The Big UMD Change Thread

[Subutai]

Check out cataclysm: dark days ahead for an example of how a volunteer project can successfully organize efforts. It is possible.

Not only this, but the dozens of successful open source projects, all purely voluntary, that have QA, and release schedules, and other processes all firmly established, along with beta versions of the code where even more QA and acceptance testing is done before the changes find their way into the latest release.

Also, any of the literally hundreds and hundreds of volunteer organizations in your country, state, province, municipality, township, or maybe even neighborhood. I can assure you that almost all of them have various processes in place that ensure that the volunteers contribute the right thing in the right way. You wouldn't show up at a soup kitchen and expect them to just tell you to make whatever food you felt like, and distribute it however you thought was good enough.

I'm not saying that Arelith needs to, or even should, be run exactly like a professional organization. But from every project I've ever worked on, if there's one thing I've learned about burnout, it doesn't come from having to send you code to QA. It might come if there's way too much process, but far more commonly, it comes because devs work hard on something, only to be beaten up because the client, internal or external, thinks (or knows) things aren't right. It might be the devs fault, or it might not. Either way, it's hard to stay motivated and happy when your hard work is met with anger and derision. The best way to avoid that anger and derision is to do what you can to release completed, well-architected, well-developed work. The best way to get that work is to ensure that features and fixes are complete, mostly bug-free, and are released in an understandable manner.

Actually, on that topic, I want to add something else to my post above (I'll also edit it in).

Transparency: One thing I've noticed is consistently absent from updates on Arelith is really any form of transparency. Big changes are released without warning, smaller changes often have almost no documentation, future plans, even in the immediate future, are left extremely vague. While this might help prevent people from being a little angry at first, it's a bit like the scene in The Office where Michael tries to appease everyone by telling them he'll have a big surprise for them at the end of the day. When the end of the day comes, they all stand around waiting for the surprise, only for him to panic, try to come up with something, and then shut down as they all walk out in disgust.

If people can know what to expect, they can prepare. They can start to come up with ideas and plans, potential issues, potential fixes, etc., all of which can be taken into consideration for the upcoming changes. Sure, there will always be anger and frustration when things seem like they're not going well, or going against what people want, but it's much easier to handle for players than what can feel like suddenly being ambushed with potentially game-breaking changes all at once, with no idea it was even coming.

This can easily be done by more-or-less comprehensive patch notes. Release the upcoming changes to UMD, for example, a few days early and let people go through the changes and find the potential issues. This not only gives devs time to make any changes that the community comes up with, but also leaves time to detail and define some potential solutions to predicted problems in a calmer environment, rather than in the storm of bug fixes, changes, and tweaks that come after release.

But, alas, i could also understand why you wouldn't want to do this....
When i used to work in IT, the last thing i wanted to do when i got home was fix a friends broken computer (which, inevitably when people find out you work in IT they will ask this of you). Same situation i guess.

This is unfortunately true, compounded by the fact that I really don't have all that much free time most of the time. I'm waiting until maybe Friday of this week to log in while I wait for the dust to settle around these changes, but it's honestly not a huge change from normal for me. It's not uncommon that I only have a few hours or less a week to spend with Arelith.

I'd be more than happy to help figure out processes, but when it comes to the day-to-day handling of it, I wouldn't be available the majority of the time, and for the tiny amount of time I might have per week, I'd inevitably start to feel resentful of spending it doing the same stuff I do in the office.

[NauVaseline]

And the fact that they somehow were better than Wizards at it was even worse.

This is patently false. NWN & Arelith mechanics have never, ever worked this way.

[MissEvelyn]

And the fact that they somehow were better than Wizards at it was even worse.

This is patently false. NWN & Arelith mechanics have never, ever worked this way.

It isn't. Wizards cannot use divine scrolls/wands unless they had UMD. Furthermore, it is easier to dispel a, let's say, level 25 Wizard spell than it is a spell cast with a wand by a character that only has 3 Rogue levels. Since I didn't see any notes on dispelling in the update section, I'm assuming it still works this way.

[Dr. B]

Change is good.

Is climate change good? Would it be good if my dog died? What if Irongron changed things back to the way they were, would that be good?

That's quite a statement to make

I'd say it's either vacuous or false.

yet I do believe this change is good.

This on the other hand actually means something--and is also false, because it makes spellcasters uncounterable, and will result in a server full of unbeatable spellcasters throwing their weight around.

The fact that a character with 0 lore could go from nothing to being able to understand every single scroll and wand in the world, with full knowledge on how to use them made little to no sense. Like at all.

I disagree. Lore is knowledge of the setting--things like history and myth. I think it makes absolutely no sense that being able to read scrolls is tied to lore.

Consider opera singers who can sing in foreign languages with perfect intonation despite not understanding them. That's basically what UMD does.

And even if you're right, why should the lore score be too high for anyone to reach? Why not a lower number? Your argument doesn't speak to that question.

And the fact that they somehow were better than Wizards at it was even worse.

Explain this? Spells cast from scrolls have a much lower caster level than spells cast by your typical epic wizard or cleric, who also took UMD.

It's a big change and will naturally take time to adapt to.

How, exactly, is anyone going to adapt to this? Either more changes need to be implemented (new items that can counter spellcasters and are about as common as scrolls were--those changes probably should have been implemented as part of this update--or there is going to be a huge problem which no one can adapt to.

Which is why everyone is given free relevels.

That does not fix the issue I just described. Maybe you did not look in to the lore requirements for scrolls? You need 50 lore to use Word of Faith, 80 to use Time Stop and Mordenkainen's Disjunction. The only people who can achieve the latter are wizards, who can use those scrolls anyway.

My takeaway from this is that change is, indeed, good.

This is meaningless.

[Durvayas]

As someone who has worked in video game development in the past, there are a few things that jump out at me as contributing most to the anger and frustration surrounding this update.

1) There is clearly little to no centralized QA.

This last update very clearly was never tested in any meaningful way. Releveling was bugged from the outset, something that was so universal it would certainly have been caught well in advance had it been tested even once. Creating commoners was bugged, which would have been noticable. There is a skill titled "Unavailable" lingering in the skills selection.

This issue is compounded by this being far from the only change pushed by this team, and unfortunately I do have to call Irongron out on this, that is a buggy mess on arrival that necessitated scrambling to patch. This happened under Mithreas as well, make no mistake, but not nearly as frequently. Mithreas had a reputation for really bad ideas. Irongron is quickly acquiring a reputation for poor implementation. (The good news, is you can improve the process. There is no cure for having bad ideas.)

The point is, that these changes should not be being pushed out at all without having been properly tested.

2) You should never, ever, EVER intentionally break a critical mechanic without previously launching its replacement.

I refuse to believe that the dev team went in with shut eyes when they launched this debacle of an update. People knew this was going to be poorly recieved, and it wasn't hard to tell why. A mechanic that was critical to server balance was absolutely gutted, and nothing was initially ready (or even offered) to take its place. The piecemeal 'rods' that have been added to the loot matrix are like slapping a band-aid on a severed limb. They are not helpful at all, and are more akin to salt in the wound than anything else.

What boggles my mind, is that this update was pushed in the first place. If there was to be a replacement system for UMD, it needed to be implemented first. Whatever phase 2 of the rebalancing was to be, be it new items, or whatnot, it needed to be pushed first.

You do not do cardiac surgery where you cut out a heart, and then wait around for a replacement. You have to have that replacement on hand, ready to go, before you make the incision in the first place.

What was done here was the equivalent of taking away a soldier's weapon, handing him a rifle without any ammunition, and then dropping him into an active firefight with a promise to get him some bullets later, and then being baffled that he is upset at being given such a shiny new rifle.

We would literally not have this thread at all had the full system been ready before this change was pushed through.
You should have had that ammunition ready, and given it to the soldier(us) at the same time as that rifle. If the gun jammed, we would have understood. These things happen sometimes, but we would have everything we need to do the job on the battlefield.

We would not have the angst and anxiety of the unknown "Fix" to restore balance. Which brings me to the next point.

3) Tansparency, or rather, the utter lack of it.
Irongron; this next bit is for you, and I mean this in the most caring, and respectful way when I say this, so try not to take offense.

You have not been instilling in us a lot of confidence recently.

• You wiped out cage betting, despite everyone telling you it would wipe out participation in the cage fights as public events. We were right, it did.
• you greenlit giving the radiant heart some really absurdly broken rings.(which we're sure will have to be revisited in a few months)
• you released an update for assassins that was broken on arrival and still does not work properly(the hidden danger bonus has been broken since april)
• you removed a plethora of gods (including player made ones that have been around for 6 and 10 years) on an artistic whim
• you released new spells without a means for an entire class to get them and then penalized people for trying to get their hands on them the only way they could.
• You removed the ability to rebuild in a wild overreaction to the community's natural response to the above issue that you caused.
• You randomized the ore node system, throwing the server economy out of whack for a year.
• Releasing greyport with its bartender NPC broken at launch, no persistant storage, nor letting it participate in the land auction system (Or really, anything that would make it function like a district), with a nebulous promise of more changes later™.
• You sacked the balance team for not being yes-men and then publicly threw them under the bus (and then had the nerve to praise their work in a kudos thread later)
• You changed enchanting and never fixed Enchantment's ESF Perk, and the Epic Spell you promised being 'in developement' still no sign of it 10 months later.
• I don't think I even really need to get into the monk update that you let fester for months.

So I really don't understand where you thought the server's community would be reassured by you saying "This is phase one, phase two will come later™" when you have a long history of letting things that are obviously out of whack sit for months and months on end without fixes or rollbacks, and have a tendency to double down when faced with negative criticism.

The lack of transparency about the development process leads us to believe there IS no process.

It leads to anxiety about what you have planned next. I am not the only player that looks at the updates thread with anxiety, rather than anticipation these days. I used to look forward to your updates; That hasn't been the case lately.

Lastly, and probably worstly, it leads to suspicion about your motivation for keeping everything so hush-hush and opaque.

It leads us to believe that phase two was never planned; That the addition of rods is either grasping at straws to cover up the fact that phase two was never thought out (and you thought, for some reason, that needing 80 lore to function effectively would be well recieved), or, perhaps, due to their quality, that you are intentionally pouring salt into the wound.

But the point is that we, as players, have a not unreasonable desire to want to be able to make informed decisions about things that we know are in the works. People would not be upset about this past update if it was clear what was planned to fix what you broke.

[Seekeepeek]

There is a skill titled "Unavailable" lingering in the skills selection.

i think it's intention is to show what skills you can't take. since on a fighter level both UMD and Unavailable share the same grey color. (to show you can't take it at this level). not completely sure tho. if it is so.. then a change to a red color would be more suited.

[NauVaseline]

+1 to literally everything Durvayas said. I completely forgot about some of those updates listed.

It can be really tempting to doubledown in the face of such intensity, especially after putting labor to realize your idea. I really hope that the dev(s) can step back, take a pragmatic look at the situation, and hopefully rectify things for the better and do better in the future.
Honestly community faith is pretty splintered up, and it can be easy to have feelings hurt over a reaction to your labor being not well received (I believe another has said as such already in this thread but I didn't want to go digging for their quote), as well as being the recipient of brutal honesty. Sometimes it's really necessary though to get that shock, or we just don't learn and grow

[ltlukoziuz]

Long post of p10

Having my current work be in gamedev QA as well as be close to some companies, i +1 every single word in there. The transparency and halfbaked updates, especially when PGCC server exists now, are the two biggest nono's on the server currently, and it's making it sad when every morning you wake up it is "So who lost on the roulette today?"

As a sidenote, considering the fact I both have fair amount of free time and formal experience in the field, I am volunteering to be QA for the server. It's truly the right saying - if you want things fixed, come at them yourself.

[Bunnysmack]

Well...one rod that is downright terrifying is the rod that casts Greater Ruin. So I will say that at least ONE is scary

Spellcasters were already at the top of the powercurve before this update, we all knew it was true. I get that this was intended to address how everyone was using cookie cutter dips to get Discipline and UMD by removing the level of power that discipline defends against and making UMD less of a enormous boost but... nothing was done to address how Spellcasters are utter terrors in a fight against non-casters...while taking away some of the very few things non-casters could employ to close that gap somewhat.

[xalaram]

Very big quote

I like the new UMD changes and whatnot as outlined in my one other post on this thread. However, I strongly agree with everything this man has to say. And he just covers the recent stuff. Everything else is another can of worms altogether and probably shouldnt be discussed here.

[Marsi]

Check out cataclysm: dark days ahead for an example of how a volunteer project can successfully organize efforts. It is possible.

Not only this, but the dozens of successful open source projects, all purely voluntary, that have QA, and release schedules, and other processes all firmly established, along with beta versions of the code where even more QA and acceptance testing is done before the changes find their way into the latest release.

Yeah, most of the non-boomer web is powered by open-source projects, just to preemptively counter any more talk of volunteer organisations being incapable of project management.

I don't know if I agree with the QA analogy exactly though. Arelith's most infamous updates were (usually) functionally sound, they just sucked and betrayed a lack of direction, ideological consistency and most importantly, understanding of the player-base. The QA team can't help it if the CEO insists the spaceship be made out of ham, to borrow from Aodh Lazuli. This is how many tech startups fail: out-of-touch management. For the record though, I think "push the update that could negatively affect 100's of people and we'll tweak it over time" is a really poor release strategy.

Anyway, what I feel Arelith lacks is "product management" if we're using tech company terms. The updates ever since EE have felt very reactionary, whimsical and haphazard. They work, but they set weird precedents, scrap stuff that had no need to be scrapped, or usher in slow-burn consequences. It feels as if there's no-one sounding the long-term direction of Arelith, which I'm sure isn't true.

And I know there's no-one judging mechanical changes, what with the balance team shuttered. It's frustrating that after ten years the server changes are still driven by a mechanics/xp antipathy in spite of the ingenuity of writs and adventure xp. You aren't going to bring about a quaint intellectual roleplayer's paradise by making xp-driven gameplay obscured, unbalanced and frustrating, much the opposite in fact. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the "grind culture" we have now can trace it's beginnings to the mid-decade which saw some of the darkest ages for server mechanics and PvE.

[Arigard]

And the fact that they somehow were better than Wizards at it was even worse.

This is patently false. NWN & Arelith mechanics have never, ever worked this way.

It isn't. Wizards cannot use divine scrolls/wands unless they had UMD. Furthermore, it is easier to dispel a, let's say, level 25 Wizard spell than it is a spell cast with a wand by a character that only has 3 Rogue levels. Since I didn't see any notes on dispelling in the update section, I'm assuming it still works this way.

This is a little disingenuous as an argument & a pretty blatant strawman. Yes, charges from wands take up a higher dispel resist, but the hardcore change was not made to wands, it was made to scrolls, most of which are utility spells that work at a much lower level to their cast counterparts. People putting in 15-20 UMD ranks can still cast zoo buffs and wand charges with higher dispel CL's than mages even with this change, unless they have fixed that bug/whatever you want to call it with this update.

For scrolls, UMD users do not have the same level of CL's, they cannot extend, they also, unless it's a very niche build do not gain bonuses from the feat investments like abjuration to make certain actions more powerful. So the big change was made to the magical items that UMD users were observably worse at casting. Wands remain pretty much exactly the same in terms of their accessibility.

UMD is supposed to be about use, not creation, or core understanding. Just because I can drive a Ferrari, doesn't mean I know how to build one, or handle it as well as the engineers. But I can still turn the wheel and point it in the right direction with a base level of study. -that is what UMD represented-.

I don't disagree with the changes, but I do feel like if magic heavy classes are going to be so potent, there should be less of them running around the world. It was mentioned as a joke somewhere in this thread, but tying some kind of reward to powerful base classes might not be such a bad idea, especially those like clerics that are tied to some pretty substantial RP and should be held to higher standards.

The real issue with the changes for me is that they are going to start skewing the world in a way that RPwise just isn't very immersive. Mundane classes are mundane in DnD for a reason, they are the most common and expected classes to see running around the world. High level magic users are powerful, but they are also rare and usually manning the top of organisations and groups. When you walk around an RP world and run into more heavy magic classes due to balancing than mundane classes, things just start to feel a bit off and out of place in the context setting we are playing in.

People will gravitate to playing the better mechanical classes, because it's human nature to compete and after being dumpster-ed 4-5 times people will join the party and get in on the act especially if you're the only fighter based class around a majority of spell casters. There's a reason why races like Vampires and Dragons are restricted. If they weren't everyone would roll one because of their power curve. If you push too much power to base classes like mages/druids/clerics then you run the risk of every encounter just being 3 Charizards vs 3 Undead Charizards with a side of multiple Time Stops & then you do the opposite of removing encounter-able magic from the world and in fact just encourage everyone to roll the base magic classes instead, which has ironically, the opposite end result of Hogwarts Online.

For structure to be upheld if there are glaring power imbalances, there have to be social ripostes to shift the power dynamic away from very powerful characters (i.e they are feared/mistrusted and greeted with hostility and aggression by the masses - like Vampires/Monster roles), or there just needs to be less of them so that if they appear they can be rallied against through RP.

Neither of the above things work when everyone is just given the same choice between playing S tier or everything else meta. So either social balancing needs to occur, if heavy magic classes are to stay as powerful as they are, or elements of the classes (such as summons in particular) need to be dialed back a bit so that conflict doesn't just turn into a one click I win button, because that on its own will change RP and influence characters actions. The knowledge that you have power as a PC over others will whether it is subconscious or not allow people to feel more comfortable being assertive and taking risks etc with the OOC knowledge that it's highly likely they are going to win out in most encounters against certain classes due to just base statistics.

Personally, if I was building Arelith, I would push for more social balancing, similar to what we have with higher tier races, simply because I think as a world it would make sense for high level casters to be somewhat special and have that reflected in rarity. With the influx of potential new mundane classes due to PrC it also allows newer players to learn the game, setting and understand the RP required for some of those heavier RP driven classes as mundane classes first so that we don't end up with people (as an example) rolling Druids just for the power curve that then stand around LOLing 24/7 next to Pale Masters with their Mummies out (which happens all the time btw). Traditionally this role was done by DM's who would observe and make sure alignments and actions taken IC by PCs made sense (i.e Paladins slaughtering everyone mercilessly and not acting 'Paladin-esque' might lose their Paladin abilities and get their alignments changed). On Arelith it would need to be a combination of both this social and mechanical overseeing, I would imagine.

[Liareth]

There's a lot of truth in a lot of these posts. It's refreshing to read posts that are both insightful and polite (well, mostly polite). Props to Subutai and Durvayas especially.

I do want to address something from an earlier page in this thread.

I'm currently writing a long post on this issue. The way Arelith has always been run is that, ultimately, authority to decide what happens to the server resides in one person.

I think that's insane and that it's time to reevaluate it. It might have made sense 15 years ago when Jjjerm created and hosted the server. Now it has existed for 15 years and has become, in a sense, a living artifact to which many have contributed. It's not clear that it belongs to one single person, even if the computer that hosts it does. It's also not clear that the current leadership model is in the best interest of the server.

There needs to be a conversation about whom Arelith belongs to. My answer, in brief, is that it belongs to the Arelith community, and that the decision-making structure needs to reflect that in some practicable way.

I want to distinguish between the 'module' and the 'server' in this preamble. The 'module' covers all the assets that comprise Arelith. The 'server' is the community. When somebody thinks about the mechanics, the dungeons, or the loot, they are thinking about the module.

If somebody took the module and hosted a splinter copy of Arelith under new leadership, they would be creating a new server using the existing module. If they brought the vault and database with them, and they had majority community support, I would argue that it was the same server.

As you've correctly highlighted here, the Arelith module is a product of many years of development by a large team of volunteers. It isn't clear who owns the module.

Is it the person who pays the bills? What about the bill-payers of ye olden days? And how do community donations factor into this? Do community donations cover module development or server maintenance?

Is it the person who drives development (the 'dev lead,' as used here)? Again, what about the previous dev leads? How much of the module does Mithreas own, if any? How much do I own, if any?

Is it the coders, without whom the server would have no custom mechanics or systems?

Is it the artists, without whom the server would have no areas?

Is it the designers, without whom the server would have no content?

How much ownership does the balance team have over the content produced under their guidance, given that many implementation details would be different without them?

Do players who post suggestions on the forums, which are later implemented by a developer, have ownership over the original idea?

I won't open the can of worms that is ownership of the module from a legal perspective. From a moral one, I think it's sanest to consider ownership of the module split between the developers who have contributed to it over the years.

This is consistent with the internal policy that Irongron holds: core members of the team who discover irreconcilable creative differences are free to take components of the module and create their own server using them. Irongron offered this to me, and Peppermint, and probably others. Mithreas uses the core engine code from Arelith on his server. We've shared our code with many servers. Even Sinfar!

ETA: Irongron informs me there is even an open-source version of the code available for everyone to use, updated last in 2017: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nw ... -pw-engine

The community has very little entitlement to ownership over the module and its creative direction. One could argue that recent donations by the community have funded module development and so they should have a say in how to spend that money. If you were to analyze Arelith's financials, I suspect you would find that donations barely cover the hosting cost. Irongron is probably paying out of his pocket for module development costs.

The role of the community is incredibly important to the success of the server - but it does not convey ownership over the module. Without the community, the server would not be where it is today, but the module might well be.

They're obligated in much the same way that curators are obligated to care for and protect works of art. Great works of art have intrinsic value for many people and ought to be preserved and protected. If the board of trustees in the Louvre decided to vandalize the Mona Lisa, they would have done something wrong. The Louvre is entrusted with something, something valuable--something that they did not create, though that they have taken it upon themselves to maintain. They stand in a fiduciary relationship, and I think this is the sort of relationship standard to which Arelith's host should be held.

Arelith is a more complicated affair than the Mona Lisa. Its function is to promote excellent and enjoyable roleplay, which is fostered by a diverse environment in which characters of many faiths, alignments, and professions exist. The server is better to the extent that this goal is met. Aodh Lazuli explained this very well in a previous post. The updates up until now have done a lot to promote that. There is a clear sense in which this latest update stands to make Arelith worse. This is not how a caretaker should treat the thing in its care. Of course, I understand the caretaker thinks the server is better this way. But the feedback overwhelmingly says otherwise. The caretaker, in this instance, should defer to the feedback.

But more important, my argument for this is ameliorative: it would be better for Arelith and the community at large if it were understood that this were the host's role. If it isn't, it ought to be, because it stands to benefit Arelith. And I also think the server host should be honored by that role. It's an honorable thing to do, as would be deferring to the feedback in this instance.

This example made me think about the duty of the 'dev lead' more deeply than I have in the past.

Is the Mona Lisa the module or the server? From a like-by-like perspective, the Mona Lisa is the module. But it is quite different to the Mona Lisa, which was painted by one artist who is now deceased. The module has been created by many contributors over the years, most of which are still alive and kicking. A painting is a one-and-done. A video game evolves.

The curators of the Mona Lisa are almost certainly paid a salary and given the objective to "preserve this painting in its current state." It is their job for which they receive a salary. Contrast this with the Arelith development team, who do not receive a salary. On this point alone, I think the model of development you propose is unsustainable.

Additionally, the Mona Lisa most likely belongs to the Louvre, or the French government. Either way, the painting is their property, so they should be able to with it as they please. Just like how the French government owns the Mona Lisa, Irongron owns the module. He was given ownership of the module by Mithreas, who was, in turn, granted ownership of the module by the owner preceding him.

The Louvre or the French government has made the decision that they wish to preserve the Mona Lisa in its current state, which makes sense. It is a real, physical piece of art painted by a deceased artist. Arelith is and has always been an ever-changing module. It is not complete, and it never will be. Irongron has not decided to preserve it, but to change it, and improve it – at least, improve it in his view – which is his right, because he owns it.

You could argue that once ownership passed from the original owner to the second owner, the module was 'completed' and, therefore, the owner must preserve it in that state. Do you want that? I doubt it. Some people do, but you value mechanical balance and variety like I do. You don't want a broken and terrible Arelith like it was ten years ago. You want Arelith like it was 6-12 months ago.

But you can't have it both ways. You want to freeze the module at a state that suits your subjective view on its quality. Why should the module forever reflect the values that you consider essential? Others disagree with you. Historically, the module has always been poorly balanced. Mechanics at the forefront is a recent event in the timeline of Arelith.

Let me be clear here – I agree with your view on quality. A big part of why the module improved from a mechanical perspective after Mithreas' reign is because Peppermint and I pushed hard for that. I don't approve of the new direction. I do, however, support the development team's right to set it, and I encourage them to do what they feel is best for the server.

Arelith is not a work of art in the same way the Mona Lisa is a work of art. It is a video game that has, since its inception, undergone consistent, rapid, yet often contradictory change at the whim of the individual who ran it at the time.

Your argument is like barging into Leonardo da Vinci's house while he is still painting the Mona Lisa, and declaring that he must never finish his painting! It is perfect just the way it is, and now it belongs to the French people. Good old Leonardo is an abject moral failure if he doesn't abide by your request.

You do not have the right to demand this. The module does not belong to you – you have no say in its direction, and to imply otherwise is, in my view, meritless.

Irongron should have the right to do as he pleases with the module, and if the contributors don't like its direction, they should take their work and apply it elsewhere. This is the status quo, and I don't believe it should change.

Your argument does have merit when applied to the server, which was built by the community and is therefore owned by it. I think Irongron does have the moral responsibility to preserve it to the best of his ability.

But make no mistake, that doesn't restrict his ability to push change on the module. If he must shut down the server for any reason, he should publish the vault, database, and anything else required for the next generation to carry the torch. He should adhere to the community values that are long-established on the server, like the server's age rating and established style of administration.

[Dr. B]

I've been discussing this privately with with Adam. I only have time to reply to a small snippet of this, but:

Arelith is and has always been an ever-changing module. It is not complete, and it never will be.

I acknowledge Arelith is different from a painting due to the need for updates, and allude to that when I call it "a more complicated affair than the Mona Lisa". It stands to be improved, whereas the Mona Lisa only stands to be preserved. But improvements to Arelith, having been made and other things being equal, should be preserved, rather than destroyed, and that's largely the point I am trying to make here.

I think Irongron does have the moral responsibility to preserve it to the best of his ability.

We agree on this. Of course, if it's true, then perhaps there's a sense in which it's not merely his, to do whatever he wants with... it depends on whether we think that moral responsibility is owed to previous developers, or to the game world itself.

You've drawn a distinction between the server and the module. I think you can draw a further distinction between the module and the game world. The game world is not just the module, but a particular instancing of it that this community congregates in and around, and which includes the players and DMs as well as the narratives they create. Is it meritless to say that the game world does not, to an extent and in some sense, belong the the players? Of that I'm not so sure, because there is a sense in which they, not just the developers and contributors, are a creative force in the game world.

Does that mean they should have some authority over development decisions? Maybe not. But this question is largely academic and I'm going to back off from it for now.

[Ecthelion]

Additionally, the Mona Lisa most likely belongs to the Louvre, or the French government. Either way, the painting is their property, so they should be able to with it as they please. Just like how the French government owns the Mona Lisa, Irongron owns the module.

The Mona Lisa belongs to the Louvre which is owned by the French Government. It does belong to the Government, thus to the nation, meaning the community of 67 millions of people that forms it. I do not believe the Goverrnment may do at it pleases with it without consulting the nation, although with the utter absence of morals in politics it would not surprise me more than that if they did. And that despite the fact that the people had barely a part in making Mona Lisa.

Works of art and cie often begin with one person owning property, and then falls in public domain, because it grew to be more than just a physical property. I believe this is the case of the server/module. I do not agree with how you separate both. I can agree on the physical server used to run Arelith, the computers etc (read all technical material used for it), to be owned by Irongron. All of the rest, IMO, module included, would never have existed without its community, and would never have been what is has been and is.

Now we can debate whether or not Arelith has already fallen into being a "community object" (Apologies for the crap term, I didn't found any to describe it better, but I suppose it's understandable) or not, sure. But we can probably agree that one day for sure it will be, and that retaining property over it for the longest time possible doesn't make much sense (In the case of paintings etc they are often the salary of the artist thus retaining property makes sense. Though I find it distastful when it belongs to already super-rich companies, of course.).

On another note, you are suggesting that disaggreeing with a particular update (or wishing ownership to be held by the community ?) is equivalent to wishing the server to stay in the same unchanging state, which of course in both cases isn't a correct equivalence.

[Dr. B]

I just want to point out here that even if the people of France could legally vote to vandalize or destroy the Mona Lisa,
it does not follow from this that they wouldn't be acting wrongly in doing so. At most it shows that no one could stop them if they chose to. Might =/= right.

[Ecthelion]

Above goes further than my points but I can certainly agree with it on a moral point of view.

[Adam Antium]

I have to say that you seem to have a lot of implicit assumptions when discussing this, Dr. B.

if the people of France could legally vote to vandalize or destroy the Mona Lisa,
it does not follow from this that they wouldn't be acting wrongly in doing so

Your language here means that the initial assumption is that they ARE acting wrongly, and it does not follow from a democratic vote (hypothetically) that they would NOT be acting wrongly.

You need to -demonstrate- why this is wrong, not take it as assumption.

Quite on the contrary, let's extend this to a global vote - if the entire population of humanity who even knew that the Mona Lisa existed, voted in a majority to destroy it for some reason, that means that the desire of the most people this matter even is known to would be to destroy it. Given that a piece of art like this has no value other than in the perceptions of people who look upon it and think "I like this," it would seem that in this scenario there's literally no reason to suggest they've done anything wrong, so far as has been demonstrated.

[strong yeet]

I don't really think the debate of whether the community or Irongron owns the module is on topic to this thread; which is a dumping ground for the community's thoughts on this change so that there weren't fifty threads on the same subject.

I get that most people, myself obviously included, have thoughts roughly equitable to a discussion of its consequences but nonetheless comparisons of a roleplaying server to the Louvre are probably not on topic.

[Ork]

Liareth the voice of reason. Let's accept her position and move on: we can't do anything about anything as a community - even if we wanted to.

I wanted to just affirm that while I do not like this update, and am very frustrated by the direction we're going — Irongron and the team he had around him kept this place alive after a lot of debacles. A GOOD MAJORITY of the updates pushed out by Irongron & co. have been excellent additions to this server.

We'll adapt and move on after this. I am hoping for some reversal, but I'll still play here if there isn't. It's simply the end of an era, and the start of a new one.

[Adam Antium]

Liareth the voice of reason. Let's accept her position and move on: we can't do anything about anything as a community - even if we wanted to.

I wanted to just affirm that while I do not like this update, and am very frustrated by the direction we're going — Irongron and the team he had around him kept this place alive after a lot of debacles. A GOOD MAJORITY of the updates pushed out by Irongron & co. have been excellent additions to this server.

We'll adapt and move on after this. I am hoping for some reversal, but I'll still play here if there isn't. It's simply the end of an era, and the start of a new one.

I feel the same way basically.

I'm not happy about the change or the lack of overall communication with large updates prior to them happening, but I still enjoy the players I play with and the stories of the server, I'm not leaving. Just voicing my dissent.

[Dr. B]

Since I'm the one whose views are being replied to here, I'll just state my final thoughts and then move on.

I can't deny that Irongron owns both the server and the module, and he has a prima facie right to do what he wants with them. Sadly, I also can't deny, as Ork rightly pointed out, that either way, nobody can force him to change things, as least not given the way Arelith is currently run.

It's not clear to me that Irongron owns Arelith, however:

Arelith is not the server, because it has been hosted on different servers at different times.

Arelith is not the module, because multiple copies of the module could exist. The host could theoretically copy it, delete the old copy, and host the new identical copy on the server.

To me it's most plausible that Arelith is the game world, which is defined partly by the in-game setting and narrative created by the developers but also by the players and DMs. It's also defined by the community of people that travel with it.

There's a clear sense in which the server owner can do what he wants with the server and the module, because they are his. It's not so clear to me, however, that the game world is his. Too many other people, past and present, have contributed in various ways to creating and sustaining it--although the server owner's contribution is significant, and shouldn't be downplayed.

So at best we have a moral dilemma: the server owner can make changes to the module that affect the gameworld, but there's a sense in which the game world doesn't belong solely to him. There are two conflicting sets of claims here: the claim that the server owner can make on changing things in the gameworld by doing things to the module and server, and the claim that the community makes on him not to make unacceptable changes, which entails some claim on what he does with the module and server...

So to me there is a compromise to be made here. Players need to respect the fact that the module belongs to server owner, and can do things that affect the gameworld. The owner should respect the fact that the game world belongs to the community. Both should take ethical weight. (Naturally, you can guess where I stand on this most recent update: it goes too far.)

To that extent, I'm going to reiterate my agreement with Liareth, who I think herself states largely where I now stand on this:

Your argument does have merit when applied to the server, which was built by the community and is therefore owned by it. I think Irongron does have the moral responsibility to preserve it to the best of his ability.

I would replace "the server" here with "Arelith", and agree with you.

I hope my rearticulated stance here can appease people on both sides of this debate.

[chris a gogo]

Ladies and gentlemen.

This is what happens to all servers when Haks are introduced for the first time.
The people that control the changes go alittle nuts with all the new toys and play with them all at once, it will calm down it may take a while but in the end either the server will stabilise or it will be deserted, it's happened to every server that added haks.

What im doing is waiting to see the player numbers over the next couple of months that will say better than anyone here how well these changes have been received.

Peace out.

[NauVaseline]

What im doing is waiting to see the player numbers over the next couple of months that will say better than anyone here how well these changes have been received.

Do those still get posted?

[Subutai]

What im doing is waiting to see the player numbers over the next couple of months that will say better than anyone here how well these changes have been received.

Honestly, this is an awful metric. This is kind of like saying that we'll see how well received the President of the United States is by how many people don't leave the US, or how well received Brexit is by how many people don't leave the UK. Obviously, those are much more dramatic examples (and absolutely no one should read anything into my opinions on either political situation one way or another).

Arelith is a long and storied server. Some people have been playing here for half their life. A change like this isn't going to collapse the server, and probably won't even cause a significant change in the number of players. You'll notice that a huge number of players who have, and continue to, complain still actively play, and have since the day the changes were made.

This doesn't mean people love, like, or even don't hate the change. It simply means they're not willing to up and leave the world they know, the characters they've build, and the friends they've made over a change. And overall, since the change mainly affects PvP with mages, it doesn't ruin NWN, but merely kicks it back into the same spot as traditional DnD, where everything but mages are meme characters in a fight.

People will accommodate to the changes, whatever the end result is, but that doesn't say one single thing about how well received they are.