I agree that the contest felt difficult without knowing much about the devs at all. I didn't want to draw, not because of a lack in skill albeit it is quite lacking , but rather because I didn't know how to portray them. I felt even my writing took many liberties by way of not even being sure which pronouns they preferred. Many of them, I avoided pronouns completely for several of them, because I didn't feel it was appropriate to assume their identity, although that was quite a challenge to work around. I understand them wanting to preserve some anonymity, but I do also feel that their is a lack of engagement with the community that this contest highlighted. On other heavily interactive games I've enjoyed, I've seen devs/adminstrators host weekly or monthly Q&As with their community. I would enjoy seeing something like that. At set intervals, they could announce an open forum with set times where the community can voice their comments, questions, concerns, praise, et cet for however set length of time. The mods could have an open discourse with the community and lock the thread at the end of it. They could choose to ignore questions they felt were too personal or inappropriate, gain a better understanding of the mindset of their community, and show us players that they are involved and do care about the player base. I think they would find a few hours set aside every couple of weeks to be beneficial as they develope PIMD further.
For the pronouns bit, they gave pronouns for all of the devs (except Wanda) in their mini-descriptions. 😉 But yeah, your point still stands and this is very well-written. 💟
I only used the descriptions they gave in that post, as I'm not familiar with any of the devs at all; I do remember looking back and double checking to make sure. Many of them lacked pronouns in that post, and I was not really keen on searching through everything just to find pronouns for those. Thank you.
That isn't at all what I was saying. Their personalities are irrelevant. Their philosophies regarding game design, their values, their impacts on the game from the perspective of what's literally written in their job description, is relevant. This stuff impacts us. A relevant profile of a game's developer in the eyes of the game's community should be based off of their personality. If Strange is our technical daddy, fixing pvp and restoring the game's core, we can make an appropriate caricature. If whoever else is whatever else, ditto. Nice stories and stuff we can write about them. Idc if they wear pants or a dress. If we don't have a baseline model of them with relevant-to-pimd's-development characteristics, when they get us to focus on their personalities, I see that as a way to ignore what's more important. We see their humanity and their relatable lives but who is responsible for the good updates and the bad updates? Whose impact on the game do we as a community like or dislike? I don't care what their star signs are, how they take their tea, their coffee, what their pets are, etc. I have characters in books, I have friends, coworkers, film, television, etc. PIMD doesn't have near as many developers. I'll dress up and write fan fic about mod mark. I haven't played Runescape in years but I know and remember the impacts that some of their mods had on the game despite never being involed in their forums.
O, I wasn't suggesting a Q&A for what their favorite color or star sign is. 🙃 Im more interested in asking: do they plan on updating all the parties to the style of the new starter party? Who is responsible for drawing the avatars? Where do they get their inspiration? I'm curious about what the artist's background(s) are? I don't even know how many artist there are on the team. Is it the same person who draws the avatars that draws the items? Who has a role in deciding the items? Are they also in charge of the stats? Have they considered x, y, or z? What has been their favorite hunt to work on? Et cet... I have a lot, haha. To me, who answers these questions and how would give me a much better idea of the team. It would give the game a more personal touch, and it would probably do a lot for talking money out of people's wallets. I, personally, enjoy having good knowledge of where my money is going: to whom and for what. Again, I found even writing a story to be difficult. I relied heavily on the snippets we were given, and tried not to assign any roles to anyone. That's part of why I wrote their meeting as being at a round table, and their conversations were so general. Idk who manages what or if they have teams or if they all are just working together. I find this to be a flaw; I wish there were more transparency to their operations. I've done much research about ATA; part of why I spend money in app is because I've read about the company, how they operate, what their values are. I remember finding one artist's profile somewhere one day by random, and I enjoyed seeing their style and what they brought to the table immensely; however, I'm not even sure it was an ATA artist, because the information to fact check it was not readily available to me.
Bumping this because it deserves attention. I was really excited when I first saw the contest. Drawing AND writing? Those are my only two certifiable skills. I thought it would be fun. Then I read their little snippets and realise how entirely lackluster it was. I read each Devs sentence three times and I couldn't for the life of me pick someone to draw because this gave me absolutely no insight whatsoever. There wasn't anything to build on. The entire community has no sense of connection and it really shows on forums.
Ah I glossed over your reply and didn't see anything specifically relating to their impact on the game so assumed it was about personal stuffs, like dat But yee 💜