What happened to the love for nerds?

@Sarah said:

It's difficult to tell exactly what your point is so please correct me if I'm wrong but your basic premise seems to be "who cares?" and I'm not sure how to explain why a seasonal leaderboard might be important to people. Shteev did a good job explaining why competition is important to him on a youtube video recently--perhaps that might be easier for you to digest? A lot of people seem to care very much about not only their own scores but how their scores compare to the scores of others and how the scores change from week to week.

I think you've elided my point entirely, although I do have to give credit that you're acknowledging the seasonal leaderboard proposal is a purely optional sidequest for a small subset of the player base. (And I'm not going to engage in semantics of what "small subset" means if you're not going to provide a frame of what "a lot of people seem" means.) My point, as I was pretty detailed about, was the timing and framing of the complaint against Webcore "refusing" to help. There are plenty of things that have been worthy of criticism since their takeover, and much of that criticism I agree with, but this particular case is far afield from that.

@Sarah said:

...a handful of people have attempted to keep the wiki up-to-date but we've lost a lot of long term players over the years and haven't brought in enough new players to replace them. I don't think this problem is isolated to the wiki team, it seems more of a game-wide trend.

@Larz70 said:

I suspect that Sarah made this post because she is feeling a little abandoned since I was gone for months with player scores no longer getting updated and the card bot going down with nobody there to start it back up.

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This is getting to the core of the issue, I think. When Oktagon (not Webcore!) stopped providing the resources directly, the player base was larger. As that player base has shrank, it affected not just the number of people contributing to these community resources, but also the number of people interested in consuming these resources. So it's confusing why this complaint is being laid at the feet of a different developer when the pool of people finding benefit five years later is smaller than when it was previously available. If there isn't enough interest that can be rallied to help maintain a public wiki now, what priority should be given to develop optional tools for an even smaller audience? And again to the question that was never actually answered, why excoriate Webcore for it, when they had nothing to do with the original decision to remove them?

Separately, Larz, I have very much appreciated the dedication you've shown and do find your resources engaging. I understand the desire to have links to your webpage included in-app, but I cannot imagine how linking to user-owned websites/structures would be adopted from Webcore's side. You're right that only links to YouTube have been included, but that seems more like a security policy concern than any judgment on the content itself. I cannot recall any links that were not to (a) a website controlled by 505/D3Go/Oktagon/Webcore, or (b) YouTube/Facebook, where content is housed in a standardized framework. While I am speculating, it seems consistent with their general communication policy as aversion to outside structures, such as not hosting a Discord. If there are recent examples that contradict this, I certainly will stand corrected.

@Sarah please don't motte-and-bailey this. Your original post cast aspersions that Webcore was "refusing" to do something that Oktagon stopped doing five years ago, and demanded a response (by tagging IceIX of all people?!). It was not sent to the Q&A to get Webcore's direct response, it was posted here as a grandstanding, accusatory call-out. You haven't offered a constructive "here's my proposal" approach, and while demanding Webcore take on extra out-of-game responsibilities for things that don't have widespread support, you're explicitly dodging the questions of "how should this be prioritized?" and "why now?". Plus, you've now made several gratuitous, irrelevant cracks in this thread at "making Youtube videos" that have nothing to do with the argument of Webcore prioritizing developing technical tools.

If you're still not getting it after all these posts, let me make my point crystal clear: you're making arguments that are inane and read like you have a personal beef with Webcore because you're not a YouTuber. Not everything is related to their communication strategy, and they certainly don't owe you, me or anyone else here justification on development plans that they have nothing to do with and have never promised.

I don't see where I've ever called you inconsistent, @Sarah. I have questioned "why now?" in light of bringing this to the forums and tagging someone who hasn't posted here in years. If anything, I believe your consistency has led you to over-apply one train of logic into questions where that logic is irrelevant. That was my motivation, to bring specific facts to a complaint lacking them, and avoid a misleading framing of the issue.

I'll certainly acknowledge being incorrect on one part, my assertion that you have not previously submitted to the Q&A. Clearly if the devs did not want to respond, they would not actively post the question and say "no comment", it would just get no response.

However, if the last known comment was that something was being discontinued, and repeated questions about reinstatement went unanswered, isn't that your answer? If you're confident in your inference about me over five posts that I'm "over-emotional", shouldn't your inference on five years of non-response be that these things aren't coming back? If I may analogize, if my favorite TV show was actively announced as canceled five years ago, and I email the network repeatedly about it and get no response, and the active fanbase engaged with that show has been declining the whole time, would you presume that the appropriate next step be to publicly accuse the network of "refusing" to bring back the TV show?

(As an aside, if the charge is that I'm over-emotional and unhinged because I'm persistent about clarifying a timeline and facts for a specific claim about this game, it works both ways. Your own prior posts include instances where you link to further detail in the forums to challenge someone else's point, then continued engaging with the person to press for an answer. Bonus points that you yourself requested that "if you have specific data that points to a premise being wrong then please do share it!", which is what I did here in laying out the full context and timeline.)

You've mentioned time and again that the devs don't communicate with you or respond to your ideas ("poop on their shoe" and all that). Nothing is stopping you from explaining your perspective in public here and now. As a dev, how would you prioritize out-of-game requests like these with in-game experience (including QoL), and what standard would you apply to what out-of-game-requests are significant enough? Does the shrinking player base factor into this prioritization?

All of that said, this back-and-forth has grown quite tedious. Again, I recognize your extreme consistency, especially that your view of what is beneficial to the game/player base is unlikely to change from a detailed post on the internet. I'll cede this to a fundamental disagreement on what we're owed from the devs, and go back to playing the game I've enjoyed for several years now.