gogameguru wrote:
Fair go mate!
They did their best and as far as I can see Gabriel hasn't said anything about giving up on the project. He's just said that he needs a job on the side to pay the bills, which is entirely reasonable. What else do you expect him to do?
Anyway, the server they've made seems pretty good to me. It's just hard to get enough people to play there.
The reality is that it's incredibly hard to run a Go related business without also doing some sort of other work to support you and your family. Until there are many more Go players in the West, that's not going to change, no matter how much you rail against it.
Nearly everyone I know in this business either has a second job or is retired. And they all do it primarily for the love of the game.
Nobody's getting rich here...
Would it be too much of me to think that you are biased by our previous disagreement in the Baduk TV thread?
You say they did their best, i say they didn't. Otherwise a lot more work would have been done within that time. Remembering that most of their structure work for the server was completed before opening to others. Then adding that most additions to the server from that point were others providing various sections.
He might not has said directly that they were giving up, but you watch. It's the same old letting people down softly routine. Which is what has been playing out for a long time now. Until the user base drops so badly that they say "Oh there is no point now". It's going to happen.
Saying there isn't enough user base for it is utterly ridiculous if it was meeting peoples NEEDS then there wouldn't be a problem. Most go players have an account that they use on multiple servers skipping between them at will. It's when a community starts to shrink from inactivity and see a lack of progression, compounded by incomplete projects losing traction that they lose faith and habitually stop accessing it.
I understand that it is hard to run a go based business. But for a project that was funding their venture allowing them to get off the ground without having to worry about holding a job for that time means that side of the equation shouldn't have been a concern. At a time that they should have been pumping out updates daily. Not 4-5
weak updates weekly. Conveniently not dating them to see just how poor an effort it really was.
They were complaining about how hard it was to work on the server while maintaining a job before they took it upon themselves to "work full time" on kaya. Being the main factor for why the donations were being requested in the first place.
As you would expect there to be some transition period, a sacrifice if you will to facilitate the process until the business becomes self sufficient. This was where the money was to be taken into account. So i don't share the same sympathy you seem to be mustering up. I am like i said earlier, disappointed. I can't help it.
Kaya.gs wrote:
.
Kaya has a bundle of features everywhere and its made to remain flexible to outside changes. However we noted that most users aren't familiar or know a lot of the features already presented actually exist, like variation sharing, malkovich, broadcasts (had some really nice broadcasts by JeanSebl). When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability.
What kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game, which is the fundamental service of a Go Server.
I do have a plan for that, but i don't have the personal finances to wear that out until it "may happen". On the other hand, because of this i will have way more resources and can patron the server in another way.
As many already know, OpenKaya is always open for contributions, and some developers have gained access to the private repositories of Kaya. There are many things to contribute to from a developer perspective, and I will make sure to check, verify, guide , write tests and more for such contributions, as I have already done on many side projects.
A new air-conditioning unit doesn't excuse the fact that the car doesn't have any windows. You can say "oh we have x,y,z features that are really cool" but lack fundamentals. Without the basic features that are expected from a product no-one is going to find it terribly useful and its not like its recent that they were promised as being high priority either.
Broadcasts, consisting of an embedded stream slapped to the side of a pre-developed board is hardly a time consuming feature. Considering it is far from a recent addition. Variation sharing, another feature from almost the start, barely changing along the way. Malkovich, another simple feature to implement.
And when you say "When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability." Why does it have to be one or the other, and from what we have seen it has not really helped that much along the way.
Kaya's fan-base was increasing, and rightly so when it was something to look forward to something new claiming to be better than the rest. Mocking on occasion the many other servers openly. So when you say that what Kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game. I disagree as do a lot of people i have spoken with. Kaya lacks basic ingredients but tries to pass it off as a complete alternative. Like the old saying goes, build it and they will come. But you know that is where the problem of this equation lies.
Open Kaya is your answer to a public request of becoming open source? The reason people barely are contributing code anymore is because they don't want to work on things that you will profit from it later, and rightly so.
If the project was completely open source i have no doubt contributions would increase drastically. But keep it to yourself, let it become old and outdated while Kaya continues to wither.
You know my thoughts and that's all i can say. If you are honestly proud of how you used your time and the small amount of fruits it bore than that is all we could honestly ask.