I would just like to ask you, in the interest of not arguing in circles, to clarify your original argument in light of accurate information of the game's size. You used an example of a game type that you claimed typically has on average about 25 players on the high end (which, in my experience, isn't true, unless you're excluding the entire "teamnesia" subset of murdergames from that) and then stated "VR has a much larger playerbase". You can go to the latest activity check post, and see there's 35 individual comments there. The hiatus post shows 2 players who hiatused for the month of October, and who may or may not have checked in, I didn't double check that. So 35-37 players. 55 total characters by my count of the taken pages. I'm really not understanding how this places VR as a "much larger playerbase" and that's making it hard to see why you find my position so unreasonable.
I understand that it takes time to revise things, but if discussion takes that long, it's probably a case of too many cooks: most rules clarifications boil down to a matter of "was there an answer given to that? Okay, what was the answer?" and little more. Most contradictions that need to be ironed out aren't exactly things of huge grave importance in the grand scheme of things, like one comment saying items can be found along routes while an older comment or two state that no items of x class are obtainable if they're not listed. Or setting a price for Ice Stones to add to the shop list. I'm not seeing how things like that require months of discussion. But it still affects everyday gameplay in a pretty significant way. And that's what the majority of this stuff is.
Things like trainer class overhauls? That's gonna be a big deal, and we can wait for that to be perfected. But having new 'mons made available without the means to evolve them? That's a bit problematic.
So yes, the big things need to be discussed and the mods can and should take their time. But that doesn't mean neglecting the relatively little but still important bits.
As for communication, the lazy answer would be "more than what we're getting". A more precise answer would be more disclosure--what's being worked on, a place for players to drop in comments if they notice something missing or a broken link, being able to actually count on getting answers to inquiries within a couple of weeks.... And having those answers match up with what's already been stated in the rules/info/prior inquiries.
Instead, we get things like the Ride Pager poll, where there was some great discussion and a few new suggestions tossed into the mix.... And then absolute radio silence on the subject for, quite literally, months. And while Ride Pagers definitely aren't a high-priority thing, as I said at the start, since it was my suggestion that ended up being used, if the problem had been mods being busy, I'd have been perfectly happy to go do a proposed writeup or two for the mods to use!
I suspect--at the risk of venturing into speculative territory--that part of the problem we're seeing may be due to a notion of "the mods HAVE to do everything or they aren't doing their jobs". Which isn't exactly true. Things like apps and approvals and updating the actual pages need to be done by the mods, sure, but there's another option for some of the grunt work, and that's farming it out to volunteers. Back in the old Route 29 days, the game usually had about 2 main mods, and then 2 or so "helper" mods. The main mods ran the show and did the big stuff, the helpers did the mundane little details like the list updating and such to allow the primary mods to focus on the big things without worrying about it. But even then sometimes players would volunteer to do things--I myself once went through the entire Q&A post at the time (with the mods' help for getting the text of some inquiries as all of them were automatically screened at the time and some got left that way) and compacted it into a clearer, categorized Q&A, with some nice basic formatting, and passed it back to the mods to post, which I did. Granted, half my motivation was because I got tired of manually digging through the replies for info I needed and a compilation was much handier, but it's still an example of how players can save the mods time on things. Could the mods have done it all themselves? Sure. But why bother when there's a player who's conveniently willing to take the time and do it themselves?
My point being, there's nothing wrong with this. Players, generally speaking, offer feedback/suggestions/offers of help because they want to help the game. Do I want to be a mod? Not particularly, I have other projects I'd rather devote that time to. Would I be willing to help out in that capacity if the help were needed? Absolutely.
But we can't reach that point if no one stops and says "hey, I think this is a problem and I'm frustrated and here's why..." in the first place. The mods don't have to agree with me, and I don't have to agree with them either, but an open dialogue, even a "thanks for the offer, we actually are mostly done with that thing already" would be worlds better than the radio silence that we've all too often been getting.
no subject
I understand that it takes time to revise things, but if discussion takes that long, it's probably a case of too many cooks: most rules clarifications boil down to a matter of "was there an answer given to that? Okay, what was the answer?" and little more. Most contradictions that need to be ironed out aren't exactly things of huge grave importance in the grand scheme of things, like one comment saying items can be found along routes while an older comment or two state that no items of x class are obtainable if they're not listed. Or setting a price for Ice Stones to add to the shop list. I'm not seeing how things like that require months of discussion. But it still affects everyday gameplay in a pretty significant way. And that's what the majority of this stuff is.
Things like trainer class overhauls? That's gonna be a big deal, and we can wait for that to be perfected. But having new 'mons made available without the means to evolve them? That's a bit problematic.
So yes, the big things need to be discussed and the mods can and should take their time. But that doesn't mean neglecting the relatively little but still important bits.
As for communication, the lazy answer would be "more than what we're getting". A more precise answer would be more disclosure--what's being worked on, a place for players to drop in comments if they notice something missing or a broken link, being able to actually count on getting answers to inquiries within a couple of weeks.... And having those answers match up with what's already been stated in the rules/info/prior inquiries.
Instead, we get things like the Ride Pager poll, where there was some great discussion and a few new suggestions tossed into the mix.... And then absolute radio silence on the subject for, quite literally, months. And while Ride Pagers definitely aren't a high-priority thing, as I said at the start, since it was my suggestion that ended up being used, if the problem had been mods being busy, I'd have been perfectly happy to go do a proposed writeup or two for the mods to use!
I suspect--at the risk of venturing into speculative territory--that part of the problem we're seeing may be due to a notion of "the mods HAVE to do everything or they aren't doing their jobs". Which isn't exactly true. Things like apps and approvals and updating the actual pages need to be done by the mods, sure, but there's another option for some of the grunt work, and that's farming it out to volunteers. Back in the old Route 29 days, the game usually had about 2 main mods, and then 2 or so "helper" mods. The main mods ran the show and did the big stuff, the helpers did the mundane little details like the list updating and such to allow the primary mods to focus on the big things without worrying about it. But even then sometimes players would volunteer to do things--I myself once went through the entire Q&A post at the time (with the mods' help for getting the text of some inquiries as all of them were automatically screened at the time and some got left that way) and compacted it into a clearer, categorized Q&A, with some nice basic formatting, and passed it back to the mods to post, which I did. Granted, half my motivation was because I got tired of manually digging through the replies for info I needed and a compilation was much handier, but it's still an example of how players can save the mods time on things. Could the mods have done it all themselves? Sure. But why bother when there's a player who's conveniently willing to take the time and do it themselves?
My point being, there's nothing wrong with this. Players, generally speaking, offer feedback/suggestions/offers of help because they want to help the game. Do I want to be a mod? Not particularly, I have other projects I'd rather devote that time to. Would I be willing to help out in that capacity if the help were needed? Absolutely.
But we can't reach that point if no one stops and says "hey, I think this is a problem and I'm frustrated and here's why..." in the first place. The mods don't have to agree with me, and I don't have to agree with them either, but an open dialogue, even a "thanks for the offer, we actually are mostly done with that thing already" would be worlds better than the radio silence that we've all too often been getting.