RI,
For what it's worth, we get you, and you're good. Your original post was pretty respectful, and we weren't complaining about it for the most part - you were caught in the crossfire. The quote that set off this arguments was two posts above:
You guys keep teasing us with all this great screenshots but you havent added anything new to you site in over a half a year. When will we see somthing new on Trianz Forge?
I'll take the opportunity to critique both questions here, since you and JRegner took a very different approach to things.
You complimented our work, asked where it was available (Pro tip: We mostly release on the site after which this thread is named; it is more appropriate to ask
if it is available. We'll take it that
where is implied.)
By contrast, JRegner's post starts by saying we are "teasing," jumping to conclusions about our motivations for posting screenshots, before proceeding to call us out on our frequency of releases, and then asks when we'll next have a release. All three of his points aggravate both the average content creator
and the average website manager, of which I am both, for the following reasons:
-First, it implies that we do this for the attention. Sure, it's nice to get people complimenting your hours of labor when you can finally show off the result, but really, we make things either because we want to make them (as in, we derive enjoyment out of the actual modeling process) or because we want to run them. Being able to release it and feel like a contributor to the game and its community is just a bonus. We aren't
teasing, we're proud of what we've accomplished and we want to be able to display it without "spamming" other threads. If you feel
teased then don't look here, and if you
enjoy seeing what we're working on, then don't complain, please.
-Second, creation takes time, and it's not worth my effort as a site admin to upload everything that's done immediately when it's done. A good pack can take anywhere from two weeks to nine months to create, and routes take
years if they're going to be any good. And I'm not going to log in every single time I finish a boxcar and upload it because that's not an efficient use of my time, and because I probably want to include it with similar boxcars and make my site navigable. So releases have to be spaced out reasonably. It's nothing new, either: since I joined in 2013, we've generally been having releases every 6-14 months. The only rapidfire releases we've ever done were in 2016, when I made and released the first two Exposition Flyer packs over a four-month period because the site wouldn't have paid for itself in September or December otherwise. I'm sorry if it's not enough for you, but we don't rush. This is our hobby; for most of us it's not even our only hobby. We don't move very quickly.
-Lastly, if you ever,
ever want to know when something is going to be released, I can tell you the answer right here, right now, in bold so it's visible for posterity:
When the creator is ready to release it. We aren't psychic; we don't know when that will be. Things fall apart; we aren't infallible. We might set ourselves deadlines, but setbacks will occur, computers will self-destruct, reference websites will go offline, and we will want to put those extra little bells and whistles on a project. It's impossible for us to say when the next release will be, or when something will be done. How would we know? We're not professionals.
That last is the most aggravating, because it's the single most common words that we have to say. People ask when things are going to be released even more than they ask us to create things without giving us the details we'd need to actually create them. It's really frustrating, because it makes us feel as though we're a broken record, just repeating the same three or seven words over and over again.
Again, RI, you're fine, and I hope you aren't turned off by the fact that I just kinda picked apart what's wrong with someone else's post. I'd honestly be a lot more eager to be on the forums if everybody who asked where they could find a certain project was so courteous about it.