Cav's Place

Finding a gaming system that most computer gamers have likely never heard of before and using it is a risk and a challenge, but also a big opportunity, because you can address the issues some gamers have with the most popular systems, most notably Dungeons and Dragons, while sticking to a tried and true recipe and therefore reducing the risk of running into the inherent problems of developing an entirely new system yourself. When you attempt something like this, you need to explain the system very well and implement it in an appealing game, one likely to create fond memories that will draw players to future games using the same system, because otherwise you run the risk of making a good number of them stay away from any such future games without even giving them a chance. And the gaming system itself needs to be a good one as well, of course.

Fortunately, the gaming system itself truly shines. It was my very first contact with it and I have to say I was quite impressed. It’s quite complex and also, if I may use the term, pretty elegant due to how skills and attributes are connected. Not to mention that you can use your accumulated experience to gradually improve almost constantly, without needing to do it in leaps and bounds only when you level up. It is also somewhere in between more typical computer gaming systems and Dungeons and Dragons when it comes to the importance of random chance. I still prefer the systems that make predicting the exact effects of an action according to the character’s attributes and skills pretty straightforward, but this still seems somewhat better than the highly randomized nature of Dungeons and Dragons.
Unfortunately, however, the developers didn’t seem to keep in mind the fact that for many people this was likely to be the first contact with this particular gaming system. Perhaps they tried to make it appear more accessible by getting rid of more in-depth information, but I really don’t think that’s the right approach. Reading the manual before starting to play is a must, but even so I was still left wondering whose rear end was the game pulling some of those numbers out of. The console isn’t particularly helpful in that regard either, as it seems to have been designed with the same idea in mind and is therefore unlikely to provide the player with all the required details. Plus that in-game information regarding the maximum level for each talent according to the character’s current attributes should have been provided so players won’t need to check the manual if they forget how that’s calculated whenever they want to plan ahead, and being told what the maximum value each character can have for each attribute would have helped as well.

The game’s story is somewhat different from what you usually see, because you’re not one chosen from birth, or aware of some great destiny, nor are you the random stranger who happens to decide to save the world. You start on a personal quest, which will actually only be completed in the second half of the game, and happen to get involved in something along the way that will later prove to be far greater. The main quest develops in several stages, giving you a reason to be where you are at pretty much every moment of the game, that reason really becoming “to save the world” only towards the end. I’m not saying the plot design should win any prizes, because it has few notable moments and plenty of rather weak or somewhat unclear ones, not to mention a really disappointing ending, but it should be noted that they tried.
Your companions’ little quips are one thing I have no complaints about, however. They’re often quite appropriate, give you a sense of their personalities and can sometimes even point out some things you could otherwise have missed. At times I was really sorry I couldn’t take them all along wherever I went just so I could hear what each of them had to say. The voice acting is also quite good for them and any NPCs that have a lot to say, though it becomes poor for the others, who generally only have their first line voiced anyway. The bad thing about your companions, however, is that there’s no point in actually talking to them more than once, or twice for those you get early on, because they won’t have anything new to say. And Jost stands out in a bad way because his story seems to imply a personal quest but there will be no such thing during the game.

Moving on to the combat system, I have to say that, while it’s generally functional, it can be really frustrating at times. The most notable problems are the fact that everyone moves around to reposition themselves pretty much whenever anyone either joins the fight or dies, potentially destroying your tactics, and that, while this doesn’t happen too often, there are times when characters just sit there, refusing to attack because they can’t find a good path to the enemy or even refusing to cast spells for no apparent reason. Some sort of adjustable AI could have helped as well, so you could, for example, set your party members to automatically use strong special attacks whenever they can against tough enemies unless you tell them otherwise or to focus on a single enemy, such as the strongest, the weakest or the one attacking a certain character, instead of needing you to make them focus once again after every kill because they tend to spread out, with each picking a different fight. The lack of that AI isn’t that much of a problem for someone who likes micromanagement as much as I do, but I’m just saying it would have helped quite a lot.
Another relatively minor reason for annoyance would be the graphics. Sure, they look really nice from a distance, but they can break down somewhat if you look closely. That would certainly be no problem in itself from my point of view, but it becomes one when it seems that the system requirements are too high for what it offers. Those high requirements may well be directly connected to the insane amount of bloom, which made me rub my eyes on more than one occasion, thinking my vision was getting cloudy… Also, while I’m talking about the system requirements, I should also mention the pretty long loading times…
And, while in a way it makes sense, I could also list the available equipment under minor annoyances. There are things you’ll be able to purchase or otherwise obtain as soon as you gain access to the Ducal Citadel that you’ll likely be using until the end of the game. In fact, you’ll only be able to purchase better equipment in two places: Tallon and Murolosh, and even then the differences will be minor. Not to mention that the best armor you can find in Murolosh can only be worn by dwarves, pretty much forcing you to take Forgrimm with you until the end of the game, because he’s the only one who can use the best pieces of equipment. Weapons aren’t that different either, with arguably the best rapier and staff of the game being obtained in Moorbridge, which is the very first area you’re sent to as part of the Dragon Quest, and a two-handed axe that’s better than anything you’ll be able to get your hands on until Murolosh being obtained in the Blood Mountains, which is the second Dragon Quest area. And the fact that the Armor of Fire gets turned into a single suit once you gather all the pieces isn’t exactly pleasant either, because it no longer allows you to mix and match parts of it with other pieces of equipment that could perhaps be more useful for your chosen character class.

But this game’s major problems are exactly two, with the one that will plague you from the very first moment to the last being your characters’ slow running speed. Coupled with the lack of any mounts or means of teleporting, that turns going from one end of a map to another, which you’ll need to do quite often, into a very tedious and time-consuming task. While a slow jog would seem like a realistic running speed for someone in heavy armor, implementing it in a game is nothing but annoying and a serious design flaw. Not to mention that you’re not too likely to have more than two characters in heavy armor at any one moment, and possibly just one.
The other problem is that most areas only get unlocked when a quest sends you there and then get locked again once you complete that quest. That’s right: Once you complete the main quest in an area and exit that area, you can never go back! If there were any other quests there that you hadn’t finished yet or if you wanted to purchase or otherwise obtain something but didn’t before leaving, tough luck. The only exceptions to this rule are Ferdok, Tallon and Murolosh. Though you’ll bump into several NPCs in more than one location, meaning that they advance through the story as well and therefore certain areas could end up looking quite deserted if they’d still be accessible, there really is no excuse for something like this and I therefore consider this to be the game’s biggest flaw.

If you glance over my review, you’ll see that I listed a few good things and many more bad ones. Does that mean this is a bad game? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. Personally, seeing as I’m very interested in what goes on “under the hood” and usually have a couple of gaming system concepts running through my mind at any one time, the complex yet elegant character development system got me quite hooked, while my penchant for micromanagement meant that I wasn’t really bothered by the combat issues I mentioned above, mainly just making note of them in order to properly write this review. Otherwise, I learned to more or less ignore the loading times, made sure I finished everything before an area would get locked and generally found ways to put up with every annoyance, with the possible exception of the slow running speed, without significant problems.
In the end I can say that, while I found certain things frustrating, a couple of them very much so, I still thought it was a reasonably good game overall. It’s just so disappointing to recognize its true potential and imagine how great it could have been if the developers wouldn’t have insisted on “compensating” for every good feature by intentionally implementing at least one really bad one!

As the Kepler team is bent on secrecy, at one point even attempting to obtain approval not to release any information until the primary mission finishes, which is scheduled for the end of 2012, we can only be thankful for such slips that can shed just a little bit more light on their finds. Sure, they released something, but that’s just raw data about 306 of the 706 planet candidates they had at the time, which may be interesting for very dedicated amateur astronomers but otherwise doesn’t count for much unless others would be able to follow up on that set of data, which would require plenty of time on good enough telescopes, and that is in very short supply.
So I’m quite pleased that such a piece of information came out, no matter how it did, though the people involved most certainly are not. We’re basically just talking about a single slide, which is questionable in itself, but it is nevertheless an update. I would like it very much if they’d take this as a cue to be more open and release information as soon as it becomes available, therefore also being able to properly explain what that information means and how it should be taken, but fear they’ll unfortunately go the opposite way, becoming even more guarded and erecting more safeguards in order to prevent even such slips from happening again…

I looked for and watched that speech after a notice stating that the team was working hard on responding to the reactions caused by it, but before reading what the fuss was actually about. What I can say is that, while the guy is certainly not the best person to give speeches, the confusion wasn’t really his fault. In fact, I wasn’t sure what they were supposed to be busy responding to at the time I finished watching his speech, so I then had to look for other articles in order to figure out what the misunderstanding was. Sure, he said “Earth-like” a number of times, but he was obviously referring to data regarding the size of planets, so the thought of taking that term as meaning “habitable” didn’t cross my mind for even a single moment. In fact, the terms used for comparison were listed under the sizes on that chart, with “like Earth” being clearly defined as “having a radius less than twice that of Earth”.
Yet he still came under fire and likely had to pay more of a price than we’re led to believe for what is in fact a misunderstanding generated and propagated by others. I’m sure the main culprits are some tabloids that thought it’d make a nice headline to say there are so many planets just like Earth, likely pretending to misunderstand on purpose, just to make it sound more interesting, which is what such publications usually do. But he had to publish a statement meant to clarify the matter and probably had to face various sanctions as well, not to mention the mistrust of his colleagues from now on, who will likely keep blaming him for… Well, for the fact that they didn’t make that data public sooner and in a more “official” and organized manner, which would have allowed them to explain it better as well.

Yet, as I said before, that slide is pretty questionable in itself, because it lists a total of 1160 planet candidates at the top, but if you estimate the number of planets in each category according to the bar sizes and the numbers listed on the left you only get to a total of about 270, even lower than the 306 covered in a paper analyzing the candidates about which data has been released last month. That seems to suggest either that the numbers are wrong or that the slide is based only on a specific selection of planet candidates, both of these significantly reducing the credibility and relevance of the information offered.
But, if correct, that single slide does provide a fair bit of additional information, starting with that number at the top, which appears to suggest that about 454 new candidates have been taken into consideration in the few weeks between the official release of data and this speech. That number could perhaps be reduced to about 300 if the total includes the roughly 150 candidates that are mentioned in the paper as being known at the time of the release but labeled as likely to be false positives and therefore not included in the count, but it’s a significant increase even so. Yet the most significant piece of information is just the size distribution displayed, which contradicts the paper mentioned above, which indeed stated that most planet candidates had a radius no more than four times that of Earth but listed those with a radius two to four times that of Earth as clearly outnumbering the smaller ones. The paper clearly stated that only candidates with a radius at least 25% larger than Earth’s were included in the data that was made public, even though smaller ones have been detected, so it’s easy to assume that the percentage of small planet candidates detected is significantly greater than what the release suggests, but this is the first time that assumption is confirmed in any way, which is a major development!
(Interestingly, that paper is somewhat questionable as well. The first reason is that apparently they did away with the three transit requirement, listing promising candidates after only two transits, though I can’t quite understand what can be so promising about two similar dips in a star’s brightness coming at apparently random intervals. The second reason is that there are at least 12 planet candidates that shouldn’t be there even if you only count two transits, meaning a single full orbit, because the data covers 43 days of observations and those ten have estimated orbital periods longer than that. Even if we’re to assume that the first transit happened during the first moments of observation, the four with the longest periods couldn’t have even covered half their orbits during that time, as we’re talking about estimates of roughly 87, 119, 207 and a staggering 10389 days, respectively, so not even the infinitesimal dip in brightness that may be noticed when a planet is directly behind a star could have possibly been observed and taken as confirmation in those cases. I really don’t see how a single dip in a star’s brightness can be considered a planet candidate, nor how can one claim to reliably estimate that potential planet’s orbital period based solely on the time it took to pass in front of the star, if that’s indeed what happened.)

Since they announced that they won’t even be releasing information on the 400 candidates held back from the announced 706 until 2011, I don’t exactly hope to see many things happening in the near future, but I will be watching, just in case. With the Earth-based observation season for that patch of sky ending in September according to what I heard, they could at least release an updated list based on those first 43 days of observations towards the end of the year, confirming what they could confirm by then and eliminating those proven to be false positives, but we’ll see. At this rate I really wonder how many decades the team’ll need to go through all the three and a half years of observations that’ll be generated by Kepler during its primary mission if they insist on holding on to the data so much and not allowing others to help…

There was a time, when elections were looming, when I had to rush so I wouldn’t end up needing to post something during the last two or three days of the month in order to stick to my rule of posting on at least two separate days each week, because the server the blog is on was exhausting its allotted monthly bandwidth early due to the high traffic generated by the blogs of some politicians, also hosted on it. But it’s been quite some time since that last happened, so I was no longer worried about it. Yet this month the bandwidth limit was exceeded over a week early, and it’s no longer the server that’s to blame.
As you may know, Jen was kind enough to host my blog on her site, so the bandwidth allocation is for the entire site, not just for my blog. I believe early on the limit was 5 Gb per month, which was just manageable, with my blog’s part being completely negligible. Then the allottment increased to 10 Gb per month and, despite a total of five blogs being hosted on this account, the amount used was only about 6 Gb per month, so it was never a question of hitting the limit. My part of it increased drastically once I posted that beginner’s resource guide for Perfect World International, averaging some 500 Mb per month ever since.
Yet Jen started using her personal blog less and less, eventually abandoning it around the end of 2009, which pretty much halved the monthly bandwidth usage, making it appear quite impossible to ever have such problems. But here we are today, with the limit actually exceeded for the first time ever, and so far from the end of the month too. I would be feeling guilty for my part of it if this would have happened just before the end of the month, seeing as my blog’s not really supposed to be there in the first place, but the total bandwidth used by me during the first 22 days of the month equals the amount used by the most active part of the site in about a day and a half, so removing me completely would have merely delayed this outcome until tomorrow evening.

Still, seeing as, for reasons as yet unknown, Jen’s been ignoring me completely for some time, I was starting to very seriously consider looking for hosting offers and talking to dad about paying for one in order to move to my own site. I mean, it would make sense for her to withdraw the friendly offer of hosting my blog now that she apparently no longer wants to have anything to do with me, so I didn’t want to be caught with my pants down when that happened. And dad found my blog some time ago as well, so hiding it is no longer an issue, though apparently the fact that it’s written in English was thankfully enough of a deterrent for him after a short while.
But I didn’t want to bring it up this month, still hoping to figure out what exactly made her stop talking to me and preferably also solve that problem, as that’s the most important part of this. If things didn’t improve, I was thinking about bringing it up in August, possibly even in the second half of August, and probably move in late September or early October if it worked out all right. But if this high traffic trend continues I’ll likely need to bring it up sooner and possibly even make the switch before it’ll happen again towards the end of August.

Since the site will likely be blocked for the rest of the month, there can be no further developments there, so I’ll need to wait until August to figure out whether the bandwidth issues require me to make the switch sooner anyway. But this did light a fire under my existing concerns regarding this issue, so I’ll be actively looking for options. I certainly don’t need much in terms of space and monthly bandwidth, so I’ll be looking at the cheapest offers from that point of view, but excellent reliability and proper management tools are a must, as there’s no point in paying for something unless it’d be better than what you could get for free, and I had a pretty good thing for free for quite some time now. As for the domain name, unfortunately the one I’ve been thinking about eventually getting for the past 11 or 12 years has been taken some years ago, but I have two more options, one of them being to simply change the TLD I had in mind for the original name, assuming the company that now owns the one I had my eyes on won’t have any problems with that.
Until then, I’ll be making use of the LiveJournal account I made to be able to follow Ami‘s posts, so I’ll stick to my plan of posting on at least two different days each week, then move the posts once I’ll regain access, preserving the original time and date of posting, deleting them from there at the same time.

In other news, I have actually managed to start working on that other plan of mine on Monday and so far stuck to it well enough. It’s not much, but something’s better than nothing in that case, so I’m quite satisfied with it. The quality of the results seems really bad to me, but then again how often do I think anything else about anything I do? That’s the real challenge, in fact. I need to somehow just ignore the quality, or my opinion of it, and do something, because otherwise I’ll keep saying it can’t be good enough and never get anything done.
That’s how it is with this blog as well: Just struggling to put something out there every week despite being thoroughly embarrassed with the quality of nearly every single post… Yet I have managed to keep it up for over three years already, so maybe I’ll manage something similar with other things as well. Or maybe not, because that’s much greater and more difficult than a blog…

Edit: Something strange is going on…

I know there’s little point in posting this here and basically none to write it in English, but the start of our championship is right around the corner and I found myself thinking about this once again over the past couple of days. The competition format that I came up with now is significantly different from the one I have been toying with for the past several years, but I think it’s even better. I wouldn’t be suggesting it if I didn’t, after all. It also makes for a pretty nice format for the Cup, as I took this into account as well, despite my desire to be fair and also include a few more teams from the county championships creating a potentially complicated first stage.

Explaining the current competition format may be somewhat tricky, both because detailed official information regarding the lower divisions and the first stages of the Cup isn’t readily available and because there are changes currently taking place, but I’ll do my best, starting from the bottom.
The fourth level of the pyramid is made up of 42 separate county championships managed by the respective County Football Associations. The number of teams varies, sometimes the competition format may also vary, and certain championships, those that have enough teams for this purpose, have two divisions, therefore creating a fifth level. The 42 winners of these county championships enter a promotion play-off, with the 21 winners promoting to the third division.
The third level is called Liga 3 and currently has six series running in parallel, with teams being entered in them according to geographic criteria. Each series had 18 teams last season, though than number was reduced to 16 for this season. The six series winners promote to the second division and normally 21 teams, the bottom three from each series and the three ranked just above them with the poorest results, would relegate at the end of each season. However, 37 teams relegated last season, those being the bottom six from each series and the one that finished 12th but had the poorest results against the teams ranked above it, in order to reduce the number of teams in each series by two and also make room for the four additional teams that relegated from the second division. Then again, it must be said that one team was excluded and no less than 14 others withdrew from the third division last season, usually due to financial difficulties. This season 31 or 33 teams should relegate, those being the bottom five from each series and the one or three that finished 11th but had the poorest results, to make room for the additional teams that will once again relegate from the second division.
The second level is called Liga 2 and currently has two series running in parallel, with teams being entered in them according to geographic criteria. Each series had 18 teams last season, though than number was reduced to 16 for this season. From each series, the top two teams promote to the first division and normally the bottom three relegate. However, the bottom five relegated from each series last season, to reduce the number of teams as stated above. But it must be said that two teams were excluded and three others withdrew from the second division last season. Plans call for the two series of the second division to merge into a single one, having 20 or 22 teams, starting next season, in which case 16 or 18 teams, or the bottom eight or nine from each series, would need to relegate at the end of this season, assuming six will still promote from the third division.
The first level is called Liga 1 and has 18 teams, with the bottom four relegating. There are currently no firm plans to reduce the number of teams in the first division, though calls to take it down to 16 are rather frequent and numbers as low as 12 have been mentioned on occasion, as several teams have financial difficulties.
As for the Cup, the exact details for each round are irrelevant at this time, but the 42 County Cup winners enter in round one, third division teams enter in rounds one and two, second division teams enter in round four and first division teams enter in round six. Starting from the second round, teams that promoted at the end of the last season are considered as having finished last in the division they promoted to and those that relegated are considered as having finished first in the division they relegated to, but this rule does not apply in the first round, where teams that relegated from the third division are entered and those that promoted to it but didn’t also win their respective County Cups are not. The final is the tenth round and the semifinals are the only matches played on a home and away basis. Most first division teams will be drawn against lower division teams in the sixth round, with the four remaining, weaker, ones being drawn against each other. Any lower division team that makes it to round seven or even the quarterfinals will be placed in pot three and drawn against one of the best first division teams left in the competition, which are placed in pot one.

The problems that many teams keep having mean that the number of teams that can be supported on each level is lower than the one the current system assumes, which means that we need more levels and less teams on each. For that purpose, while I see no need to impose any other changes on the county championships, I think they need to be bumped down to levels five and six, with a regional championship being added as the new level four. I also think 12 teams are a reasonable number for each division or series on any of the first four levels, which would also allow for an interesting championship split in two parts. The first part would involve the teams playing each other normally, home and away, but for the second part they’d be split in two, as it’s done in certain other places of the world as well. The top six would fight for the title or promotion and the bottom six would fight to avoid relegation, each playing each other once again on a home and away basis, making for 32 rounds up to this point. However, to make the first part more meaningful, one more home and away match could be added in part two, played by each team against the one that had the opposing position in the respective half of the classification at the end of the first part, so the first against the sixth, the second against the fifth and the third against the fourth.
Moving on to specifics, the bottom two from the first division would relegate and the two ranked above them would enter a play-off against the teams finishing third and fourth in the second division, with the winners promoting or staying in the first division. In the second division, which would have a single series, the top two teams would promote, the next two would enter the play-off mentioned above, the bottom two would relegate and the two ranked above them would enter a play-off against the teams finishing second in each of the series of the third division, with the winners promoting or staying in the second division. In the third division, the winner of each of the two series would promote, the second placed team would enter the play-off mentioned above and the bottom four would relegate. As for the fourth division, the regional championship I mentioned, I’m going with the idea of the eight regions that kept being mentioned by our politicians not so long ago, so I say it should have eight series, with the winner of each promoting and the bottom two relegating, then comparing the results of the teams that finished fourth in the battle against relegation and having the weakest two also relegate automatically and the other six enter a play-off against each other, with the winners saving themselves and the losers relegating. 21 teams would still promote from the county championships, according to the current system.
It should be noted that this system includes a total of 144 teams on these four levels, while the current system includes 146 teams on its three levels, not counting the county championships in either case. My system would also allow teams that need to withdraw from the first part of the championship to still fight to avoid relegation, if they’d manage to solve their problems by the start of the second part.

If having county championships implies having County Cups, which makes perfect sense, then having regional championships also needs to imply having Regional Cups. And I plan to use them to correct what I believe to be the unfair first round of the current Cup format. It makes perfect sense for the teams that promoted to the regional divisions to enter the Regional Cups, but I also like the idea of having County Cup winners enter, so I add some more places and another round. That round is a play-off between the 21 teams that relegated from the regional divisions and the 21 county champions that lost the promotion play-off, with two or three of the winners being entered into the qualifying round of each Regional Cup. If a County Cup winner also won their respective championship, then the team they defeated in the County Cup final will take the lowest slot they’d be entitled to. So if a County Cup winner also promoted, the finalist will enter the Regional Cup qualifying round, while if a County Cup winner also won the championship but failed to promote, the finalist will enter this play-off.
Each Regional Cup will have the same format, starting with a qualifying round in which five or six County Cup winners (or finalists, in case the winners also promoted) and two or three winners of the play-off mentioned above will compete. This actually requires 64 teams, but there are only 42 County Cup winners and 21 winners of that play-off, so one more team needs to be added in one place, likely as a fair play award. Either way, the four winners of the qualifying round will join the 12 teams from the respective regional division, including the recently promoted ones, in round one, and the eight winners of round one will play each other in the quarterfinals. But this is where it gets interesting, as the four winners of the quarterfinals will move on to both the semifinals of the Regional Cup and round one of the Cup (or Romania’s Cup). At this point, the Regional Cup will pause, with the semifinals and the final being played towards the end of the season.
The first round of the Cup will involve the 24 third division teams and the 32 winners of the Regional Cup quarterfinals. The 12 second division teams will join the 28 winners of the first round in the second round, while the third round will have the 12 first division teams joining the 20 winners of the second round. The competition will continue normally after that, with round four, quarterfinals, semifinals and final.
I’d really want to see matches played home and away for the Cup semifinals and quarterfinals, as well as for the semifinals of the Regional Cups. I’d also see it as quite fair to have two pots for each draw up to and including round four of the Cup, meaning that half of the teams will be seeded and each of them will be drawn against one of the unseeded ones. This also means everything up to and including the Regional Cups’ quarterfinals, though not their semifinals as well. I think the draw for the Cup quarterfinals should be open, however.
Currently, a first division team needs to get past four rounds to reach the Cup final, while that number increases to six for a second division team, eight or nine for a third division team and nine for a team from a county championship. In my system, it’s still four rounds for a first division team, but only five for a second division one, six for one from the third division, eight for one from a regional division and nine or ten for teams from the county championships. So it doesn’t make it more difficult for first division teams, but it does make it more attractive for lower division teams, plus that it gives some more teams from the county championships a chance to take part. Not to mention that the Regional Cups give lesser teams something to play for and should increase the attention and possibly also the support they receive from their communities.

A recent article, citing some studies that have been around for some time, is giving me the opportunity to get back to this issue. I’m obviously just proving their point, looking for information that backs up my existing beliefs on the matter, while those who believe differently will just ignore all this, as expected. So there’s no real point in writing it, but then again there’s little real point in writing or saying anything, yet that never stopped me.
The fact that people filter the information they receive through their existing beliefs should be quite obvious to anyone who cares to look for it. But that’s just the issue, as those who believe that education and information will solve all the world’s problems because people who have the correct facts will also make the right decisions are no more likely to look for such data, or even accept it if it’s provided to them, than the ones they’re trying to educate are likely to seriously look at the facts they’re provided with. So we’ll keep having a lot of resources wasted on education and awareness campaigns that will fall on deaf ears instead of using those resources to do things that’d actually be effective in getting us closer to reaching our goals…

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that education and awareness campaigns are always a waste of resources, but only that they’re wasted on the people who already have an opinion regarding the matter at hand. Such efforts can produce good results if they’re aimed at people who really were unaware of the issue being discussed, or at least never gave it enough thought to form an opinion. But they will often backfire if people who already have a conflicting viewpoint are exposed to them, as they’ll most likely just look for flaws in the arguments, or even make some up if none are found, and possibly also blame it all on some conspiracy and therefore become even more determined to fight against the viewpoint supported by the campaign in question and reduce its believability in the future.
So what I am saying is that such campaigns are usually a poor use of resources in “developed” areas, as the people living there already have access to information if they wish it and are likely to have already reached their own conclusions, whether or not they make any sense. As for the other areas, studies should be carried out before the start of such a campaign, to determine the beliefs of the people living there and exactly what kind of information, misinformation and propaganda they have been exposed to. If they seem to have beliefs that go against the facts you’re trying to inform them about, or if they have already been exposed to the correct facts, regardless of the results, there’s little point in trying and your resources are better used elsewhere. If, however, you can find a group of people who do not have clear beliefs regarding the matter at hand, and especially if they have not been exposed to much information, whether correct or incorrect, about it either, then such a campaign could prove very useful.

But that only applies to awareness campaigns and education efforts aimed at making people realize the necessity of certain measures and actions. There is, however, a very different way in which education and information campaigns can be used when it comes to people who are already aware of the issues in question and who already believe in the measures and actions you support. I’m talking about using such campaigns to teach those people the best ways to act on their beliefs, as all too often they’ll be confused when it comes to the paths to take or likely even say that nothing can be done, especially when the society they live in generally encourages a model that opposes these beliefs. So, at that point, the best thing to do is stop wasting your resources on attempts to convince more people that you’re right and focus on those who already think so, helping them help you.
To be even more specific, it doesn’t matter why those people believe in the measures and actions you support. Though this could cause problems in the long run, it may not even matter whether or not they believe the issues you are concerned about are real as long as, for whatever reason, they agree to the practical part. It’s simply a matter of making use of existing support and helping each other for as long as possible or desirable, moving from talk to action as quickly and decisively as possible in the areas where you actually have a chance to make a difference in a relatively short amount of time. After all, it’s small groups of determined individuals that change the world, so you just need to find or form such a group and ensure its efficiency.

It really should be obvious that you can’t usually change people’s minds, especially when it comes to the truly important issues. So, when you have big plans and limited resources, you shouldn’t waste them on such attempts, but instead focus on what could actually yield results. That may also mean informing those who have not been previously exposed to the issue, or at least have not yet formed a clear opinion about it, but what it certainly means is helping those who already agree to act. It’s simply a matter of efficiency, of doing what actually works, or what at least has a reasonable chance of working, instead of what just sounds good or appealing.
People are far less rational than they believe themselves to be, not to mention that intelligence usually far surpasses wisdom even among those who could really be considered intelligent. These facts are used by those who currently hold the reins of our society for their own benefit, but they could be used equally well by the “good guys” for the benefit of the causes they fight for. It just requires no longer assuming that people will make the correct decisions if given the correct information. Seriously, most don’t and likely never will.