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This is the best place to be for NWN:EE news and information!

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 :wink:.

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!
TheBarbarianJuliusBorisovvoidofopinionAtrophiedericfetito666BelgarathMTH

Comments

  • SkipBittmanSkipBittman Member Posts: 146
    Eh. Nah.
  • SelpheaSelphea Member Posts: 23
    Every forum/community has a use.

    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.
    DerpCityTheBarbarian
  • FreshLemonBunFreshLemonBun Member Posts: 909
    Personally I don't like forums, my stance is that in this day and age someone shouldn't have to sign up for an account just to participate. It's like an artifact of a bygone era that just wont go away.

    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.
    TheBarbarianSelpheaAtrophiederic
  • TarotRedhandTarotRedhand Member Posts: 1,481
    edited May 2018
    @FreshLemonBun Personally I don't like forums, my stance is that in this day and age someone shouldn't have to sign up for an account just to participate. It's like an artifact of a bygone era that just wont go away.

    Were there no spammers, hackers or trolls that would be a viable option. Alas in the real world things are different...
    I've peeked at a few twitch streams of the game and found that it often stutters while ppl are streaming

    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?
    So a perception of NWN EE as rough around the edges is probably fair and justified

    It may be a perception but to me it is neither fair or justified.

    TR
  • FreshLemonBunFreshLemonBun Member Posts: 909
    It's a fact that because there are registrations there is something for trolls and hackers to get or use in the first place. One account often leads to the next and that's generally speaking how things like identity theft occur, these places aren't totally secure and that is the actual real world unfortunately. A search confirms for example that BioWare had 18,000 accounts compromised through their forum before they shut it down.

    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.
  • TheBarbarianTheBarbarian Member Posts: 58
    Intriguing thought. What do registration-free places of discourse look like? What are the pros? What are the cons?

    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.
    Atrophiederic
  • TarotRedhandTarotRedhand Member Posts: 1,481
    Pity BD. They are trying to make the game foolproof. The trouble with that is -
    A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - DOUGLAS ADAMS

    (Sorry TB, I just love that quote).

    TR
    TheBarbarianAtrophiederic
  • FreshLemonBunFreshLemonBun Member Posts: 909
    Generally it depends on the community that is attracted to such places, and the various tools that are in place. For example captcha seems to do a better job overall at keeping spam out of discussions than registrations do, and short term user identification is enough for moderators to keep threads clean and ban troublemakers. Generally speaking the more information a user has out there the more at risk they are, if all your user accounts don't have different passwords, and all your security question answers aren't different then you're at risk. Furthermore with an e-mail address you can find if a user is registered on some sites or not. Nothing is truly untraceable on the internet but security really isn't an argument in favor of forum registration, including trolling and spam, neither of which are eliminated with registration.

    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.
    TheBarbarianSelphea
  • grom56grom56 Member Posts: 109
    Couple of silly questions here: What's twitch? And "Let's Play"? Is that some kind of game video on youtube? Do these both allow you to watch others play NWN?
  • SuperFunHappySuperFunHappy Member Posts: 44
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv

    "Let's play" are just videos where the player plays through the game.
    grom56voidofopinion
  • grom56grom56 Member Posts: 109
    Interesting.... Thanks SuperFunHappy!
  • FreshLemonBunFreshLemonBun Member Posts: 909
    Yes, you can watch other people play NWN as well as use the modding tools to make their own adventures. It can also be used as a way of promoting games and gauging their impact on contemporary audiences.
    grom56
  • JuliusBorisovJuliusBorisov Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,714
    The load screen flickering is fixed in the current beta build (8170).
    Sylvus_Moonbowgrom56
  • voidofopinionvoidofopinion Member, Moderator Posts: 1,248
    edited May 2018

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv

    "Let's play" are just videos where the player plays through the game.

    I am so late in getting in on this train but as a fun little aside.

    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.

    :)
    grom56JuliusBorisovDerpCity
  • grom56grom56 Member Posts: 109
    Thanks Void.... I can see the appeal of both. I was able to get Twitch working on my TV, but there is no fast forward, so it's a bit clunky.
    JuliusBorisovvoidofopinion
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