Insane Difficulty: Insane Difficulty

All the teams are in and we've begun playing out the actual fights between participants! You can check out the matches and their results as they are posted in the ID Youtube Channel and discuss them in the Tournament Thread. Big thanks to Crimson Avix, Stann, and FFTA for hosting the tournament!



Here's the first two matches:

Scope Creep, for those not familiar with the concept, is a project management term that refers to out of control changes or goals within the scope of a work plan.

You might ask yourself; what does a term from the project management world have to do with the mods we create here purely as a hobby?

Good question. The answer is simple: projects that people carry out on their spare time, such as game mods, are usually not restrained by deadlines, project managers, budgets, or similar constraints that lower the risk factor for professional business endeavors. Because of this, scope creep is a huge risk for modding projects.

From the Wikipedia article: Scope creep can be a result of:

• Poor change control
  
• Lack of proper initial identification of what is required to bring about the project objectives
  
• Weak project manager or executive sponsor
  
• Poor communication between parties

Insane Difficulty's modding projects have the advantage of already having a pre-defined goal in place for most games: Increasing the level of challenge for the player and making the gameplay experience more interesting overall. However, even on this site we face the problem of scope creep frequently.

Keep this in mind whenever you are working on a project that seems to have new goals added on a weekly basis, where no matter the amount of work you put in, the deadline never seems to get closer. Scope creep and lack of proper planning could be the thing keeping your project from being enjoyed by a lot of anxious players.

Here's the setup:

• DOTA2 is a competitive multiplayer game produced by Valve Corportation.
  
• DOTA2 has a large, passionate fan base.
  
• DOTA2 fans lovingly refer to Valve as "Volvo" in the style of bad-internet-grammar-humor.
  
• Last year, Valve established an exclusive Halloween event for DOTA2 called Diretide, where users could access Halloween-themed game modes, rewards, and in-game goodies.

Now here's what happened this year's Halloween in the DOTA2 world: Nothing. Fans became furious on the night of October 31st, when DOTA2 offered no Halloween content patch or any word on the status of the in-game holiday from Valve. A massive 400+ page, 4,000+ comment thread on the DOTA2 development feedback forums was created, with fans expressing their displeasure over Valve's lack of communication with the community. The news even made it to Forbes and a petition on Change.org was created.

The running text gag this year:

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE

After Valve did not answer their pleas for help, DOTA2 fans turned to the (obvious) next best thing, the actual Volvo Car company. Volvo's Facebook page was immediately invaded with ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE posts.

However, in an unexpected move, Volvo's official Twitter responded in a positive way to the invasion of their company Facebook page:






By recognizing Valve's DOTA2 fans and their outcries, Volvo might have just gotten themselves free advertising. What started out as completely misguided complaints could very well turn into DOTA2 players buying Volvo cars! To find out more about this year's DOTA2 Halloween drama, check out the Diretide/Halloween 2013 Event Withdrawal Thread over on the DOTA2 subreddit.

After several months in development, Brave New World 1.3.0 is now available for download!

• A complete overhaul of how stamina works to bring it more in line with the other stats
  
• A rewrite of the dialogue to remove gratuitous swearing and an optional "clean" patch
  
• Updated bonus/unlockable content for players who've beaten the mod
  
• Much, much more

Thanks to Stann and everyone who played through the beta and gave feedback.

Don't miss your chance to conquer your enemies by designing the sickest 360-no-scope team you can imagine! Registration is now open for the First Annual 1.3 AI Tourney. You have until November 13th at which time teams will become final for the remainder of the Tournament. Videos will be uploaded on the site's Youtube Channel!

Mega Man X, one of the SNES era's many master pieces, finally gets its own hard mod. Check out Hart Hunt's Mega Man X Hard Type project and play-test the first level! As always, we need your feedback, ideas, and suggestions to improve the project as it goes forward.

Check out JITD's awesome new Dark Souls Aggressive Mod! Changes include:

• No more invisible barriers blocking enemies.
  
• Enemies will notice you and walk towards you from long distances.
  
• Some npc's will follow you around, making it a little harder to keep some of them alive.

Advent and Emitai have taken on the daunting task of figuring out many of the unknown bytes in the Breath of Fire III ISO in order to design and create a new hard mod for the site! Breath of Fire III: Dragon Trial is now under development. If you have assets, ideas, or work to contribute to the project, let them know in the project's forum.