TRONICv1

The first outlining of the idea and the responses different people had to it.

2020
I prepared this:

I cut it into sections, passed them through skype chat, and the others responded as we went along. Generally wolverine ghableska and mazuffer listened throughout and then said stuff at the end. I remember maz's response: 1,000,000 is impossible... hehhhe... which of course it isn't... though there is still a tiny chance. My first response to his was: 1000 in 6 months... to which he said: that should be possible. And then I went on to explain the meta-reason for such an idealistic objective: to inspire -- it has to be exciting enough for people to go... wouldn't that be cool... 1 miiiiiiiiiiillion players... in a year... wow! It kind of aligns people and gives their contributions... parameters. Wolverine went into some detail regarding problems with money and time-syncing with different servers, and we discussed most of that through voice so i have no recording of this suffice to say it was exactly where i am blind: serious here-and-now practicalities. My initial response was to emphasise that I have no interest in money, but that I thought that the developers deserve something for all the fun I got out of the game, and I kind of like seeing skillful player rewarded for amazing skill. My second response is to leave most of those technical details for later once we have enough players who are interested in the idea and we start to learn the social skills to bring it about. This for me is the most important factor and something demonstrated so well by the developers: the ability to work together without a hierarchical structure or selling their time and skills to a business-company. (Albeit the developers have a slightly easier time of it since they are producing a thing, and confrontation of perspectives can be resolved through actually producing the most efficient code for example.) Ghab was enthusiastic and without him I think I would have just crumpled under the initial criticism -- this is not a criticism of the participants, it is merely a recognition that we are trained to be critical (you know... the dialectic, devil's advocate, scientific disproof). To my mind we apply this critical faculty too early which is another reason why the idealistic objective is presented first: if you like the idea then whatever objections you come up with makes you you want to come with the solutions rather than presenting them to another as if you have already been defeated by it. Anyhoo, these ideas and reasons are covered elsewhere on this wiki... contributor's guidelines.. I think. In conclusion, I wanted to voice the idea to a few players and if they didn't like it I wouldn't have taken it further: we agreed to reconvene a week later to give everyone the chance to mull the idea over (TRONICv1.1). So my deepest gratitude to the people known as wolverine ghableska and mazuffer, and for the others who have shown interest but have not been able to afford the time yet to pursuing the idea further.

ghableska
So far, I think I like what we are trying to accomplish. :-) I think that we can at least try, and if all else fails, we would have had fun trying the idea.

That's pretty much what I have to say.

P.S. /me looks at the length of 2020's post, then back to mine.