Meeting: Tremulous, Unvanquished, & their Communities | on Saturday October 11

[dGr8LookinSparky]

Brainstorming Meeting: Tremulous, Unvanquished, & their Communities

When: Saturday, October 11, 2014 at 1:00 pm United Kingdom time.
 Click here to help determine the time of the meeting at your time zone.

Where: The Acidtu.be irc channel on freenode.net: ##acidtube
Three possible ways to join:

• Use the built in web based irc client located at the bottom of the index page of http://forum.acidtu.be
  
• Use freenode's web based irc client: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23%23acidtube
  
• Use your own irc client to connect to the irc channel ##acidtube on freenode.net

Meeting Organized by:

• acidtu.be: An online community of enthousiasts of the free and open source games Tremulous & Unvanquished. It serves as a forum for players & developers, as well as providing shelter for various Projects and creative endeavours surrounding Tremulous & Unvanquished.
  
• New Edge:  A Tremulous GPP mod and community.
  

About the Meeting:  The purpose of this meeting is for Tremulous & Unvanquished players/devs/admins/leaders to discuss and brainstorm with each other the following issues:

• What are the current functions, projects, and goals of Acidtu.be?
• What are the current functions, projects, and goals of New Edge?
• What are the current status, and objectives of Unvanquished?
• What are our common interests/goals, both short term and long term, and how can we pull our resources together to help our common interests/goals?
• How can we unify the Tremulous GPP, Tremulous 1.1, and Unvanquished communities to expand our community and player base, as well as encourage collaboration?
• How can we attract new players that have never played any Tremulous based game before, and how can we encourage them to stay after trying Tremulous and/or Unvanquished?
• How can we continue to improve the game experience for the existing player base?

The meeting would start with an introduction of Acidtu.be by the Acidtu.be site administrators, then with an introduction of New Edge by New Edge site administrators.  The discussions would commence after the introductions.

After the live irc meeting is over, a copy of the irc chat log for the meeting will be posted on the Unvanquished forums, where the conversation will continue, and allow interested people unable to attend the meeting the opportunity to contribute to the conversation.


Meeting Rules:  To ensure that the meeting is productive and yields good results, all participants must adhere to the following rules during the meeting:

• Be respectful to all other participants
• No personal attacks
• No insults
• No fallacies of ad hominem, nor fallacies of appeals to authority.
  
• No straw man fallacies.
  
• No deliberate flaming
• No trolling
• No spamming
• No filibustering
  
• No impeding the discussion from being productive in any way.
• Everyone gets a chance to present and discuss their ideas/questions/concerns, in a way that does not violate the above rules, without interruption
• Constructive criticism is encourage
• Everyone is free to voice any disagreements they have to ideas in a way that does not violate the above rules.
• A participant violating any of the rules, does not justify another participant to violate any of the rules, every participant is accountable for his/her own actions.
• If a participant violates any of these rules, said participant would first be warned, and if the violation continues, that participant would then be muted.

[/dev/humancontroller]

• No trolling
• Constructive criticism is encourage

be advised: various people have their own interpretation of what "trolling" means. often, a person calls any act, that he or she dislikes, "trolling".
be advised: some people have a surprizing interpretation of what "constructive criticism" means.

• No impeding the discussion from being productive in any way.

what if one way impedes another, and vice versa?

[dGr8LookinSparky]

Thank you for your feedback /dev/humancontroller

• No trolling
• Constructive criticism is encourage

be advised: various people have their own interpretation of what "trolling" means. often, a person calls any act, that he or she dislikes, "trolling".
be advised: some people have a surprizing interpretation of what "constructive criticism" means.

Here I'm considering trolling to be any form of pranking, usually malicious.  Stating a sound argument that some1 does not like, would not be considered trolling. There are important topics that will be discussed at this meeting, it is looking like we are going to have a high turnout, and the live portion on the irc may only be a couple of hours or so in length, so everyone's time is valuable.  The intent of these rules is to keep people focused on productively and effectively discussing the topics of the meeting without having distractions.

By constructive criticism I mean critiquing an idea to find the pros and cons of the idea with the end result of improving said idea.

• No impeding the discussion from being productive in any way.

what if one way impedes another, and vice versa?

I'm not sure what you mean, please elaborate.

[/dev/humancontroller]

By constructive criticism I mean critiquing an idea to find the pros and cons of the idea with the end result of improving said idea.

what if the said "improvement" is the abandoning of the idea, because the cons outweigh the pros? for example, what's the acceptence of the following hypothetical scheme?

• proposal: <insert_idea_here>
• statement: the idea is crap
• reason: the current state is better
• proof: <insert_proof_here>
• consequence: an increased understanding of what ideas not to use

• No impeding the discussion from being productive in any way.

what if one way impedes another, and vice versa?

I'm not sure what you mean, please elaborate.

what i'm talking about is that in the case of young and inexperienced people ("brainstormers") and ideas or works by such a people, every proposed alteration -- whether on the grounds of decency, implementability, immersiveness, theories, or etc. -- (potentially) improves the idea or the work (and coaches the said people), but also potentially "scares" the said people away. this would not be a problem involving professionals.

[dGr8LookinSparky]

By constructive criticism I mean critiquing an idea to find the pros and cons of the idea with the end result of improving said idea.

what if the said "improvement" is the abandoning of the idea, because the cons outweigh the pros? for example, what's the acceptence of the following hypothetical scheme?

• proposal: <insert_idea_here>
• statement: the idea is crap
• reason: the current state is better
• proof: <insert_proof_here>
• consequence: an increased understanding of what ideas not to use

That would also be criticism that would be constructive, and would be welcomed.

• No impeding the discussion from being productive in any way.

what if one way impedes another, and vice versa?

I'm not sure what you mean, please elaborate.

what i'm talking about is that in the case of young and inexperienced people ("brainstormers") and ideas or works by such a people, every proposed alteration -- whether on the grounds of decency, implementability, immersiveness, theories, or etc. -- (potentially) improves the idea or the work (and coaches the said people), but also potentially "scares" the said people away. this would not be a problem involving professionals.

It would not be productive if someone held back on a sound argument that would attack another individual's idea in fear of offending that person.  The soundness of an argument is independent from its source.  An idea being bad or good, does not make the idea maker bad nor good, and sound attacks on ideas are not attacks on indiviudals, and are acceptable.  What would not be tolerated are any kinds attacks on people or groups of people, neither would irrational attacks on ideas be tolerated.  Participants in this meeting would have to be professional in giving and receiving arguments so that the meeting is the most productive, and it is not difficult to learn if people come to the meeting with an open mind.

[dGr8LookinSparky]

Good news!

We have created a small site to post ideas that will be discussed during the meeting.
If you have any idea on how the Tremulous/Unvanquished communities can improve, how to attract new players, how to encourage players to stay, how to improve the sense of community, etc. please post them in the site linked below:

http://vote.acidtu.be/

No need to register to post or vote for ideas   

[dGr8LookinSparky]

The complete official log of the meeting is posted on the Unvanquished forums here: https://forums.unvanquished.net/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=1611#p14584.  That particular conversation will continue on that thread, so if you were unable to attend the live meeting you, can still participate in that thread.

[Nux]

I'll try my best to answer some of these questions:

What are the current functions, projects, and goals of Acidtu.be?

From their homepage:
"Acidtu.be is an online community of enthousiasts[sic] of the free and open source games Tremulous & Unvanquished. It serves as a forum for players & developers as well as providing shelter for various Projects and creative endeavours surrounding Tremulous & Unvanquished."

What are the current functions, projects, and goals of New Edge?

I can't easily find a source for this information but it would seem that New Edge is simply a modification of Tremulous 1.2 and the people who develop it intend to have fun creating a game they love from a game they love.

What are the current status, and objectives of Unvanquished?

A lengthy explanation of what Unvanquished is as well as a description of the team that develops it can be found here. Their goal seems to be the same as for New Edge whereas their project is evidently different.

What are our common interests/goals, both short term and long term, and how can we pull our resources together to help our common interests/goals?

Your common goals/interests seem to be:

• Playing Tremulous
• Modding Tremulous
• Talking about Tremulous

As for how you can pull your resources together: surely you just make stuff, show it to each other and work together on stuff where you can.

How can we unify the Tremulous GPP, Tremulous 1.1, and Unvanquished communities to expand our community and player base, as well as encourage collaboration?

You can keep making sites in the hope that one of them will become hugely popular or that it will inject a sense of novelty and excitement. Honestly though, I think you can do just as well with the tools, people and places that already exist and your probably dividing the community more by creating yet another place to gather.

How can we attract new players that have never played any Tremulous based game before, and how can we encourage them to stay after trying Tremulous and/or Unvanquished?

I'm a strong believer in 'build it and they will come'. I see attempts at forcing communities together as somewhat misguided.

How can we continue to improve the game experience for the existing player base?

Spend more time creating and playing and less time talking about doing them.

It seems to me like if nothing else, by trying to answer your own questions it creates a starting point from which you can approach a consensus.

[kharnov]

The only ones qualified to say anything about the goals or objectives of Unvanquished would be me or another developer from our project. It isn't much of an issue now, but keep this in mind for future discussions. We are not some unknowable bogeymen, we can obviously be talked to.

[Nux]

Hi kharnov! Could you please tell me what the goals / objectives of Unvanquished are?

[your face]

hay nux! you aren't on any more

[kharnov]

Hi kharnov! Could you please tell me what the goals / objectives of Unvanquished are?

What do you specifically want to know?

[Nux]

Nothing too specific: Just a summary of your goals / objectives.

To explain, I'm attempting to answer the questions that were meant to be answered by this discussion. This is because I'm not entirely sure they got answered by the discussion itself: This post could easily have been a statement prepared before the discussion for all the conclusions it comes to (i.e. None that I can see). I will admit that I didn't read the entirety of the log, but from what I picked up from scanning it for maybe ~10 mins is it was sparse on actual discussion of the given topics.

You didn't seem too happy about me speaking of the goals / objectives of your team (which was one of the questions to be answered by the discussion) or at least wanted to assert some control over what is said about it. Maybe I've read your message wrong but in case I didn't I'm happy for you to do the talking. On the other hand, if you agree with what I said then please say so.

Cheers kharnov

Hi your face! Yes I am. It's hard to get rid of me.

[kharnov]

My post wasn't directed at you, it was at discussions like these in general. It just happened to reference the "goals and objectives" thing. People have tried to put words in our mouth in the past.