I agree that it's annoying when people post things such as your two examples mentioned above.
With that said, no one here is under any obligation to share his hard-earned secrets. You (the OP) suggests that if you don't reveal them, you won't get credit. I would counter that if you do reveal them, you probably won't get credit anyway.
But what matters most to me is that I don't want to spend time trying to explain concepts to subpar programmers or designers or LAZY mapmakers. I'm all for open source: my team's project Starcraft Tactics, which has some incredible code, is entirely open source. And I'm all for helping others out: 99% of my 300+ posts can be found in the map development thread trying to help. BUT I have limited time to devote to mapmaking, and I don't care to devote that time to writing tutorials or otherwise writing out explanations of my latest finds. I would rather, as the saying goes, my fellow mapmakers learn to fish on their own than to simply feed them the occasional fish.
But I also wouldn't boast of a particular secret without sharing it. That's not helpful at all and rather childish.
Perhaps trend is too strong a word, but I do see this far too often. People seem to think that not sharing their ideas will benefit them even though I am quite sure sharing benefits them more than not sharing it. It's not like people will play a map just because of a gimmick feature that no other map has. And I think if we don't do something about it then it will just become more common as people adapt this mindset.
I never stated in any of my posts that people had to share or that they have any obligation to share. Which is why I am not for banning or punishing people who don't share in any way, rather I think we should encourage people to share by showing them with reason why sharing is beneficial for them and also why not sharing is rather pointless as it doesn't benefit you in any way.
I also agree that it can be annoying to explain things to beginners sometime, specially when they try to understand advanced topics when they don't even grasp the basics. However this is not really what I intended, if new discoveries is shared with the community I am sure some of the many tutorial makers on this site will take the time to put a tutorial together for the beginners (with whoever discovered it getting credit).
i would agree to sharing alot of the information also , stuff like explaining how to make systems and spells should not be a problem... How ever i do have a problem with open source maps, Heaven forbid you try to make your map popular, then have some random guy say this part is imba, then makes the adjustments , creates a new name, and republishes the map as his own.. So im all for sharing info, Just not for serious maps the user intends to get popular.
I just wanted to throw in that for every hoarder it seems we also an awesome teacher like yourself on these forums and its the people like yourself that keep me coming back to learn more about what's not only possible with the editor but excellent help on how to reproduce it ourselves. Thanks man.
As for the particular examples in the original post, I agree that its pretty dickish to respond to a request for knowledge with a demo of how its possible but no explanation on how and then denying requests for explination because it wasn't your intellectual property to show off in the first place. Leak implies trade secrets, trade secrets are terms used for concepts among competitive groups so I guess that leaves us with the feeling that some people are competing in what the rest of us consider a cooperative environment.
But again, for every hoarder there is a ProzaicMuze and the teachers are what makes this place great.
IMHO I think this issue is old as ideas. If you share an idea, you risk someone else scooping it up and doing it better than you, and with a very large group of amatures (I doubt any of us would call us professionals at GE or GS) you get a lot of that. Everyone wants recognition for what they've done. That's natural. You can tell people to share their ideas, and you can berate them for being selfish (not saying you are) and you can ask them for ideas, but in the end, it's each user's choice.
If you want to encourage people to share more ideas, then the community needs to adopt a more "shout out" kind of attitude (not that there isn't one). In my map, I have a "Special thanks" and thank Blizzard for their work, and then also thank "S3rius of sc2mapster.com for answering all my simply API questions" and had planned on thanking him (and a couple others now) in my release post. And I didn't even get any code from him, just some questions about the development environment and such.
It will mean more dead posts to wade through, but if you want people to be more willing to share, then you have to be willing to make that "I gotta try this, thanks!" post.
I would like to agree for all things except where art is concerned. If I spend 40 hours animating/rigging/etc a model, there's no way I'm going to just give it out or explain how I did it. We have both a Saturday learning event and my own request thread for such things, but I still get pms about getting the rigged Nova even though I haven't shown ANY screens of it yet.
I try to share information of things that our team discovers. However the main problem with our team is that when you are working on a fairly large project and discover something new it can be very time consuming to then write a guide and make a separate map with only that discovery featured. I hate to take tons of time away from the project to write lots of guides on stuff that may or may not be useful for other mappers. That being said most of my issues have been resolved by people releasing guides and tutorials so I do appreciate the time and effort it takes to do this. In any case I believe that as time passes we will see more and more guides once lots more of the very large projects are finished. I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels like they'd rather keep working on their project than spend the time to write a guide until they are finished and have released their work for play.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
@Beider: Go
I agree that it's annoying when people post things such as your two examples mentioned above.
With that said, no one here is under any obligation to share his hard-earned secrets. You (the OP) suggests that if you don't reveal them, you won't get credit. I would counter that if you do reveal them, you probably won't get credit anyway.
But what matters most to me is that I don't want to spend time trying to explain concepts to subpar programmers or designers or LAZY mapmakers. I'm all for open source: my team's project Starcraft Tactics, which has some incredible code, is entirely open source. And I'm all for helping others out: 99% of my 300+ posts can be found in the map development thread trying to help. BUT I have limited time to devote to mapmaking, and I don't care to devote that time to writing tutorials or otherwise writing out explanations of my latest finds. I would rather, as the saying goes, my fellow mapmakers learn to fish on their own than to simply feed them the occasional fish.
But I also wouldn't boast of a particular secret without sharing it. That's not helpful at all and rather childish.
@tigerija: Go
I'm sorry if you feel offended but it was the first example that I could find while making this post. in retrospect perhaps not the best example.
@malu05: Go
Perhaps trend is too strong a word, but I do see this far too often. People seem to think that not sharing their ideas will benefit them even though I am quite sure sharing benefits them more than not sharing it. It's not like people will play a map just because of a gimmick feature that no other map has. And I think if we don't do something about it then it will just become more common as people adapt this mindset.
@jarltheafro: Go @xenrathe: Go
I never stated in any of my posts that people had to share or that they have any obligation to share. Which is why I am not for banning or punishing people who don't share in any way, rather I think we should encourage people to share by showing them with reason why sharing is beneficial for them and also why not sharing is rather pointless as it doesn't benefit you in any way.
I also agree that it can be annoying to explain things to beginners sometime, specially when they try to understand advanced topics when they don't even grasp the basics. However this is not really what I intended, if new discoveries is shared with the community I am sure some of the many tutorial makers on this site will take the time to put a tutorial together for the beginners (with whoever discovered it getting credit).
You're all wrong. We should be hoarding information like a veritable mound of gold.
It's mine. All mine. And I simply refuse to share it. . .
ever. . .
All I can add to this is:
Frodo, just throw the damn ring.
Whatever you do, wholeheartedly, moment by heartfelt moment, becomes a tool for the expression of your very soul.
i would agree to sharing alot of the information also , stuff like explaining how to make systems and spells should not be a problem... How ever i do have a problem with open source maps, Heaven forbid you try to make your map popular, then have some random guy say this part is imba, then makes the adjustments , creates a new name, and republishes the map as his own.. So im all for sharing info, Just not for serious maps the user intends to get popular.
@ProzaicMuze: Go
I just wanted to throw in that for every hoarder it seems we also an awesome teacher like yourself on these forums and its the people like yourself that keep me coming back to learn more about what's not only possible with the editor but excellent help on how to reproduce it ourselves. Thanks man.
As for the particular examples in the original post, I agree that its pretty dickish to respond to a request for knowledge with a demo of how its possible but no explanation on how and then denying requests for explination because it wasn't your intellectual property to show off in the first place. Leak implies trade secrets, trade secrets are terms used for concepts among competitive groups so I guess that leaves us with the feeling that some people are competing in what the rest of us consider a cooperative environment.
But again, for every hoarder there is a ProzaicMuze and the teachers are what makes this place great.
IMHO I think this issue is old as ideas. If you share an idea, you risk someone else scooping it up and doing it better than you, and with a very large group of amatures (I doubt any of us would call us professionals at GE or GS) you get a lot of that. Everyone wants recognition for what they've done. That's natural. You can tell people to share their ideas, and you can berate them for being selfish (not saying you are) and you can ask them for ideas, but in the end, it's each user's choice.
If you want to encourage people to share more ideas, then the community needs to adopt a more "shout out" kind of attitude (not that there isn't one). In my map, I have a "Special thanks" and thank Blizzard for their work, and then also thank "S3rius of sc2mapster.com for answering all my simply API questions" and had planned on thanking him (and a couple others now) in my release post. And I didn't even get any code from him, just some questions about the development environment and such.
It will mean more dead posts to wade through, but if you want people to be more willing to share, then you have to be willing to make that "I gotta try this, thanks!" post.
I would like to agree for all things except where art is concerned. If I spend 40 hours animating/rigging/etc a model, there's no way I'm going to just give it out or explain how I did it. We have both a Saturday learning event and my own request thread for such things, but I still get pms about getting the rigged Nova even though I haven't shown ANY screens of it yet.
I try to share information of things that our team discovers. However the main problem with our team is that when you are working on a fairly large project and discover something new it can be very time consuming to then write a guide and make a separate map with only that discovery featured. I hate to take tons of time away from the project to write lots of guides on stuff that may or may not be useful for other mappers. That being said most of my issues have been resolved by people releasing guides and tutorials so I do appreciate the time and effort it takes to do this. In any case I believe that as time passes we will see more and more guides once lots more of the very large projects are finished. I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels like they'd rather keep working on their project than spend the time to write a guide until they are finished and have released their work for play.