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Pic0o

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I want this to be short, yet more detailed than a tweet or lost in a string of them.  I have to say there is an issue with contributing to a public project, that is when you are eternally expected to maintain said thing.  Especially with no compensation or expectation of support timeline.  I know that can sound rude, but the context I am especially honing in on, is stuff like game mods or application support by a person or community, that the OEM / vendor ignored.

There comes a point when if you want to improve something or add features to it, you need to roll up your sleeves and figure it out yourself, instead of ranting on reddit for someone who did a kind deed of the original contribution, to somehow become the permanent dev to your whim.  This applies to games as well, because it seems like smaller developers get bombarded with this syndrome, while a major game studio just gets a shrug and 'oh that's the best we will get from them' replies from the same people making outlandish demands from the smaller developers and studios.

Sharing another story, I know a person who wrote a Gamefaqs guide and still had people emailing for intricate details about a thing, 9 years later.  I'm sorry (but not really sorry), people probably moved onto other projects, especially in that span of time.  It seems like if you give a huge effort, you are presumed to own it forever.  Don't get me wrong, kind people do pick up the torch on projects and move forward, but the issue of insane expectations is a real thing.

If you can ask the question and understand the basic of how something works, if you apply some effort into research and working out the problem, you can likely contribute, if not completely solve the issue itself.  I feel many people get burnt out trying to contribute to communities for reasons like this.  Throwing in a video game trope; when I played Final Fantasy XI heavily, many of the newer members always showed up for the leet boss fights, but were never to be seen or magically went afk, when the core team was farming triggers (items required to actually fight the leet bosses), because the trigger part takes time and does not directly lead to an immediate reward.

That ends my rant.  Please be courteous of people who produce content and products to help others.  Donate them some loot for good work, if you want to help debugging and giving feature requests, do not write snarky comments about how dumb they are for omitting your favorite feature.  Especially because it may already be there, you just didn't see it or it has another name for that flag option.
I don't know about you, but working a day job, upkeeping around the home, finding time to spend with friends and family, getting some recreational and sleep, can be a struggle.  Especially when day job requires after-hours maintenance.  Please be cool to others.  If someone is releasing a tool or something cool, remember they are people too, or at least some sort of advanced AI that probably has some feeling registers too.

Let's try to avoid pushing people to burn out faster.  It's hard enough to avoid without the crowd heckling that can be this social media age.  Thanks for reading and visiting :)

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