It’s not about me personally donating @SithLordEDP , my comments and most of this discussion is about a COMMUNITY FUND benefitting valuable members of OUR COMMUNITY.
It’s one thing for Iron Galaxy and Microsoft to publicly recognize these members which is great because they absolutely deserve it, but I think they can do more with this fund than only reward top-level players.
I say that but I nor anyone else at this point know exactly where and how the Community Fund will be spent. I’d be happy to be wrong.
Well the good news is we know Brandon @TUSKODINSON will benefit from the community fund because he has been all over Twitter talking about it and supporting it. And to me that’s great. I’m not certain but I suspect that Sajam will benefit as well by being able to provide more commentary (i.e. The funds directly or indirectly allow them to fly him in etc). I couldn’t tell you about @l8BHZombiel, but I don’t think @infilament will get anything out of the fund unless they support his attendance to provide commentary at events. He’s pretty modest about the guide but as @SithLordEDP mentioned you can donate to him directly.
Actually, one of the things that I think would have made a much cooler community fund would be a physical printing of @infilaments guide as some sort of reward tier. If they put a nice cover and sprinkled some art throughout and then printed it I would feel pretty happy about paying to support that. Probably the economics don’t work out, but it seems like a neat idea.
Edit: I would lose my mind if they just figured out a way to add his awesome shadow breaking Flash applet to the actual game…
The final 8bitbeatdown and zombies stream thereafter was heartwarming. I for one am really glad I had the opportunity to buy kilgore and support selfless people like him and brandon alexander. They make sacrifices and spend many hours of their personal life supporting this game. I’ve chosen to not make any such sacrifices myself so 5$ is a small price to pay to show them I appreciate their efforts. It was nice to see the positive side of the community without much of the toxicity you see here in this thread.
IMHO a printed version of @Infilament 's guide would be pretty sweet, but with the way KI keeps getting updated and rebalanced I wonder how long it would be until the guide was outdated.
Living games are interesting, because they make the gameplay different and exciting but they are really brutal on content creators.
For example, if I wanted to learn how to play Dota or League, I would probably go check out some Youtube tutorials. If they are dated January 2015… should I even watch them? I have no idea. Dota recently released a hugely game-changing patch called “Dota 7” which changes the map structure and a bunch of other stuff. Maybe there is value in a 2 year old Youtube, but as a beginner player I have no idea how much of what they’re saying is outdated.
For another example, most (all?) of Sajam’s MKX character breakdowns are now completely outdated. They were useful for about 2-3 months and then every character got changed and nothing works the way it did, so who knows how much of what he says in a video is accurate. He (rightly) never released updated versions, because that’s 2x the work for what, to extend the value of his videos another 5 minutes?
This is one of the big stresses of my guide. I have done what I think is a good job of keeping on top of all the patches, but it is incredibly draining. Your project is never complete, never accurate, and if you ever stop, all your work is for naught, because it won’t help new players anymore.
Clearly living games are the future though, so I don’t know how these things can be made better. If I was making money off my guide, maybe I’d be less stressed about it, since investing the time makes sense. But as a fan project I’m doing for free + a few small donations, it’s just insane.
It depends how you define new player. For players who are brand new to fighting games or mobas the generalities in those guides will always been helpful. Now if it’s someone who knows what they’re doing, they understand the core concepts of the game, say someone who is looking for frame data in a fighting game the out dated guides can be harmful.
I think in general despite the many changes KI has gone through the characters and concepts haven’t changed a lot. Most of the Dojo trials are still very relevant and helpful for new players picking up the game.
I think your guide has done a good job at filling in the gaps especially on the instinct front where it can be somewhat difficult for new players to understanding what the actual instinct traits are.
Yeah, my guide wouldn’t be totally useless if I stopped updating it. There is a lot of valuable info still there, and it does try to tackle the “intuition” part.
But I guess what I mean is, often I write long paragraphs about a particular thing. For example, in S2 I thought Cinder really needed to make use of LP LP LP xx shadow fission a lot. It was lots of guaranteed chip damage off a jab, and I thought it was his best use of meter. They changed that in S3 to be different; you can still get the chip but now you need a different setup.
If I left that section in my guide as written, people would think “why does this not work?” when they try my very specific advice. I can change the advice (sometimes easy, sometimes requires a 2-3 paragraph rewrite + re-shooting videos), but it’s a lot of small advice to keep track of across a huge guide. Eventually I might just stop writing that level of specific advice for fear of it maybe changing, and then I think my guide suffers because of it.
It’s funny, the Information Age is a blessing and a curse in this respect. There’s no way your guide could have the impact it has without the Internet (and all of its associated glory) but people have correspondingly come to expect detailed and up to date information instantly. It wasn’t that long ago that I had a car full of out of date road atlases and a house full of out of date Encyclopedias that everyone understood were “good enough,” even though the real world those things supposedly describe is constantly changing.
Anyway, in lieu of a fund to print special editions of your guide (which was never a practical suggestion) I’d like to instead suggest that the developers should think about a fund for making an “Infil” guardian in Shadow Lords. The power could be something clever like “this guardian ensures you automatically get optimal combo on lockout.” A ghostly floating version of your current profile pick would be a riot.
I know it’s something that would likely never happen, but they could take the SF2/USF4/KI Classic approach to updates where they could essentially have updates kinda sectioned off into their own versions, and if you wanted to play say version 1.0 or 2.0 you could, albeit that type of mode would likely be relegated to offline or casual/exhibition play.