Let's assume that MF's developers are completely incompetent and that we are entitled to a better gaming experience than what they offer.
If it's not just one guy then it could be a decent guy and two awful guys or whatever - they're each their own person.
I think obv. they are not completely incompetent. They have basically blown it one way, that's right, I can get it down to one thing. That one thing is speed. What they have is fine for some point along the journey from nothing to the perfect program; it's just taken too long to get here.
I don't know how many man-hours Dominion gets per week, or whatever else. At one point somebody (supposed to be working on Dominion for MF) wasn't doing anything and was fired or some such; I'm not digging up the exact story because I probably shouldn't tell it. But you know. I can believe there's some of that, and some "we have to spend our time on these hidden pictures programs that pay the bills." Still, progress has been too slow.
The only way we have of playing Dominion Online rests with Making Fun, and that will not change unless something big and unforseen happens.
I'm not sure that's true (maybe there's a Vassal version or something), but it's certainly the intention.
At this point Jay and I have to, while desperately trying not to be affected by the sunk cost fallacy, consider where we are and how best to get where we want to be. Despite the slow progress - and believe me Jay is not impressed - we don't see how to do better.
The MF Dominion client has been improving, and it still is being developed so it will continue to improve.
Yes, it's continuing to improve, which is crucial; again the issue from my perspective is entirely one of speed.
Wait a tick, shouldn't we have a voice in this? Yeah actually we should.
I'm not sure what this voice is supposed to accomplish or can hope to accomplish, that it isn't already accomplishing.
(fact: stuff that gets spit out of a decompiler does not resemble the code MF writes, and is not grounds to criticize their design or anything else about them).
That's partially right, partially wrong. Some things that look bad because it's decompiled might not look bad in the actual code; e.g., Jeff said the "if (x == 0)" ahead of multiplying x was there because there was commented-out debugging code that was supposed to be skipped (but wait, if it's only needed for debugging, why not tie it to the debugging and thus comment it out at the same time?). Other things that look bad are bad, they are not the decompiler giving the programmers a bad name.
The threads in here (the Dominion Online sub-board) have become so toxic, I'm seeing a side of people I used to have respect for that makes me want to have nothing to do with them.
Well I don't know your specific examples, but it feels a lot less bad to me than when I quit the forums.
Do we want to burn the bridge we have with MF, to throw away our chance to have our voice heard and to have features added that will make us happy?
I'm not sure there's even a way to do this. MF will consider you as people; if f.ds makes a big anti-MF statement and then Kirian posts some feature requests, they're not going to say "no way, you're one of those f.ds guys." If they somehow became career-suicide-insanely spiteful, they would still need to answer to me and Jay or be done.
The dll patch is getting in the way of making Dominion Online a better experience.
I don't see how this is possible. It means a few people who might complain about something might instead not bother, they've got a fix. But plenty of people don't have the patch and will complain about whatever it is; the complaining will get done for sure.
Did anyone out there ask MF if they could contribute in a constructive way towards Online Dominion by asking if MF would make a public-facing API or log file interface or something so that the changes made by the dll patch would be scalable, sustainable, etc? This would be a much better solution: something a lot more like Salvager, only still compatible with MF's continued development of their product.
I don't think MF will be interested in that in the short term, nor should they be; whatever man-hours they have for Dominion, man, let them spend them on the actual work. It's potentially something to bring up in the long term.
The logs are already public, if you know how to get at them, which I posted somewhere.