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That's a very valid question. Personally, I'd say the key is to watch what the otherwise-disengaged fringes of the community are saying. If first time posters or long time lurkers start coming out of the woodwork about well made new missions, praising them for their geometry and story but saying that innovative parts of the gameplay felt frustrating or off, that's probably the first sign that the innovations are starting to get out of hand. For a more concrete example, re-read the comments on Hazard Pay. As much as I and many others love that mission, it's clearly a case where the author strayed further than many people were comfortable with. It also points to the likely endgame if authors do take their customization too far. After getting the negative feedback, kingsal made adjustments, and now the mission is much more friendly towards player preferences that don't match the author's original vision. You don't need to restrict the mapmakers' tools to stop them from straying too far from the traditional formula. When people start speaking up, the authors will rein themselves in on their own.

I can only speak for myself, but I think option 2 would be fine. This will at least allow the missions to be playable on the dev builds for now, and we can see if any other issues pop up

Speaking of actions for the missions which only tweak zoom delay. What would you prefer right now? Mission broken on the latest dev build (as it is now), but working as intended in the latest release. Mission working as intended on the latest dev build, but working without customization on the latest release.

I could take your reply much more serious, if you wouldn't call my valid objections "whims". If you don't care about what players think about the decisions you made in your missions (or your "whims"?), then I wonder why you make your missions public at all. Seriously, I'd recommend to get off your high horse.

Well, I disagree. I play this game for the features it offers, not the features some mission author thinks he has to change to his personal favor. And, frankly, some of the more current missions offer too much of that "I think this works better" feature change. For example, the sounds some missions introduce add nothing over the original sounds, but are rather worse in my opinion.

Damn right, and I personally am going to keep making changes on how I want MY mission to be played and what I think is best for MY FMs. If that's not to your tastes, then I'm sorry these changes don't align with your preferences, but there are tons of other missions you can play that do. FM authors have ZERO obligation to provide uniform experiences that try to cater to everyone. Some people are going to enjoy these custom changes (I really loved the Resident Evil style saves, and I can't wait to see more missions with that) and other players are gonna be unhappy about them, and that's a crying shame, but it is not going to stop me from making FMs how I want them to be. Never once has a beta tester or a player brought up an issue about these kinds of choices I made for my FMs

Well that doesn't mean that everyone is d'accord with all the gameplay choices he made in these missions, does it? All I can say is that I never got the impression here or elsewhere that there are issues with the weapon behavior in TDM. Maybe apart from the blackjacking, which has been a controversial topic in the past. I can only repeat myself in arguing that the big problem is the uniformity of essential gameplay elements. The game just doesn't feel coherent, if every FM author changes important gameplay dynamics, and it makes it difficult and frustrating, not just for beginners.

Gosh you're right. As a result it only managed to snag spot #10 in terms of highest user rated TDM missions on thiefguild. Kingsal could make a mission where you crawl around like a baby in moon gravity and I might be right there with you saying it was a bad idea. It'd still be his mission so his choice.

Sounds great. Unfortunately you don't have to get very far in any discussion about either changing existing gameplay mechanics or about giving players more in game customization options to see why mappers stop bothering with the debate club politics and instead divert the energy to do what they can to address what issues they can themselves. There is clearly also a disconnect between how people think they feel about these changes and how they do in practice. Kingsal's missions seem to be widely considered as some of the most polished missions in the game, because they are a holistic designs that look, sound and play a certain way. As a result I have never seen a player complain about something like the run modifier being increased in a particular missions thread and it’s clear there are very few players who are ultimately conscious of anything besides that the overall experience feels good. So there is reason these get adopted by other authors. The players are entitled to their opinion - but it's the mission authors choice ultimately. And I can only speak for myself, but I came to TDM because I saw working examples of things I wanted in my mission. These were not “stock” or “standard”. They were achievable by virtue of the games extendability. If the day comes where we get locked out of that kind of control of our designs, I would probably walk.

I agree entirely. Unless a mission is aiming to present a completely different gameplay experience (like making a rapid-fire archery-based combat mission instead of a stealth mission), I see no reason why things like bow aiming should vary on a mission-by-mission basis. If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed. If they are a matter of taste and there is no agreement on what the value should be, they should be configurable by the player and take effect in all missions. Imagine if every desktop application made its own tweaks to your keyboard layout or mouse acceleration because the author didn't personally approve of the default values. It would be a horrible user experience. Some applications actually do this with fonts, and yes, it's horrible. Potentially useful functionality made inaccessible because the author decided to ignore system font choices and DPI, and impose his hand-picked non-scalable 10pt font which I can barely read.

As a player, one thing I'm also not too fond of is the lack of uniformity. I think mission authors should take into account that especially players new to the mod want to figure out how the weapons work, and, they will have a hard time doing so, if many missions tweak the weapons. Apart from the "WTF" moment, they will also not know what the default behavior of the weapon is. Also not a fan of some other things some missions introduce, like the different sounds for foot steps etc. Most of them don't improve anything over the default sounds, to be honest. They're rather worse, and irritate me every time I play a mission with custom sounds.

2.12 we introduced the mission.cfg We just need to ensure that the cvars revert when switching missions.

Are we switching 10 scripts for 10 defs? What if the core def changes sometime in the future and we then have not 10 but 15 or 20 missions from different authors with this def? What if, in the end, nobody is willing to change/enhance/improve the bow because of the trouble? This is the day people might look back to in the future, which reminds me:

Thank you for saying as such and clarifying the path forward with regard to these missions, I do really appreciate it

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though). Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future. Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond. Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely. I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused. Sometimes I am too rough in communications. Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person. Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, it's not so much that the missions are broken that is frustrating to me and several other affected authors, it's that there was zero communication to the affected authors that this was going to be happening beforehand. There is no reason why a message couldn't have been sent to the affected authors saying "hey, this will be broken in the upcoming dev build for X reasons. I thought you'd like to know before surprising you." Or even an open discussion beforehand about why these authors decided to make these customizations to begin with. Plain and simple, that's just a lack of respect. If you have the time to break these, you have time to communicate and see if there might be a solution to avoid all this (and there is!). And perhaps from YOUR perspective, you might think this reaction seems silly, unnecessary, and that this is totally fine, but from my perspective and that of a few others, it's not. EDIT: In addition, when creating or modifying existing assets, I and others take great care in making sure that these changes don't break existing maps. And if they do, we do whatever we can to own up to that and fix it. I do expect that same level of respect to be shown to existing maps so they aren't just broken with reckless abandon and no clear path forward.

Yeah, we could change ARROW_ZOOMDELAY from 6 down to 3 in core, after a good debate. Or have an optional mod that applies to all missions.

Do we have any volunteer to participate in fixing these missions? The first (and perhapsthe most important) step is to download these missions, diff tdm_weapon_arrow.script against stock version, and list all the things that are actually customized.

Is it not possibly to just add a small script to these missions that only does this: #define ARROW_ZOOMDELAY 3 //VOLTA MOD Edit: I haven't installed the newest tdm version yet, so I guess this might be complete nonsense..

The training mission’s job is not cover the diversity of FMs across the entire platform. There are lots of stuff in volta universe missions which are not covered: explosive barrels, ammo crystals, loot you dislodge by shooting it with an arrow, completely different undead AI with a completely different damage model, etc Just like in northdale missions: neutral/hostile areas, in game shops, simplified lockpicks, etc Why would you need to be told any of this is happening by anything other than the game itself? That’s how games communicate: you play them.

You are confusing how the core game is packaged with a "standard". The “standard” TDM experience imo would actually be however the mission author intended the mission to be played. There are lots of different types of missions which as experiences deviate from anything packaged in the core game. You are not owed a disclaimer.

I can understand your frustrations, however the main reason why we have had to replace the core files is because we don’t have the ability to make tweaks to the core game without doing this. In particular having the bow speed reduced from 6 seconds to 3 feels a lot better ingame. And it’s something that I personally have in all of my missions since I saw it in Kingsal’s mission the first time. If it’s possible for us to tweak that variable without needing to replace the .script file that would be really handy.

Why? Do you have resentment toward these 10 missions in particular? Do you not care if you break any and all missions on your whim and then release a public build? Breaking existing missions and then making a public dev build available with broken FMs doesn't really seem like a great thing to do. I get that missions get broken from time to time because improvements need to be made to the core game, but this is essentially a public release (even though it is a "dev build" it is still a "public dev build" available to anyone and everyone, and with that comes certain expectations). You didn't even notify the affected FM authors beforehand. This is just not cool.

Good question. Maybe because I don't feel myself too guilty breaking these missions? Maybe because I know that fixing them will be a long story. And I feel confident that we (or more likely I ) will be able to fix all of them by 2.13. You might have noticed that I have also enabled two behavior changes in the latest build (1 2). In these cases it is not even mappers' fault that behavior change is needed. I have a script which can update all missions at once so that they work properly both in 2.12 and dev builds. But somehow I feel I should wait for at least some feedback on the new behavior before doing a massive change to dozens of missions.

As you probably know, overriding core files which are not specifically designed for that is fragile and unsupported. Indeed, it usually works... until it does not Here is the list of missions which completely override tdm_weapon_arrow.script: ahouseoflockedsecrets @Moonbo byanyothername @joebarnin cauldron_v2_2 @kingsal good @Amadeus hazard @kingsal northdale1 @Goldwell northdale2 @Goldwell seeking @Amadeus@Dragofer@Wellingtoncrab snowed_inn @Goldwell @kingsal written @Amadeus @Dragofer I have just got rid of creating cvars dynamically (5600), and shooting the bow stopped working in these missions. Because they distribute an old version of the script which runs in "debug mode" that relies on dynamic cvars. Core version was updated some time ago and this debug mode was removed. I'd like to ask authors: why did you decide to override this script? Perhaps we can add some customization points and delete overrides?