Complaints and Grievances

Marco wrote:
Jelle wrote:Wanna show me where I mentioned anything about being greedy? Or is a straw man argument really the route you wanna take...

Literally all mods are "exposing all intellectual property", I don't know why you wanna pretend it's a big thing Sigma has done the same. Heck, other mods exposing their work is the entire reason Sigma exists to begin with.

You seem like a smart guy, but calling your long-time players for "leeches" makes it sound a lot like you have forgot what modding is about. (It also violates your own forum rules, but I got too thick skin to seriously complain about that).

Kudos for responding. Not so much for the lack of maturity.

I didn't call *you* specifically that, but the group of people you invoked - which love this theory that we "despise", or purposedly try to ruin the SP experience, so we can increase MP popularity for more bucks. I'm not trying to get admiration for "exposing IP", I am just stating reasons why we respect SP, because at the end of the day actions speak louder than words, and we haven't gotten anything out of it (nor expected).

You have provided little substance to your argument other than "uh no plugy yet???" but it hasn't even been a year, sigma took 6 years of development, and developers have their own life/jobs. It's just nerve-racking to see people bring provoking comments and demands, resurrecting threads. You are definetly helping a lot here mate, kudos.

PlugY is a very big deal, it's arguably the biggest QoL-feature to ever be implemented in D2. But I did also mention the horrible drop rates and lack of D2SE. Beyond that there is /players 8, removal of SP trading/discussion and D2MultiRes.

edit: to clarify I don't expect of all that to be supported, but you specifically asked for more stuff than just PlugY. PlugY is by far the most important one, which is why it keeps being bought up.

D2SE simply doesn't work with sigma, and since seltsamuel has been "working on the new version" for almost a decade now, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say we're not ever seeing an update that could potentially make sigma work with it. And since seltsamuel hasn't expressed any intent of open sourcing it, there's no hope for a community driven fix either.

D2MultiRes was a hack, not a QoL mod. Being able to snipe monsters 3 screens away while their AI is not even aware you exist at all, is not a QoL, it was plain cheating. And again, it wasn't compatible with the new game engine.

As far as plugy goes, again, same deal. We didn't intentionally disable it, it's just not compatible with the new engine. As it's already been mentioned way too many times already, bringing back the extended stash is still in our roadmap. People playing online have been doing fine without it for years now, so I'm sure you can do fine without it as well.

The new game engine was a huge project, that replaced and modified a huge part of the original's game engine, it was quite obvious that third party tools that rely on the original engine were gonna break. On the other hand the new engine has increased our possibilities in ways and magnitude you couldn't even imagine, so we pretty much have zero regrets regarding 2-3 old third party mods being broken because of it.

How's this thread still alive?

Exposing of intellectual property is a highly questionable reason, let me elaborate on this statement. The heart of this project D2Sigma.dll is valuable as a whole and not by some of its parts, by now it has size of a solid software library, it consists of more than a thousand (or is that two thousands already?) of various patches, no one in their own mind is going to reverse it entirely, especially considering the constant updates for it. Any existing big project for d2 would barely benefit from some parts of that engine, there is a plenty of talented developers out there, they could work out their own solution and it's highly debatable that finding and reversing this solution from Sigma would be even faster or better. The only big deal there is China and their community, yes they are using your work and they benefit from it but let's be real here, it's hard to launch anything there if you are not chinese by yourself, even the giants like Blizzard and Valve having some troubles there.

On the other hand you haven't mentioned any benefits from allowing the others to play your project on a single player while you definitely got some. How about some fresh blood that SP could constantly provide you. If that was a strictly pvpgn experience, I highly doubt that many of d2 veterans would give it a shot because it's a total conversion mod, it's hard to convince that sort of players unless they have a possibility to test it by themselves in a perfect environment. Not to mention that SP community was a significant part of MXL for its whole existence, if you decided to release Sigma without that part you were risking to fail at launch and there would be no fallback. Everything has its cost, it was your weighted decision and there is no reason to blame anyone else for it.

SwineFlu wrote:Exposing of intellectual property is a highly questionable reason, let me elaborate on this statement. The heart of this project D2Sigma.dll is valuable as a whole and not by some of its parts, by now it has size of a solid software library, it consists of more than a thousand (or is that two thousands already?) of various patches, no one in their own mind is going to reverse it entirely, especially considering the constant updates for it. Any existing big project for d2 would barely benefit from some parts of that engine, there is a plenty of talented developers out there, they could work out their own solution and it's highly debatable that finding and reversing this solution from Sigma would be even faster or better. The only big deal there is China and their community, yes they are using your work and they benefit from it but let's be real here, it's hard to launch anything there if you are not chinese by yourself, even the giants like Blizzard and Valve having some troubles there.

You're missing the point, of course nobody's gonna reverse all of it, but the fact is if we despised SP so much, it wouldn't be exposed at all, and that would

1) prevent the chinese scum from blatantly stealing our work
2) prevent datamining

One good example of datamining is when you basically revealed the whole samael solution only a few days after it was released. suchbalance had invested a lot of time, work and thinking into it, and there it was, a few days after it's release, all datamined. He had hopes of people working their way and figuring out the mechanics slowly, and eventually someone would put the pieces together and beat it, but instead it ended up being a "read datamine thread, gear check, kill".

That in the end, decreases the motivation to develop new content with "secret" mechanisms because we've learned our lesson and know that all of it will be datamined in a matter of days. Again, if we despised sp so much, sp would be gone and these mechanisms wouldn't be exposed to the client.

whist wrote:One good example of datamining is when you basically revealed the whole samael solution only a few days after it was released. suchbalance had invested a lot of time, work and thinking into it, and there it was, a few days after it's release, all datamined. He had hopes of people working their way and figuring out the mechanics slowly, and eventually someone would put the pieces together and beat it, but instead it ended up being a "read datamine thread, gear check, kill".

Sorry to say that but it wasn't me, I had a little to none interest in the mechanics behind this boss fight before it was beaten on TSW. And even then I decided to release this information only because I thought that his design was flawed and anyone without that knowledge didn't stand a chance to beat him legally.

Edit: Reading stat lists from the player or monster units is a piece of cake even on the server, I don't see any problem there. Yeah, you'd need to interpret it but at the end of the day there would be no big difference or any secrets.

Spoiler alert: Darth Vader is Luke's father.

But I guess since you were going to see the movie anyway it doesn't matter