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40oz

Teams

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I was casually browsing some of the classic megawad articles on the Doom Wiki this week and was reminded that many Doom and Doom 2 projects pre-2000 that featured somewhere between 5 and 32 levels were often created by teams or partners. Meanwhile today, megawads and short episodes are (much more often than not) either created single handedly by a super-industrious loner, or created by someone pitching an idea on the forums and in a way, crowdsourcing their project idea into fruition.

What has made the Doom community so different today than it was a decade and a half ago? I've heard little voices around here mention that they wonder why teams haven't reformed or resurfaced. Is it because communication was more personal and arbitrary back then? When I look into it, IRC and email was still prevalent, people posted on forums, I think it was a bit more commonplace for people to know basic html programming and host their own websites than it is today. Still, it doesn't seem so far off from what we're still doing today.

Yet, I've observed that the Doom community now seems much more impersonal (at least when we're not berating each other) and there's little movement to change it. People tend to keep a wall up so they can't expose a personal feeling or an opinion that can be shot down, and prefer the method of shouting something like a joke or intentionally misinformed opinion on the public forums with the intention of getting a rise from people. Maybe the community is much more venomous than it used to be. Even when I'm exchanging PM's with people on this forum -- which I do quite a bit, many people seem pretty resistant to keep the conversation going. We don't learn much about each other and the exchange seems to come to a halt after a few back-and-forths. It feels sort of alienating sometimes.

Having not been in the Doom community pre-2000, I don't actually have a firsthand experience of what the Doom community was like at all, so I could be talking completely out of my ass and it has been this way the whole time; it was just organized better. I'm no saint either. I can be very selective about who I open up to.

I've accrued a lot of level design knowledge out of personal interest in the last decade and in that time, my availability to execute what I've learned in Doom is shrinking. The growing popularity of community projects allows for the ability for more megawads to form, but there's still a great distance between contributing members, and a lot of lost communication which keeps them from being a nice cohesive project. Thus, my interest tends to grow more towards the formation of teams, similar to old, old, id software, which comprised of programmers (read: resource management, wad compilation, bugtesting) level design (mappers) art/graphics (textures, titlepic, misc graphics) sound (music composing) and maybe a PR guy (someone to manage the forum thread, announce dates, post regular screenshots, answer questions, etc.). To me, that seems like a much more practical way of getting good wads out in the open than the infinite possibilities of weird mapping gimmicks that are designed to attract strangers to community projects and contribute something to play.

I don't know how well this thread will hold water, or if it will have any effect on people's social skills, but I'd be very interested to see what could come of the community if it were divided into more segregated groups of best friends rather than everyone being a part of a nebulous secondary group doom community and having to work so independently.

tl;dr PM me, I could use some Doom friends. Lets get to know each other better and make stuff together and show people how cool we are so they act like us too.

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Mapping also became a lot quicker and more efficient ever since Doom Builder. I'd argue it was right around 04 when the themes seemed to shift from teams to "industrious loners."

The early megawad team efforts often had special textures or musicians which were not as easily shared. While there was irc and the like, sending a texturepack or a midi file was a little bit more arduous fifteen or even ten years ago. The fact that we have so many resources at our fingertips makes us able to be more ambitious with our projects. BTSX, which is sort of the last big team project thing gets such regard because they do so much exclusive in house stuff. I dunno. I only really do team/community stuff anyway.

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Well I don't know about everyone else, but after about 7 or so years of playing Doom nearly every day (I have spent A LOT of time on this game, and a long-ass time being a huge supercreep on these forums to find new PWADs before I registered), I finally got kind of sick of playing it, and that's why I finally started mapping a year or two ago. Also, my interest in Doom now kind of waxes and wanes; I haven't really played or mapped much at all the last four months or so until about a week ago when the Doomness came back.

...Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm personally resistant to team/community stuff is because I would feel like a douche if I signed on for something and then suddenly went into "Doom? Meh" mode and went MIA on people. I would probably come back eventually, but I don't know when.

Also what TheMionicDonut said about utilities/tech in general becoming advanced enough to allow easier modding by yourself, probably

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I have memories of doom project announcements and member recruitment as far back as I've been online. Often it wasn't verbalized, but when people were posting screenshots and elaborate design docs on forums DW front page and their "Y2K Proof Web Portal", those were cries for help to finish a project. Most of these went completely ignored however and the projects vanished with no playable content ever to be released.

Today it seems like people are just more up front by saying "I want help" instead of trying to lure talent via screenshots. And they get help, and finish stuff (or at least release stuff in some playable state).

This still doesn't explain the mutant strain of humans we had back then who could pump out full megawads of reasonable quality with only 2-3 folks in a few months, however.

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This a bit guess-y since I wasn't around "back then" either, but I'd be willing to bet that today's "community project" is no less tightly-knit than yesteryear's "team project." The only differences in the general case are the lack of a catchy team name (e.g. "Team TNT") and that the message exchanges are happening on a public forum rather than an e-mail list.

I don't even think there's really a shortage of "private" team/partner things either, thinking on it. BTSX and Square are purely-team, D(2)TWID and TNT2 have a tight-knit collaborative focus despite being public CPs, and the idea of the "power duo" is far from dead either with Sunlust on the forefront of everyone's mind.

tl;dr: This is Doom, Dammit. The old ways never die.


As a side-topic:

40oz said:

Even when I'm exchanging PM's with people on this forum -- which I do quite a bit, many people seem pretty resistant to keep the conversation going. We don't learn much about each other and the exchange seems to come to a halt after a few back-and-forths. It feels sort of alienating sometimes.

For whatever reason, I find that PMs/email are an extremely impersonal form of communication since they're crazy-slow to write/read/respond-to. Forum posts seem much less so given that the conversation doesn't grind to a halt waiting for one person to respond, since there are other people around to keep the ideas/communication flowing. Contrast either to IRC/IM, which is much more quickly flowing and conversational enough to keep the mind+heart engaged. All IMHO, of course. :P

I really have no idea what I'd do if I suffer a time travel accident and end up in a situation where I have to write letters to people. D:

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I think they still exist but nowadays are much more freeform associations. People feel freer to contribute to whatever projects they like without needing to ally themselves under a particular flag.

I think a lot of it comes from having better communications mechanisms nowadays. Back in the 90s things were far more fragmented and Internet access far less ubiquitous. I was part of "TeamOnslaught" which was basically me and a couple of friends from school who played Doom. The other couple of members were people my friends met playing Doom on dialup BBSes.

People form groups with the other people they're exposed to. This is the essence of nationalism for example, or people who support their local sports club. With Doom there's very little left. There's no DoomNation, no NewDoom, no DWANGO, no BBSes, no CompuServe action games community. There are a few exceptions like the ZDoom forums or Zandronum community but for the most part there's only Doomworld left.

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I think teams can form today by announcing your megawad idea on the forum, and picking up volunteers at your discretion (i.e. they can PM you to help, but it's your decision to let them in and give them access to your resources). Then you can invite them to private Yahoo/Google groups.

Usually team and crowdsourced megawads are better than single author ones. The latter tend to become highly repetitive, and that's doubly unfortunate considering the author spent a lot of time to make them in the first place. As for coherency, it seems that "magic" is in the air that causes a community project to converge on a specific theme, despite being made by dozens of authors.

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I think Teams now days just operate under different banners of a sort, as mentioned.

I always entertained the idea of joining or trying to put together a team, but as the Wads & Mods forum suggests, I'm terribly unfocused and unmotivated with map making, and the only maps I ever gave a damn about are either lost or missing, or terrible anyways (And that number is 2, by the way. There's one called Halls of Satan or some shit that's deeply buried. There's about three threads for it for three different versions of it, and then there's that more recent one that just flat out disappeared off of my computer after I got some decent progress done. I even made a cool mausoleum I was all proud of).

So really, any team with me on it would probably be terrible or kick me out. I couldn't even stick with Blasphemer.

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I've thought about this a lot and wonder if I am one of the little voices you mention as I have posted about it before as well. It's a little early in the morning to collect my thoughts comprehensively but the first things that come to mind are:

I have also noticed there used to be more teams. Team TNT, Alpha Dog Alliance, the Innocent Crew etc, and I romanticise about how great that is compared to today's community projects. But when you look into it further, I think Xaser is right. The team's were pretty much community projects of their day. It's not like they are usually comprised of six like minded guys, they have large rosters of mappers that changes from project to project (if they make more than one) apart from a handful of core members and the project usually ends up with the same mixed bag inconsistencies that occur in inclusive CPs of today. The difference is probably the fact the team are named and that communication was handled differently. Now almost everyone uses the same forum so here's less mystery. The Russian and French Doom communities are a more able exception and could be said to be more comparable to the 90s teams.

I also like the idea of a small group of keen and dedicated people working together in a project as opposed to open invitation inclusive CP's from a personal perspective as a mapper. I also agree it is an experience thing. The allure of CPs when I was new was getting a level into a product that would be discussed. With Hadephobia I took the next step of project leading the same thing. Occasionally a CP pops up that still intrigues me but I would much prefer working with a small team of people who are regularly in contact.

However, if this became more popular I think it would be a new thing rather than a return to the past for the reasons I mention in the same paragraph. I can't think of many megawads that share the labour between 3-6 people. Excluding guest spots it's usually 1, 2 or more than 10 - and yet to me 5-6 people would be the sweet spot of consistency versus variety. I'm not sure I made it public but I have thought over an idea to have a friendly competiton where we agree to split into teams of 3-6 people each and compete to see which team makes the best megawad after 6 months. My worry is that 6 months later nothing would be finished but it would at least be interesting to see who would group up!

Lastly, I have occasional correspondence with SteveD, which I enjoy but otherwise will normally discuss things only on forums IRC when I'm on the. I am always happy to discuss Doom, though I prefer email to PMs so feel free to drop me a line.

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40oz said:

Yet, I've observed that the Doom community now seems much more impersonal (at least when we're not berating each other) and there's little movement to change it. People tend to keep a wall up so they can't expose a personal feeling or an opinion that can be shot down, and prefer the method of shouting something like a joke or intentionally misinformed opinion on the public forums with the intention of getting a rise from people. Maybe the community is much more venomous than it used to be. Even when I'm exchanging PM's with people on this forum -- which I do quite a bit, many people seem pretty resistant to keep the conversation going. We don't learn much about each other and the exchange seems to come to a halt after a few back-and-forths. It feels sort of alienating sometimes.

Don't diss people for acting like that if that's what they personally prefer for whatever reason, perhaps for being introverted. Also take into consideration that the intention of posting joke-alike replies can be a self-less attempt to amuse the readers just for the sake of fun, not a means of "getting a rise". None of these are evil things that should be attempted to be changed for the better (IMO), which you almost made it sound like.

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hee when I think about it, all the NAMED mapping teams put out the sort of levels I prefer - maps which are flawed, weird and ambitious with fairly atypical gameplay, adventure levels taking you to unpredictable places.

"Black Star Coven" is still the coolest team name. Shame they hopped between popular games instead of sticking to Doom because they were evolving a really cool atmospheric style. thinking of Team TNT brings to mind adventurous, innovative and strange maps with frankly messed-up texturing. Clan B0S united these themes and pushed them to a high watermark of weirdness in ALT.wad which became my favourite level set.

I guess if any group of mappers deserves a team name, which is to say that they have an identifiable "brand" and consistency, it probably is the BTSX crew, who frustratingly all go by their real names. get some cool ass dark nicknames, for god's sake, and get more spinning skull logos on your webpage while yer at it! =P

edit: i'd love to form a mapping crew for people making bizarre maps with a political/protesty sub-theme, high on story... sort of an antidote to all the current mods and mapsets arriving with "you are fight the monsters, lol!" written in the intermission texts - but I realise that 40oz's point is that such a group should be big on community, too, not just necessarily slaved to a founder's ideas, and that there's lots of language issues, terse/shy people (like me) the pervading 4chan-ness of the modern net and other barriers to overcome

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From my experience, I can't really collaborate with other level designers in a way that I would find comfortable. Which is why I kind of freaked out when you started a project where collaboration was mandatory. That hit a nerve with me and I started posting bad comments, so sorry for that. I actually think that you're doing a good thing by encouraging team effort, which we indeed lack nowadays.

Maybe it's wrong to diss some specific people for being introverted, but that doesn't mean that the overall problem doesn't exist. People indeed tend to be more secluded nowadays, and even when they act as a part of a group it often looks even uglier. Like when some drama begins on the forum, someone sends the link to their IRC buddies and then they all come to the thread uninvited and write same snarky comments like some kind of a hivemind. I dislike that so much.

Then there is the phenomenon of same commenters always giving same advice to all newcomers no matter what ("add more interconnectivity, play this highly acclaimed wad and then copy its gameplay ideas, remove this death trap because we collectively decided that they are inherently bad"), which makes the picture even worse, like Doomworld is a machine designed to turn all aspiring mappers into similar boring robots. Again, maybe you can't blame any of these commenters in particular, but that doesn't change the fact that the overall effects of their comments are kinda shitty.

I feel like my individuality as a mapper suffered quite a bit from reading Doomworld so much. Actually, there are some Memfis fans that frustrate me, because in some way their praise means that I'm still the same boring Doomworld-oriented mapper that just caters to the audience. I almost want these people to dislike my newly released maps, but yet again and again they say "I liked it" and I just get annoyed. But I won't give up. I swear that one day I'll manage to make a map that scifista will hate! He is like the final boss in my game of trying to get away from Doomworld-oriented mapping.

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Memfis said:

Like when some drama begins on the forum, someone sends the link to their IRC buddies and then they all come to the thread uninvited and write same snarky comments like some kind of a hivemind.

brb paging IRC to this thread

edit for serious reply:

I feel like my individuality as a mapper suffered quite a bit from reading Doomworld so much. Actually, there are some Memfis fans that frustrate me, because in some way their praise means that I'm still the same boring Doomworld-oriented mapper that just caters to the audience. I almost want these people to dislike my newly released maps, but yet again and again they say "I liked it" and I just get annoyed. But I won't give up. I swear that one day I'll manage to make a map that scifista will hate! He is like the final boss in my game of trying to get away from Doomworld-oriented mapping.

Isn't it possible, though, that this outcome could mean there's not really a fixed set of expectations that everything is expected to live up to? If you're trying to go against the qualities you see as cliche or typical and still receiving praise, doesn't that mean people are enjoying your maps for other reasons than their ability to fit into a mold you're consciously avoiding?

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No, I think it's because I'm very much stuck in this style and haven't yet managed to properly get out of it. I suck at getting out of my comfort zone. So far I'm only starting with adding unfair traps, confusing progression, obtuse mandatory secrets, non-family-friendly texture combinations, uncomfortable ammo balance and other good stuff to my maps. I need to do a lot more of this for it to work. I'm only starting to become a villain.

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With the number of community projects I've been in, seeing familiar names over the years, I tend to think of this forum as being a mapping team or perhaps club. We don't field the same squad every time, but there's a vague cohesion to the overall effort over time. This seems to be roughly how Team TNT worked, from what I can tell.

Annoyingly I feel myself relating somewhat to Memfis' view on things. Maybe we need a depression mapping team or something :p

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I would totally join Team Hipster even though I enjoy the "standard good doomworld megawads" just fine when I play them nowadays. I do agree that some more diversity in mapping could stand to be encouraged, which means getting rid of all the "this, this and this are things you never do, while this, this and this are things you should always strive for" mentality in level design advice/criticism. It's fine if there's a big group of like-minded people who've found their way to enjoy Doom the most, but others with minority tastes need to keep in mind that they should probably do what THEY themselves want, not what they think the majority of doom players wants.

That is not to say "never listen to criticism", of course, only that being critical about the criticism you receive is nice too.

Anyway, although I personally much prefer working alone, being part of a team does a good job of encouraging you to work more / faster / better. Plus it does feel nice to be a part of a group, at least to someone who isn't used to it. Contributing to "bedlam" and d2ino was fun.

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