Modding Discussion Avali 1.0 Reboot Discussion

There are quite some nice features thanks to new mods and libraries, that obviously expand starbound greatly. Of course, coding isn't easy, but I'd love to see him feeling ok with his creation again. [And I know exaaactly the level of bad community you are referring to.]

That said, whoever is from Very Definitely And Totally Official Avali Nexus Fangroup Which Is Still Definitely Focused On The Avali™ and wants to help, totally should give feedback.

 

To be fair, the same thing has happened before with sergals, and there's entire wikis based around the drama on that alone.
Same sort of thing also seems to be happening with these Protogens/Primagens as well, as well as yinglets, I guess its just part of the furry community that this stuff constantly happens.
At least it was nice while it lasted.

 

I'd love to see this mod happen, but it doesn't look like there's much chance, is there? Ryuujin, if you're reading this, just know that we all would love to see those fluffy space raptors come to life.

Or something like that.

 

I'm actually curious what you're talking about when you refer to the fanbase being rabid or misrepresenting the avali. Sure, I've seen examples of it, but in the case of the fanbase quality, it's really no worse than your average furry race fandom. There are some bad apples (and I've met a few of them firsthand, like Tara/Oceana/Pixelburst if you've ever heard of her), so it's not really reasonable to say I'm not privy to that side of the community. But, unlike people seem to portray it, that's a vast minority of the fandom; most avali fans are your average people just there to enjoy something the way they want to and mind their own business. What's so bad about that? And this segues into the representation of avali: I think it's pretty contradictory for Ryuu to be steering away from them when he created the race partly to be a creative outlet. Yet when people use it like that and don't get all the canon trappings right, that's somehow a turn-off now? It seems pretty snobbish to me.

What I've noticed as participant of the avali fandom for well over 2 years is that there's a disconnect between most of the community and those that are well-versed in and actually care about the avali lore, canon, you name it. Most people are quite "meh" about the canon, and rightfully so, because it's a pretty vague, incomplete, and somehow still restricting bunch of lore. No wonder most people ignore it and use the avali however they want; I mean, that's literally actually accounted for in the canon through the independent colonies. So you can't possibly blame people for doing that. The former group tends to see the latter group as very snobbish and elitist, and the likes of Shady and Charles on Discord don't help to prevent that viewpoint from spreading.

Reading over your post again, the "those of us who actually care about the Avali" part irked me because of how haughty it sounds to me, so I felt I just had to say my piece.

 

Just gonna point out that this constant bickering and necro-posting to old posts really doesn't make things look good for the wider community.
Also, check Ryuu's FA sometime, the autistic and horrid parts of the fandom absolutely scared him off of anything to do with Avali anymore.
A shame but its better then him selling out to the worst parts of the fandom I suppose.
Also just going to point out that the community on the fandom wiki (not to be confused with Avali Nexus Fangroup, that's a different site and community altogether) are a bunch of imbeciles that appear to think that the starbound mod is not only what the avali lore is, but is the ONLY canon.
These people are just too stupid to reason with. And this sort of thing happens with any community that gets too big, as I've pointed out last month, pic related.
Call it snobbish and elitist if you want but once you've seen this happen with enough things you love you'll understand the sentiment entirely.

 

In response to your first statement, people are already leaving the community due to lack of activity/updates, so I don't really care even if that is the case. And also (more relevantly) these forums are barely frequented by anybody anymore.

Yeah, I just visited Ryuujin's profile for the second time today. Attached are screenies of what I'm seeing, and I'm pretty sure it shouldn't appear differently for anyone else browsing his page. Simply put, what's the problem here? Yeah, the shouts are a bit cringey in wording and spamminess perhaps (particularly the one guy that shouted five times in a row, screw shout etiquette I guess) but I completely fail to see how any of that is autistic or horrid. That's some pretty strong language for pretty benine actions.

Selling out to the worst parts of the fandom? Why would he ever have to do that? When we say worst part of the fandom, we're talking people like Tara here. They usually leave the fandom anyway after their efforts fall flat (thanks in large part to the inevitable drama). This is an either-or fallacy; he doesn't have to avoid the avali community altogether in order to avoid standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the bad apples.

I'm not going to respond to the fandom wiki statement specifically, since I don't frequent the wiki comments enough. I'm focused on the actual wiki content. Seems like some pretty good (if not entirely canon-accurate) stories are on there though, including one I wrote that's maybe not-so-good (and I try to stay closer to the canon while taking artistic liberties in my roleplay). And I will say that you can't really fault people for just plain being oblivious to the canon. The wiki is the most readily-available source people have for that, and they will be completely blind and speculative on anything it doesn't touch, which is a lot since they downsized the wiki a bit. Most avali fans don't even know about Ryuu's lore dump because it's not advertised at all, and there's just some parts of the canon that literally aren't written down period (like the fact that avali have pawpads... yeah, that's canon last I checked). It's pretty poorly-documented, actually, at least for the average Internet goer. So for you to call them imbeciles is pretty judgmental.

It's funny you link that picture for two reasons. First, I'm about as hipster as hipster comes, so it's painfully obvious to me how a fanbase can "deteriorate" in complexity/quality (though I do think you don't necessarily need to get bad apples for that to occur, so to me it's pretty naive of it to assume so). And as one, I can say in the grand scheme of things the avali are still quite niche and obscure. They're perhaps the most popular Starbound race, yes, but they haven't reached sergal/protogen/dutch angel dragon status yet. And that's just comparing them to other fanmade races, not even accounting the rest of the furry community which makes even those races look like minorities.

Second, Ryuujin has shown that casualizing/audience broadening isn't always a deterrent for him. He's an Undertale fan judging from the art he's done, and look how much that fanbase has exploded with popularity (and toxicity). I'm in the same boat; I prefer obscure series to avoid the crowd and cringe, but I'm a big fan of Star Wars, Undertale, and Final Fantasy VII, all of which are very popular and pretty mainstream. Ultimately, mainstream vs. obscure is a dichotomy that is all relative, and as a hipster I'm forced to keep that in mind when pondering why I may be shying away from some franchise or series. Took me this long to pick up Warframe proper because I was scared it was too mainstream and toxic, which was a rather irrational fear; funny thing, there's Mr. RyuujinZERO having played it at least 2 years prior to me (check his YouTube channel, if you're lucky enough to find it ).

This all leaves that image in a very situational position; it's possible for that train of events to occur, but I doubt that is exactly how most media gets blown wide open to the casuls (for example, if the obscure hobby happened to be dominated by female participants). Things often end up occurring in a more complex manner than that, and I believe such is the case with the avali community.

TL;DR, it seems to me a lot of the more staunch long-time avali fans, or "canoneers" as I like to call them, are overblowing the community's issues to justify keeping to their own little circles. The Nexus appears to be one such circle that's gotten so desperate to distance itself that it's gone completely off-topic (to the point where they petitioned to have the "Avali" removed in "Avali Nexus"). It almost seems like you are trying to push other people away so you can hog the race for yourselves and feel more special a la hipster supreme, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that conspiratorial asspull of mine's not the reasoning for this.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention this, but notice how in the images, his latest favorites (most of which are avali) are actually more recent than his most recent submissions. Seems to suggest that he is still following the community at least in the art department.

 

3.5: The Paid Modding Debacle of 2015 also left a sour taste in his mouth.

 

Context, please?

 

Man that whole thing is still absurd.
And to think, there are people that actually defend that sort of thing. Gaben needs to stop being such a fat tub of lard and pay modders if he wants to "curate" that sort of thing, not try to shill people paying valve even more money for stuff that used to be free, and more importantly a community effort.
Its like bethesda and unofficial patches. Bug test the game, don't force the community to fix broken things then take all the credit yourself. ugh.

 

What I would have to ask, is at what point do we forgive and forget? (well, not LITERALLY forget, but yanno what I mean)

Okay, so he tried something bad, and people hated it. Sure, okay, fine. He pulled the program IIRC, and there are no paid mods on Steam that you have to pay Valve for.

But, 3-4 years later, some people are STILL harping on about it like it happened yesterday.

Hey, at least Valve didn't pull a Creation Club, or a Fallout 76.

 

Well, it's the fact that Valve (unlike Beth) didn't really learn anything from it. Prior to their little paid mods scheme they had their steam greenlight, which was a massive shitshow even before the paid mods debacle (in fact steam greenlight was one of the biggest arguments against the people who said "oh but paid mods will lead to better mods because authors will have a living wage. Except that's not how the market works) and up until it's 'death' only got worse (and then got replaced with something even worse.) During the (thankfully short) time it was run, the Paid Mods showed no signs of producing quality content. Everything in Paid Mods was either cheap crap that could be gotten better at Nexus, ports of DOTA stuff that wasn't rigged properly, blatantly stolen stuff, or stuff that modders long gone decided to come back and make "new" versions with only minorly improvements that they thrust behind a paywall. Not to mention the "joke" items like people charging 100$ for horse cock (no joke!) or 10 bucks that put an apple on a rock. At best stuff was mediocre. At worst it showed the worst excesses of developer greed.

Beth at least learned something, though it learned the wrong lesson. It thought it could get around the problem of shitty paid mods/paymodwalls by curating it themselves through creation club. Of course, problem there is that they didn't go for quality items or hard/impossible to do things in regular modding like XRE-Style drivable vehicles instead of wonkey physics vehicles or flyable vertibirds or that drivable tank thing in the CK Trailer or in game dynamic seasons, they went with cheap crap that they could sell for quick cash. Cheap skins, fo3 ported weapons that were knockoffs of existing FO4 weapons (The Prototype Gauss Rifle, aka the Laser Musket with a different skin), and a halariously ironicly unironic horse power armor. Creation Club could have worked if they had gone for big quest mods or mods that actually added exciting new content instead of just cheap items.

Ryu unfortunately found himself on the wrong side of that argument at the time, during which and after he lost the respect and friendship of a lot of modders and community members, and it ended up being one of the things that drove him from the community.

 

Bethesda learned lessons?

That's why they made Fallout76 and have been screwing up at every turn with it, right?

As for Steam Greenlight/Direct, I'd have to ask you, then, how is a small-time indie or solo developer supposed to get a game on Steam, then?

You can't just allow damn near anything, or we get junk like Unit-Z asset flips, Rape Day, School Shooter Simulator, etc going on, so Valve thought "OK, maybe if we do a Greenlight system where a developer submits their idea, and if it gets enough votes, then surely enough people wanna play the game".

Well, Greenlight didn't work sadly, because the system was abused and other problems it had, so they decided "well maybe a paywall would make it so that only serious people need apply" ... problem is, they are still doing the trading card thing, and $100 is paltry compared to what you can get if you can push a garbo game on the platform but stuff it full of trading cards and then have bots buy the cheap game en masse and generate trading cards to sell.

The only thing wrong that Valve did there, is they failed to close the loopholes. Steam Direct would be fine, if it weren't for the trading cards being so lucrative and easily exploitable. And/or at least a little human moderation/curation would be nice.

 

Like I said, they learned the wrong ones.

That's the problem with steam and the gaming community in general: it has this false dichotomy problem where you either have too much moderation and it becomes a gated community (which is Creation Club's problem... which wouldn't be as much of a problem if they promoted quality over quantity instead of the cheapest kind of mods one can get) , or you go full retard laissez faire where anything goes until it causes media outrage. Thing is, it doesn't have to be this way, right now there are alternative platforms out there like GoG or Discord, or whatnot.

Not to mention the exact same problems that plagued Greenlight still plague Direct.

 

Personally I think Steam should dump the stupid trading card system, and that would be a great start. Without trading cards, you get rid of all the botting BS, and you'd get rid of most of the reason why people want to have bots out there buying license keys and getting into the trading card market, etc.

And last I checked, the other platforms aren't exactly rosy either; GoG is lacking a lot of features Steam has, which is why I rarely use it, the Epic Store is just nasty, Discord could potentially be something, but it's in its infancy at the moment.

If I were a first-time game solo game developer, where am I to go? Looks like Steam would be the only reasonable option and just advertise the game everywhere and just hope for the best. Because it sure sounds better than the alternatives at the moment.

EDIT: Another thing I think Steam could do, is Steam could extend the Refund Period to a week for game developers who have less than 3 verified good games that they've released (said developer could apply for 'verified status' after releasing 3 games at which point Valve would curate their games and go 'okay this guy released 3 actual real games, we'll let him in). This would make it far harder for an asset flipper to release total junk on Steam and get away with it. No Trading Cards, and no Trick Purchases, means the Asset Flippers and Joke Game pushers have no way to make money therefore they wouldn't do it.

EDIT2: That or Trading Cards can only be made/sold by people who have such verified status. Or maybe verified status is something you have to apply for, and you can do it with 1 game, but you have to apply for this status otherwise you can't do trading cards, and getting the status requires an actual human to look at and test your game to make sure it's not an asset flip and it's an actual game.

 

Well its moreso that he set the precedent, and now we have crap like Bethesda's "Creation Club" as well as endless amounts of people ripping off of other's works because they assumed its sanctioned, now that a corporation is paying for it in a really under-moderated program.
It was just a super greedy move, and inspiried even more stupid greed from it imo.

 

the thing is though, if you check the legality on it. Technically all Steam does is let you rent a liscense of the game you purchase.
And there's been more then one occasion on which a game that people bought on the steam store got removed - with no refunds.
Gog gives you physical files, that are a lot more accessible then steam. But stuff can still end up removed there too, so there's not really anything good here, everything's terrible lol.
like with Diablo 3 and its "always online". What are you supposed to do when those servers shut down? All the money, microtransactions you spent on it?
All gone. Nothing would remain, all that money and time and effort utterly wasted.

 

It's not like Bethesda wouldn't have thought of that themselves eventually. If Steam hadn't done it, someone else would have. It was inevitable.

But Gabe had the decency to step back and go "wait a minute, this is stupid, let's not do this." ... Bethesda has no excuse for not doing the same. Instead, Bethesda doubled-down and went even further with it.

In most cases, even if a game is pulled, if you bought the game prior to its pulling, it still exists in your library and you can still play it. In most cases. It takes a pretty extreme case for it to also be unplayable, and usually if that were to happen, it wasn't a game worth playing to begin with.

Sometimes crappy games get removed. That's just... how things work.

Barring some kind of major collapse of the company, I highly doubt that is going to happen anyday soon.

 

It's kinda bad the fanbase drove away the creator of the race.

I was hoping that RyujiinZERO would get the Avali back on track like some of the old race mods on here.

If you are reading this RyujiinZERO, thanks for the legs on the Lucario Again. I am still communicating with Ochiru to make sure the Lucario keep on track (even though I am granted creative freedom at this point)

I was hoping one day I could form dialog between the Avali and Lucario through the official source though.

 

Okay, so over on the Triage mod discord channel we've heard from Ryu's wife who has some information:
1. The mod ceased development because Ryu fell out of love with Starbound. IMO, you shouldn't expect him to return to this mod.
2. Ryu isn't currently doing anything with the avali because he doesn't have a medium he's happy with. If he finds a medium he likes, he'll probably make something avali-related for it.

 

This. Thank you, YellowDemon.

I'm not saying the Avali community is some perfect place that doesn't have any glaring issues, but to assume that the creator of a race has decided to abandon what he put time and effort into because of a "rabid fanbase" is quite an assumption and it even comes off a bit disrespectful. Not to mention, you're kind of insulting the community that actually cares about and sticks with the race by just saying "fanbase" as a general term and not specifying.

This information makes much more sense, that he simply ran out of creative steam and doesn't really know what to do with them. I'm glad we have cleared this up. Shame the mod is basically confirmed dead, though it's not much of a surprise and I don't fault the guy.