Absurdist wrote:I disagree entirely with strop, the aero thing is very obviously a significant bug, it is not normal to load up a car with 20 wings. The game is not designed with that in mind, or at least I really hope not!
First off, welcome
Absurdist!
Second, please don't consider my addressing this post specifically as antagonistic. I don't wish to argue (I would prefer to discuss!), so I apologise in advance if it seems I've misunderstood your intentions in what you've written. Also, I don't wish to be a total douche who has to have the last say on everything, because that does ruin the community vibe, but there's an itch that I can't bear not to scratch, so I guess I'm going to have to concede to being a douche this time LOL
Also I'm trying to keep myself awake as I switch from day shift to night shift, so I find myself with an unusual amount of time to burn.On a positive note, I've run contests as a forum moderator elsewhere and encountered similar issues which required several iterations to iron out, so I can assure everybody this is really just part of a process and not a symptom that the community isn't awesome or something. There's an important opportunity here to help make the running of contests in future smoother, and prevent many a headache for our hardworking hosts. I'll convey my perspective as thoroughly as possible so as not to drag this out over multiple posts.
I certainly agree that the aero bug is to be considered a bug and that the properties of that bug used was not in line with the intentions of the developers (which they have explicitly confirmed, I look forward to seeing it fixed at a later date). What discomfits me is the persistent misunderstanding that somehow people who use this exploit where there were no rules about it are "cheating" (or have failed at some kind of moral
obligation, hence implied to be cheating). It's important to make the distinction that this is a simulation, which, by virtue of being a virtual environment that emulates, but isn't constrained by real life parameters, can yield scenarios that are uncommon or vary from real life. And it's up to the developers to choose which parameters they simulate, just as ultimately, it's up to the individual user as to which of the existing parameters they choose to be constrained by.
I do think where people get mixed up is in that the very vision of this game is to be as true to life a simulation of being a car building tycoon, which requires the player to consider factors that impact upon the fiscal viability of their decision making. In these situations I well imagine that this would discourage such things as fixing 20 wings to a car. However, the tycoon part of the game hasn't been released yet, and so these forum run contests that we have require us to use sandbox mode, where essentially anything goes unless specified by the user running the contest. In this case, the rule was simply overlooked, but was rectified when it was in fact declared by a user who was using the exploit and thought to check it with
Der Bayer shortly before actually submitting.
On the other issue of bug reporting, I also agree that it is something that should be encouraged to facilitate the improvement of the game. I wouldn't object too strenuously to somebody suggesting that I was "not a good contributor" to the process because I don't report bugs. In the context of a forum contest, I would even entertain the argument that some users being privy to the bug and secretively exploiting it to gain an advantage over others might be considered "unfair" or even "unsportsmanlike", though that would turn into a semantic argument about what "unsportsmanlike" actually means given just how darn competitive you have to be to best an entire field of competitors. But you have to remember that nobody was trying to hide anything from the tournament adjudicator.
All that said, there's some merit in what
Absurdist has said with regards to timely and transparent bug reporting. In retrospect, it would have been better to run the aero bug by
Der Bayer earlier, but that's said with the benefit of hindsight and I think it's reasonable to make a recommendation based on the outcome going forward, as opposed to harping on about what already happened.
Finally, as I said in my previous post, once you gain familiarity with the way the game works you'll realise that the math doesn't lie, and will point out exactly what you did, and if you claim otherwise it'll clearly prove you wrong, unless you've edited the text of the .lua file manually, which also becomes quite easy to figure out. In this way the simulation is actually pretty water tight!
In short:
- One can create a simulation but you can't force people to use it in the way you intended if you didn't code for it (yet)
- You can't hide what you've done with your files, at least, I'm pretty sure of this
- Hiding something from your fellow competitors may be uncharitable, but only trying to hide something from a tournament adjudicator is cheating
- Please don't imply somebody is cheating if they aren't, because that just creates unnecessary friction
- Reporting bugs is good but I think it's a bit harsh to automatically apply the converse and say not reporting bugs is bad
- But in the context of contests, perhaps we should be obliged to report bugs as they are discovered to the tournament adjudicator. After that it's up to the adjudicator to make a decision as to how it relates to the rules and how the rules are to be interpreted
To sum up, in generating that list I was trying to weigh up how the simulation is still in open beta
(EDIT: oops, we're actually into public release phase but what I meant was that the game is still incomplete!), how the contests therefore relate to the simulation, and how best to respect the autonomy of users as well as the authority of a tournament host and thus the integrity of a forum tournament simultaneously. Hopefully this maximises participation and therefore awesomeness
What do you all think?
Tue Apr 29, 2014 7:52 am 
