OSM HM nr 2 - Playing an Open Source game

Wesnoth is an open source game. Everyone who want to participate in development can do this. There are different levels - either people can aprticipate in writing the source code, the basic system for the Wensoth games, or participate in writing and developing scenarios for different stories either short or long ones.
I have played some similar strategic games like Wesnoth before, and as I am not familiar with the ideology background of wesnoth or other commerce games similar, I can't make conclusions based on that.
These are the main points that I would like to share about Wesnoth:

Dying all the time
As I said, I am not a fan of these games, so I ended up dying with even playing the easier versions. Usually the game was over during first scenario already. So I could try out the Wesnoth itself so much, when couple of hours played I didn't end up getting to second level. Yes, its bad to actually admit it, but I am really bad at this game.
But it went a lot better when I started to look inside the game codes myself and after I had tested several things on "Simple campaign" - a 1-scenario test version game that I got from Wesnoth forums. - everything was a lot better, i really could get the feeling of how to decide things and make my turns.
I guess my biggest mistake in just playing the game at first was that I didn't think of actually recruiting new units :P So it's not imaginable that the game was finished quickly.

Getting the information
Every scenario started with the goal what I have to do to win the game itself. I don't remember what game I was playing, but when at some point the game was over with sentence "You have been defeated", I really didn't understand why. My teamleader was alive, that was the intention of the game - I didn't end up using all the moves I had, but my character in the game was still dead.
It would have been really good to get the notice why the game was over and what I did wrong, not only write so platonic message with no information in it.


Ambiguity
Wesnoth games are developed by real fans of these games - and it shows. I guess this is why it was hard for me to try to start liking the game, as at first the feeling of actually making something myself together with teammembers wasn't part of the case.
I totally understand now why Wesnoth is liked and how the community behind it functions. Although I am most likely continuing developing Wesnoth games or participating in the game forums, for several days my evenings were full of reading information about Wesnoth, getting information what code parts to use to be able to make the scenario we had decided.

It's interesting that if users of Wesnoth have some idea what they want their characters to do in the game or want to change the source code and change some default expectations, it all can be done.


So anyway, when me and the team got hands on on the game code, for me the game became much more interesting :)