Crawl Development, and the lack of Player input therein.

[Alatreon]

Hello, I am Alatreon, and I generally frequent CBRO. I have been a active part of this community since august of last year, and with off and on spats. During the past year, I have noticed a disturbing trend. It seems as though the player base of this game has little to no say in how it is developed. Of course, this is only based off of evidence that I personally have seen. A number of players agreed that certain changes to the game were not in the best interest of the enjoyment of this game, such as amulet reform and other things. Now, I am no game developer, nor do I profess that I know how to be a better one, but is it not true that the developers devlop games for the consumer? And if enough of the consumers want something, is that not a logical reason to design for what the consumers want? Anyways, sorry for the long paragraph, I just needed to get something off of my chest.

[Lacuenta]

Because the forums tend to get frequented by the vocal minority.

[Arrhythmia]

Now, I am no game developer, nor do I profess that I know how to be a better one, but is it not true that the developers devlop games for the consumer?

No. Putting aside the specific case of crawl, there's plenty of games (brogue comes to mind) that are developed towards the developers' interests.

And if enough of the consumers want something, is that not a logical reason to design for what the consumers want?

Definitely no. People are by and large, idiots, who don't know what they want.

[Shard1697]

"Develop games for the consumer" is not really the same as "do whatever people say to do the most often".

Crawl development is probably the most open and player-influenced of literally any game I've ever seen.

[Sprucery]

In fact, there have been surprisingly many GDD threads resulting in actual commits given that this is not an actual DCSS development forum...

[Alatreon]

Hmm, apparently I was under a different impression, sorry for my misunderstanding. I have only recently joined the forums, what with it's... less desirable reputation, and am only going off of what I see in webtiles.

[duvessa]

most posters are absolutely horrible game designers
this is demonstrated by how many of them think amulets of rMut/clarity are a good idea

[chequers]

The dev team IS players, just ones who send in patches. I'm not part of the dev team but I have ~70 commits in game, just by writing and submitting them. Contributing is certainly intimidating but when I started i had never written C/C++ before. The dev team are generally helpful on IRC if you want to get into the codebase.

[jwoodward48ss]

Ah, so that's how you get help...

[goodcoolguy]

It's open source. If there were a sufficiently competent and motivated set of players to develop a fork, build an alternative online infrastructure, and promote it, the situation you describe could change, not to say I entirely agree with it.

Whatever failings you can point out in crawl development, there are few people I can think of who would do a significantly better job over an extended period of time. There's negative money in it, no real compensation outside of personal satisfaction/reputation and whatever professional advantages one can leverage out of involvement in a project like this. The latter are probably pretty limited.

A lot of the proposals that hang around in the player community and in GDD for a long time, for example removing food, are totally correct in my opinion, but if you have a bunch of people who do something that takes work with marginal compensation, you can't just force through changes some of them view as radical or whatever and expect to keep them around for long. I think a couple of knowledgeable players could put together a fork that's much better than .19a in a relatively short time, but will it still be better than .21 a year and a half from now? Would anyone still be playing it? These are the questions you have to ask.