The state of the community

[CT075]

Before I go into anything else, I'm going to start by saying that something like this is long overdue.

I'm writing this post because, quite honestly, I'm pretty disappointed in the way the Fire Emblem hacking community acts at the moment. If a new hacker posts an idea with no progress (or a terrible amount of progress), they get ridiculed and laughed at by "vets" and others who've been through this again and again. I'll freely admit that some part of this is my fault (on a side note, for anyone who remembers my blowout a few years ago, i owe everybody an apology for that); I kind of want to go back and punch myself in the face.

What I'm trying to get at, however, is that the community I see today isn't one that I'm sure that I want to take part in. This is a community where aspiring hackers are too afraid to post without sufficient progress, but can't make progress because they're too afraid to ask the "obvious" questions and get laughed at. The tons of people (myself included) who've spent time saying the answers are "obvious" or "easy" just create this atmosphere where it's frowned upon to not instantly understand what one is reading.

Now, a lot of the things in this rant are somewhat outdated; from what I've seen, people are gradually getting nicer about things again. But the fact remains that there are still so few projects being posted, and a huge percentage of the questions asked are all from the same people. I'm pretty sure that there have to be more people with both an idea and the willingness to learn how to hack, but nobody posts. Why? Because people like myself have built up a reputation to be, quite frankly, pretty elitist.

So I'm just going to put this out there - We need to start being more supportive. Stop shooting people down, stop telling people their ideas are dumb (unless that person is astra; i hate that guy and his dicks of faggots hack can go die in a hole). If someone asks a question that's answered easily by a tutorial or a doc, just tell them and link it to them; if they can't find it, pull out the part of it that's relevant. We should be encouraging people to take risks and figure things out by trying them themselves, instead of discouraging them by telling them their ideas are too grandiose and "impossible without asm". The reason hackers like Arch and Blazer are so good at what they do is because they know how to take their ideas and run with them. I'm 95% certain that if some nobody, right now, were to post an idea topic for Elibian Nights (in an alternate universe where the real deal didn't exist) with no progress, they'd get laughed at and bullied out instantly.

I'd far rather that this be a place where people with ideas can both share them and learn how to put them into motion.

tl;dr - BE NICER PEOPLE PLS THIS COMMUNITY SUCKS

[shadowofchaos]

Why? Because people like myself have built up a reputation to be, quite frankly, pretty elitist.

I do have to admit this.

It took Nintenlord slapping me in the face for me to realize how mean I was. Urgh.

[Brendor]

this seems looooonnnngg overdue.

I actually fall into into the category of being afraid to ask the "obvious" questions and posting my hack progress thus far; I thought it wasn't sufficient and I didn't want people saying "lol noob gtfo" or whatever but at least people are becoming more self-aware.

[Lord Raven]

The day I'd see Cam posting something like this

goddamn

I must be really out of touch with SF these days huh!

[Espinosa]

These ideas are equally applicable to just about any other online (and beyond that too) community. One person thinks "I'm great and this handful of people who think I'm great are great too; everybody else is just pixels and text on the screen", and having agreed upon that they might as well not be doing anything. But they do get things done occasionally, so not all is that bad.

Does anyone ever make hacking tutorials? Making such visible would allow the obvious questions to arise less frequently.

[Brendor]

It's a sign of Armageddon

These ideas are equally applicable to just about any other online (and beyond that too) community. One person thinks "I'm great and this handful of people who think I'm great are great too; everybody else is just pixels and text on the screen", and having agreed upon that they might as well not be doing anything. But they do get things done occasionally, so not all is that bad.

Does anyone ever make hacking tutorials? Making such visible would allow the obvious questions to arise less frequently.

Take this idea one step further; these ideas are applicable to any community, whether it be online or not. Imagine if someone went into a church to learn about Jesus Christ and they're met with the clergy saying "read the damn Bible then!" or whatever else. If someone experiences this they'll think "hmm maybe Christianity isn't for me" an d they don't pursue their interests any further. Basically you attract more flies with honey than vinegar and the "Golden Rule" is also applicable in this situation. Say you didn't know anything about hacking or anything else for that matter and you ask someone a question. Would you rather the person respond by saying figure it out yourself or would you prefer them to compassionately and patiently guide you to the necessary info? This was a problem with my math teacher in junior year believe it or not; if you asked him a question, you'd be met with "why don't you understand that!? It's so simple!" or "read the textbook" it's just counterproductive.

Edited November 22, 2013 by The Booty Wawriah

[eclipse]

Does anyone ever make hacking tutorials? Making such visible would allow the obvious questions to arise less frequently.

There's quite a few floating around in Hacking Resources. I tried my hand at FE8, and I found enough tutorials to do most of what I wanted to (the worst part is reinforcements, and I think it would be wise to play through what I have before messing with them).

[Klokinator]

Alright, who hacked Cam's account. This isn't funny anymore. I want IP addresses pronto.

j/k

But yes, this is completely true. I've always tried making Klokreations as open to newbies as I can and Blazer does the same thing as well on his site, but SF needs more of that attitude as well. Trolling people is fun (Especially that asstra guy he sucks so bad) but it won't make any better projects get out any faster. We definitely need to work on this.

[Espinosa]

Well, explaining anything takes effort and some people are naturally better at explaining than others (an ability that can be worked on and improved no doubt). It's a bit too idealistic to expect people online to put effort into anything, really (not to say nobody does).

[Brendor]

well if you don't want to put effort in then stay silent. We have too many people here that say "read the doc" or "figure it out yourself" like those types of things aren't helpful

ps: why is Astra such a bad guy?

Edited November 22, 2013 by The Booty Wawriah

[Klokinator]

Dude asstra is making the worst fangame in the community, dicks of faggots. How is he not such a bad guy.

[Brendor]

what makes it a bad game?

[Vennobennu]

_{(Pretty sure the Astra thing was a joke!)}

But yeah, asking around the hacking questions I tended to feel that I have to 'step carefully' to avoid annoying the older members. To an extent people should definitely try to help themselves, but you do have to start somewhere. Am I making sense? It's 2AM here after all.

@Eclipse, if you have troubles with reinforcements I'd be happy to offer advice.

[eclipse]

I think everyone is being sarcastic about Dream of Five. ;/

Vennobennu: I'll PM you if I have any questions. Thanks!

(can you guys stop spamming the topic?)

Edited November 22, 2013 by eclipse

[Arch]

Bravo. Thank you for posting this, Cam.

There's no reason for us to be mean spirited to one another; we all share a hobby. It's a community, after all, and supporting one another truly is the key to success. My projects would be crap without support I've received from my colleagues. I think we ought to focus on extending support to anybody who wants to join in our hobby. I've espoused that sort of mean-spirited mockery in the past, but for a while now I've been focusing on trying to bring other people up. I'd love to see a community-wide attempt to build and help one another. Guess what my first hack was? "Secrets of Darkness." And guess what, it sucked. But through exchanging ideas, learning how to hack, and trying out a variety of projects, I was able to refine and create. It takes more than just one person. Without that help, there'd be no Elibian Nights. There'd be some FE8 reskin crossovery thing with a self-insert lord and a green cavalier named Alex (he's the descendant of FE4's Alec, who was my favorite character once upon a time). It's all about support. When we support each other, we support our hobby. As Cam's so rightfully pointed out, that's why we're in this dismal state.

Two ideas on how we can improve the community structurally:

• A "Hacking Concepts" sub-forum would be an incredibly welcome addition. Essentially, it'd be a designated area for the exchange of ideas and conceptual/infant hacks. We want to encourage people to share their potential projects, and hopefully the community can help newcomers and veterans alike refine their ideas. It could even extend to hypothetical works and design docs and such (I know that I've at least got some docs for a couple of conceptual projects, even if they were only useful to pillage ideas from). Anything without significant progress or a major patch release would go into this subforum. A designated area for this sort of discussion, I feel, would help promote a healthy discourse that this community desperately lacks.
• Beyond that, I think the veterans really need to focus on solidifying the resources section. Too many basic things lack tutorials, sans the behemoth Ultimate Tutorial by Blazer. We want the barriers to entry to be as friendly as possible. It shouldn't be easy--by nature it simply isn't an easy thing to do--but, we at least ought to support newcomers by helping make the education as seamless as possible. Once we get all of the content, we can focus on organizing it in a user-friendly fashion (perhaps a difficulty-esque tiering for Novice, Intermediate and Advanced level techniques).

[Brendor]

while more diversified hacking subforums are a novel idea, the main problem is attitude. You can have all the subforums and tutorials you want but if a newcomer doesn't feel welcome, then we've failed as a community and this obviously isn't a problem that's going to be solved overnight. I suppose the best way to create a community-wide attitude shift would be to draw people's attention to the negative effects of their poor attitude but you can't really force someone to change. There's no doubt the community needs to fixed but I don't think there's an easy or quick fix to this.

[eclipse]

Arch's points are a step in the right direction, IMO. While there's a lot of information out there, it's not the easiest to come by. I'd support a Hacking Concepts subforum, so that people who only have ideas can bounce them off of other people.

[Arch]

I agree that the main problem is attitude, and adding a subforum ain't gonna fix that overnight. These are structural things we can do, however, that'll help newcomers enter the community. We can tackle both at the same time. As a community, we need to stop accepting this shitty behavior. Speak out against the haters.

Speak of the devil we've got a Hacking Concepts subforum.

Edited November 22, 2013 by Arch

[Brendor]

I'm not saying it's not a good idea but they address only part of the problem. Maybe the mods can come down extra hard when it seems like a newbie is being intimidated?

edit: hey! hacking concepts is a thing! maybe now I can finally make a thread about my project

Edited November 22, 2013 by The Booty Wawriah

[eclipse]

I'm not saying it's not a good idea but they address only part of the problem. Maybe the mods can come down extra hard when it seems like a newbie is being intimidated?

I have no mod powers in this section. The best I can do is yell at the topic.

I don't think punishing people extra-hard just to improve things in this subforum is a good idea. I believe that critique is a good thing, and it should be up to the people doing the critiquing to word it in such a way that it doesn't come across as inflammatory/demeaning/snarky/etc.

[Brendor]

I don't mean actual punishments I mean like someone just saying "hey, that's not cool. no hate" or something like that because right now no one says anything

[shadowofchaos]

I do remember a couple of tutorials I made... and I had saved from FEU.

Maybe re-writing them to be more newbie friendly might be a thing.

...and putting more reliable image hosts. Using my photobucket when the 10GB bandwidth runs out fast (don't ask me why) makes the tutorial worthless for the rest of the month.

Maybe it's the FE13 screenshots on this forum and whenever it gets loaded on a popular thread... or the fanart I have or something.

Edited November 22, 2013 by shadowofchaos

[Brendor]

I could maybe make one if there are any specific tutorials needed?

[Alm]

Perhaps we should also have a good amount of visual examples for the smaller details. I remember when I was first learning the steps for eventing, for some reason I had trouble with scripted battles. Arch went over it in his eventing tutorial, but he mostly just mentioned it and had a template. The first thing I tried to look for were visual examples to get a better idea for what I was doing wrong. I sadly found none and it was a pain.

Edited November 22, 2013 by Ashley3wl

[Brendor]

Personally I find video tutorials more helpful but it's different for each person