One year ago, we wrote a blog called Stitching Up Colony Survival, in regards to update 0.6.0. It contains this paragraph: "We feel like in the past two months, we removed and replaced multiple major organs. Last week, we celebrated successfully inserting the last organ. But the patient still lies on the operating table, with the body cut half open. This week, we've been working on stitching everything back together. Updating interfaces, cleaning things up and fixing the last problems." That's pretty much how we feel today, but instead of the 'surgery' lasting two months, it lasted a year. With airships / gliders now being present and functional, the last big new feature of 0.7.0 is done. That doesn't mean everything is ready for release. Plenty of things are okay for internal testing, but lack the polish required for public release. One example is the way to start multiple colonies. In the current testbuild, you can just walk up to any spot and click on it to place another banner which automatically contains a new "initial stockpile". That's too simple, and easy to exploit. What we're currently working on is a new item, which we'll name something like the "Colony Starter Package". This item has to be unlocked with the science system, and it's place in the tech tree will be behind matchlock guns. Once you've unlocked it, your colonists will have to craft a new Colony Starter Package. This will require at least all the resources that will appear in the stockpile at the start of the new colony. The Colony Starter Package will contain more items than merely the ones present in the stockpile of the very first colony. The first colony contains relatively few items, forcing players to learn about the new jobs and items step by step. That's useful for the first colony, but boring to repeat over and over again. That's why the Colony Starter Package will include quite a lot of basic materials, to quickly get later colonies up to speed. Our current goal is one Colony Starter Package. But we're pretty sure we'll add more variants later one. Perhaps even custom ones, designed by players themselves! Zun is keeping this in mind while programming the current system, trying to keep things future-proof.
Moderation in an Age of Censorship Yesterday was the birthday of our moderator, Vobbert! He's 27 years old now. Apart from nearly single-handedly managing Colony Survival's Discord and its over two thousands members, he has been a lifelong friend who has offered invaluable advice to me and Zun. If Zun and I disagree, which we do regularly, Vobbert is the one to cut the Gordian knot. This week, we had a serious discussion about moderating the Discord. We've got an amazing community that provides great insights and help in the development of Colony Survival, that in general needs little moderation. Most of the work consists out of giving people the "verified" rank, and sometimes pointing people to the appropriate channel. But there was a growing problem. The off-topic channel #not-so-serious received a large daily influx of memes. Some of them were absolutely hilarious, some of them were highly offensive and others were questionable. We often had to have a discussion whether a certain meme was acceptable or not. In general, we're strongly in favor of free speech. We've never removed criticism of Colony Survival anywhere, unless it contained explicit insults like "retard". We try to moderate our Discord, not by outright removing content, but by sending it to the right location. For example, we've got off-topic channels, and when users engage in off-topic chat in the #general channel we'll point them there. There has been an intense discussion about free speech outside of Colony Survival as well, this week. Facebook/Instagram banned "dangerous individuals" this week. Facebook said something about banning people who promote or engage in violence or hate. Hate is hard to pin down - should we ban people who hate nazis and homophobes? Recognizing calls to violence is a lot easier, and I'm pretty sure that Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos did not encourage their fanbase to engage in violence. We're very skeptical about large companies removing individuals from their platforms for vague reasons. As Lord Acton said: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority." So we had some pretty ironical discussions. On one hand, we were worried about the threat of large companies being able to remove anyone from online platforms just because they have an opinion that is disliked. On the other hand, we were thinking of the best way to remove offensive content from our Discord. In the end, we decided on this solution. We made a new off-topic channel called #memes. #Not-so-serious was renamed to #less-serious-no-memes, to clarify the change of rules. Slowmode is enabled in #memes, meaning users can only post one message or image per minute. This prevents spam and encourages players to post only their best content. We'll finetune these rules in the next few weeks. Slowmode can easily be set to a shorter or longer amount of time. We have to see how it works out. What scares us most about censorship is vagueness. Having unclear rules and sneakily removing content without properly stating the reasons for it just feels wrong. We're trying to do the opposite by writing about it in this blog. We'd like to have your input. What is it that annoys you the most online? Harmless opinions being removed by powerhungry corporations? Or tasteless trolls ruining the signal-to-noise ratio? Where's the line between a controversial opinion and hatespeech? Is "punch a nazi" a bannable call to violence? Is "punch a communist", "punch a socialist", "punch a liberal"? It might seem unrelated to Colony Survival, but these are the decisions we have to make when judging content on the Discord. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord