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by wulfeet 855 days ago
I had my first negative experience contributing to open source with Mana World.

I thought that there were too few quests, so I wanted to add some. I was struggling compile code or getting the server to run or something like that. When I asked for help in the forum, I got a rude response mocking my technical abilities. It was completely demoralising and I stopped trying to make more quests.

For years, that was my last experience with contributing to open source.

4 comments

I had similar experience with TMW. Tried to contribute with a new system in the game, made proposals and first draft implementation. I had 10 years of professional AAA gamedev at the time... I was mocked and kinda bullied.

Never looked back to this project, but explains why this project is basically stuck at the same place as before.

In any case, I didn't let this bad experience affect my passion for foss and I continued contributing to more welcoming and successful projects.

Did you find any games to contribute to?
Not really. Hard to find any decent open source game unfortunately, but also lost interest in using my day job also as a hobby and focused on other kind of software to help when possible.
If you wanna give it a another shot and you like Zelda, check out my profile. We'll be kinder.
No OP but I enjoyed contributing to Minetest!
Welp, glad I didn't go through with trying to contribute to TMW. That's disappointing to hear. I've had a much better experience trying to build my own MMO engine instead.
hurt people hurt people. destruction is linear but fast. creation is slow but exponential.

I hope you found a better culture by now! It makes all the difference. I used to hate trolls but now I just empathize and pity them.

Interesting I always viewed it as creation is sigmoidal and destruction is superexponential.
my first open source experience was thinking i knew better than the mana world devs about something and just screwing things up. i dont blame them for being standoff-ish as the internet is full of teens who got up one day and said "i could build my own MMORPG. how hard could it be?"

i have my own reasons for avoiding open source (ask me about them!) but i hope your experiences got better