I don’t need advice from Orson Scott Card.
You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
71–80 of 100 posts
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built. Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good. Rome 2 total war (divide et impera) Empire at war (thrawns revenge)…
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description. Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI w…
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#73Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description. Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI w…
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision. Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judg…
>Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Translation: You have decided to move to cherry picking. Got it.
>Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind.
If the developers cant do what you suggest while being profitable, then it isn't a sustainable path for them to take is it?
>You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff.
No I judged it by the average quality of output of the kitchen staff.
>Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement.
Modders do a lot of stuff. As a category their output is starkly below average.
>Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
No about 100 hours out of those millions are probably worth anything.
>The wide audience argument is the death of art.
No it really isnt. You are presuming "Widest Possible" audience which would be. But I was only talking wider than the audience for any particular mod. Which is roughly a good spot for art and roughly where games have been for decades.
>grey sludge you are currently defending
You just seem so mad now you cant even articulate an argument without using the standard slurs from slop youtube reviews.
>You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint.
You mistake a couple of nuggets for a mountain of gold lmao. Regardless of the shit they lie in.
>You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets.
Some shit you just made up. Yawn.
>Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
And now you seek to gatekeep a discussion you aren't even fit to partake in yourself. Boring. Go and goon in peace.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#75As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it. "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback. If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right!…
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback. smells like LLM
> Smells like LLM
Smells like not adding value to the discussion.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description. Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI w…
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Bethesda does have sort of a weird hangup on that front, at least since Daggerfall where you could disrobe the characters.
Bethesda has quite a unique approach to everything. Its almost a joke at this point where most of their negative reviews are demanding more content after 300 hours of gameplay. I knew a guy who bought Oblivion at launch and played it for 2 weeks straight before declaring it trash. I would like Bethesda staff in general to get high and make weirder games like they used to, but at the same time, a lot of people are screaming at them to become like every other modern RPG which is not going to improve them at all.
Its clear they could get away with more sex thanks to games like Witcher, but i think they think it would require making more elements of the world fixed and detailed, where they like to spread their attention further to less depth.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone and their LLM is flooding them with slop every day, it's no wonder it's hard to get any feedback whatsoever. And even if you do get selected, you may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following. If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in. I mean, it was al…
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Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of the infamous Sid Sheinberg memo to Steven Speilberg and Bob Zemeckis on changing the title of “Back to the Future”. https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during... “Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
I would never have gone to see a spaceman from Pluto.
Based on how “Pluto Nash” performed: that’s a deeply and widely held sentiment.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure how this is "sound advice". Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts". For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the…
And he's clearly not talking about scientific journeys. Glad he didn't ask how HN thought before he posted this :)
Similar holds for literature. Not taking advice in general as a rule is stupid new age shit.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#80Feel the could be _some_ survivor bias. It seems plausible that multiple Hugo and Nebula award wining best selling author's may need feedback less then the average writer?