The Direction of the Mod

[Sir_Eldras]

Having played since December, I too have made some observations. The existential nature of discussions seems to stem from the problems occuring when the devs have an idea and implement it, but the result doesn't turn out the way they had imagined. For example massive walls of deployable shields or never-ending kiting on horseback. They try to compensate but it seems human nature can be somewhat of a letdown at times. That being said, the mod is still alive because of the larger part of players that have a sense of community and enjoy the mod for what it is.

I couldn't agree more. I've been playing this mod since about January or so, and have seen it narrowing in focus regularly. Part of this may be due to annoying exploits (kiting from cav, glitch spots on maps,etc.,)  and part of it may be due to the desires of the dev team. For the most part, I've been okay with the choices made, as I respect that this is not MY mod, but the dev's mod. This process can be slow and painful at times to play through, but I love the fact that it keeps moving forward. Every new patch is the dev team attempting to listen to suggestions, fix problems, and experiment with new stats/maps/ideas. 

I also love the sense of community. While a lot of members seemed to drop out with the recent NA server problems, there are still plenty of familiar players logging on these days. This goes to show that the dev team is making decisions that are helping to craft a mod with long term appeal. That word, appeal, is funny though. The notion of making a broad-appeal mod means catering to the masses, and from what I've seen of this community, most regular players have pretty narrow needs when it comes to this mod. I think that it is hard for the devs to cater to the niches of players that regularly play NI.

It would be easier to make a mod that would have broader appeal, but the devs are seemingly up to something different. The thing I see as hard is that they are tasked with shaping the mod for so many specific reasons. On one side, there are shield wallers, players who solely play to hold a shield and never swing a weapon. I'll never understand that, but that doesn't mean that they are not enjoying their time doing that, nor will I work against that in-game. That's the current direction, and I've decided to be a good team player within this framework. Then, there are people who religiously follow the economy in order to amass huge amounts of mats and/or money. We've got crafters, kiting snipers, foraging alchemists, etc.

Each player wants something specific out of this mod, and if they are not in-line with what the devs are up to, I don't think that they will be happy - then the rage ensues. It's pretty selfish to work against the grain of every other player on a server because you want to solo. It's also discourteous to the community at large to kite, but as stated by Fingus, human nature works against us here. I guess that's why hard mode works so well. If you are not a team player, you are dead. 'Nuff said. It's often shocking to go back to normal servers and have to deal with shenanigans like archer kiting and people swinging in the shield line. Still, I have faith that the community eventually gets filtered, so that by the time someone gets to hard mode, they know some of the ropes, and will get their asses handed to them if they don't cooperate. That's a cool feature of this mod, and I don't want that to change.

I will say that I dislike that the mod has devolved into one strategy/approach, but it's fairly presumptuous of me to rage about someone else's labor of love. I've been invited - at no cost- to explore someone else's playground built on creativity and hard work. The playground is constantly updated at no cost, and has provided me and many others with hours of entertainment. If there's one thing that I've learned in months of playing NI, it's to just hang on if the direction of the mod or some specific aspect of it seems to frustrate you. Things evolve with this mod, and being part of this experiment is great fun. Wait a month, and suddenly major changes have happened - good and bad. I'm not saying that we shouldn't grumble about things now and again, but the devs owe us nothing, and we owe them respect and courtesy.

WALL OF TEXT DONE!