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An Editorial
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ctown28
ctown28
Huntsman

Jun-28-2008 08:39

There have been some recent events on this game that warrant some concern. It’s no secret that there has been a lack of interest. Much of this may be attributed to the release of Shades of Mystery. If that is what people want to play, far be it from me to tell them not to play it.

That being said. I am still a paying customer of Sleuth Noir. As a paying customer there are some things that I expect. Ben has done a decent job at keeping the server up and running. We had a slight issue earlier in the week with not being able to travel and Ben did a great job of addressing the issue and getting it corrected. He always has done a great job of taking care of things. He has not however kept the game fresh and interesting. We recently had the expansion of the USS Sleuthetania. There was a buzz before the initial launch of it and we couldn’t wait to see what was in store for us.

Well what did we get? The opportunity to pay $20,000 to get on board of a ship and do nothing more than play cases. Sure there are some new characters and new items along with 2 new “coming soon” links. That’s it! I can’t help but to feel disappointed in the way this has played out. Two weeks later, the links are still coming soon and the interest of the boat has already gone away. I know I have no plans or reason to get on the boat and be cut off from my agency completely. I don’t know this for a fact, but I think a lot of people are disappointed with the boat as well and some may even be irritated and feel cheated by the whole development.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh and we are missing some secret that still needs to be unlocked on the boat, but if people aren’t playing, the secret will not be unlocked. I know that Ben is just one person and can only do so much. He has a lot on his plate right now with running both SOM and Noir. I’m sorry, but SOM means absolutely nothing to me as I don’t play over there.

Replies

LoveHugs
LoveHugs
Well-Connected

Jul-2-2008 02:50

Jojo: we all know that Hypoware is a small company. I guess it's about Ben in person in size. It's a great company, if you see the great games he have been able to produce. Many companies with much more people have NOT managed to do what Ben have done. That's true. And if I have read the threads correctly, Ben not only have 2 great games to take care of, but he also have a little baby sleuth as well.
On the other hand, I do think that he might take advantage of getting the community involved. - and I don't think any of us have ever dreamed about getting paid for the job. Except for may be a couple of days or hours extension on (one of) the subscription, if much work is put in?
I know that if I had some support from Ben, I would be able to develop some small things, (for free of course, I already have an ordinary job), releasing Ben to concentrate on the bigger things. Also I do think that a development team could easen the work, as there are many things with getting an application working that's not programming. I know in the company where I work, we calculate that the core programming is less than 25% of the complete work of getting the job done. So it's easy to imagine the potential for what the community can do if allowed to be put in a position where we can cooperate with Ben.

LoveHugs
LoveHugs
Well-Connected

Jul-2-2008 02:54

Oh, I see that I have used some different doubles of me, when responding on this thread.
Huglover, Ija and LoveHugs share the same brain (when it's availiable), even if they also borrow someones others to control them some times. They are created to play with, and are happy when someone takes the time to play with them. :-)

Huglover
Huglover
Old Shoe

Jul-2-2008 04:21

Jojo, I am sorry to say, but I am sick and tired of waiting. When I complained last year, I was demanded to wait and see, things will change I was told....

Well, only main thing that have changed are the time that have passed. I have made my program a little better, so it's quicker to run a case. I have improved my ability to hack the resources that Ben lets out, but it's not that fun. It prooves to me the repetitious pattern of case solving. Always the same. And, makes me impressed that people can stand doing the case solving the manual way. I am bored even when I have a program that does most of the work automatically for me. Some times I think to myself, "what if my skills and abilities could be used constructive for the community, rather than just playing in my own sandbox, with a program that I can't share with many because it might be too destructive with the Sleuth server?"

Time, well, give it time....

I have had a look at the game info page, and at the number of active players. If the trend continues as it have done the last 3 days, we have between 50 and 80 days before the whole community is vanished.
I don't have the patience to wait another year for something to happen, that might improve the game. With the development team, at least some could be using their time being involved rather than waiting... - and if the team was wise, they would make sure that everyone would be able to involve, even if fewer people were the ones driving the project.

So, yea, I understand that I am commanded to give it time once more.

May be I'll just give it an eternity of time?

May be I'll just let all the 10-12 sleuths I am supporting at the moment lapse, and don't renew their subscriptions? I guess my opinion does not count anything anyway.

(oh, yes, I am able to do all the cases AI on a day if I use the time, but what's the point? What's the gain of it? Well, I might get 30-50 favors, so what?)

miss snopes
miss snopes
Demon of the Due Date

Jul-2-2008 10:24

Does anyone know if Ben still reads these threads anymore? I would hate for all of the positive feedback and great ideas here to go unseen.

Sleuth Admin
Sleuth Admin
Tale Spinner

Jul-2-2008 13:32

Hi all,

Thanks for the post Ctown, and thanks to everybody for weighing in. While it's always tough to provide enough new content for dedicated players, it's obviously been a long time since we've released significant new content, so I don't blame folks for getting frustrated.

First off, no you're not missing any secrets currently available on the Ship. Getting most of the narrative elements to work in the context of a ship, rather than in a normal city, has been more time consuming than I anticipated. The two under construction sections are getting closer to complete, but I still need a bit more time.

Considering that Sleuth Noir is never going to make much money, and we're putting more of our eggs in the Shades of Mystery basket, it probably is important for us to find more ways that players can contribute to the available game content in order to keep things fresh.

I have given some thought to making Sleuth Noir an open source project, so that other developers could work on the game code themselves. There are some complications to going that route, but it may be doable if there are a couple of programmers among the players who are interested in taking an active part (and learning spyce/python).

Short of that, we could definitely get more mileage out of the Scripted Mystery editor. I'll talk to SS and Anikka about whether it would be helpful to get more editors involved.

Also, maybe it would be a good idea to add some kind of Scripted Quest Editor that allows for Scripted Mysteries to be linked together with other smaller tasks (bring me a Rasputin's Egg or do a favor for the barber in Delhi) that would allow for another layer in player generated content. Before I add more editing/authoring features, I want to make sure there are people interested in using them.





Sleuth Admin
Sleuth Admin
Tale Spinner

Jul-2-2008 13:32

As for making better use of Cairo:

1) Including AV Hunts
- I'll go ahead and do this very soon (of course players who don't have access to Cairo should not get AV's that require them to go there).

2) Cairo Treasure Hunts
- This might be a little complicated because not everybody has access to Cairo

3) Some kind of special Treasure Hunts that only take place in Cairo
- This is a possibility, but would take a fair amount of programming work

4) Add apartments to Cairo
- This is easy. Are people interested in having Cairo apartments? Oh well, I'll go ahead and add this.


miss snopes
miss snopes
Demon of the Due Date

Jul-2-2008 14:01

Thank you Ben!!

ctown28
ctown28
Huntsman

Jul-2-2008 16:24

Thanks Ben, I knew you'd do the right thing and give us some kind of update! :-D

lilangel
lilangel
Sleuth About Town

Jul-2-2008 17:22

Well, now I can put my two cents in: I would very much be interested in helping with the editing... as long as others are willing to help; I'm sure with the few players we have left, we may be able to make this grow again. Of course, I may just be a tad optimistic about it.

Scarecrow Sam
Scarecrow Sam
Well-Connected

Jul-2-2008 23:03

I know I never post, but Admin's suggestion of a Scripted Quest Editor brought to mind something that I've always wished was implemented in the game, and I thought would go well in this thread.

Anyways, that idea would be for players to be able to use the textboxes (that you can type things into when you're not doing a case and for the most part only gives the reply "I'm sorry. I don't know anything about that.") to be able to create their own "hunts." Then if the people (that they invited to participate) typed in the particular keywords, they could get the clues to help them along.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but if given access to the code, I would definitely be willing to help out (on ideas like mine or other ideas as well). I don't know Spyce, but I did know Python at one point in time...And most languages are really similar anyways, so I wouldn't think it'd be too hard to pick up :)

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