"-narrative looks dishonest when you've made that experience. I've got some people that'd elicit a quite bitter laugh from me if I saw them advocating prosocial values and behaviours, too.
People tell you what they see, not what is. Don't disdain somebody for being unable to see anything worth loving. They've got reasons to be that way, and they didn't get to choose the circumstances that made them them any more than anybody else did. It's tempting to conclude that we're 'better' than somebody else for whatever reason and whatever qualities it is we've personally got - more attractive, more wealthy, more intelligent, more kind, more hard-working, more proactive, more calm, more cheerful, more generous, more proficient at (Insert Skill Here), more humble (which is just the height of irony). But in practice, that's just the same kind of self-soothing they're doing; reassuring ourselves of our own worth and worthiness by belittling somebody else.
Life's the biggest, most insanely complex and amazing and exciting story there is. Appreciate your antagonists. What would LotR have been without Sauron? :-) One may wonder what the hobbits looked like from his perspective.
Bit silly to hate on Beamdog enhancing NWN, though, yeah. It's not exactly as if they're strangers to the franchise, or as if NWN hasn't been a great big tinkery lego box game that anybody gets to mess with from the get-go. Give it time, I suppose. The campaigns and modules BD and the community produce will matter in the long run, but... well. We'll never be without critics, no matter what we make. Even the greatest works of art have been verbally ripped apart. It's not avoidable, and it's not really desirable to avoid it anyway - as a crafter, you want to be criticized, and learn from the criticism, in order to improve.
We need to be able to see what's wrong with something in order to make it better. A lot of the stuff I've crafted has been crappy just because I'm too easily satisfied; I don't polish enough, and put out imperfect things because I operate on a "(makes thing) -> Yay! This is the best thing I've ever made! -> (makes next thing)"-basis. It's a good attitude for continuing to practice enough to improve, but not a good one for achieving true mastery of a skill, or producing truly high-quality work. Ironically, I think malcontentment with something might be the prerequisite for becoming a master of it - but if you try crafting something and then hate it so much that you never craft something else again you can't improve your crafting skill to be at the same level of your skill level at perceiving and judging that thing. So I'd say, optimally, you'd want to combine people who really enjoy crafting stuff and people who care enough about the stuff's quality to criticize it until it's perfect, not separate them.
In NWN's case, sincerely inviting malcontents to start modding seems like a good idea. Sharing knowledge and resources is one of the real, practical advantages of prosocial mentality. Maybe that can even give some deeply disillusioned folks a bit of hope for humanity back. "You don't have to be a Yay-we-are-happy-flower-people-and-we-like-eachother!-cultist, just put some minor degree of effort into not acting like a jerk because (insert string of good reasons here)", is a much more reasonable thing to demand of somebody in return than "Yo, why don't you just stop disliking things you total downer?". "Adjust your behaviour a little because that is beneficial to you as well as everyone around you" versus "Invert your entire perception of reality and personality because it doesn't please me".
But I say that as someone who isn't really keeping up with the Steam parts of the community. X_x How bad is it? Can I see? Is anyone getting death threats yet? Do they have lions? Would they set lions loose on us / NWN / Beamdog if they could? Do they need some butterfly pictures? I can draw them some butterfly pictures. Or lions! If they don't have lions, I can draw them some lions. We can have a Steam forum arena fight for the honor of NWN using pictures and pantomime. It'll be fun.
I like these forums because posters tend to be more experienced with NWN-specific subjects. So when I talk about a specific feature request or bug it doesn't need a lot of explaining about the context.
I like Steam's because it's a good place to get a gauge about what new players are looking for or run into. I can never be a new player again but those forums give me a lot of insight into a new players' thoughts. For PW/module makers and guide writers it's very useful.
Since the Bioware forums' Sundering the community has been scattered across the planes. I don't think they'll ever come back together so this fragmentation is something we'll have to live with.
I also think that while some users may not be so articulate about their concerns it usually stems from something valid. For example I've peeked at a few twitch streams of the game and found that it often stutters while ppl are streaming sometimes to the point the streamer decides to play something else. Every time when ppl transition to another area the text area with the name of the area flickers incessantly. So a perception of NWN EE as rough around the edges is probably fair and justified but most folks aren't in the mood to go somewhere and make bug reports.
Others get upset that Beamdog didn't deliver what they never promised they would do and I think that's both unfortunate and a bit frustrating at the same time.
Were there no spammers, hackers or trolls that would be a viable option. Alas in the real world things are different...
Surely that is a twitch problem that occurs across many games. Anyway, don't people check out the "Let's Play" videos on YouTube anymore?
It may be a perception but to me it is neither fair or justified.
TR
The problems with the game isn't with twitch, it's with the game freezing. I think ignoring those things is detrimental to the game's future either way. The other problem even sometimes occurs on the live stream and on my own desktop, and I don't think I've seen an NWN EE that doesn't have flickering loading screens. There are numerous other problems too that people have noticed with the game, probably more than what gets reported as bugs.
You may think things are unfair but then again if the product is not functioning well people will notice and they wont always be forgiving.
I imagine it'd be harder to clean out spambot attacks. When spam messages are linked to user accounts, you can delete the user and everything they've posted in one swoop. And, making people's actions on the internet untrackable mightn't exactly reduce it's usability for real-life crime... although, to be fair, it's not exactly as if it's not being used for such as is, so who knows whether removing registration and accounts from the picture would increase or decrease total amount of (expletive)y stuff being done online. Good time to raise some awareness for avoiding password reuse?
Makes a lot of sense for people to stress problems more loudly than lack of problems, anyway. Communication-wise, sending out constant calls of "EVERYTHING IS FINE!" isn't as sensible as being silent by default and going "THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG HERE!" when something's wrong. I think criticism mostly just puts people on edge because it's much more widely used to undermine and ostracize people rather than to improve the overall situation in some way. Poisoning the well and all that.
Shipping new bugs every now and then is pretty hard to avoid in agile development too. Makes the "augh!! BUGS AGAIN! YOU INCOMPETENT BUFFOONS! WHY DID I PAY FOR THIS?! I COULD HAVE BOUGHT CAKE INSTEAD!"-displeasure a perpetually recurring thing. I'd be tempted to call that a good thing for general mental health maintenance - not expecting Ultimate Perfection (TM) from ourselves and eachother means we can't crash and fall as hard when we inevitably fail to live up to it, so I'd think approachableness and fallibility in professionals and idols to be nothing if not healthy for everyone involved. But the "These people's products are a buggy mess!"-reputation that's likely to come with that can't be good for marketing. :-/
People who aren't emotionally invested in this game and it's community the way we are aren't going to be comparing the EE and it's ongoing improvements to 1.69 and earlier, or to be patient and trust that the bugs will be followed by bugfixes, they're going to be comparing it to all the other games they could be spending their time playing just then. So it's... overall, probably actually pretty fair for them to be judgmental of the problems they encounter. They're just viewing it all on a bigger scale. If negative Steam reviews and such contain mention of specific bugs, that alone makes them pretty dang constructive and valuable, since it shows which bugs are particularly noticeable and annoying to players.
(Sorry TB, I just love that quote).
TR
My personal objection to "forums" has more to do with the kind of behavior I think such places encourage in the sense of being used as a soap box and a tendency to become insular communities of cheerleaders. Nay saying valid criticisms is one of the things I commonly see in such communities and I agree with TheBarbarian it's less useful to try and somehow invalidate product criticism because if left unaddressed they continue to remain. In the threads preceding the launch on Steam, in response to raised concerns some users commented the reasons why they're perfectly happy with NWN EE as is. It doesn't seem that those comments here alleviated some of the negative reactions elsewhere, after all why would it?
It's better to leave your own opinions of the product to the side and try to understand the criticisms if you wish to improve the product and appeal to a wider audience. As long as you want them to buy the product then their criticisms (within reasons / if it's realistic and not a personal attack) is always valid.
I personally think things like the flickering of the text area in loading screens while not a show stopper does help set the tone of quality of the product lower than it has to be, and it's like why does that even happen and why have they not fixed it in half a year. If you haven't noticed it you can see it briefly each time an area loads for example in the April 20th stream at time 1809, or 30:09, if you go back and watch other past streams it happens there too, and if you use NWN EE for real you probably experience it too, and it's on every NWN streamer's playthrough, except for Diamond Edition users. Small things and little glitches like that just look totally unpolished and it's hard to defend that.
"Let's play" are just videos where the player plays through the game.
A Let's Play involves the player adding their own commentary and input which marks it as a transformative performance.
A Long Play is just raw gameplay with nothing added by the player.
I found that out last year when I discovered a channel dedicated to Let's Play/Longplays of old point and click adventure games.