Ikkarou Tatsuru said:
It's been established very early in this thread that it's always a frustrating experience whenever this topic comes up, developers are asked to elaborate on what led to these decisions, but the explanations given are often insufficient or disagreeable at the very least, or something that ends up being subjective in its earnest, hence the ping-pong. No one understands anything, frustration escalates, and whatever instance of the discussion that went wrong gets written off as drama, which in turn lowers everyone's patience whenever the topic comes up again (because it will). It's not as irrational as it looks. That's why I believe it would be better if, for some cases, an explanation wouldn't be provided at all.
So, as it turns out, when we make changes or decisions people don't like, it's very common for "well this answer is just unsatisfactory" to be a response.
Remember this? No amount of information was gonna change this dude's mind or get him to understand the decision made.
Not every decision we make is going to be something that is based on as much hard data as that thread, and yes, that means that we're going to make decisions that are subjective sometimes and decisions that people don't like sometimes, and it won't be as cut and dry as "analog sucks based on years of observation." You're free not to like it, and express it within reason, but I have to be brutally honest here. You're not owed a completely satisfactory answer for decisions we make that you don't like, and using "well we didn't get a satisfactory answer" as an excuse for people being overly hostile is just not acceptable. So, I'm sorry, but while it may be established that it's frustrating, I don't find that to be particularly compelling for anything. We're not going to ignore questions people ask us just because some people might not like the answer. You're just going to have to live with that.
TehRealSalt said:
The fact that the gamedata exploit is literally in Releases right now, and anyone can download it, is proof enough that this system does not work.
So, I'm not sure I see the problem here. Having it so that you can set a custom gamedata also means you can mod the game to whatever extent you want and never have to worry about it. Extra characters? Done. Extra levels? Done. Reorganize the campaign? Done. Overhaul the campaign? Done. Anti-cheat here actually doubles as a method of prevention for someone just loading a wad to try and and accidentally spoiling something for themselves. I don't see having it so you can build a custom save file completely and making it an opt-in setup be an issue. It also has the side benefit of letting you fire up vanilla whenever you want with no issue.
Where I agree with you on, however, and I was convinced on through discussion in dev, was save files & ghost data for custom characters, but as I recall, that came up close to when we decided to push hard for release and that kinda fell through the cracks. We'd need a system in place to properly track that, and we don't have it.
JEV3 said:
There was a page or two that actually had very interesting and constructive discussion about what were some of the ways getting all the chaos emeralds could be made more diverse for other characters... including something about Fang riding a motorcycle. Looks like it got buried again by people still picking apart Mystic's first couple responses.
I think people were too eager to pick apart the response to actually engage with the idea presented. There was some interesting discussion there I agree we could use. It'll probably be a while before we actually get to implementing some sort of super concept though, since we're still not even 100% sure on how the abilities on the new characters have turned out, and that's something in particular we'd be looking at before putting super abilities in.