Katabatic

Contains no E18 story spoilers, but I put a spoiler tag just to be safe.

Very cool mod, thanks.

The first rule of business: you're never going to eliminate people who want to ask questions. That's just a fact for any field where people actually care about what you're working on. And I absolutely agree that new members should be greeted a welcome and an earnest attempt to answer their questions instead of snark and 'pick on the newbie' inside jokes. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the handwringing is brought on because of a lack of transparency. People don't need to know the exactly date/hour/minute the episode is going to drop. But people who have been waiting patiently for however many days/weeks/months would like to know, or at least approximate, how far along they are in the whole process. The developers do a good job of it with the progress bar while the episode is still in development, but then has largely dropped off since. Without giving away too much or trying to toot my own horn here, I work with a team of fairly high credentialed individuals, and we are given a lot of latitude as a result. So while we may not be tasked with grunt work that has a set deadline, we are expected to manage projects and give rough estimates on when content can be delivered. Saying "we're aiming for a release in three weeks" at the very least signifies intent. It doesn't set a date in stone; some breakthrough can still happen that allows us to release early, or something unforeseen can push the date back. For example, take the dev blog, the last proper update came 9/24, and in it, the best estimate for a release came here: Which is great news, and everyone appreciates this. However, what gets people anxious is that now, 9+ weeks after the announcement, we still have yet to have a community release and people are still suggesting "it'll come out when it comes out." Which, I'm sure everyone understands, is not a timeline. It's not even an approximation. It's little more than a "stop asking us, guys." Even a "we're currently in beta" would be very welcome. An update saying "there's been X issues discovered during Internal Testing, we're likely to push back the release Y weeks" is fine. People aren't afraid of 'bad' news. They're afraid of no news. Especially in an online environment where there's so much abandonware and people dropping off the face of the earth with no warning. Now granted, I'm aware that people are volunteering their time for this project, so no one should expect AAA levels of QA and project management (and even they get it wrong a lot more than they like to admit), but people shouldn't be afraid of communicating with the community. If a setback happens, letting people know then is a lot better than letting the expected date pass by without a word. That's when you get more and more confused people come out of the woodwork with, "hey guys, when is the ep coming out?"

I really don't understand the complaint about it being 'broken': 1.) It's a mod. If you think it breaks the game by trivializing the leveling process, don't get it. There are plenty of other mods that trivialize aspects of the game. 2.) Grind is not difficulty. Grind is simply grind. I have a pretty extensive background from years and years of playing ARPGs, where grind is the name of the game, and I have a pretty high tolerance for it, but I would never consider it 'skillful' or 'hard'. Leveling pokemon is not 'hard'. It's just your tolerance for grind and a timesink. If you realize you need a specific pokemon and you know where you can get it and what level you need to be, it's no feat of skill to get there; it's just putting your nose to the screen and grinding. Any schmuck can do it, it's simply a factor of time invested. 3.) Reborn already has a check on acquiring XP. If you overlevel you just end up hurting yourself because your pokemon no longer obey. The official games do not, so gaining 3.5x the XP dramatically changes the grind curve. Though I do think these games have made an attempt to balance it. Try playing Sun/Moon from the beginning with no EXP Share and compare it to a playthrough of an earlier gen game. No EXP Share would require a fair bit more grinding to get your party up to level. I would be down to add a mod for it, as it's a nice QoL feature and allows you to experiment with grinding more potential teams. And hey, as an optional mod that enables a toggleable feature, if you think it makes the game too easy, turn it off.

So I'll preface this as saying that I finally decided to register (and stop lurking) after reading through this entire topic. I didn't have any experience with the Reborn online league, and have only been playing this game since Episode 14, but each episode since has elicited a replay from the very beginning. There's a lot of things the game does well—better the official games, even—so this is not really a criticism of the game itself. But as it's a topic on what you don't like, I figure I'll expound on them here. - As mentioned several times, the game gets rather tedious with the sheer amount of backtracking, especially through the city. There could be a better sense of direction through the game. And while the wards are cool enough in design, navigating through them more than a few times just feels like a waste of time. I almost always just speed through them on my bike at 3x gamespeed. Backtracking through a city is expected, especially if you're a completionist like me, but when you're skipping through the city many times over, it really loses a lot of the appeal. - There's a severe tedium to a lot of the puzzles. A few of them are very well designed, but most of them are just grindfests in high encounter zones (Chrysolia, 'Mt. Doom', the Water Treatment Facility, push the crustles, and electrical-floor conveyer-belt meteor base come to mind). They aren't terribly difficult as puzzlers, but they're just long and often require going back to the same spot over and over again. These kinds of engagements get old, particularly on replays, because they don't explore anywhere new and your progress doesn't feel as tangible since your environment stays the same. Add in the high encounter rate in this game and it's either just a tax on your repels or your patience. - Characters sometimes become rather one-dimensional. Not necessarily that they are one-dimensional, per se, but they're often portrayed that way. And I would liken it to the worst bits of Game of Thrones writing where they essentially zone in one trait of a character and beat us over the head with it in every scene they're in (almost like reminding us that that's who they are, in case we forgot). It's how Fern will always have some way of calling you a loser, even when it makes no sense. Or how you can grow tired of Bennett by the third time he shows up the screen even if you can kind of see where he gets it. There's just so much "enough already, I get it" in the handling of characters. It seems like every character is reduced to their shtick. - Railroading of your character I get sometimes that moving the story along is necessary, and as a game designer you can't simply allow the player too much freedom or you create a nightmare number of scenarios. But no one likes feeling like they're set up for failure no matter what they do. But the way the protagonist is handled sometimes is really immersion-breaking. I get that, as an RPG, you often want to allow the player the freedom of creating their own character (sprite, style, etc), and as such you want to keep them relatively silent so you can imagine them however you like. But in this scenario, the last thing you want to do is force player action (or often player mistake) as a means of story progression. You take this character where you work so hard to preserve optionality and make sure they're open ended enough to fit the RP creation of a wide variety of players, but then force them to do a variety of questionable or dumb things just to advance the story. Like why are you forced to fall into the Nuzleaf trap, even if you can clearly see that it's a trap? Why are you forced to 'read' (even though this was changed in E16 it still feels like you're forced to read it) Titania's diary to advance the plot to the Water Treatment Center? Why, if the gems are so valuable, are they filched off your character by every other character you encounter? Why isn't your, presumably reasonably intelligent, protagonist protecting these vitally important gems better? Why aren't they hidden under layers of clothing and tied to your person? Why aren't they tucked deep in your shoe/sock? Why aren't they in some carefully zipped inside pocket of your bag? Why aren't they shoved up your rectum? There's a degree of presumed/forced incompetence about your character that makes it feel like you're set up for failure regardless of your RP preferences. Which is fine; your character can be a bit of a bumbler. But if that's canon, you might as well create a set protagonist and develop meaningful relationships/dialogue with various characters you encounter.