FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

To be honest, minetest is a blast to play, and with it being awesome and all, i can barely find any lets play still being made on it, i cant lets play, as i am very boring on a voxel game, so ive tried believe me, but this game def. needs people to try and promote it

People might kill me for this question...
Why? Why do we need people playing this game? We dont earn money or something when others play this game.
What is the difference when many people play it?
There are even downsides: There will be many n00bs and trolls if we get a bigger community. How can we handle all this?
Personally I like the current state of the community. We are many, but not too many people and devs here.

PilzAdam wrote:People might kill me for this question...
Why? Why do we need people playing this game? We dont earn money or something when others play this game.
What is the difference when many people play it?
There are even downsides: There will be many n00bs and trolls if we get a bigger community. How can we handle all this?
Personally I like the current state of the community. We are many, but not too many people and devs here.

i agree. for one thing i follow the forum here on minecraft if i press a topic link and back out more will most likely pop up all the time. i would like more people but not to the point i am drowned out. more developers would be nice for faster production.

I would say because the fewer people we have that play the game, the less interest there'll be for folks to contribute to it. The reverse isn't necessarily true beyond a certain point of course, and we're probably at a comfortable place now with the userbase, but that doesn't give us license to "slack off", so to speak.

I'd say a bigger community is a plus, but to be honest.... noobs and trolls will always come. We already have enough greifers and things on our servers.

As I said in partial rage on VanessaE's server, People are idiots.

Still, if we really wanted to get serious and start advertising, we'd need a better name first. Who wants to play a game with 'test' in it?

Also, a flipside to what you said about noobs and trolls, with the bad, there comes some good. Think for example, eloraam on MC. She single-handedly is coding the entire Redpower^2 mod, which includs tons of things never-before attempted. Genuises may come, and with the help of the community, their work can be even more amplified, making everyone happy.


My fingers hurt after typing this much with my thumbs. :(

But why do we need fast development? The development of Minetest is fun, not the finished product.

Indeed, development is fun, and fast development only increases the fun!
Who says we need a finished product? Theres always something that can be added or improved. The more people contributing, the faster things are fixed, refined, and added. Whats so bad about that? (Except that it might wear out the people who review pull requests)

Honestly, I'd have to agree with cornernote a bit, some people here are too closed-minded. (no offense)

I think that the biggest problem of Minetest is that there are few servers registered in server list, most people would just assume that Minetest is unpopular/dead and leave.

PilzAdam wrote:People might kill me for this question...
Why? Why do we need people playing this game? We dont earn money or something when others play this game.
What is the difference when many people play it?
There are even downsides: There will be many n00bs and trolls if we get a bigger community. How can we handle all this?
Personally I like the current state of the community. We are many, but not too many people and devs here.

+1
Minetest should be attractive to developers (which is the case thanks to the Lua API), not so much to players. However, some people (like me) first played and then started development (when the API came out).
I think minetest should be found when looking for it at the right places, which is first of all different repos of linux distributions (where you will likely find devs!).
So, instead of advertising minetest with YouTube Videos and such, better just make it easily available for linux users.

In my opinion:

Traxie2 wrote:Who says we need a finished product?

What is a finished product? perhaps a product which must not be more developed further.

PilzAdam
But why do we need fast development?

We do not need a fast development, but development too slow obsoletes the project

Traxie21:Still, if we really wanted to get serious and start advertising, we'd need a better name first. Who wants to play a game with 'test' in it?

I do not look at the name of a product that is still under development. This particular however, should be considered in a more advanced phase of development: when a default gameplay will be implemented in a stable manner.

PilzAdam:Why? Why do we need people playing this game?

the fact that more people play this game makes me (and I hope those who make more than me for this game) aware that you are doing something good. I'm happy if many people play minetest.

Psychotic:needs people to try and promote it

In the end I think it's true. But this must go together with an increase of responsibility of current users, which need to be vigilant about the inevitable infiltration of trolls and others bad user.

i think that because this happens in the correct way should be planned and controlled by the game developers mainly, they should indicate who is authorized to promote and how to promote it, preserving the authority to remove any unwanted content.

I ask you: How are decisions made within this community? Those of us who look at this project with curiosity and passion count something? or what we say is not taken into consideration?

I once tried to get the people on PureZC interested in this game (so that individuals like Jared, Noel, CastChaos and DarkFlameWolf build stuff in our servers,) but I was not the least bit successful. Below is the topic that I made for this game in that site's forums.
http://www.purezc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=57000
If any of you are members of that site, I ask that you put in some good words for this game in that topic.

More users mean the possibility of amzing mods, more servers mean more people would ay, hey this game is cool! and play it, lets players doing minetest videos would get people on the fence about the game to come join the mintest community,

And trolls and idiots are going to be in every community, it just depends on how they are handled

Personally, I abhore let's players. I'm sure there are plenty of good ones, but then people like PewDiePie destroy any love I have for the "genre". Plus, the sheer volume of Minecraft LPs, most of which are dull and stupid, reminds me of how terrible the Minecraft community is.

Tell your friends, share the game through word of mouth. That's all I feel we need.

We should advertise minetest when it is a finished product.

I hope to God that Minetest will never be a finished product (where all development stops).

Jeija wrote:...make it easily available for linux users.

That's not a bad idea at all. Looking around Ubuntu repos is how I found Minetest. Linux users—and particularly those who explore repos and look for open source games and such—in general comprise a great, supportive, open minded community. Although it can be a pain to maintain distro packages, it's not that big a barrier and is not as much pain as many other distribution methods. So if we can find someone willing to do a small bit of regular release management, this seems like a very inviting way to proceed (to me anyway).