Run this by me again?

I may not have lurked in this part of the forum as much as the others, (as proven by my extremely deadbeat Gomez request) but don't take offense when I ask what this part of the forum is made to accomplish. Like, are we trying to decide who else should be in Crusade? And if that's the case, who makes the cut? The top 5? 10? Only the winner? Or perhaps it's literally suggestions that will be taken for consideration later.

Even if these character polls do come to a close, what does that mean? I would assume they'd be bundled with the very, very last release of this game, but that may just be me. I know we already have around 7 or so characters anticipated for .9, but what after that? I don't assume the rest of the characters in Crusade will be taken straight from the poll, right?

I think I understand why the Suggestion Poll was made, but how much will it actually affect Crusade?

I think was back when "CrusaDLC" was 100% going to be a thing, which may or may not still happen. It'd basically be who the public is interested in to see, then over time the devs would maybe make them and then include them as free DLC for the game. I always thought it was pointless because you can just update the game with them rather than downloading them.

Nowadays I think its more for who the public wants to see and that may or may not have an impact on the actual roster, but I have no idea.

See, that's a cool idea and all, but the process of counting each vote and inactive member sounds like a pretty laborious chore for SK and whoever else dictates the poll. Especially for something that's just "for fun".

I still have some faith in poll, and would love to see some of these fan favorites come through, but I'd be pretty concerned if I saw Wreck-It Ralph land in the roster before 2016.

I do have a feeling that the poll will be shut down eventually, if not very soon. Every time it is updated, we lose more votes than we gain, basically slowly but surely dwindling the number of votes that actually matter, until the 11 people that are active here are the only ones who have votes left.

I think that if we were to do something like this again, we'd need to use Facebook and not the forum. There's a ton more people there than here.

I'll run a brief history of this concept as well as explain what it currently does.


3 years ago, the Crusade forums use to be under Proboards. The current forum we are in now is under Forumotion. Between 2008 - 2011, Crusade was developed by the Rentz Bros. (Falcon8r, Dr.MarioX, & PhantomVII). Though their roster was private like it is now, Dr.MarioX had a habit of hinting and spoiling the roster. The results of the roster were unpleasant for those who were actively part of the community cause it consist of unpopular choices for the roster.

There was a raging community between the fans and the Rentz Bros. (specifically Dr.MarioX & PhantomVII). This eventually formed the Alliance (Det, myself, GoldenYuiitusin, etc). Between all the fiasco, GigaPichu who was new to the forum agreed to sprite Ridley, who was one of the characters spoiled by Dr.MarioX. Due to Giga's work-ethics and non-involvement with the drama, he became the 1st person to join the development team that wasn't part of the Rentz family.

With Giga's involvement with the development team and Dettadeus being a moderator to the forum, this helped established CrusaDLC. This idea was made so that the Rentz can keep the roster the way they like it, while DLC will have 10 or so characters of the fan's choosing.

After Crusade 0.7 demo in 2011, the Rentz Bros. lost interest in the project and passed Crusade over to Dettadeus. This change also brought us this very forum your in now. Along with Crusade, the idea of CrusaDLC was brought along with it. CrusaDLC was kept alive through Dettadeus through most of 2011, responsibilities were then passed to GoldenYuiitusin through 2012 back when he was still a forum administrator, and eventually passed down to me until present day.

The CrusaDLC Poll has seen many revamps due to people cheating on their votes. Alternate accounts were being made to vote twice for example. I eventually revamped the poll so that cheating wouldn't be an option. This does however meant that I had to manually add the votes.

Due to the idea of having DLC as an option when the roster itself is always open for changes, the current development team canceled CrusaDLC and revamped it once more to be called the Suggestion Poll.

The idea of Suggestion Poll is this. The poll itself, regardless of rankings, doesn't confirm nothing but what the fans demand. The purpose of this poll is no different from a popularity poll. Developers every now and then have a roster debate. The devs at times will look at the suggestion poll to see if that specific character has support within the fanbase. Mind you though that just because a character is in 1st place, doesn't mean that the character is on the roster. Reason for that is because this poll only confirms popularity within the Crusade fanbase. Other factors can get in the way of a character not making it to the roster. Things like lack of originality, no unique playstyle, too many reps, etc. This poll is only to support how popular the character is to the Crusade fans and nothing more. Yes, this poll to a degree can have a big influence on who the devs add to the roster, but it is not the only factor.

Unfortunately, there has been an issue with this poll.

As the forum activity has died out, so has the poll activity. When I revamped this poll back in December 2013, we had 110 - 120 registered voters at its peak when we started. 8 months later, the registered voters had dropped down to 59 registered voters. We lost more than 50% of our voters in 3/4 of a year. Every now and then we would get like 3 new voters, but in exchange, we lose like 10. I use to update the poll weekly, sometimes twice a week cause it was soo active. Now, I update it every month or two cause there is little to no participation.

There is a 6 month trial for all registered voters. The reason for that is cause we had characters on the poll that were extremely high in the rankings because they had vote from voters that participated a year ago, but never returned. Ask yourself this. Why is it fair for an active forum member to not see his favorite character up in the rankings because 10 people who haven't even bothered to log on for over a year voted for the one that is winning? In other words, to keep your votes intact, you just have to log on to the forum.

If you have any further questions, I am more than willing to answer them in all details.

Smash King wrote:

After Crusade 0.7 demo in 2011, the Rentz Bros. lost interest in the project and passed Crusade over to Dettadeus. This change also brought us this very forum your in now. Along with Crusade, the idea of CrusaDLC was brought along with it. CrusaDLC was kept alive through Dettadeus through most of 2011, responsibilities were then passed to GoldenYuiitusin through 2012 back when he was still a forum administrator, and eventually passed down to me until present day.

If you have any further questions, I am more than willing to answer them in all details.  

Unrelated question: why did the Rentz Bros lose interest for crusade?

And about the suggestion poll, yeah, it's kind unfair, as you said, your votes literally fly to the ground when voters don't come back to keep their votes alive, so it's kinda sad how it's going. But even if they did come back, there wouldn't be probably anyone that would vote. And, even if the suggestion poll was to survive, it doesn't make, let's say Zero, a playable character, right? As you said, it just makes them popular, not real crusade PLAYABLE characters

I would love to see all those characters to get in, but it's a ton of job, so it's understandable why you guys don't make it a 100% sure thing

As for why the Rentz left, they simply outgrew Crusade. Falcon8r finished college, got a job far from home, and got engaged. Dr.MarioX is now making fanmade films with friends. I'm guessing he is on pursuit to be an independent movie director. Not sure what PhantomVII is up to these days, but he wasn't as heavily involved with the project as much as his brothers were other than gfx. So as the one who directly contributed the least, it was expected he would go, especially with the frustrations Crusade went once it was passed down to us.

Yea, this is pretty much a popularity poll at this point may effect some of the dev's decision on the roster depending on the circumstances.

Smash King wrote:

As for why the Rentz left, they simply outgrew Crusade. Falcon8r finished college, got a job far from home, and got engaged. Dr.MarioX is now making fanmade films with friends. I'm guessing he is on pursuit to be an independent movie director. Not sure what PhantomVII is up to these days, but he wasn't as heavily involved with the project as much as his brothers were other than gfx. So as the one who directly contributed the least, it was expected he would go, especially with the frustrations Crusade went once it was passed down to us.

Yea, this is pretty much a popularity poll at this point may effect some of the dev's decision on the roster depending on the circumstances.

Well, that i did know that there was going to be new devs for Crusade at 0.7, but i did not know why such change was made, so, thanks, SK, for telling me the story.

The game being passed down was the best thing that ever happened to it. Granted, Falcon did a very good job as an essentially one-man team, but the other 2 siblings would not allow capable people to contribute. When Det recieved ownership of the game, Jaklub was the main coder and giga the main spriter and the team was unrestricted by Phantom's bad choices/taste. The rest is well known history.