A Plea to the Mods

Hello all,

I've played Median for ~3 years now.
There have been many patches in that time.
Some good, some not so good.

One commonality in every patch is painful installation -- skips normal/nightmare, straight to hell difficulty
I set aside 6 hours every time I re-install MXL. "Install Night", I call it.
Last time, I was going to show my buddy, but *knew* that I wouldn't have it working Night 1.

I'm not a completely computer-illiterate person. I'm a pharmacist, not a developer, but consider:
Most whom I show this AHK (script to message people rather than /m *) to on bnet are utterly bewildered.
You might crack a grin at how amateur this is, but I assure you, it mentally overwhelms people:

; ## Fast MSG - Input
			LAlt::
				InputBox, Username, Fast MSG, Account to MSG (` Key), , 200, 125
			Return
				
		; ## Fast MSG - Output
			`::
				send {enter}
				sleep, 200
				send /m *%UserName%{space}
				sleep, 200
			Return

It should NOT take me 6 hours every SINGLE time I want to play this otherwise wonderful game.
And what about the people who are blown away by ^^ shit script above? What chance do they have? Honestly?
If my girlfriend saw c00005, she'd call me in the room. There would be no effort to resolve the problem, whatsoever.
I have not been impressed by the staff's collective efforts to make the game more available to the lay public.

Now, if Marco/SB/Whilst/Quinirus consistently made sub-par content, I wouldn't bother asking. You can't get blood out of a turnip.
But if you all can take a 17 year old game and be a Mod of the Year contender,
I have to believe you can facilitate install further than present!
And, frankly, I'm not even going to get into PlugY/D2SE. The new core will be worth losing it.

Again, this is coming from a guy who's played the game 3 years, hopefully another 3!
It's a damned good mod, installation (c000005, C++ Redist. Error, Service Pack 3 compat, Run as Admin,1.14 vs 1.13, D2SE/PlugY) issues are worth it.

As they say in sports, the best ability -- is availability.

P.S.: Do NOT respond with "system specs pls", "what was the issue", no no no that's not the point.
The point is that it should not matter. You download Quinirus' launcher --> hit install --> its ready to play
Or, you go through the manual channel (ModDB DL), same deal. 20 minute delivery

Whilst / Quinirus

that spelling :lol:

Now to answer, we're actually working on it. Thing is, the original game itself can hardly run without issues, at least on newer operating systems. The Sigma project along with the creation of the launcher are steps toward a simple and straight forward installation process.

The sigma project, among many other thing, aims on getting rid of outdated code that cause issues on newer operating systems. The launcher on the other hand, aims to simplify everything related to installation, dependencies, version management, OS settings, etc.

Things are far from perfect right now for sure, but this here:

I have not been impressed by the staff's collective efforts to make the game more available to the lay public.

That's definitely not true and not really called for. You might want to take another look at things here.

Some people install from their old CD, some from blizzard's online installer, and both solutions install the game in a different way.
Some use D2SE, some use Plugy, Some use X, some use Y, they're third party tools, and somehow we need to support all of them or we get yelled at.
The game works slightly differently depending on which language your game dist is.
We have players using operating systems ranging from Windows XP to Windows 10, not to mention some rogue linux users, a few Mac OSX users. And again we somehow need to support all of them, otherwise we get yelled at.
The mod is aimed at a legacy D2 version, and Blizzard really doesn't make it that easy to revert to previous versions.
The original game supports a bunch of different renderering modes (glide/d3d/ddraw/etc) and we have to support all of them, even if a few of them really aren't working well on newer operating systems

I could go on really. Short story is, there's a bunch of factors that makes this really hard to make it simple and straight forward. This is a work in progress, but you have to understand it's far from being easy and it will take quite a bit of time to get it right.

Whist,

Why'd I throw an 'L' in there?
You have deserved no 'L', only 'W's.

I suppose my only reason for writing this thread was to stress the end users' frustration.
Really hoping that it has not escaped the mods' attention that the least flashy thing about an MXL -- installation -- is tough.
Not Marco's thematic direction (Kehjistan, Western Kingdom, Wastelands), not SB's itemization (overhauled loot in Sigma), ...

That stuff *will* progress. For example, last patches Torajan Jungle was a disaster. This patch, it's being fixed.
You have my utmost confidence that the content, given time, will be great.

Sometimes I feel that the rate limiting step for the community is being ignored.
I wish I were confident that I can get current patch / Sigma working.
I would love nothing more than to see this all as a thing of the past.
You are probably tired of this sub-forum, yourselves

whist wrote:
Some use D2SE, some use Plugy, Some use X, some use Y, they're third party tools, and somehow we need to support all of them or we get yelled at.

I hope d2se and plugy are made incompatible sooner than later. The amount of time spent trying to troubleshoot issues for people every season is too damn high. Only the devs know how much time they spend making sure 3rd party stuff remains compatible. Single player now has everything that mp does so its about time players to learn to mule the regular way. I can see value of d2se and being able to avoid patch/realm swapping but the laucher now reverts to bnet gateway on uninstall. With that huge improvement, people should be able to navigate to other mods.

I have two level 120s in sp. Its not a burden having to mule items that are worth keeping.

Fumbles wrote:I hope d2se and plugy are made incompatible sooner than later.

They are as soon as MXL is released. They both simply do not work with MXLS, and there's not much I can do about it. And as soon as MXLS is out, we're done supporting third party tools tbh. We'll eventually implement multi-page stash, both on SP and MP though.

Single player now has everything that mp does so its about time players to learn to mule the regular way.

Irony here is, players will complain there are too many useless items. You'll read stuff like 99% of uniques are complete trash and not worth keeping. Yet they'll manage to hoard 600 pages of items. They'll never ever use like 98% of it, but hey, it's a must have feature.

As to your views on separation from 3rd parties:
"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept." ~ Architect, Matrix Reloaded
If you implement multi-page, it'll be okay. A couple pages is good enough. 1 gets tight.

Do your thing and overhaul older, incompatible D2 code for Sigma.
If it gets the rigor of install from an 8/10 --> 5/10, I'll call Sigma a game-changer.
Since you posted that, I'm actually as excited about that as all but one other improvement:
I think SuchBalance is going to deliver us a masterpiece with the new items.

Whist, dunno if this falls under your responsibilities, but you make it easier and you'll be a damned hero.
Okay, I've stated all that I aimed to in this thread.

Thank you

Trust me, I know the install and other problems players have, because I daily deal with multiple issues on the Discord #tech-support channel and various DMs, and forum threads/PMs. :mrgreen:

To add to what whist said, some of the errors are hard to fix because me or whist can't reproduce them on our computers, and there's only a few users getting them. If I can't directly test an error on my computer, it's a LOT harder to track it down and fix it.

Just yesterday I found out what causes one of the errors, since I didn't get it on my computer and it doesn't come up that often, so it was really hard to find and figure it out. I will soon add a fix for it in the Launcher, and we'll have one less error to deal with.

You also have to keep in mind that this is not our job. We have to work and lead our lives, and do tons of Median stuff when we have time. We also don't have the game's source code, so fixing and modifying various things is really hard/time consuming, and only whist can do it, while me/Marco/SB/Aahz can only try finding workarounds if possible.

I'm trying to figure out if this is a troll thread, and if people bit on it hard.

whist wrote:
Fumbles wrote:We'll eventually implement multi-page stash, both on SP and MP though.

Best news I've read. Ever. About MXLS. This is hands down the feature I am appreciating the most. Not to make the other features look any less, but the amounts of items that are available in MXL/S are so large, it would only be logical to have moar stash.

Man I can't wait for Sigma. And I won't play again until it launches.. My life is more important now than a game but I'll be reading up every week. Love the work you guys are doing and actually the criqitue you're getting isn't fair.

Fumbles wrote:I hope d2se and plugy are made incompatible sooner than later. The amount of time spent trying to troubleshoot issues for people every season is too damn high. Only the devs know how much time they spend making sure 3rd party stuff remains compatible. Single player now has everything that mp does so its about time players to learn to mule the regular way. I can see value of d2se and being able to avoid patch/realm swapping but the laucher now reverts to bnet gateway on uninstall. With that huge improvement, people should be able to navigate to other mods.

I have two level 120s in sp. Its not a burden having to mule items that are worth keeping.

I have 31 different mods installed (not bragging, just facts) and run them via D2SE. How you advise to make them all available with no D2SE ? 30 additional copies of the game installed ? No thanks. As for pluggy in SP - best tool ever for people with OCD/hoarding/collection completion issues. No doubt about it. Median sets alone would fill like 3 mules.