Updates - Help me understand

[s5669111]

Why don't the developers say "We do updates on Tuesdays at 12 PM ET." ? If the game is up at 12:05 there's no update. No speculation, limited frustration.

[Niph]

To truly understand this, you must have developed a game yourself.

[Aionlasting]

In all honestly my biggest frustration with this game is the slow development time. I'll be in the grave by the time I see the end of the proper game.

What's even more frustrating is that its a completely self inflicted wound. Citan refuses to increase his development team size, preferring it to remain between himself and his wife, minus the odd jobs where they acquire third party help for (i.e. the interface) and so we see very slow development of the game. Its a project, true to the word, and one that we might all die before we see the conclusion of.

Its frustrating because with a proper team this game's potential is limitless. The proof of concept has been tried and found to be true. If only we could properly commit a full team.

[cr00cy]

In all honestly my biggest frustration with this game is the slow development time. I'll be in the grave by the time I see the end of the proper game.

What's even more frustrating is that its a completely self inflicted wound. Citan refuses to increase his development team size, preferring it to remain between himself and his wife, minus the odd jobs where they acquire third party help for (i.e. the interface) and so we see very slow development of the game. Its a project, true to the word, and one that we might all die before we see the conclusion of.

Its frustrating because with a proper team this game's potential is limitless. The proof of concept has been tried and found to be true. If only we could properly commit a full team.

You are assuming Citan has enough money to hire people full time. I'm pretty sure that if he could afford it, he would.

[Oxlazr]

I mean, a larger development crew doesn't necessarily mean faster updates.

Project Gorgon actually has a fairly steady rate of content releases when you compare it to other games - the content that is released doesn't always appeal to everyone, however.

Anyway, a couple WoW patches lasted for roughly a year and they certainly weren't stumped by a lack of staff.

In a MMO environment, bugs can have a lasting impact as well.

[s5669111]

To truly understand this, you must have developed a game yourself.

I don't accept this as a valid response. Condescending to your audience is not only insulting to them it should be embarrassing to you.

I also don't appreciate someone trying to hijack my thread.

[Mbaums]

I don't accept this as a valid response. Condescending to your audience is not only insulting to them it should be embarrassing to you.

I also don't appreciate someone trying to hijack my thread.

The team shouldn't do your original suggestion imo. They should have flexibility to update stuff when it's ready.
The previous posts Eric had suggested this is meant to be a very significant update. Some patches are behind the scene hardware jazz and others are content.
We don't know what this next one exactly is, but we know it had hiccups.
For the pro contractor crowd, I like Eric's goofy idea of lore VS some hired gun. Contractors aren't the best tool everywhere.

[ShieldBreaker]

I don't play many other games that have frequent updates, but I don't recall any having a fixed schedule on when they do updates. If I was running a game company and was going to introduce a system that would dictate when patches were expected, I would want to see case studies that prove the net positive benefit to the company. My opinion is, that it wouldn't lead to no speculation and limited frustration. I think that it would lead to increased speculation and heightened frustration.

If it was an industry wide standard that you have a set update day, and Elder Game was the only one not complying. Even then, I would be inclined to let Citan do what Citan wants to do. We have gotten by this long, with the system of updates that we have. The game is making progress. Other entertainment projects like movies and other games have unexpected delays. Citan and srand are giving it their all, and programming complex systems are going to result in certain kinds of bugs that need to be addressed before making an update live. This is for our benefit.

It is fine to suggest that it might be a better system, but to up-end the current system you would need strong, empirical proof that it would be a huge benefit for all parties.

[Citan]

The idea that I want to be here coding my ass off at 5am on a Saturday because I insist on doing everything? That's complete nonsense. I want to be the person designing, yes, but not the person designing, coding, analyzing, performing database maintenance, overseeing CS, prepping ads, etc.

I would love to hire more people, and we definitely will. Actually I expect the first full-time developer hire may be possible soon... but I'm not hiring anyone unless I can do it responsibly.

I realize you're all familiar with indie companies that burn their budget fast and end up successful. Minecraft (or whoever) did it, so why can't we? Because the successful ones are extreme outliers. I've been involved in a half-dozen of those projects where indie teams burn their money fast and pray it works out. It almost never works out. I'm too old for that shit, and I won't keep passing that sort of tragedy on to other game developers, or to you. Because the people that usually lose are you, the customers that buy in early.

How many Kickstarter MMOs have failed after reaching their goal? Most of them. But I can confidently say we are not gonna fail. Really! We won't hit our time estimates at all... but eventually we will make good on our crowdfunding promises. Reaching the finish line is my top financial priority, and I won't jeopardize that goal.

So we hire contractors when we can. And when we can hire full time people -- and give them realistic time windows to get ramped up before we expect them to pull their weight -- we will! We're watching our bank account carefully and planning when we might be able to hire more people. I'm optimistic, but I don't have a crystal ball. When we can hire, we will, simple as that.

--

As for schedules, this is an MMO in development. We release updates when they're ready for testing. Your job as Early Access players is to help playtest, so we can't release them too early: when we do that, you just find the obvious bugs that we already knew about. Getting bug reports about already-known issues is a huge waste of time for everybody! We need the updates to be clear of obvious bugs or design flaws, so you can give us feedback on finished ideas.

So why don't I just announce a launch day that's like an extra month delayed? Because we need feedback on changes ASAP. We're back here working really hard every day, and we need that new info as soon as we can. So I'm not gonna sit on a finished update for even a single extra week!

And I don't think people want us to delay updates by a few weeks to ensure we hit the deadlines... what I think people really want to know is "why don't you work FASTER!!!!" And it's because we literally cannot work any faster. We are working as fast as humanly possible. When we can hire people to work faster, we will.

I try to keep you in the loop on where we are in the update process. It does change a lot though, and I'm often wrong. But it's the best I've got. If you'd prefer to just be surprised when an update comes out, you can easily accomplish this by not reading my twitter -- that's usually the only place we talk about timelines.

Thank you for supporting us while we struggle with this Herculean task. The game is finally starting to feel like a "real game", which makes people assume we're a large development team. That leaves us in a weird spot because we aren't. We're what we can afford to be. We work super hard, and we haven't stopped for years and we aren't gonna stop until the game is done. And hopefully, soon, there will be more of us doing that work.

And you're here now to see it happening, and to help shape it. I'm excited to show you this next update, but even beyond that, we have great ideas in store for the future. Thank you for the opportunity to show them to you.

[Loggy]

:clap :clap