Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 5, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
Page 5

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SUGGESTIONS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Last week I explained what happens to your suggestions when you mail them to feedback@ibgames.com. This week, I'm going to explain some of the categories that players' ideas fall into.

The "good" suggestions break down into several types. There's the ideas that are great ideas, and that we love so much that Bella decides to code them in immediately. They are pretty rare, though, and generally you'd only see immediate implementation if they were incredible simple and didn't take much coding.

Then there's the ideas that are great ideas, and which we already have on our list of stuff to do, but not near the top because there are things that are more important. You may have come up with what you think is a startlingly brilliant suggestion, but chances are, somebody has made it before - or we've even thought of it ourselves. Don't let that stop you suggesting it, though, because it's just possible you have come up with something totally original.

There's the ones that are great ideas, and that we would love to do, but we know they are fiendishly difficult to code. So they go on the list of stuff to do, but near the bottom. Remember that there's only one Bella, and until they come up with a way to clone people in real life, she can only do things one at a time. So these ideas may get implemented, one day, when all the urgent stuff is done... but don't hold your breath.

The "bad" are ideas that, while on the face of it sound reasonable, just won't work in Fed. Sometimes a suggestion does sound like a great idea but when you examine all the ramifications it turns out that it could have a bad effect on game dynamics. Remember that as players you tend to see the game from the perspective of whatever rank you hold at the time, so are naturally concerned with things that make life easier or more fun for you; but in Fed, the ranks all affect one another, so making a change to one rank can have repercussions for other ranks to. Bella, as the game designer, has to consider the game as a whole and how everything fits together.

Another type of "bad" idea is the things players suggest that we add to make the game more like other games. Clearly, some games are more popular than Fed and have a lot more players, so it's common for people to think that we should add to Fed the things that make those games more popular. But you need to remember that Fed is different from other games - it was deliberately designed to be different - and it is the differences that appeal to many of our players. Sure, we could bolt on a few things to appeal to those who like more traditional MUDs, but it would be hard to actually integrate them seamlessly into the game structure without alienating the players who like things as they are. That doesn't mean we don't want you to send in ideas about how things work in other games - we're certainly not above stealing ideas if we can get them to work!

Finally, the "ugly" ideas are those that are barking mad. They cater to a particular obsession the player has, without any thought to whether the feature actually belongs in a game like Fed (or indeed any game). An example: "I want to be able to buy a laser handgun so I can walk into a bar and shoot everybody dead." Well this is an idea for people who like shoot-em-up games, and it would also be directly counter to the idea of Fed as a social game where players co-operate with each other and make friends and allies. So no, we are never, ever going to put into the game the ability to walk into a bar and kill everybody dead, whether it's with a laser, a broadsword or your bare hands (or equivalent).

And if you think that idea is completely off the wall, it's relatively sane compared to some of the "ugly" suggestions we get!

Still, I don't want to put any of you off sending us your ideas, even if you're not sure whether they are good, bad or ugly. We want to hear them, and we'll consider all of them, and add some of them to the list of stuff to do, and eventually we'll actually implement some of them - and if you do not send us your suggestion, you will never know which category it will fall into!


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