I wonder if it makes sense for all the included mansions to be available from the forum in the same way or similar to how Trigger Island and The Caves and the Castle now are. I realize that these mansions were always custom mansions, but it might allow issues such as these to be resolved quicker.

Now... I realize this would be flawed, since they would have to be played as Custom mansions and the high score wouldn't be counted until the updates could be included in a game update, but it would be a way getting the changes out quicker. It could be that after one issue is resolved there might be others (hopefully not...). This could be handled more effectively through the forum, and it would potentially minimize game updates.

I think it would also be a more natural way of separating feedback for each mansion. Just a thought...

Rob, the included mansions will never be available from the forums because those are mansions that people pay Actionsoft for playing.  The custom mansions in MM2 are more like a bonus.  Vern has agreed that they can be downloaded from the forums (and thus might be updated quicker than the included mansions).

We have a separated feedback (boards) for the custom mansions but not the included ones.  The reason for this is mainly historical.  When Vern put up this forum there had already been two older MM forums, where the included MM1 mansions had been discussed in details.  So when Freddy and I started administrating this forum we quickly realised that there was much more need for separate boards for the custom mansions than the included ones.  I would not be surprised if in a years time from now we would have about 30-40 custom MM2 mansions but "only" the same amount of included mansions.

brell wrote on 09.09.2010 at 07:09:38:

Rob, the included mansions will never be available from the forums because those are mansions that people pay Actionsoft for playing.  The custom mansions in MM2 are more like a bonus.  Vern has agreed that they can be downloaded from the forums (and thus might be updated quicker than the included mansions).

Seems reasonable I suppose, though technically, you need the game engine which you pay for to really play the mansions, especially given some of the changes from MM1 to MM2. Perhaps modifications could be made to make them run under MM1, but it probably wouldn't be easy, and they would still require substantial effort to adapt, to the point where you'd wonder why someone would even bother given the already low price. 

I realize that this may not always be the case in the future with other expansions that don't feature many changes to the game.

As for the custom mansions... I fully expect that over time the custom mansions will vastly outnumber the included mansions as has happened for MM1 (why should it be any different?), and I'm a little puzzled over why that should really matter. Comments from those custom mansions are already separate from the Included mansions.  I was just thinking that there could still be some value from easily separating out the comments for each Included mansion, though it won't be evident early on.  That value only increases over time as posts and topics increase. Ultimately, I'd never expect it to compete with the posts for custom mansions.

I didn't *really* expect my original post to change the status quo, but it didn't seem unreasonable to me. Still doesn't. Thanks for creating a new topic by the way... it's what I should have done originally.

It doesn't matter to me from a financial standpoint if the included mansions are on the forums... As Rob points out, you'd need the MM2 engine to play them.

Rather, the reason for not putting them on the forums is it just seems sloppy to me... it'd be harder to know if you were "current" and try to collect the latest version of all the mansions. I do updates fairly quickly when mansion bugs are found. And while there might be a lot of updates initially, I expect that'll die down as the mansions get tested more, game bugs get resolved, and things become pretty solid.