Originally posted by far-trader:
as I understand it some of what Mal is upset over was in private comms so nobody knows
That'd be correct.
It seemed like he tossed the files to us like so much raw meat to hungry wolves and said here go to it, then promptly left without full instrucitons or waiting for any questions. It sounds like after I left, he came back and to continue the analogy, took one look at the mess of half ravaged meat and told everyone they weren't supposed to be eating it, they were supposed to be cooking it, and he wasn't interested in them making suggestions about changing the recipe.
Yeah. First, we had a month of basically nothing but a crappy intro document that didn't tell us anything solid, and introduced some very bizarre concepts that had a lot of people scratching their heads.
Then a month later we got a very complicated alien generation system that was incomplete and lacked explanation, and a counter-intuitive random dice rolling system. I think most people were assuming we'd be getting something actually useful, like a chargen system.
When I gave up on the playtest, he was starting to ask playtesters to actually design the game engine in that he hadn't settled on a task system or the skill list. That was pretty much the last straw for me.
Much frustration later, I left the board (and then TPTB deigned to ban me from the board for good measure, but that's very much their loss) and got a PM from Hunter with a passed on message from Marc that implied to me that he was very out of touch with the reality of how playtests work (with the aforementioned 'you're only supposed to see where the mechanics are broken' implication) and with what people were wanting from the game. But in that he basically declared that the playtest was actually an 'alpha' of the system and that a proper playtest would follow when that was ready (of course, nobody had said anything about this to the playtesters when it started). The whole playtest was a badly run, disorganised shambles.
Thing is, if you playtest something, a designer needs to do two things: 1) have the COMPLETE system available for playtesters to test so they know how everything fits together, and 2) be available and willing to comment on what the playtesters suggest, because feedback is essential. That's how its worked on every other playtest (mostly at SJG) that I've been on, and it works very well.
Instead we got a few scraps of half-written garbage thrown at us, and a designer who was doing his damnedest to be as inaccessible as possible. Personally, I fully expected that the previously available T5 drafts had been updated and fleshed out and would be presented to us when the playtest started, not the half-formed crap we got instead.
A lot of people who could have been very useful in that playtest - both for specific expertise and general experience with Traveller - left early because it was so badly handled.
I can't imagine what people are talking about on the T5 board now, since there have been no new files posted to the playtest area since the Alien Generation rules in May, and those haven't been updated either according to the datestamp on the files. Talk about shambles...
