I think there should be some kind of notification directed toward the community before _any_ change that affects game-play is implemented, so that discussion is allowed before hand.
Here we're talking about tweaking something just a bit
(~5%), a change that is almost certainly not noticeable for the large majority of the community. I can see how some would say 'so what' / 'who cares'; as obviously this doesn't really have a widespread effect. However, why make the change at all if it is largely insignificant to the bulk of the community?
I feel like the people who are most affected by something like this are the veteran players (such as myself) who have the most familiarity with the previous 'aiming' techniques. If you will -- compare it to, say, the developers of UT2K4 releasing a patch for their game that makes the rail-gun shoot a few in-game-inches lower than normal. They've researched some game statistics, and found that the most common rail miss occurs above the enemy’s model, so they decided for the sake of game-play that they would implement a small tweak to accommodate this new information. No posts or discussions for this tweak are made, just a couple lines of text added to a .log file in the install directory.
Average Community Reaction: None. They
wouldn't even notice. However, if it was finally discovered / announced on a public scale, I think the majority of the community would embrace the new patch. Hey, I can hit more rails now?!
Great!Veteran / Professional Community: There are people in every community who have spent years honing their game and
hand movement to meld perfectly with the game they specialize in. All of a sudden, without warning -- they are required to make small changes to this developed skill.
Obviously our game (dp) is on a much smaller scale. People do not make a living playing dp (except Skater); however, I chose this example in an attempt to
emphasize the issue on a different level.
To summarize my thoughts: The smaller group of veteran players suffer, while the bulk of the community has no noticeable impact at all. The difference between my example and this case is that there hasn't even been any such statistical evaluation done which implies a positive effect on game-play from the tweak! At least in my example there was some kind of community wide good-intent, and not just some kind of developmental OCD for no specific (or at least not specified) reason (
no disrespect intended, I do truly value your continued development on this great game of ours – I just struggle to understand some of your methodology) .
Or perhaps, the point is to just continually make these little changes as small, irritating slaps to the face of players such as myself? Are you pushing to eradicate the already struggling competitive clan-scene as a whole -- in the quest of non-stop public servers, running 8 different server versions, with all kinds of different configurations, and a complete lack of standardization for the community to agree upon
(and the clan scene to look toward for guidance)?
If so, you are on the right track..
As a veteran of this game, I ask -- Please, just
let us know if and when you plan on making changes like this in the future, so that we at least
have the opportunity to discuss them in an intelligent and organized manner before things are set in stone.
Thank you.
