Ylands...Crossroads, U-turn or Dead End?

[kimbuck 746]

Since this game first appeared,  have  spent  3015 hours playing it .. and that's  not a lot  compared to the efforts others have done.

Yes  early access...with   flying sharks that would emerge through ships keels and  attack you whilst sailing...  Horses that disappeared when you mounted them, then behaved the same way as vehicles  did in  diving underground   and never been seen again.

and many more eccentricities.. but it was early access.  And  we stuck  with it.

And there were hot-fixes appearing to correct the serious  issues that we reported. We looked forward to the future..

Then came the dark ages......

We sent in reports ..and    nothing  came back ..it was like being part of SETI, sending  off into  space messages and waiting for intelligent life to respond ...   we got  zilch most of the time.

Occasionally  we  got a response ( after a lot of  prodding)  that  something was being done ...we  didn't know  what, but it was being done,  we were assured.

Then there was a disastrous  update  with  ships   disappearing,   eaten by   an invisible  ship-worm,  and a myriad of  other "enhancements"  that  sounded good  but we wondered if they  had ever been tested  before release.

Meanwhile  a lot of the old  bug reports   were never acknowledged or fixed  .

The game  was rife with griefers, and lag,  and the problem seemed to be that  the  spawn  area was a target  for  griefing, and also  the source of  much of the lag, with dead  bodies from one-off players  stacking up.

So  some  clever people  looked into the scripting functions and found they could  modify games and maps to provide  Admin tools  so that a game's  host could control the game, purge out the  bodies and  bring in ideas that  reduced the lag and made the game  more enjoyable.

But  what happened?

Again we had an issue where  non BI servers would not  connect, and  we are now used to this  as we grew to  know it was  an indication there is an update   coming through...unannounced. or something  changed  back end   unannounced.

Finally  - there's a major  update -.(0.14).. whoopee!  with  lots of  new stuff to test to see if its  broken,  ( some of it apparently  has not been tested!)   ..but there's still  old issues  not  attended to ....   were the developers ever told about them?

But  whats so  annoying is that  months  and  months of  scripting  enhancements  that made the game playable   have  been ignored, and literally  tossed into the bin, .. these  scripting  enhancements really  should have been available in game  by default. Also a lot of the scriptwriters used these enhancements  to  create  mini games within Ylands... but  the incentive  has now  gone  from  a lot  i  know of.  - Especially as in one case a  game was created by  Bojo, and someone got in,  removed a lot of the admin stuff and then locked  her out of the game .    She doesn't  want to  bother anymore, i gather -  and i understand why. ..its  a waste of time to have others profit  from your  hard work  or destroy it for "lol" 's

So now we have a group of scripting players  who   are wondering why they wasted so many months  doing something for the  game   that really  should have  been part of the game, but now is  "ignored and not wanted"

It sounds from the discussions in these forums that BI developers   were not aware of these  desired enhancements...   and  i  feel they were surprised to actually  see them in effect.

So what happens  now?

Will BI reverse and look at these  improvements and take them on board for  future updates?   

 Will they do a U-turn and   incorporate  into the game  these necessary admin tools  and allow  games to be hosted on Non BI servers  without the current problems?

or has BI /Ylands  reached a Dead end?   

To answer the last  question, i suggest perhaps  BI people  read the steam reviews of  Ylands ..and see why people are leaving,   The Steam community is where you get your player base..and that support is  falling away.

Meanwhile some of us ( a declining few) are sticking with the current  maps  /games  but when the latest one falls over ( as is customary  within a week), i gather that we will be moving to  non  public accessible private mp games ...and  that means   less promotion of  Ylands.

 -----Or to other  games.

 

[bojo2736 1016]

Ah good times.  

Seriously, I stay in the game because I have made some really good friends.  Not because of the game. 

[RedEagle_P1. 905]

I agree but I think there is more going on here and I have written it up: 

 

[kimbuck 746]

The clever scripters  of P1 gaming added the "clean up" facility where  bodies would not  pile up on  spawn  creating  lag.  They have had  this operating  for a while  and despite sending in  game  logs/maps  its apparently  not  been noticed   by  BI.

This  scripting  idea  should be in the game by default.

Why?  well after about 3  days the  current  NA1 game   has bloated to  over 50  mb  because of the  stack of  bodies on spawn...     so many in fact that if a  player dies,  due to the game crashing and hes  at sea, or wearing a prop pack , or gets  dumped through the  floor / earth  by  the usual  unfixed  ylands  bugs,  they cannot respawn   as the spawn point  just cannot cope.   So they get a  time out  error again and again...   and  decide to go somewhere else   instead of ylands.

Please,  take note, and  support those P1   (and other) scripters,  that have  put  into the game  controls to make it  playable.

[Adam Snellgrove 1451]

Hieee,

I decided to address some of the issues regarding scripting and explore brought up here in a separate topic: https://ylands.com/community/topic/25478-scripting-in-standard-explore/

Might answer some of your questions and worries.