woah, thanks for your post, looks like you put a lot of time into it! I’ll try to address it all. here goes
I never intended to suggest that people should switch to reflex. I made the post originally in “the little big list” just to let people know that reflex existed, and to see how many were interested in a game like it.
This is also one of the times where devs may not live up to their promises.
I understand your skepticism, but I definitely don't share it. Nothing that the devs have said or done in the ~6 months that I have been watching this project has given me any reason at all not to trust them to deliver. I don't expect you to just take my word for it though, you're entitled to your own thoughts :)
If you look at designs, plans, and old test server things of planetside 2 then compare them to the current version of planetside 2. The idea became radically different and some things that were unique and very accessible were removed. The original UI for upgrading your gear was very streamlined and was a list which was very simple and anyone could be able to know the upgrades by simply eyeballing the list. It was to some extent, very accessible. The problem however, was that it was a very cluttered UI and you would have to scroll up and down a lot. This caused them to edit it and it certainly looks a lot better and organized but it wasn't as accessible at the get go like the original UI.
Later in your post you say that they should have worked with a publisher. They've actually already turned down more than one publisher exactly for the reason that they want to keep complete creative freedom on their project. Publishers influence the development of a game in a huge way, and rarely for the good of the game itself. Take Jagex's Ace of Spades for example. :)
Map editting is something that is good but it is highly complicated to code.
Perhaps not as complicated as you might think. It's already been put into the game. Here's a stream of an old q3 mapper creating a map for reflex, in reflex (and swapping in and out of editing mode to playtest it). There's no sound because twitch mutes stuff with third party audio content and he was playing music at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aga-IPmsq84&list=PL1OXqlrRvr40NkQtwTM9QeYL6KZlEUL7d
We have been promised of very smart AI from many huge game companies like EA and none of exactly delivered to the sweet spot. They either fail to even work or they are extremely smart and incredibly hard to beat. I don't see how an indie group can do this without massive funding.
Game companies can make promises and fail to deliver. These guys actually enjoy what they're doing and they don't want to compromise their product due to artificial time or money constraints. It comes down to whether you believe in them or not I guess, but I do wholeheartedly. As for funding, the entire point of the kickstarter is to get enough money for them to keep up development for the next year at least.
Nothing is coming up of Phil Brown as a famous coder who's coded a lot of games on google. He could be just lying to make sure his product is widely played.
If you google my name you get a baseball player, a tenor and a murder victim... and my name isn't even close to as common as Phil Brown! Regardless of whether or not he's lying (which I genuinely doubt he is - he was reluctant to share his identity in the first place for fear of losing his job) he's managed to do an amazing job on the game's engine so far so I have total faith in his ability to deliver.
Dev created tutorials rarely work for games like these as players who actually played this game without any knowledge beforehand can actually give meaningful advice.
They're already working together with people who are very fluent in the game's movement mechanics to come up with genuinely helpful tutorials. At least one of the guys they're working with has been experimenting with people totally new to the game and trying to find the best way to teach them. Dev tutorials often focus on the most basic mechanics of a game (which is understandable but far from ideal! developers often don't have a chance to discover the intricate details of how a game plays out in their limited time playtesting it... 15 years after quake 3 was released, strategies are STILL being developed and improved upon.) Quake Live's tutorial, for example, teaches you to pick up weapons, health and armor, and shoot at a bot. It doesn't teach you anything about how to move around the map efficiently, how to avoid taking damage, the concept of weapon choices/usage being situational, etc. and that sort of stuff is [i]absolutely crucial[/i] to being a good player.
The developers of reflex have gone through everything new players go through with quake and at least one of them has become one of the best cpm players in Oceania. Even if they didn't have this experience for themselves, they're very open to community input. I think the tutorials will be more than satisfactory. :)
This promotional poster could be quite easily recreated by any of us as most of us know how to make some sweet looking banners so there's the bordering, already a lot of different font types out there, and pretty sure most of us can just throw in a bunch of coding terms and some adjectives to make everything look super legit.
Well yeah, you [i]could[/i]... but what does that have to do with reflex specifically? Besides there are a ton of programmers that are interested in the project and I think by now one of us would have called them out if we didn't think they knew what they were doing :)
What I'm getting at here is that this "Reflex" project, with "known" coders might not be as good as it sounds. If they actually are legit about creating something amazing, they should have gotten a publisher out of there enthusiasm rather than begging for money on KickStarter. Also as this is quite a very small community centered around a very small game, we won't be making much of an impact.
Might not, but everything I've seen has made me believe in them strongly.
Also I didn't make this thread to try to get aloha to make an impact, I made it because I figured some of us might enjoy it as much as I do! :)
