Oversight Committee?

Yeah, sure.

Sounds reasonable. I assume these questions will be answered here in short order . . .

 

Now this from post #27:

Um, sounds fairly conclusive to me.

 

Well that gives us a Co9, which saves C-Blue having to worry about casting deciding votes unless we have a kerfuffle so severe people actually abstain from voting. I'd say its all good

 

Well now that that is settled, I wish to bring to the committee's attention the "Project: Delicate Reballancement" thread. IMHO this is the most pressing issue we have, and was caused by our community's carelessness (and not Troika's fault - for once ).

Curruntly we have a few proposed solutions, namely the reduced XP mod, and the "Tales of the Wild Coast", among other ideas.

Now I know KotB is in the forefront of peoples minds at the moment, everyone is excited about the demo release and all, but I for one would like to at least settle on a course of action for this issue before even more mods are completed, further unballancing the ToEE.

 

I suppose we have to determine if the committee is really the committee yet before we do anything else. How do we do that? Do we put up another poll, or do we just complete the coupe warlord-style?

We should probably try to finalize/formalize a few things also:

• Do we want eight in the council or nine?
• If it's eight, and Agetian is available, who's the odd man out?
• For the purpose of answering Ag's availability questions, what exactly will the duties of a member be?
• Someone is going to have to be a sort of chairman, handling things like initiating discussion on mods, refereeing grudgematches, proclaiming debates concluded, calling for votes, etc. I think people expressed a desire to have Blue be that guy in one way or another, which makes sense to me. Will it be so?
• We should also make some type of formal declaration to modders and the rest of the community at some point that starting at such and such time, their mods will now be subject to scrutiny and acceptance/rejection from the council.

Axl's right about the pressing nature of the 'delicate rebalancement' matter, as currently we've got a mod making the rounds out there that's kind of broken. However, delving into all that again right now will unavoidably hamper the KotB push, I believe, so I do think we should continue to let that lie for now.

One final point: this thing has never really been my baby from the onset, so I'm looking to the originator of the concept and it's biggest supporter - Kalshane and Blue respectively - to run with the ball here. That said, we do also need input from everybody who's been nominated for the council to get this underway if it's gonna go, so . . . speak up everybody.

 

Well, I can definitely try but I'm afraid that now is not the best time for me to do this since I'm still relatively busy with my real life... That's why I'd gladly pass over my place to someone else who feels he'd find time right now to perform all the listed tasks. Thanks for showing your confidence in me, guys, but I'm afraid this is just something I can't afford atm due to the time limitations (I still have the front-end to update and some KotB stuff to test).

- Agetian

 

I can't see any need to boot someone just so we can say, "hey, now we have a Co8 not a Co9". 9 makes more sense, in as much as we don't have ties that way, and the 9 that have been named all bring very different perspectives to the council: its not like we have 6 rules lawyers or 5 mesh-modders or 7 old-style AD&D DM's. We have a nice balance, lets just accept that there is a committee of 9, make Blue the chairman, and move on with life.

I've always agreed with us having a responsibility to fix our work (said so, too). But I've gotta say, there is no way this should be a priority ahead of KotB. I think Blue put it best the other day - he released his Time.event fixes for the Scather issue and all the other timed problems in the game (several), and it was downloaded, what, nine times?

How many people are still playing Co8? Sure, we've got a core of devoted fans and we've got a good community here, but do we seriously want to concentrate our efforts endless releasing slightly different versions of the same game over and over and over? We may have a monopoly as the only turn-based D&D game in town, but I really think we have to look at the big picture. A mod that fixed one of the longest running and most annoying bugs, not to mention with massive potential for future modding, and NINE people downloaded it. What does that tell us?

Alternately, once KotB is out (even just the Demo), how many people will download that? I like to think it will be thousands, I mean, even 0rion's "Hommlet of Horrors" made it into 4 figures on Sorcerer's Place.

So where do we want to concentrate our efforts? We've discussed this, debated it, had several "where is Co8 going?" threads. Surely we can draw the line in the sand and make KotB the priority. It doesn't mean people abandon 5.0.x, it just means they put their KotB dtuies, such as they may be, first.

As for the new modders coming through, I don't doubt for one moment that folks like Sitra and Axe Thrower who are releasing new ToEE mods can make them consistent with each other without our help. I think Blue has been spoiling us a bit lately with the quality of his 'admin' work. Folks managed to make their mods work together back in the early days, and they will continue to do so if the CMF gets left un-updated for a little while. And if people want to keep downloading and playing those mods, well thats fine too. Then when they get sick of the KotB demo (which obviously won't be anywhere near as long as ToEE) they can come back to ToEE and find a plethora of new stuff has accumulated, and doubtless with their KotB duties taken care of, lots of modders will have done rebalancing efforts too. Everyone will be better off for the break.

 

Well, it looks like it would be eight anyway, doesn't it?

Sorry to sound like a stick in the mud, but what that tells us is that only nine people knew and/or cared to come to Co8 and hunt around the GM forum for what to most would appear to be a fairly obscure fix. ("Time.event fix" isn't exactly sexy sounding, is it? )

The big picture message is easily deduced by checking SP for download figures, which I just observed to be 150 for 5.0.0 so far this month. At any rate, I'm not sure why I'm arguing this side, as I did say in the quote above that we shouldn't pursue the rebalancement matter for the time being so that KotB could proceed unhindered. :shrug: