Hi JasonGodwin7,
I hope this email finds you well.
I regret to inform you that I’m staging an intervention.
Very frequently, people do engage with your posts and give rebuttals and alternative viewpoints to your proposal. Like here:
I do remember this thread, yeah, and the issue is that you’re just assuming that your solution is, innately, clever. It is not. Nobody is obligated to be as interested in your ideas as you are. The pushback you got was because your justifications behind the ideas were flawed and relied on premises you failed to properly establish. You defined “preventing players from relying their jagen” as an inherent positive thing to accomplish, which is not necessarily true; you designed use of a jagen as “cheating,” which is both literally untrue and thus argumentatively impossible to reconcile - you feel it is cheating because you feel it is cheating. Your personal preferences for gameplay will differ from others’.
What people were arguing was that there were other approaches to accomplish the same ideas that they feel are more elegant, lead to better gameplay patterns, or are otherwise, in their minds, preferable to your proposal. Not to be overly curt, but this is an extremely natural and normal thing to happen in debates about a subject that you will experience one million times if you talk to people about topics, ever.
The issue here is you aren’t creating threads for “respectful intellectual discussion,” you’re creating threads to show off your idea and have people talk about it. I, speaking respectfully and intellectually of course, have found you generally fail to apply “critical observation” to the things people tell you, or to the things you yourself say in the first place.
See, for example, here:
Critical observation would tell you that, for the same reasons it’s somewhat pointless to try to imagine an entire game around a hypothetical gameplay system, it’s similar pointless to offer that gameplay system as a point of discussion without providing the necessary context. In either case, that is with or without context, it is entirely fair to attempt to make assumptions where the author has failed to offer information, such that you may try to imagine a context for the mechanic that will let you conceptualize it. In your example;
Or maybe I question the inclusion of this feature at all. I have to imagine what this niche they fulfill is, and in turn the rest of the game around them - is it their long range? It sure seems like it must be their long range. Is long range low damage useful in this hypothetical game? It doesn’t seem like it would be, unless there were very specific things archers are meant to take care of on the map with their long range. But then, why give them this vantage mechanic? Doesn’t that seem at odds with what their role might be? I don’t think I like this mechanic very much on paper. - and this is very typical for these kinds of discussion online. Nobody can read your mind.
Believe it or not, Jason, you are not the only developer on this forum with big, transformative ideas. My project fucks with the FE formula heavily, departs in some major ways from established FE gameplay pacing and unit design and stat design and encounter design, and even has a jagen death exactly like you described it. You may remember that, even so, I still disagreed with the points you made in your thread about jagen death, because I thought your argumentation and reasoning were wrong, as you kept describing the various gameplay benefits to letting your jagen die which, I thought, was anathema to how one should be viewing the characters in their game.
The story arguments you offered were, of course, a story by story basis - there is no discussion to be had other than “yes, we were taught the hero’s journey in high school, we remember obi-wan in star wars and greil in path of radiance, we know what the deal is with mentor death, it can be a good and useful plot beat” - so I’m not going to waste time telling you “great job!” for a relatively straight forward inclusion to a story.
So I have to wonder, then, what your goal is when you make these threads, because it is not “respectful, intellectual discussion.” My hypothesis is that you define respectful as “in agreement with me” and intellectual as “in agreement with me,” and thus what you want out of these threads is for people to read your idea and go “wow. powerful stuff. so big.” I don’t think this is a conscious decision you’re making - I think you really do believe you want to spark thoughtful debate about game theory in the SRPG space - but you’re struggling with your assessment of other people’s ability to engage with your ideas as they’re presented.
It doesn’t help that many of your gameplay decisions, even when taken in full context with another, just do not sound fun. As in, even if you think they are balanced and functional and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish as a developer, I as a player have played games with similar mechanics and found them detrimental to my experience, and thus have reason to believe they would be so for you as well. If your argumentation were better, and I had more faith in your justifications behind your decisions, it might be a different story; instead, the more you explain a concept, the worse it sounds, suggesting to me one of three things
a.) you’re just very bad at explaining yourself in these contexts and thus make your ideas sound worse than they are, which I do not believe to be the case,
b.) your ideas are consistently either built upon assumptions I feel are unfounded, or do not logically follow from the assumptions you’ve made, causing them to fail to address the problems you identify, if you even successfully identify a problem at all,
c.) you’re making up your arguments as you go along, creating a gameplay idea and then finding justifications for it after the fact.
None of these inspire much confidence in the prospect of trying to engage with your concepts in good faith on a regular basis; I remember have a discussion about archer design with you, providing several examples of how archer design can be addresses as well as reasons I don’t think other solutions are particularly effective, and you thanked me and the others in chat for our time before immediately asking the question again in another discord bc you didn’t like our answers. I’m pretty sure you then took it to the forum after the other discord was even less receptive to your ideas lol.
This is why people don’t want to engage with you in “respectful, intellectual discussion.” You do not respect the intellect of other developers, including those with more design experience than you, and that is a fatal flaw. I have, many times, genuinely tried to understand what design philosophy you’re adopting when making decisions, only to find much of what you say to be tangential rambling about a related creative inspiration, partially or even overtly conflicted design goals, strange and unfounded misreads of the opinions being offered to you, and a general background radiation of feeling like I’m reading your stream of consciousness as you think about a topic for the first time. I would attempt to engage with you earnestly, try to explain a perspective on your concepts and reasons why I believe your ideas were built on shaky ground, in the hopes that you could find some value in my ideas. However, my ideas were not “intellectual,” nor was I “respectful,” because I was no already in alignment with your rough draft.
Woe.
When you first started posting, even if I vehemently disagreed with you, I honestly did “respect” your intellect, in that I assumed you had some; I still somewhat do, even, by making this post and assuming that, on some level, there’s a chance you’ll realize why your argumentation fails. My reward for that respect was a complete lack of reciprocation, or even an attempt at such. Why, then, would I continue to offer the benefit of the doubt to somebody who won’t do the same in return? Why should I not assume that, after noting several consecutive failures to demonstrate either of respect or intellect, that the root issue is a lack of both?
There are people on this forum who are, often, overtly rude to your face; I myself have not shied from cracking a joke at your expense from time to time. I’m sure it’s frustrating; it is likely equally frustrating to devote 10x that amount of effort into trying to engage with your point, only to be either ignored completely or else given a “rebuttal” that demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension on your part. It probably sucks to be on the receiving end of; I’m telling you now that the common denominator in these threads is the way you engage with posters in those threads, not the way posters are engaging with you.
If you want your ideas to be taken seriously, start by doing the same for other people. If you’re not capable of doing such a thing, do not post; fix that part of yourself. It is a vital, vital, vital part of becoming better as a creative, and if you think that you have a uniquely valuable and especially brilliant level of insight into game design, then you will not ever become a good game designer. It is not a difficult skill to learn, but it is a necessary one, and it is one that people have noticed that you lack.
This genuinely comes from a place of perhaps misguided enthusiasm for your work. I actually, in a way, enjoy whenever you make a new thread; even if I rarely if ever agree with your points, it can lead to some discussion at times that I find rarely finds its place on the forums, which can be fun. I think you clearly want to break out of the FE mould and try something new; that’s a really good first step that a lot of hackers never take. However, I think there are several more steps you’ve left to take, and you have some kind of ego preventing you from taking those steps, and I genuinely do hope you try to calm your horses, reassess some of how you’ve been engaging with the community, and make an attempt to better engage with the good faith actors in the community.
A good jumping off point might include not relegating somebody’s point to a tangentially adjacent twitter drama that you learned about through a youtube video, and instead engaging with the text they write in the post. You know, just as an example.
Sorry if that all sounds very mean to you right now; interventions are seldom staged for the receptive and intrigued.
Warm regards,
-Xilirite