I'm faintly amazed at the level of childishness on display in this thread. Do you guys simply enjoy complaining for the sake of complaining? I thought I could put a stop to it by laying the smackdown on blowfish; I now apologize for singling him out, as it clearly did little to establish precedent for everybody else.
Now look. You need to realize that letting projects run wild with no focus, no direction, no strategy, and no definition of success is very bad management practice. (Go look at the Iraq War for a real-life illustration.) What we're trying to do here is
harness the creative efforts of members and channel them into productive projects. Not throw them away on vague albatrosses that will cause burnouts five years down the road. If the project is destined to die or fade away anyway, then it's better to save those five years and use them on something more profitable. (Look up
pruning for another real-life illustration.)
Now that that's out of the way, let me address the mosquito posts with a well-dispersed shotgun blast:
1) We are not going to remove projects from the Hosted list simply because they're old. They're still hosted, aren't they? Have some respect for your elders -- both the campaigns and the people.
2) Releasing campaigns in chapters, while a good solution in theory, adds too much risk in my opinion. It's far too easy for somebody to disguise an albatross as a chapter'ed campaign, and then we end up with the very same problems we had before.
Sequels, however, don't fall under this category.
3) The reason I posted the policy is because I found it in the admin forum and realized it had never been announced. And the reason it was in the admin forum is because it was composed after we hosted Procyon Insurgency and Halo for FreeSpace, and we figured we should have something official written down.
4) I don't think cinematic missions should count toward the 20. We wouldn't count cutscenes, after all.
5) For those not familiar with the short campaigns I listed, I highly recommend you go check them out, as they're well worth playing. That's not an exhaustive list, either... there are a bunch more short campaigns I didn't list.
6) If you don't like the hosting policy, there's nothing forcing you to host it here. Go apply at Game-Warden or SectorGame.
7) It's worth keeping in mind exactly what
hosting means. It means you have a website and, optionally, a development forum. So obviously, if you want presence on the web then we would really like you to know how to design a website. We aren't going to do it for you.
8) As a corollary to #7, if all you want to do is post a campaign and you don't need or want a website or forum, then you don't need "hosting" and this policy doesn't apply to you. Just go ahead and release your project in the Missions and Campaigns forum. (Most of the short campaigns I listed were released this way.)
9) I'm going to clarify that this policy only applies to campaigns
in development. If you came along with a finished campaign, most of the rules wouldn't apply to you and the rest wouldn't make sense. If we denied your hosting application, it would be for an unrelated reason like lack of space or bandwidth, neither of which look like they'd be a problem for the foreseeable future.
10) I actually do think projects are held up by a lack of FREDders, for the simple reason that FREDders are in short supply on HLP. Look at the frequency of posts in General FreeSpace (plot, writing, and commentary) and FreeSpace Modding (models) compared FRED Discussion. Also, note that, by definition, mission design is the one and only prerequisite to a campaign release. Everything else, from cutscenes to new mods to new graphical effects, is just polish.
11) If completing a 20+ mission campaign is easier now than ever before, where are all the 20+ mission campaigns? We have plenty of examples of HTL models, rendered cutscenes, bumpmapped textures, and other such excellence in many other areas of expertise.
12) Agreed regarding the fact that people try to be too epic for their own good. However, I still think number of missions is a good metric, as the scope of the project seems to scale linearly with the size of the campaign.
13) Nearly all the campaigns here fall into one or more of several well-trodden categories. Terrans fight against Terrans; Terrans fight against Vasudans. Vasudans fight against Terrans; Vasudans fight against Vasudans. Terrans and Vasudans fight against Shivans, either together or separately, and sometimes in parallel with one of the first four. Some faction discovers a technology or secret that they shouldn't have, or that somebody else wants. A charismatic leader is causing trouble and must be captured/defended. Etc. To pick on CP5670, Procyon Insurgency was basically Silent Threat with cooler missions and with plot elements swapped around.
14) Less posting, more development would be beneficial for us all.
Okay, so this was a long post, and I don't want my bullet points to take away from the first two paragraphs. Let me close with two good quotes that are applicable here:
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. (Einstein)
A designer knows he has achieved perfections not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away (Saint-Exupery)