Well i thought PI was pretty damn good, but im pretty laid back and easy to satisfy when it comes to campaigns.
Some of you guys are really vicious in your criticism though , i know if i went and put weeks and months of effort into a campaign only for it to be verbally butchered by a disgruntled few in the community, id be pretty thrown back. Perhaps some of you should take into consideration the amount of time and effort put into campaigns, and whether or not you could do a better job of it yourself before you unleash such harsh criticism.
Disgruntled few? Dude, people are free to like and not like what they please. Personally, even if I dislike a campaign as a whole I've usually had fun at some point during the course of the missions. Transcend for example was the most repetitive campaign I ever played, after a certain point I lost all enjoyment as one identical mission followed another. But the video at the end was cool. And I enjoyed the first 10-12 missions. And I appreciated the FREDding work that went into it. But SUPER repetitive.
Your comments remind me of the some of the deviantArt fanboys. People post artwork, ask for critiques and everyone says "oh wow, that's great!" "Fabulous! You roxxors!" "Wow your drawing is amazing" then someone like me comes along and says "Yeah, I like it overall, like this detail here and yadda yadda. But your perspective in this area is kinda wonky, and you could have a cleaner line, but overall not bad" then oh wow, negative criticism. Soon you have people jumping all over you "the perspective is fine! shut up, you suck" "I'd like to see you do better" or "I visited your deviantpage, your gallery is a bunch of garbage" and so on.
People don't learn anything when they get it right. If someone makes a campaign and everyone says "wow, that was great" x50 then what does the author know? : that some people enjoyed it. But maybe his campaign has a few flaws, and maybe some of those flaws were so bad that people quit playing his campaign out of frustration but they didnt say anything. So then he goes and makes another campaign, but because he thinks his first campaign was hot **** he makes exactly the same mistakes. Basically, he doesn't improve.
Everyone who is a modder is an artist. FREDders are story tellers, modellers and textures are visual artists, etcetera. Without criticism, these people will never grow as an artist. Without criticism, the quality of community campaigns wouldn't be where it was today. Because at some point, someone had to have played a campaign and said "that wasn't good enough, I can do better" and then they do. And then the next person in line thinks the same thing, and so on, and so forth.
In a perfect world quite honestly, every post to a campaign release should criticize some aspect of it that the player didn't like. There's nothing wrong about ripping into a campaign, but there are good ways and bad ways to do it. People with any sense of tact should realise that the best way to criticize something is to bundle it with a compliment. Authors need to know what they did well as much as they did poorly. Comments like "I love your campaign, it's the best evah!" is always nice to hear, but in a constructive sense those sorts of comments have absolutely no value whatsoever. Except perhaps, some boost in morale and motivation for the author to produce more.
And I don't know if your comment was in part sparked by my post about Procyon Insurgency. But I'll tell you one thing, I might have just stated the biggest thing I didn't like about the campaign, but at the end of the day, there's one vote for PI in this poll. And it's MY vote.
Oh, and btw the way. The biggest disappointment a MODder can ever face is not negative criticism. It's lack of any feedback at all. Negative criticism can either turn someone away from his goal, or force him to improve. No feedback essentially means that no one cares, he's not going to create something else if no one even bothered with his stuff the first time around. On another website I frequent, the administrator frequently complains of lack of comments. He and others have poured hundreds of hours into a couple mods, have seen 200+ people download their mod and at the end of the day no one says a damn thing. Appeals for comments, of any kind, go unanswered and the guy is thinking of closing the website all together.
Poll
