Developers Must Play

[James Cameron <quozl@us.netrek.org>]

I'm starting to get the impression that some of the decisions we have
been making for the Netrek community as developers have not always been
in the interest of growing the community.  What do others think?

Examples: 

1) metaserver solicitation; benefited the metaserver list maintainer,
saved perhaps 30 minutes of work a year, and opened the metaserver list
to servers being placed that do not need to be present; we have enough
already.

2) allowing features to creep in that are not common across clients,
for example det cirles, leading to an impression of unfairness.

3) improving the packaging of the server without actually going all the
way to produce a useable home practice server product,

4) making a fantastic scoring package (LTD stats) for INL and clue
games ... but still a keystroke outside the tactical is ignored.

5) continuing to release clients that are packaged well and work fine
on technical operating systems (Unixes) but not very many that work
well on the most popular operating systems.


We need to listen more to the non-developers.
We have got too technical and lost sight of the goal.
We need to understand the difficulties that new twinks have.
We probably really need to get out there and play more.

If you are part of the Vanilla project, I personally would prefer you
to spend as much time playing as coding or reading this list.

-- 
James Cameron   mailto:quozl@us.netrek.org   http://quozl.us.netrek.org/