Official FF6: Beyond Chaos thread (randomizer)

Honestly, every single time I'm forced to read through the FAQ and the changelog

Nobody's forcing you.

2 - punch Abyssonym in the face for being pretentious and annoying.

Abyssonym is not actively working on it. You want to punch me in the face.

I respect and appreciate the work you guys have put into this mod

Doesn't read like it.

I can think of exactly 0 legitimate reasons to hide this information from players, and, when presenting it, STILL f**k**g HIDE IT with encoding. What purpose does this serve beyond annoying people?

1) Since you complain about having to read the FAQ, I assume you want the codes to be listed out when running the randomizer like the flags are. That's a UX nightmare. New players already struggle with the wall of text describing the flags.
2) When new players find out about the secret codes, they tend to put a whole bunch of them in, have a bad time, and go around telling people Beyond Chaos sucks.
3) For the most part, the codes are either to help debugging, goofs, or intended to spice things up for players who are already familiar with the randomizer.
4) The codes that I think are suitable for general use are in the README in plaintext. Or most of them anyway. Arguably a few more could be added.
5) Despite all that, the rest of the codes are in the README in ROT13 as a gentle discouragement to using them without just keeping them entirely secret. You're welcome.

I should not have to search the web for 10-20 minutes to find out what a flag does. I should not have to read the FAQ and still have no idea what "Beyond Chaos Bingo" is.

You don't have to do either of those. You don't have to know what the codes do at all because they're bonus content, not the main experience. And it takes less than 20 minutes to translate the ROT13, type it in, and see for yourself. Most of them are pretty obvious, pretty quickly.

Why is this information not just outright stated? Who is it helping to hide it? It is not enhancing anyone's experience.

It is helping the new players who already have an overwhelming number of flags to look at and frequently make poor decisions about which ones to pick. It is also enhancing my experience of not seeing newbies get frustrated after picking dumb options.

All it does is irritate me every time I see a reference to a code or a mode, and have either no idea what it does, or no idea how to make the randomizer do it. Please stop obfuscating highly useful information for no reason.

It's not highly useful. It's bonus content for you to explore, like deleted scenes on a DVD. That's how I think of them: as something extra you're being given rather than something you're being denied.

I don't think you guys are putting much effort into UX

Apart from the fact that nobody's gotten around to making a GUI, actually a lot of effort has gone into UX. For example, the list of modes with short descriptions is new. The ancient cave modes there used to be secret codes. Emberling added a speed dial that lets you save commonly used flags. I added a built-in speed dial for recommend new player flags, and made it remember your last used ROM so you don't have to type the path every time. I added the feature to type '-' to use all flags EXCEPT the ones you typed, removed two seldom used and confusing flags that affected the sorting of rages, and changed the flags to print in alphabetical order instead of whatever arbitrary order abyssonym added them. AND I simplified and updated much of the README, if you can believe that. And very minorly hiding the codes not meant for general use is part of the UX.

Anyway, constructive criticism is fine, but spouting off isn't a good way to change my mind.

As for your other complaint, currently whether the characters are random in the final battle if you have both the fix exploits flag (b), and any of random enemy stats (m), random enemy formations (f), or randomized final dungeon (d). I'm not sure what abyssonym's thinking behind that was. It's probably reasonable to just tie it to the randomized final dungeon, but I don't want to make it its own flag because there's already a lot, resulting in a big wall of text.