Recently there have been a number of changes or ‘clarifications’ to rules for the City Plan Contest. Although I am sure they are well-intended and have reasons driving them, the nature of changes is that they have consequences - sometimes unintended ones. Given that these changes are not announced in advance, any impacts not foreseen by the CPC team must be raised after the fact.
At this time we don’t seem to have a good spot in which it is safe to discuss these. As an example of what I mean, a recent discussion regarding the change to only allow unedited, single-take tour videos in one of the builders discord’s brought up concerns about not being able to show some of the advanced SS2 city plan features that are enabled through the Creation Kit. Examples used included the faction-specific monuments at existing Bunker Hill plans, or the quest-completion-sensitive museum at the ROTC Longfellows Cabin build - both of which would be impossible to show under the new rules, as they would have to either be shown via spliced-together video takes, audio voice-over, or text captioning.
Instead of having a discussion on how it could be handled, a new post was suddenly dropped into the CPC forum rules thread entirely banning the use of advanced features for city plans.
If we cannot have advanced notice to discuss these changes before they come into effect, where can we safely discuss these after the fact? Right now it feels like any attempt to discuss these risks angry knee jerk reactions that simply drop further restrictions in place instead of addressing the perhaps unintended impacts constructively.
At this time we don’t seem to have a good spot in which it is safe to discuss these. As an example of what I mean, a recent discussion regarding the change to only allow unedited, single-take tour videos in one of the builders discord’s brought up concerns about not being able to show some of the advanced SS2 city plan features that are enabled through the Creation Kit. Examples used included the faction-specific monuments at existing Bunker Hill plans, or the quest-completion-sensitive museum at the ROTC Longfellows Cabin build - both of which would be impossible to show under the new rules, as they would have to either be shown via spliced-together video takes, audio voice-over, or text captioning.
Instead of having a discussion on how it could be handled, a new post was suddenly dropped into the CPC forum rules thread entirely banning the use of advanced features for city plans.
If we cannot have advanced notice to discuss these changes before they come into effect, where can we safely discuss these after the fact? Right now it feels like any attempt to discuss these risks angry knee jerk reactions that simply drop further restrictions in place instead of addressing the perhaps unintended impacts constructively.
