I am noticing a trend in the developer help section, as usual. While it is not my place to judge, I have noted a few things.
1. My left shift key seems to be breaking. I am sad; that is my main shift key. It's the one I use when I wish to effectively turn on caps lock.
2. You ever notice that when someone just joins the community, they either genuinely try to make a game, or they fish around looking for "help" in the form of lines in dm? "I learn by looking at other code" yet they go off to copy and paste? I've already made my rant on that topic, I just like bringing it up because it gets my rant juices flowing.
3. Dozens of posts by the same person within a 24 hour timeframe.
Look, I'm not perfect, and when I work, you better believe I feel the harsh reality more than usual. You better believe when I am ditched by my potential mate for some Philosophy major I feel worse than how creationists feel when they realize Jesus was lying to them about the Earth being 6000 years old. But when you hit a roadblock in your code, you don't hop on, "Welp. That's that. Doesn't work like I want it to. Better call in the rest of BYOND." No, you try to fix it.
I don't fault these people entirely for it, but it does get my goat when one problem is fixed and they wait 10 minutes to post another. And it's not because I hate seeing spam. It's because I hate to see what I call "The Un-Gamer Mindset" flying around.
Artemis, what do you mean, "The Un-Gamer Mindset?"
I mean this. When people buy strategy guides for games because "they're stuck." Maybe it's just the sarcastic jerk in me, but I don't think these people are stuck. I think they're just lazy. "Oh, I'm stuck in the water temple. I need a strategy guide." "Oh, I can't get to this gym leader because every step I take past a certain point makes me fall back to the start. I need a strategy guide." "Oh, I got stuck in the lost forest again. I better call up that strategy guide."
When I was your age, I went back to the first floor of the water temple (annoying POS) and walked through the entire temple again. I played Castlevania, and I watched my opponent's moves so I could learn to defeat them instead of running in swinging (also useful in one of the Zelda games, the one where you gotta bounce seeds off a wall?).
Maybe I hold people to better standards. When I'm stuck on my physics problems, I don't run to my professor crying, looking for the answer. And my professor makes sure that people don't do that either. He always asks, "What did you try?" and if your tries don't satisfy his expectations, he turns you back.
I'm not perfect, more often than not, Stephen or RobertBanks has walked me through learning to debug your code rather than try to analyze the logic alone (which I am happy to say I have gotten the hang of). But I say this. I try to fix problems before coming here. I pore over my code for hours, trying several approaches before I finally say, "That's it. Time to call the ER." And that's a mentality I wish to see inspired in other people. Instead of running to the ER with your tiny papercut, consider the people with broken femurs.
ID:539589
 Mar 17 2012, 5:47 pm
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Something that should be noted is that a lot of the people just starting are children, between 10 and 14 years old, who have been told their whole life to ask questions if they're confused and have had the luxury of the internet.
I don't know how old you are, but when I played OoT(I was but a wee lad at the time), we didn't have internet. If we wanted help, we had to call the number on the back of the box and pay $2/minute to have someone read out hints and tips for whatever we had trouble with, so just getting help wasn't an option. These days it's a perfectly valid option, and I know I would have loved to have regular access to a forum like this when I was learning to program, a feat I accomplished mostly offline via the built in DM reference(we had dial-up and I wasn't allowed on the internet very often back then).
I would have to say a bigger issue is with how people receive help. When these kids run to the forums, they don't get help, they get a block of code that does pretty much exactly what they asked for to copy/paste because no one really wants to deal with explaining things to them in detail. On the rare occasions that they do go to the trouble, the kids just whine about not receiving code until someone gives it to them(further reinforcing the general desire to not bother going into detail).