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I understand how you feel and largely agree with you, but if I was the dev and read your comment, the only thing it'd do is make me not want to work on the game, nor engage with the community with how a lot of people tend to come off like that.

Again, I agree with what you're saying, but it's also wise to try and imagine how the developer might feel about what you're saying. I don't think MDN is employing the phone number thing because they want personal information to be given to a private company, they want to prevent ne'er-do-wells and trolls from coming into their Discord to say slurs and spam nonsense. Unfortunately, at the moment, the only real way to stop either is to require a phone number for every account.

Personally, I've just been doing other things. I haven't been engaging with VotV at all for a while. If you think a couple MONTHS is bad, wait to see how long it's been since an update for Viktor Strobovsky has been put out, or anything for UDA-Game. Unfortunately, this is kinda to be expected - the dev doesn't have the time, money, nor hands to fully flesh out what they want to do because they want to get it right. If anything, the amount of time that it's taken for all of these things to be released just ensures that they will be even more stable and functional when they're released.

Recently I've been engaging with Joseph Anderson's Youtube channel - his commentary on Fallout 76 speaks numbers to what I just mentioned. To sum it up, here's two options: Either you get a game that takes forever and is well-polished and insanely detailed BUT it takes forever, OR you get a game that's completely buggy, a total mess, BUT it's put out quickly.

Personally, with how the media landscape currently is, I'd prefer the slow and steady release-structure. 

If need be, you can find other games that are equally entertaining. Mike Klubnika is a dev you should check out; he made Buckshot Roulette, Fused 240, and some other games that have been released for free on Steam. He's very good, though I'd suggest either avoiding Fused 240 or going in with low expectations because it's insanely slow and can be very frustrating for others due to that fact - other than that, though, he's a really good storyteller and has a lot of neat ideas. (Light spoilers: The entire story for Fused 240, including the ending, is not happy, and that fits very well in line with the rest of the game. Arguably, it fits with a lot of his games. Most end up being semi-hellish.)

There's also Dominoid by DingDong, UDA Game by MDN, The Butterfly somewhere on the front page (that looks cool but I haven't checked it out), and lots of other totally free games on here that you can just as obsessed with as I am with MDN's games. (Personally I'm kinda frustrated because Advanced Education with Viktor Strobovsky may or may not be so un-optimized that there's a tiny chance it might've had a hand in killing my good computer. Also maybe not, maybe it's correlation and not causation, but it was sort of odd timing, hence why I didn't recommend it. AEwVS is also quite buggy and not fully functional, so that's another reason.)

I'm not trying to say that any of your criticisms are invalid, but (if you'll allow me to criticize you a little harshly) you need to consider the reasons for why things are the way they are. Most devs start making games and gradually find out that game development is not for them. Either it's tedious and time consuming, or it's that the community is very irritating to deal with, or there's some other reasons that I can't think of. I'm not trying to say that the people involved are blameless - there's a plentiful amount of times where game devs are objectively in the wrong, I'm just saying that there's a lot of reasons why things are the way that they are. 

Understanding that and moving on when you're frustrated with developers is also an important concept to get acquainted with on your part. Play some older games. I've been playing No Man's Sky recently, and I've been happy to discover that it's actually gotten pretty good since it first launched and I was disappointed - much like how you're frustrated with the slow development of this game. I know how you feel, and it's shitty, but you also need get used to how things are after a certain point. It's a part of growing up. (Also please note that I'm not trying to talk down to you or anything like that, it's just that your writing style reminds me of my own writing when I was younger, hence the "growing up" comment - remembering being young and assuming you are in my state when I was younger is something I do to humanize other people when responding to their comments so I don't come off too aggressively, because I've definitely done that before when it wasn't needed, so I'm trying to pull back on that a bit.)

Anyway, you should check out other games, especially if you're on Steam - there's lots on there as well, assuming you aren't aware of that. There's also lots of emulators and things like that for other (also older) games as well.

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ok lol

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Most of the games I've played over the past 5 years have primarily been older games I've been cycling through, mostly because they're what I enjoy (e.g. rn I'm replaying through the mario galaxy games). My problem doesn't lie with the current state of games, every game has hiccups, drama, etc. It's a natural part of development and that's fine. What's not fine is encouraging your community to fracture even more and actively derailing development by fostering online relationships with strangers 99.7% of the time you'll never meet in your entire life.

This takes a lot of strength to admit, but, I've played Roblox for half of my life. So many niche games go to shit over there because the dev's "MUST" have a discord. They simply "MUST". There is no alternative/other way to grow a community according to them. And every time that happens, development otherwise derails completely. I do not want the same to occur to this one because... WE just have to have a discord, OK! This tangent relates because the bar for creation on roblox is low, similar to indie games. (Tho I'm not implying that VoTV is a low quality product- Far from that, but the bar being so low means that whoever owns it is waaay more likely to be mentally unstable compared to "normal" games, speaking from experience)

I've stated this in a different reply, and in foresight could've added it to the original, but the comment is not targeted at the devs as people. It's at their continued usage of discord despite the companies/communities shady behavior. Ditch it completely, or search for alternatives and you'll live a better life, as simple as that.

(Also my writing style is bad because I actively re-read and change whatever sentence I'm writing like halfway through writing it. I've always been shit at english and that's not changing lol. I'm trying to stop engaging with social media tho because it just ends up biting me in the ass.)

Yeah, your reasons are understandable. Honestly I was going into the discussion assuming you were just hyper-focused on VotV for one reason or another, but if it's due to actual gripes about the platform itself rather than just "I want more updates", (hence the part where I was suggesting moving on to other games) then admittedly my addition of that part was unnecessary, so I'll admit that's my bad.

Unfortunately, all social media platforms are going to have some kind of criticism that can be levied against them - I find that the reasons can typically be justified, but at this point, I don't know how any "platform" can exist without some degree of criticism. I imagine that their usage of Discord once again comes back down to the team's ability to control the community that they are surrounded by - at least in some capacity. There's several methods of locking down the server if need be and there's the phone verification thing which weeds out a lot of trolls and ne'er-do-wells, so even these two methods might be good enough for the team to justify the continued use. I imagine there's also other methods of keeping things chill that I'm simply just not aware of, but I digress.

I am not aware of any platforms that are similar to Discord that have even a fraction of reach that it does, so I assume that's also a big part of it - I am presuming that they would want the updates to get out to as many as possible. That's a lot more speculation on my part than I've done previously in this thread, however, so of all the things I've expressed, take that one with the biggest grain of salt possible. (I don't actually know anything outside of what little information I gleam out of some streamers or people that might be "around" the community, so my speculating is not to be fully trusted, but I'm hoping throughout all of my posts that's kind of evident for one reason or another.)

Also, don't justify your writing style to me. It's your writing style, own it. If it's shit, it's your shit, not just any random garbage - be proud of the work you put into things, even if it's minor (like making long-ass paragraphs of text that very few people will ever read, for example). 

Anyway, I generally try to levy my criticisms with some padding, devs might not see the "original" comment I make, so if I just criticize without said padding, it might lead into misunderstandings or an eventually necessary stating of the padding, anyway. This also tends to lead into me repeating myself, which also leads to my particular writing style, but I figure half-measures are just work with half of the effort put in, so I might as well go all the way while I'm at it. With that said, now I'm moreso offering suggestions for what you might look to include when posting, rather than offering actual criticism, as I was previously - you haven't said anything especially egregious or outlandish in either of your posts. Either way, do as you will.