As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it.
"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
The strength of a focus group is (or should be, anyway) that it's representative. It makes sense that their overall reception of a work is a more accurate estimate of its eventual popularity than the maker's.
However, the maker has tried many things, and among them will be things which are obviously bad (to anyone) if you actually try it.
Story time: in 2008, I went to the big board game fair in Essen and got to try the then-new game Dominion. I think most people who did, knew that this game was going to be hugely popular and influential, which it was. Donald X. Vaccarino is a really, really good game designer. And sure enough, it spawned the genre of deck building games, games where you build a deck as you play (as opposed to collectible card games, which are an important ancestor). But the first few attempts to adopt improve on the formula were pretty lousy.
What's interesting is that Donald X. posted dev diaries, writing at length about what he had tried and rejected. And although I'm pretty sure he did not follow the Dominion-likes closely (the dev diaries may even have been written before many of them), the things he'd tried and rejected were exactly what the Dominion-likes tried to add as their twist. Multiple currencies, like Thunderstone had, he'd tried rejected because it was too high variance. "Pick one of the cards on offer" like Ascension had, he'd also tried first, and found that the game was deeper and more fun if everyone had access to buy the same cards. (The "Pick one of three" mechanic would turn out to work much better in solo/computer games, however, as Slay the Spire's success is proof of!)
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Yes. People who live and breathe your product should absolutely be listened to. Especially when they don't have the super-user tools you do for support (or unconsciously rounding off sharp edges).
It's true. There's probably not a clean rule for when to listen and when not to.
I would propose as a heuristic that for the early stage, when your product relies on true-fans, you at least consider the content of a complaint more and don't just treat it as a signal that something somewhere is wrong. Bringing it back to the OP, I'm sure this is what Card did himself.
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
LLM writing is not adding value to the discussion.
The slightly inflated rhetoric whose tells are false contrast and unnecessary parallelism let me know that a human did not spend time writing that comment. Why should humans spend time reading it?
Very useful way to think about politics. Always remember that people have valid concerns you might not understand... but also that their solutions are probably terrible.
It’s exactly the opposite. Most concerns aren’t valid (even if and especially if they think it is) and most ideas for fixing things aren’t even contemplated let alone attempted.
That you have to lock down the ability to edit the docs in your project wiki because otherwise anyone would be able to edit the wiki.
That we have to lock down installation of unsigned extensions in Firefox on Linux because spyware/nagware in the form of add-ons that re-install themselves have been observed in the wild (on Windows) and caused problems.
Those sound like proposed solutions, not the underlying concerns. Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
The stated concern embedded in the first example is "anyone would be able to edit the wiki".
> Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
Right. That's the point. The concern that "anyone would be able to edit the wiki" is not a valid concern. The concern that "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info [if just allow anyone to edit it]" has to be determined through empiricism. Avoiding locking down the wiki and seeing whether it fills up with junk will reveal whether the concern was valid. It's possible that it's an invalid concern and therefore requires no solution.
I don't think this means "most concerns aren't valid", it's more "people aren't always good at vocalizing their underlying concerns, and instead treat a proposed solution as the concern".
Your distinction between stated concerns and underlying concerns is a red herring.
If their underlying concern is "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info because the wiki is open", and if that's empirically shown that opening the wiki doesn't produce a wiki full of inaccurate info, then it's an invalid concern. Neither it (the "underlying concern") nor the stated concern are valid.
You're not engaging with the premise. There is no problem involving a wiki that is full of junk and that locking it down is a way to solve that. The concern is that it would be filled with junk if flipped from closed to open.
Oh, every day citizens have terrible ideas too. Sometimes even worse. Sometimes our elected officials who "don't get anything done" are serving as necessary filters for those terrible ideas.
It’s more like you should have 5-10 readers. If they all say the same thing they’re right. If half think the pacing is too slow and half think it’s too fast you are probably spot on.
There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built.
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Bethesda does have sort of a weird hangup on that front, at least since Daggerfall where you could disrobe the characters.
Bethesda has quite a unique approach to everything. Its almost a joke at this point where most of their negative reviews are demanding more content after 300 hours of gameplay. I knew a guy who bought Oblivion at launch and played it for 2 weeks straight before declaring it trash. I would like Bethesda staff in general to get high and make weirder games like they used to, but at the same time, a lot of people are screaming at them to become like every other modern RPG which is not going to improve them at all.
Its clear they could get away with more sex thanks to games like Witcher, but i think they think it would require making more elements of the world fixed and detailed, where they like to spread their attention further to less depth.
Reminds me of all of the Elder Scrolls Online players who use guides to speedrun their way to max level, BIS gear, etc. and then complain that there's nothing to do. My guy/gal, you deliberately skipped the entire game
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
>Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Translation: You have decided to move to cherry picking. Got it.
>Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind.
If the developers cant do what you suggest while being profitable, then it isn't a sustainable path for them to take is it?
>You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff.
No I judged it by the average quality of output of the kitchen staff.
>Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement.
Modders do a lot of stuff. As a category their output is starkly below average.
>Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
No about 100 hours out of those millions are probably worth anything.
>The wide audience argument is the death of art.
No it really isnt. You are presuming "Widest Possible" audience which would be. But I was only talking wider than the audience for any particular mod. Which is roughly a good spot for art and roughly where games have been for decades.
>grey sludge you are currently defending
You just seem so mad now you cant even articulate an argument without using the standard slurs from slop youtube reviews.
>You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint.
You mistake a couple of nuggets for a mountain of gold lmao. Regardless of the shit they lie in.
>You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets.
Some shit you just made up. Yawn.
>Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
And now you seek to gatekeep a discussion you aren't even fit to partake in yourself. Boring. Go and goon in peace.
Maybe pick a more restrictive modding engine or cut out obvious fetish and meme material from evaluation? Even gems of games ala Factorio 1.0 aren't really as good as their peak mods ala Space Exploration. If you limited to larger scale overhaul style mods I think your economic argument starts collapsing quickly
I read about a screen test of The Deer Hunter, in which people said the movie was amazing but the beginning (the hunt, the wedding, etc.) was too long. The producers cut a bunch of scenes and tried again. This time the feedback was, "the movie sucks."
I've found the traditional publishing industry really interesting. It's so hard to get approved or even noticed from the gatekeepers[0]. Even getting a rejection from an agent can take months. And agents are just the very first gate. Being agented can be lightyears away from getting published.
And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.
I have noticed some publishers are changing the way they do things, sliding into writer spaces and looking for books that are nearly ready to be published but havent found their way onto the slush pile, because no human can actually digest a slush pile anymore.
As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following.
If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in.
I mean, it was already nearly impossible, but now it's nearly-impossibler (nearlier-impossible?), with the social media following being almost necessary to make it even a very-long-shot instead of a no-you're-definitely-getting-rejected.
The best possible position is to have a breakout self-published hit. An author with that can hand the boring difficult expensive parts - print and distribution - over to a trad publisher, and keep the rights to ebooks, audio books, movies, and the rest, hiring negotiating talent as and when it's needed.
For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.
Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.
It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.
A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.
And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.
Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".
For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.
Vaguely related, there’s been a trend (thanks to submittable making it easy to add charges to submissions), of some publications offering editor feedback for an additional charge.
Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
Feel the could be _some_ survivor bias. It seems plausible that multiple Hugo and Nebula award wining best selling author's may need feedback less then the average writer?
Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
> You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.
Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
Yeah I think the lesson is that specific suggestions for what to do aren't as helpful as just hearing how someone else experienced your work, and then drawing your own conclusions about how to fix that.
Bug reports should describe the problem but often shouldn't try to prescribe a solution.
reading TFA gave me a complicated perspective on OSC, and reading this comment gave me a more complicated persepctive on OSC, so I'm glad I read both, and I'm glad the long battle scenes were left out of both.
I don’t like when people use this without all the important context. Showing other quotes from the same person that is giving subjective advice on topics, lends to curiosity around how to filter their advice.
> It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter.
>
> I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here:
>
> https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [1]
In my opinion, it's relevant to Card's credibility. If he shows poor judgement in one area, why would I want to listen to his opinion on something else, even something which is considered to be in his wheelhouse? Poor judgement is poor judgement.
Oh course it's a high bar! Why should anyone care about this work outside of the time of their release? It's modern culture but it ain't gonna be passed down anytime soon.
If the bar is that people will continue reading their books in 200 years, than which fiction writers of the last few decades would go into your list of "good"?
The not-so-short story Ender's Game was great. The novel Ender's Game was awful. I hope someone told him it was too long, too repetitive, and too Gary Stu. I wish he had taken that feedback to heart.
The novella is the only version I've read. I came away both not understanding why a longer, novel-length version would exist, and with no interest in reading anything even slightly worse than that from the same author (which I'm given to understand describes most of his other work).
it did not make me wish to engage in political or ideological battle, i found it an interesting reflection of a complicated person's thought process. So, any battling is on you (you no doubt have a lot of company: "don't you dare feed us raw meat, we'll jump up and down in our cages and spill the poop buckets")
> Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?
i'll bite: yes. it belies a lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.
Orson Scott Card is one of the best selling sci Fi authors of all time, and has won the hugo and nebula award multiple times, and has been translated into 35+ languages. I think you would be pretty hard pressed to show that his writing isn't compelling to many people.
a lot of that happened before his views were more widely known. much like jk rowling. a lot of people have written both best-selling authors off as bigots; this is just a matter of fact. they may be financially comfortable but their standings have been irreparably harmed by their own statements.
Yes, and that's a completely different point from the one you were making.
Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their
> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.
You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.
As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it.
"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
This reminds me of the infamous Sid Sheinberg memo to Steven Speilberg and Bob Zemeckis on changing the title of “Back to the Future”.
https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during...
“Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
I would never have gone to see a spaceman from Pluto.
Based on how “Pluto Nash” performed: that’s a deeply and widely held sentiment.
The strength of a focus group is (or should be, anyway) that it's representative. It makes sense that their overall reception of a work is a more accurate estimate of its eventual popularity than the maker's.
However, the maker has tried many things, and among them will be things which are obviously bad (to anyone) if you actually try it.
Story time: in 2008, I went to the big board game fair in Essen and got to try the then-new game Dominion. I think most people who did, knew that this game was going to be hugely popular and influential, which it was. Donald X. Vaccarino is a really, really good game designer. And sure enough, it spawned the genre of deck building games, games where you build a deck as you play (as opposed to collectible card games, which are an important ancestor). But the first few attempts to adopt improve on the formula were pretty lousy.
What's interesting is that Donald X. posted dev diaries, writing at length about what he had tried and rejected. And although I'm pretty sure he did not follow the Dominion-likes closely (the dev diaries may even have been written before many of them), the things he'd tried and rejected were exactly what the Dominion-likes tried to add as their twist. Multiple currencies, like Thunderstone had, he'd tried rejected because it was too high variance. "Pick one of the cards on offer" like Ascension had, he'd also tried first, and found that the game was deeper and more fun if everyone had access to buy the same cards. (The "Pick one of three" mechanic would turn out to work much better in solo/computer games, however, as Slay the Spire's success is proof of!)
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Yes. People who live and breathe your product should absolutely be listened to. Especially when they don't have the super-user tools you do for support (or unconsciously rounding off sharp edges).
But they may not be a very representative user. Especially for things like games, they may be far removed from what originally got them into it.
Fan-modded games are often great fun if you're seriously into a game. But they're rarely better if you've never played the game.
It's true. There's probably not a clean rule for when to listen and when not to.
I would propose as a heuristic that for the early stage, when your product relies on true-fans, you at least consider the content of a complaint more and don't just treat it as a signal that something somewhere is wrong. Bringing it back to the OP, I'm sure this is what Card did himself.
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
smells like LLM
> Smells like LLM
Smells like not adding value to the discussion.
LLM writing is not adding value to the discussion.
The slightly inflated rhetoric whose tells are false contrast and unnecessary parallelism let me know that a human did not spend time writing that comment. Why should humans spend time reading it?
I read the same thing and didn’t get that vibe. The parent comment added to the discussion regardless of origin.
lol sorry, I just spend to much time on LinkedIn, I think. I promise this was 100% human-written.
I liked Zvi Mowshowitz' summary of this: If someone tells you what's wrong, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.
"Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them" - Mark Rosewater (Lead Designer of Magic: The Gathering, from his famous "20 Years, 20 Lessons" GDC talk, http://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/twenty-years-t...)
I heard very similar advice from some investors. They said:
> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.
Very useful way to think about politics. Always remember that people have valid concerns you might not understand... but also that their solutions are probably terrible.
It’s exactly the opposite. Most concerns aren’t valid (even if and especially if they think it is) and most ideas for fixing things aren’t even contemplated let alone attempted.
What's an example of a concern that you don't think is valid?
That you have to lock down the ability to edit the docs in your project wiki because otherwise anyone would be able to edit the wiki.
That we have to lock down installation of unsigned extensions in Firefox on Linux because spyware/nagware in the form of add-ons that re-install themselves have been observed in the wild (on Windows) and caused problems.
Those sound like proposed solutions, not the underlying concerns. Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
> Those sound like proposed solutions
Yes.
> not the underlying concerns
The stated concern embedded in the first example is "anyone would be able to edit the wiki".
> Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
Right. That's the point. The concern that "anyone would be able to edit the wiki" is not a valid concern. The concern that "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info [if just allow anyone to edit it]" has to be determined through empiricism. Avoiding locking down the wiki and seeing whether it fills up with junk will reveal whether the concern was valid. It's possible that it's an invalid concern and therefore requires no solution.
I don't think this means "most concerns aren't valid", it's more "people aren't always good at vocalizing their underlying concerns, and instead treat a proposed solution as the concern".
Your distinction between stated concerns and underlying concerns is a red herring.
If their underlying concern is "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info because the wiki is open", and if that's empirically shown that opening the wiki doesn't produce a wiki full of inaccurate info, then it's an invalid concern. Neither it (the "underlying concern") nor the stated concern are valid.
There's no need to tack on "because the wiki is open". That's still just part of a solution seeping into the statement of the problem.
You're not engaging with the premise. There is no problem involving a wiki that is full of junk and that locking it down is a way to solve that. The concern is that it would be filled with junk if flipped from closed to open.
Yes! Unfortunately, some people with terrible ideas get elected.
Oh, every day citizens have terrible ideas too. Sometimes even worse. Sometimes our elected officials who "don't get anything done" are serving as necessary filters for those terrible ideas.
It’s more like you should have 5-10 readers. If they all say the same thing they’re right. If half think the pacing is too slow and half think it’s too fast you are probably spot on.
It's more likely that your pacing isn't consistent and is both too fast and too slow.
There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built.
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Bethesda does have sort of a weird hangup on that front, at least since Daggerfall where you could disrobe the characters.
Bethesda has quite a unique approach to everything. Its almost a joke at this point where most of their negative reviews are demanding more content after 300 hours of gameplay. I knew a guy who bought Oblivion at launch and played it for 2 weeks straight before declaring it trash. I would like Bethesda staff in general to get high and make weirder games like they used to, but at the same time, a lot of people are screaming at them to become like every other modern RPG which is not going to improve them at all.
Its clear they could get away with more sex thanks to games like Witcher, but i think they think it would require making more elements of the world fixed and detailed, where they like to spread their attention further to less depth.
Reminds me of all of the Elder Scrolls Online players who use guides to speedrun their way to max level, BIS gear, etc. and then complain that there's nothing to do. My guy/gal, you deliberately skipped the entire game
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
>Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Translation: You have decided to move to cherry picking. Got it.
>Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind.
If the developers cant do what you suggest while being profitable, then it isn't a sustainable path for them to take is it?
>You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff.
No I judged it by the average quality of output of the kitchen staff.
>Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement.
Modders do a lot of stuff. As a category their output is starkly below average.
>Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
No about 100 hours out of those millions are probably worth anything.
>The wide audience argument is the death of art.
No it really isnt. You are presuming "Widest Possible" audience which would be. But I was only talking wider than the audience for any particular mod. Which is roughly a good spot for art and roughly where games have been for decades.
>grey sludge you are currently defending
You just seem so mad now you cant even articulate an argument without using the standard slurs from slop youtube reviews.
>You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint.
You mistake a couple of nuggets for a mountain of gold lmao. Regardless of the shit they lie in.
>You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets.
Some shit you just made up. Yawn.
>Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
And now you seek to gatekeep a discussion you aren't even fit to partake in yourself. Boring. Go and goon in peace.
Maybe pick a more restrictive modding engine or cut out obvious fetish and meme material from evaluation? Even gems of games ala Factorio 1.0 aren't really as good as their peak mods ala Space Exploration. If you limited to larger scale overhaul style mods I think your economic argument starts collapsing quickly
I read about a screen test of The Deer Hunter, in which people said the movie was amazing but the beginning (the hunt, the wedding, etc.) was too long. The producers cut a bunch of scenes and tried again. This time the feedback was, "the movie sucks."
I've found the traditional publishing industry really interesting. It's so hard to get approved or even noticed from the gatekeepers[0]. Even getting a rejection from an agent can take months. And agents are just the very first gate. Being agented can be lightyears away from getting published.
And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.
[0]: used as a neutral term, not a negative one
I have noticed some publishers are changing the way they do things, sliding into writer spaces and looking for books that are nearly ready to be published but havent found their way onto the slush pile, because no human can actually digest a slush pile anymore.
Everyone and their LLM is flooding them with slop every day, it's no wonder it's hard to get any feedback whatsoever.
And even if you do get selected, you may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following.
If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in.
I mean, it was already nearly impossible, but now it's nearly-impossibler (nearlier-impossible?), with the social media following being almost necessary to make it even a very-long-shot instead of a no-you're-definitely-getting-rejected.
The best possible position is to have a breakout self-published hit. An author with that can hand the boring difficult expensive parts - print and distribution - over to a trad publisher, and keep the rights to ebooks, audio books, movies, and the rest, hiring negotiating talent as and when it's needed.
For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.
Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.
It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.
A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.
And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.
This is a great blog post and very sound advice.
I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.
I am not sure how this is "sound advice".
Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".
For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.
And he's clearly not talking about scientific journeys. Glad he didn't ask how HN thought before he posted this :)
Similar holds for literature. Not taking advice in general as a rule is stupid new age shit.
Well, perhaps Orsen Scott Card does not need editors’ advice. But odds are you do.
"Don't try to make a living writing genre fiction for established publishers".
The money in literary fiction is even worse.
You are basically working for exposure until someone puts it on a screen.
Someone should have edited him all the times he was spewing homophobic garbage.
Or when he wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Card_novel), lol.
Vaguely related, there’s been a trend (thanks to submittable making it easy to add charges to submissions), of some publications offering editor feedback for an additional charge.
Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
Feel the could be _some_ survivor bias. It seems plausible that multiple Hugo and Nebula award wining best selling author's may need feedback less then the average writer?
Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
some years ago when I too sent out short stories: For one story, one editor loved the setting and opening scene, but hated the pacing.
The other loved the pacing, hated the opening scene! These were the editors at the top selling magazines at the time.
Needless to say, I didnt follow their advice. After some time, when no editor was found, I self pubbed the story in a collection.
> You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.
Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
Yeah I think the lesson is that specific suggestions for what to do aren't as helpful as just hearing how someone else experienced your work, and then drawing your own conclusions about how to fix that.
Bug reports should describe the problem but often shouldn't try to prescribe a solution.
It's technically correct in that you don't always need it, but it can be useful if offered.
It's only a failure if you give up and stop moving
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How is this relevant to his opinion on writing fiction ?
reading TFA gave me a complicated perspective on OSC, and reading this comment gave me a more complicated persepctive on OSC, so I'm glad I read both, and I'm glad the long battle scenes were left out of both.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don’t like when people use this without all the important context. Showing other quotes from the same person that is giving subjective advice on topics, lends to curiosity around how to filter their advice.
> It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter. > > I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here: > > https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373246
In my opinion, it's relevant to Card's credibility. If he shows poor judgement in one area, why would I want to listen to his opinion on something else, even something which is considered to be in his wheelhouse? Poor judgement is poor judgement.
Everyone shows poor judgement in one area.
It sucks that he has those ideas, but he's a good writer.
He's a popular writer, but hardly good. No one is going to be reading his books in 50 years, let alone 200.
That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.
Oh course it's a high bar! Why should anyone care about this work outside of the time of their release? It's modern culture but it ain't gonna be passed down anytime soon.
If the bar is that people will continue reading their books in 200 years, than which fiction writers of the last few decades would go into your list of "good"?
I don't know because you're asking me something that is impossible for a human that only lives to ~80 years.
Try asking better questions if you want better responses.
Take your best guess, obviously. The question is fine.
You're already confidently predicting a negative future for Ender's Game, so you're clearly not adverse to predictions.
I don't know that you can establish objectively if someone is a good writer. He's an acclaimed, award-winning writer, sure.
The not-so-short story Ender's Game was great. The novel Ender's Game was awful. I hope someone told him it was too long, too repetitive, and too Gary Stu. I wish he had taken that feedback to heart.
The novella is the only version I've read. I came away both not understanding why a longer, novel-length version would exist, and with no interest in reading anything even slightly worse than that from the same author (which I'm given to understand describes most of his other work).
The novella was an alright time, though.
Everyone is very, very wrong about something. By your logic we should ignore everyone about everything.
This but unironically!
it did not make me wish to engage in political or ideological battle, i found it an interesting reflection of a complicated person's thought process. So, any battling is on you (you no doubt have a lot of company: "don't you dare feed us raw meat, we'll jump up and down in our cages and spill the poop buckets")
Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?
I can't believe you wrote your comment on a computer with wouldn't exist without eugenicist shockley's nobel prize winning invention. Shameful!
> Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?
i'll bite: yes. it belies a lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.
Orson Scott Card is one of the best selling sci Fi authors of all time, and has won the hugo and nebula award multiple times, and has been translated into 35+ languages. I think you would be pretty hard pressed to show that his writing isn't compelling to many people.
a lot of that happened before his views were more widely known. much like jk rowling. a lot of people have written both best-selling authors off as bigots; this is just a matter of fact. they may be financially comfortable but their standings have been irreparably harmed by their own statements.
Yes, and that's a completely different point from the one you were making.
Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their
> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.
You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.
we can learn new things about people that change the way we feel about them and the work they produce. nothing is truly static.
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There’s one person I really wish still posted here. He’d light this place up.
Did Orson Scott Card ever post on HN? Does anyone know which username?
Someone you get nuked to hell here for mentioning.
I don’t need advice from Orson Scott Card.