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Wait for the next release. I want usable mugs damn it!

55 (71.4%)

We can use the current one. I like the big trees and slightly smarter dorfs.

17 (22.1%)

I'll take .34.11 thanks. I want to know I'll get to kill things for sure.

5 (6.5%)

Total Members Voted: 77

[Splint]

The Poll is already pulling for "sequel" ahead by leaps and bounds and this is honestly very distressing to me.

[TheFlame52]

I want a do-over, but with references to the original. I voted for indifferent.

[Splint]

I want a do-over, but with references to the original. I voted for indifferent.

That's closer to what I was thinking myself. I just really don't want any of us to have to put in more work than necessary and a sequel will require a lot of work.

[Aseaheru]

Why dont we just dump it all together in one pile?

[Splint]

Because the majority of us have no idea how to mod (and even I'm very shaky in what I can do,) and most of us are of limited ability to commit any time by the looks of things.

[Starweaver396]

Because the majority of us have no idea how to mod (and even I'm very shaky in what I can do,) and most of us are of limited ability to commit any time by the looks of things.

A lot of effort can simply be cut out of a sequel(basically, anything that's not absolutely necessary can just be avoided), should time require it. I liked the subplots better than the actual story itself, so I can't possibly vote for a redo. Apologies.

[Splint]

The main story wound up flat on its face because I was a controlling freak and people constantly disappeared (real life, laziness, literally disappearing, or just plain bad timing in general,) or had to drop out before their turn was over due to the same reasons.

The side stories wound up taking over as a means to fill the potentially long gaps between updates, and were the result of things spiraling out of control, stemming from my own love of sci-fi shit, Vanya's existence as a narrator (though in game terms her being around actually wouldn't have been unusual in a world-gen fortress,) and Mr Frog at the time feeling a need to make dorf!Mr Frog a special snowflake of sorts, no offense intended to either of them.

[Lolfail0009]

I'm gonna vote Sequel, tbh.

Although my story needs a total do-over tbh...

[TalonisWolf]

I'm gonna vote Sequel, tbh.

Although my story needs a total do-over tbh...

  Same, but do we have to Mod *EVERYTHING* in? Mods generally take a lot of time, effort, and debate to get a finished. Why not take what is working NOW, fix anything that's game breaking, and go?

[Splint]

I'm gonna vote Sequel, tbh.

Although my story needs a total do-over tbh...

  Same, but do we have to Mod *EVERYTHING* in? Mods generally take a lot of time, effort, and debate to get a finished. Why not take what is working NOW, fix anything that's game breaking, and go?

Continuity mostly, but also as a matter of pseudoprofessional pride; if we do a sequel, we shouldn't half-ass it which I admit since it was a first for many of us, we sort of did here.

Spoiler: Time for stupidity from me (click to show/hide)

I wouldn't want to start a sequel until we have everything all ready to go, in order to keep things... Fluid, I guess. Advanced weapons need thier own tools and workshops, and reactions to produce them and with DFHack there's the possibility of being able to produce working battlesuits that provide tangible benefits, and a matter of castes for at least dwarves and spawn, and updating the Scythod at the very least (since the manamaids and sequivet never made a proper appearance of thier own, they could be left out in theory,) since Scythod are supposed to be fairly commonplace postSB.

In general though, I also don't want to do a sequel because while we made it into the hall, it wasn't really on the merits of the fort itself since anything really "dwarfy" so to speak was cleaned up by Paintbrush (military) and Mitch (hospital) or vetoed by me for claimed dwarf safety and FPS concerns; it was the side stories predominantly written by Talvieno with a noticeably smaller amount of input from me, Mr Frog, Reudh, and Hans that made the place by and large what it became: A crazy, fucked up mess so convoluted and rife with errors, crossovers, stubborn authors, and just in general being a setting that was a barely understandable disaster area for even some of us here that the fact we can even make any sense of it is astounding. While this is awesome in and of itself, it's still a problem for the fort.

The fort itself more or less fell off the wagon and became a sideshow out in Jackfuckistan that ended in an unsatisfactory manner, leaving at least me dissatisfied with how it turned out, and any late comers lost and confused due to the side stories overtaking the fort and with the current organizational clusterfuck, even those of us who were here at the start may have trouble finding anything past a certain point. This is due in part to the fortress stagnating due to people dropping out or failing to show up for thier turns, my control freak tendencies, and in general us running out of shit to do as FPS slowly tanked. Even journals about the goings on of the fort itself from nonoverseers dried up entirely after a little while following the setting getting expanded, and most of them were at least amusing or provided something resembling input on the fort's workings. Hell I'm guilty of contributing to the last bit of journals drying up.

While I'm all for telling a good story, and a great deal of effort went into doing so here, the fortress itself wound up... Well, kind of forgettable on its own. While we had doors leading nowhere, zombie attacks, and head-eating giant emu, the concentrated efforts to avoid disaster from multiple overseers and salvage the design mess left the fort in too good a way with no real means to even do a good self-destruct because we killed all the demons in a prepared shooting gallery and FPS would have imploded moving fluids around to drown or incinerate everything, and without runesmith I don't think we could have even an-hero'd the place by having Fischer and Dauros fight eachother since our evil biome had harmless bacon-scented blood rain and no reanimation.

In short, I feel we dropped the ball with Spearbreakers. I can't even pin it solely on the side stories taking over since they mainly filled the potentially long gaps between updates, but somewhere along the way it... It didn't feel like it was living up to its progenitors anymore. The fort stagnated and was just kind of there after a while. Sorry about any repetitiveness.

[Lolfail0009]

You do have some very good points there, Splint...

But in any case, where can we go from here but up? Rock bottom is the best foundation; any good Overseer knows that~

yaaaaaaaay attempted positivity...

[TalonisWolf]

 @Splint: That seems reasonable, your points are valid. Spearbreakers, as a FORT, isn't the greatest thing ever (although Mitch's Soviet-Style Restoration of the Hospital was Epic in itself).

  So how about a Middle Road? Parasol/Ballpoint/whoever goes $@&/ this, breaks the timeline or somesuch so as to make things go their way, da de da de daa. Or something which performs the purpose of preserving the elements of Spearbreakers without... well, relying on Spearbreakers.

[Lolfail0009]

I was going to write something like such a temporal phenomenon in my story, but...
I mean if people want me to do it I'll do it but if not then y'all can do the thing

[Mr Frog]

(Why does this thread only start moving again when I stop paying attention to it? Are y'all actually sockpuppets run by SCP-173 or..?)

@Splint: That seems reasonable, your points are valid. Spearbreakers, as a FORT, isn't the greatest thing ever (although Mitch's Soviet-Style Restoration of the Hospital was Epic in itself).

I honestly am not sure why we even made it into the Hall of Legends, considering that our reception among people who weren't part of the mess the whole way through seems lukewarm at best...

[snip]

I think a big mistake that was made with this fort was not enough being done to speed things along whenever someone was dragging their heels with updates. Multiple people were given extension upon extension for literally weeks on end with no way to keep up interest in the interim beyond writing reams of sci-fi crackfic which I don't think we had the organisational competence necessary to pull off well and which largely was left dangling without any proper conclusions due to various factors. If we do more to hurry things along (read: bump people who don't keep in contact or can't update for various reasons to the back of the line) it'll probably help prevent people from getting bored and writing impenetrable walls of fanfic that make it impossible for newbies to get into things.

Additionally, I vote that we do either a reboot or at the very least a greatly-pared-down sequel with few (if any) additional mods, if only because Splint himself really doesn't seem all that keen on doing a sequel and I do not have high hopes for any project that the co-ordinator himself lacks enthusiasm for. Besides, for the sake of being realistic, I really do not think we have the time, ability, or organisational skills required to make such a massive mod in our spare time. If we did, we'd probably have the damn thing finished already by this point.

E: To add to my point concerning a re-boot being preferable, we kind of have a massive continuity lockout going on here where someone who wants to get into the story and understand what's going on has to trawl through a thread which is literally tens of thousands of posts long in order to track down and read a good-sized bookshelf's work of mutually-interconnected fanfic of decidedly scattershot quality, which they may or may not be interested in in the first place. I can forsee a crisis of dwindling readership in the future, where we lose readers due to lack of time or interest but fail to gain any new ones because they're put off by the sea of bullshit they have to wade through to get to us.

[Splint]

>Wading through shit: Yuppers. And part of it was poor planning on my part, making it largely my fault people have to wade through shit. Now this place is such an organizational nightmare it'd take far too much effort to find everything/salvage it even for a legendary manager.
>>Extensions: Optimism at its organizational worst (the fact some people made progress but had to drop out part way didn't help matters and was a contributing factor to them being granted.)
>>>Continuity lockout: Oh hoooooo boy do we have one.
>>>>Quality:  As some places would say we alternate between quality (good stuff,) and QUALITY! Meaning yes, about half of what's here is crap or very close to it/confusing as all hell.
>>>>> No confidence in a direct sequel: Not even a little bit.

Overall: This fort was what happens when a poorly conceived clusterfuck goes to term - It ended badly, tripped over itself, and in (I'm exaggerating here) general is an astonishing display of simultaneous enthusiasm, hyper competence atypical of a truly great fort, and chilling ineptitude on par with many other complete disasters on the meta front that ranks somewhere between becoming a WoW addict, killing your best friend with a wiffle ball bat you fired out of a potato gun, and being a coke smuggler.

As de facto "leader" of this mess (and I use the term loosely,) I am frankly ashamed with how this place turned out in the end. While we made a good story in one place and made some great pals for this forum/game out of those of us who stuck it out until the very unsatisfactory end, we fell flat and utterly failed to accomplish our real goal for the fort proper to be the draw, the exciting funhouse of failure and madness that makes a great fortress great. Hell it should be listed under "so bad it's good" in the Hall, because looking back that has to be how we got in with this place. On that note I think it might be why I crapped out multiple story forts - overcompensation for what happened here.

I'm going to reset the poll to see if anyone's had a change of heart, in either direction.