I'd like to toss in my two cents from my personal perspective of the SA forum. I was always afraid of posting in there as it was more or less suggested that we were to leave you guys on your own, that it was your forum and we weren't to start any topics in there whatsoever. I do remember there was a 'help' type section, but you're right, it was hardly ever used. I think another part of the lack of FA-shared information is that they maybe just didn't even have the information to share in the first place. I'll expand on this later.
You know, that really sucks. I have the PM where I suggested the SA forum and I stated that I would love to have FA's participate in it. I was looking for a workshop kind of thing, but I know that I wouldn't have minded other posts. My bet is that it was Atwa that discouraged FA's from the SA forum. She spent a lot of time on the SA forum and made herself the only non-SA resource. We couldn't do much without feeling like we had to ask her permission. I know I asked for it more than once.
You would think that the more part of a team we all felt, the less likely people would want to leave. Instead, we were under the impression that many of the FA's resented the SA's. Almost like you guys felt like we were your competition. Again, this is just part of the dysfunction that is TSR.
This hits the nail on the head. Now that I've been 'on the outside' for a while, I'm not at all surprised by the utter stagnation that's very apparent among many of the FAs. You're not exactly encouraged to go out into the larger community, so you end up having a very limited pool of information to work with, much of which is still several years behind.
SNIP
I even remember there was a push to get more FAs writing tutorials, and reassurences were given that it wouldn't be like 'we were giving away our secrets,' so it's not just competition among FAs, but goes back to the 'TSR-vs-The World' mentality. (I didn't do many tutorials because I'm lazy and am terrible at it.)
No, you are not encouraged to venture elsewhere. Although no one ever said much about my double submissions, I was the only one I know of that submitted everything at both places. Made me a bit of an odd duck, really. That whole giving away secrets thing is exactly what I feared was going on in the FA world. TSR is not interested in helping the community move forward or in gaining new knowledge. And you are right, the stagnation that we see in the creations from there is the direct result of that kind of attitude. There were very few tuts at TSR that were helpful. The only one I used constantly was the Material Definition Editing tut written by Simaddict99. I always wondered why there weren't more. Nothing else that was written as a tut was as helpful as what I got from MTS2. Except for an email I got from Simtomatic that helped me with shadows. I wish she had written that up as a tut (unless she has, in which case YEA!)
Thanks for the input Aikea. I think it is important for people to know what it feels like on the inside.
Tomato, thanks for sharing that story. It's helped me rethink a couple of things.
That being said, don't you feel like we should be careful about the whole "us vs. them" athmosphere you described? I mean, it's obviously different for us, we do openly oppose something, but still. I do see a lot assupmtions that people are downright evil just because they're on the other side of the fence. There are some deeply troubled people on the other side, people I'd probably clock if I met them in real life, but I've seen little to none evil people on TSR or anyone in the paysite community.
That is why I brought it up. I would love for just one person at TSR to read what I wrote and have it hit home. Have them think about it and decide to go free. That they would know we would welcome them and so would the larger community.
As far as no evil-you apparently haven't read the info sharing thread that coconut posted or parts of my insane journal. Or where NeptuneSuzy flat out lied about her role in the pay scheme end of things at TSR. I might not classify those actions as 'evil' per se, but they are pretty awful.
PMBD
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