The Ghosts of Community Release Past (Patreon)

given that everyone here is going to have access now, and this weekend is going to be chaos hell clusterfuck, i probably will not make a post announcing community release itself. expect to hear from a very tired, hyped, only technically-functional ame again next week.

okay
so honestly?
it wasn't even chaos hell clusterfuck. 

i am still kinda tired-- but two *coughs, sneezes, a loud clattering is heard in the background followed by the sound of an offscreen cat's terrified meow* sorry, three patches into community release and i actually feel like
things are pretty okay?
this is actually one of the smoothest releases we've ever had?

it's been 3 years since we had a reborn community release, and i'm used to the days and weeks following it-- being like... every day waking up to like dozens of messages about the release, hearing about everything that broke or was wrong, having to scavenge through the junkyard mountain of bug reports, and then having to figure out how to fix it all in a timely manner for a patch that half the people won't download and will introduce half as many new bugs as it fixes--
and just--
pain.

i was also keenly aware of jan having the same issue with being flooded with messages during rejuv's v13 testing phase. and that's in part what prompted me to make this thread on twitter about why not to dm devs with bugs. pre-emptively, i set my status to this: 

..uh, don't worry about my username. it is "butterfly pea flower tea" google translated into german and i just thought it sounded very silly.

the point is the status-- i've basically been on dnd+that since beta started and people have,
actually, like, for the most part,
listened and respected that?

like there have been a few outliers naturally but on the whole it's been great and i very much appreciate everyone respecting my space and time during all this. <3

it's like
gosh, who knew that all i had to do to make things better was, like, ask?
(the sound of like eight of my close friends groaning echoes behind me. at least five of them are cass.)

i don't know how much of it is the status, or having made the thread before, or just having generally set better boundaries with people and time and work in my life but it's been great. thanks to everyone for being chill with things even when they break!

other big reasons community has been great: actually having a team that can back me up in replicating, documenting, and fixing stuff. wild, right?
more on that next post, but in the meantime, and for the sake of not sounding like i'm casting shade on previous team members, i'll say that this is especially enabled by us now being on git rather than dropbox, or, like, skype (god forbid). 

all right, now let's talk about the main reasons community is Not great:
user environment issues ffffffffuck

all the cats we get in game that are actually related to, you know, the game?
great, i can deal with those. i'm still doing patches every few days and usually it only takes an hour or two to catch up to the misc part of what i usually handle*
*once again this is in large thanks to the help of the support team and crim and perry and vulpes and-- etcetcetc

but a lot of my energy has been focused on things like.......

• oh your antivirus is preventing saving
• oh your antivirus deleted the updater
• oh you're on a mac so everything barely works under ideal circumstances
• oh you're on a mac and you're not under ideal circumstances so suddenly our build just doesn't even work and apparently it's different than the one we used in alpha
• oh you have windows 7 so the updater doesn't work because they don't support python?!!?
• oh you have windows 10 so the game doesn't work because microsoft discontinued openGL support for old GPUs
• oh the game crashes if you try to save while having actually 0 hard drive space available
• oh the game crashes if your computer loses power mid-play
• oh the game crashes if you try to run the game on a different drive from your OS
• oh the fucking accent e in "Pokémon" breaks graphics and scripts on a bunch of computers
• oh you have linux so-- wait, what do you mean linux is the one operating system that actually works????

...
> a user comes in with a linux issue as I type the above.
> i am forced to age 100 years on the spot

............................so anyway, the point is i hate everything. i just want to mak vidya.
big appreciation to everyone who has been doing their best to help keep a lid on all that craziness too <3

anyway, part 2 of this post will be forthcoming. i'm currently in the aforementioned awkward valley where
some of you have already beaten the game!
and some of you are only just starting it!!!
how to talk about things without spoilers????

i suspect probably i'll just end up tagging some posts, but for now, why don't you all give me a reading on the vibes, how many of you have finished the game? or if not, how far in are you?
and for the sake of this, "completed" is going to mean "you've done as much of the game as you care to do before hearing about spoilers" whether or not you've seen the other routes yet, or if you're going back and doing other/challenge runs or something

see you again soon!