This is very upsetting as is the elitest dev banter in the Feb 2nd update notes. Being able to dismiss SDG out of hand for being…annoying should never have happened and it shows a great disrespect to Artists. There is a dysfunction in the gaming industry where artists are the first to be laid off and treated like disposable employees and I see that here. Artists are “developers”. Writers are “developers”. Gameplay testers are “developers”. Youtubers/podcasters are “developers”. They all contribute along with the code monkeys that write the game. SDG’s contribution to the health and long term viability of CDDA this year seems far greater than anyone else’s and its simply wrong that he can be discarded so easily.
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Go read the last post on SDG’S tileset.
Scroll up about 8 posts from yours & read Kevin’s post. He (SDG), quite literally asked for it.
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If literally anyone had acted like he did the result would have been the same, the fact that his contributions were in the area of tilesets instead of elsewhere is irrelevant.
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A person’s work and their behavior shouldn’t be linked, in my opinion.
SDG’s contributions shouldn’t provide him any immunity to repercussions due to his poor social ability. Likewise, that bad attitude shouldn’t deter anyone from wanting to use that tileset if they like it.
I feel like a positive environment is much more important than a handful of “star contributors”. Everyone in the community has the ability to contribute if they want to, and a good work environment massively facilitates that. I would not have wanted to contribute to this project myself if the community looked as if everyone was at each other’s throats.
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Its not clear to me what happened but it sounded like the LEAD artist who is clearly not a businessman or churchlady was provoked by a bunch of discord moderators. A good leader knows not to trashcan a valuable and productive relationship over petty forum behavior. Good leadership would be turning it to a teachable moment and building a relationship with the person because his contribution is more important than being right and wielding authority over someone else. Did banning him result is some sort of positive rather than finding some other less destructive way to resolve this? I see a huge loss to the game so a bunch of bullies could feel powerful and in control. And tilesets are huge for the future of the game where all the people comfortable with ASCII are being put in nursing homes. Growing the audience is way more important than new content in an already content rich game and that guy was doing a great job of it.
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No, it seems like he was playing irritating music on discord, was told to stop, argued with the mods, theN called everyone fags.
You are suffering under a large number of misapprehensions here.
- SDG was not the lead artist on the project, in fact he wasn’t a member of the project at all. He was (and as of the last I heard still is) distributing a tileset independently of the main game.
- He was not “provoked” by moderators, he was told to stop doing something (spamming youtube links) that he has previously been informed was not ok, and started ranting at the moderators, then left.
- You can’t have a “teachable moment” with someone who starts hurling abuse at you if you say anything they disagree with. Leadership isn’t worth a thing if the person isn’t interested in being led. What “teachable moment” do you expect to come out of [32x32] MSX DEAD PEOPLE Tileset ?
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Shitty behaviour and link spamming aside, his tileset was great…hope he continues working on it
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- That tile set is a major component to the game as it is played today. As I said it doesnt sound like the guy was getting the respect he deserved in propotion to his obvious contribution. Not invited to the kool table or having a sword waved over him by the queen doesnt change the reality of what should have been.
- Gimme a break. These links effected like what 3 people who couldn’t bother to look at a different topic? Who cares? Having a productive artist is more important than having a discord forum entirely. This wasnt some random jerk spamming this was a major contributor having a moment. What do major sports franchises do when a star player goes on a bender? Fire them? No they cover it up and look akwardly the other way.
- I see someone clearly hurting and prob very young. Compassion would suggest you handhold the person or at least deflect them until you can get answers as to why they were having moment. We arnt talking about a random stranger but a regularly productive member of this community. Do you not care at all about this person’s well being?
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Cataclysm: Dark Daycare Ahead.
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- He was invited, but he made the decision to not join the project. I’m not clear what respect he was supposed to be getting that wasn’t happening, he had just as much opportunity to garner respect as anyone.
- Again, people don’t get a pass on bad behavior based on contributions. Not allowing spamming is a basic rule of any forum that wants to continue operating.
- We did handhold him, he got multiple chances to correct his behavior just like anyone else. As for his personal wellbeing, I’m not really qualified to handle that, if you are feel free to contact him and help out.
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Hahaha knew this would happen, my joke even preempted it. Lets find a way to blame the devs despite the fact that the evidence for why he was banned IS LITERALLY A FEW POSTS BELOW THIS ONE ON THIS FORUM.
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Wait, SDP? Is that you?
Now granted, this is unpaid work volunteered for the betterment of a game, but let me propose a scenario:
Say you were a small business owner and had a group of employees working for you. Now when you hired them, surely you had rules of conduct while on the clock that you laid out for them and expected them to follow. Everyone seemed to get along by and large, managed to keep the peace and follow the rules while they performed their given tasks, except for one person. This person blared music when/where it was not appropriate, verbally abused your other staff and perhaps you yourself and wouldn’t take any critiques of their work. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to speak to this employee about their conduct, they blow up and storm off. What do you do?
Do you take into account they were one of your better salespeople and give them yet another pass? How does the rest of your staff not perceive that as favoritism and begin to get resentful? Maybe they see it as a sign they don’t have to follow the rules either? How does any of that advance your company’s goals?
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CDDA isnt a “small business” owned by one person. Its a community project that has now lost value and momentum because no one wants to play in Ascii. I prefer my example of the sports team with trouble stars or perhaps a military base with a bar outside. If your soldiers are getting drunk and catching the clap from going to the bar you shut down the bar you dont shoot the soldiers. The soldiers are necessary for the reason the base exists while the bar is tertiary and irrelevant. Shut the damn discord down completely if its a trap. The discord doesnt matter - the game matters. The game is why were are here and SDG’s contribution to the game was 1000000 times more valuable and relevant than a tiny # of discord lurkers feeling annoyed or a moderators need to ban someone. Also when the dramatic types say “I’m leave you” or in this case “ban me” its usually an invitation to remind them how valued they are not slam the door in their face…havnt you seen any old movies?
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Everything you said there is hilarious.
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First of all, I have no idea why you attribute such a godlike status to SDG. Dozens of people have worked very hard on making tilesets recently, including several contributors to retrodays (which has no stolen art!) and even more to Ultica (which has no stolen art!) - and these are community driven projects, which allow other people to contribute and add. SDG refused to let anyone else work on Undead People. That’s his choice I suppose, but it’s certainly not in the spirit of our project. He was not part of our project. Nevertheless this absurd celebrity status you’re applying to him because he happened to be the person most recently working on the tilesets with the longest history and therefore most tiles is just that: absurd. It’s also extremely rude to those of us that have offered hundreds of hours of pixel art time in the last while trying to prepare for just such a possibility, since undeadpeople was never well suited to this project due to copyright issues, and this isn’t the first time SDG has packed up his toys and left.
More directly to the point, no. A community driven project must not treat one person as above the rules. I can think of no surer death. Even if SDG actually was the only person doing art for the project, or our most important contributor (both of which are absolute parody level comments, let me say that again), treating him like that made him above the rules everyone else who contributes must follow would be the most fucking stupid thing we could possibly do.
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But in this case the moderators are actually the ones making the game …
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The ones making the game arent important.
We can do without them.
The only thing thats important is to coddle one artist and bend the rules for them.
Remove the devs, remove the dev discord, remove the github,and just make sprites.
The sprites dont need a game, the sprites are the important thing, wont anybody think of the sprites?
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