Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Community Relations Follow-up
/bow
NewEco wrote:
why not just simply give permanent full read-only access to the complete, detailed design documents as they develop till final release of CU to anybody?
Probably because some people can't'handle' that kind of information withoutconsidering it a set-in-stone "promise" (which it wouldn't be). When it's 180"% locked down? Maybe, since it won't change.
Till then, I wouldn't count on it (but Cal will let us know if I'm wrong, perhaps).
nobody expects any suprises nor additional new features that would be marketing-wise spoiled by pre-release of information, we simply expect you to fix a broken core system in the game .....
That's just it...I think people would twist the info and take it out of context, making it pointless. I've seen it many times. Info is posted that's specifiically stated can (and may very likely) change...yet, people still have 'fits' when it does change (even though they've been told endlessly that it might well).
I know that would be quite a breakthrough, innovative, "first in market" way of customer relation management in entertainment software industry but you might want to consider that it's just the standard procedure for any custom-tailored contract work ..........
Yet, there's good reasons why companies don't do this. Releasing info that can change just seems to set people off, since a lot of people lose their minds when something they consider a "promise" or a "lie" changes (even though said company tells themthat it can and might very well).
Respectfully,
DocMirrim wrote:
THe design should be out there for ALL TO SEE, with the understanding that there may be impelmentation changes.
That's just it. People won't (and don't) understand that things can, and will, change. Then, they freak out and lose their minds, etc.
I've seen any number of threads posted by a red-name where they state that the information being given IS liable to (but may not necessarily) change. When or ifit does, people convienently forget that part and think it was set in stone. And the whining and flaming starts up in earnest.
There's a lot of animosity on the boards that has nothing to do with what the Devs do or do not say but more to do with, basically, how much people 'whine' or twist things out of context. /shrug
I guess it's the way of things, unfortunately.
/bow
Respectfully,
Yes, a part of the community will always twist or misquote things that devs have said even when they do make it clear that it is subject to change.
However, does this mean that the information flow should stop in your opinion? Do the actions of "a small but vocal" (to quote a dev out of context) justify leaving the rest of the population in the dark?
You know where I stand. I've had the discussion before with you that I'll believe what the devs say they have planned when it hits the test server. However, that does not mean that I do not want to hear what they WANT to do.
They do have a credibility issue though. AND, that problem is not because they have been misquoted and taken out of context. They have internal issues in their organization and planning they need to fix.
Basicly, I disagree with your conclusion that the developers need to just play it safe right now because the community will see any released info as set in stone. For the most part, we are intellegent people and can handle change.
However, I find it is a general lack of change that has been driving my friends away from this game...
Cafa wrote:
Honestly, you expect anyone to answer ressponses like this?
Ass kissing apologies? Yeah, that earned you a lot of fans there.
If you ran your own business, and treated all of your customers with the kind of lack of information/misinformation that theTH litany post so clearly illustrates, wouldnt YOU be trying to save your livelihood and whats left of your reputation by abject, sincere humiliated apologies, along a with customer incentives for the money they have spent on a substandard product? If not, then you would go out of business even sooner than you deserved to.
Im not looking for fans, Im looking for SOE to shoulder in and start doing what they have failed to do repeatedly. The time for fluff and niceties has long passed. THis is sink or swim, do or die for this game.
DocMirrim wrote:
Cafa wrote:
Honestly, you expect anyone to answer ressponses like this?
Ass kissing apologies? Yeah, that earned you a lot of fans there.
If you ran your own business, and treated all of your customers with the kind of lack of information/misinformation that theTH litany post so clearly illustrates, wouldnt YOU be trying to save your livelihood and whats left of your reputation by abject, sincere humiliated apologies, along a with customer incentives for the money they have spent on a substandard product? If not, then you would go out of business even sooner than you deserved to.
Im not looking for fans, Im looing for SOE to shoulder in and start doing what they have failed to do repeatedly. The time for fluff and niceties has long passed. THis is sink or swim, do or die for this game.
I dorun my own businesses, and I also currently (AGAIN) work for the Navy because the pay is too good to pass up.
If you walked in and started screaming at my employees like that I'd be calling the cops to pick you up of the front parking lot. If someone in the government approached me with your demeanor I'd just smile as I called my lawyer.
Sentinment I can appreciate, but there's absolutely no need to take the discussion down the alley you were travelling.
Fivo Asia
TheRealTK421 wrote:
/bow
From what I can tell, this very thread and the forum changes that occurred to day are but the tip (hopefully) of the 'iceberg' of change. /shrug
And....I think we do need to take those that misquote and take information out of context to 'task' for thier part in making matters worse. It's easy for people to point at the red-names and say, "See?!?! They are the enemy!!". When those that wave that banner are just as much to blame for where things stand in some ways.
Respectfully,
/bow
DocMirrim wrote:
Cafa wrote:
Honestly, you expect anyone to answer ressponses like this?
Ass kissing apologies? Yeah, that earned you a lot of fans there.
If you ran your own business, and treated all of your customers with the kind of lack of information/misinformation that theTH litany post so clearly illustrates, wouldnt YOU be trying to save your livelihood and whats left of your reputation by abject, sincere humiliated apologies, along a with customer incentives for the money they have spent on a substandard product?
I've personally had a customer walk into a store where I worked and started to give me the kind of 'face-full' you were giving. He ended up getting lead out of the place by the police and wasn't seen since. By the way, the other customers around ended up applauding me for calming picking up the phone and being respectful as he was apologizing and asking for me/us to reconsider.
If not, then you would go out of business even sooner than you deserved to.
...I'm still in business, so your theory is incorrect.
Respectfully,
Cotasnoova1 wrote:
When I read these post and TH responses...I kinda wonder. The THs seem to be setting us up...for the usual, but now, we should EXPECT and NOT get mad when what the say doesnt come to fruition.
We were told we were going to get "lots" of info and TH post on the balance back in 2003. 2004 sucked...2005 we no longer slide out of our chair (game breaking bug fix thanks)
So the DEVS seem to be saying that they can give us all the fluff, mild truth,and lies in the world, but now, we cant bank on those cause it can all change.
But our new partner Calandryll_SOEdoes not care to reply to this element, and the designers, who have brought us some doosies like FRS, negative XP, and a long list of design oddities and poor solutions, continues to work in a vacuum, a la combat revamp. There is no buy-in to that which we had no input, and given this dev team's track record of putting out "enjoyable" solutions to past blunders, I'm just not hopeful until they start getting some community input into the design of solutions.
Don't just ask us what's wrong, or tell us what's bugged, run some concepts by the community, or representatives of the community (focus groups) before you go into hard development. The track record on solution designs (to fix prior solution designs) is very poor.
The fact is... they started announcing combat revamp aka. combat upgrade beta for January, that's here and now, so guess what? Not only do you all, as fellow SWG gamers, customers, and members of this community not know the fundamentals of this combat upgrade we're going to be handed in much the same way we've been handed everything else designed in a vacuum, but you all also had no ability to feedback on the design path that got us to the beta, so ... its too late now to change any fundamentals and we're likely up a creek again. I hope we like it. Haven't particularly so far.
aradz wrote:
I've been reading through these posts, and took a step back and decided to look at this from a developer's prospective.
When you're writing code, getting firmly entrenched into it all, you can really see some of the possibilities. As a web developer, I see this all the time in the comparitivly simple PHP work I do. You start looking at things and going "hey, we could redesign this and this and this, I can see how it'll work, and boy it would work a lot faster, and it would be a lot more fun". You can literally see it from an overview perspective, and it tends to look very simple. Then, you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, and it's some of the hardest work you've ever done!
I recently taught myself how to draw graphs using PHP. I saw it COULD be done, and I saw how it could work, once all the pieces were in place. Making all those pieces, and then implimenting them was a beast of a chore though. Going back and streamlining it and making it work better was even more tedious. I nearly gave up multiple times.
I think this is where most of the development staff for this game is. They can see the problems, and they can see the grand overview of the solutions, but getting from where we are now to those solutions is proving a tough task. I don't feel 'sorry' for the devs, I just understand what they're going through. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't worked a day in their life on some type of code, or 'built' anything. If you've done a home remodeling project you might see a bit of what's involved, but it's quite a bit more tedious, and the only things that get sore are your fingers and brain.
All the while, the devs know this, and are virtually screaming "We know we know! We're working on it!" and "Why are they so mad at us? We're going as fast as we can." The reason is the devs posted these grandiose ideas, and have given timetables to go with them (soon means a month, for example). While in reality, the developers were unsure how big of a change they were taking on originally, how many other things they'd find along the way, and how long each of those bits were going to take. It was more of an off-hand "yep, working on it" statement. Again, I'm not trying to defend the devs, the constant posts of 'soon soon soon' followed by not talking about it for months later are not excusable.
Another factor is developers trying to interperate what the user REALLY wants. You can shout till you're blue in the face about what you think you want, but are you sure? Take a look back, people were complaining adamantly that buffs were random, so they removed the randomness from them. Now everyone runs around with +2500 to all their stats, rather than the occasional low +1800 or even +1000. On top of that, you can always just get overbuffed if they're too low. This really took a lot of the challenge out of the game in my opinion. No more can a mob make me worry about dying, let alone even cause me a bit of discomfort as it pummels me. That took a ton of the challenge out of the game, for everyone. So, in essance, the player community (lead by the docs), asked for the challenge to be removed. We didn't know it at the time, but that was the end result. What's apparent now is that docs wanted buffpacks to show their craftsmanship better, and master docs should have always been able to buff better than a x/2/4/x doc, and that's where they should have focused.
Enough looking back, we can only go forward. The release of the buglist is a good first step. It'll be a checklist rather than an empty promise of what's being worked on. So long as it's updated (for example, a note by each item with the date it was last looked at and a comment like "backtracking code for such and such bug" or "caused by a runaway process, fix in alpha testing") and doesn't get a date till it's 'in publish' (example, "this if fixed, publish pushing out next week" or "fixed, in regression testing, current eta 1 month") this will truely help people understand that their issues are being adressed.
Second, the Combat Thingy™ notes. Most people are looking forward to this, mainly because this will provide the first step to (hopefully) this game reaching it's potential. There's a lot that is right with this game, that's why people are so adamant about getting it all fixed. If it really was broke beyond repair, we would have moved on long ago.
I know, I sound like a dev apologist. I'm not, really. I don't condone the constant false hopes we as a player community have been given by the development team. This, moreso than even the bugs themselves, has been the biggest let down of SWG. I hope that they've at least learned from all this, and going forward it'll be a lot better.
QFE.
Absolutely. Many of the ranting playershave no understanding of what the other half goes through. Programming a game ain't like dustin' crops, boy. 
/bow
NeoCai wrote:
Politely, I am going to have to disagree completly with you here.
Ifeveryone's views were the same, there wouldn't be manyposts on the forums.
You are saying that if we disagree, if we call the devs to task for not coming through with their promises, and if we hold them accountable for their actions, we are then responsible for their failure to actually do anything?
Nope. That wasn't what I was saying (and is a perfect example of how words can be 'misread').
What I was saying is that there's an element that likes to breed discontent by framing information as a "lie" when it isn't. The folks that say, "You promised us _________ and then didn't deliver!" often forget (by design or unintentionally) that information about ______ was likely stated as something was being considered.
Considered.
And....very likely given a disclaimer (a la JustG) of "Things can change, folks".
That was what I was saying.
Respectfully,
TheRealTK421 wrote:
/bow
NeoCai wrote:
Politely, I am going to have to disagree completly with you here.
Ifeveryone's views were the same, there wouldn't be manyposts on the forums.
You are saying that if we disagree, if we call the devs to task for not coming through with their promises, and if we hold them accountable for their actions, we are then responsible for their failure to actually do anything?
Nope. That wasn't what I was saying (and is a perfect example of how words can be 'misread').
What I was saying is that there's an element that likes to breed discontent by framing information as a "lie" when it isn't. The folks that say, "You promised us _________ and then didn't deliver!" often forget (by design or unintentionally) that information about ______ was likely stated as something was being considered.
Considered.
And....very likely given a disclaimer (a la JustG) of "Things can change, folks".
That was what I was saying.
Respectfully,
Thank you for the clarification.
I am still going to push that there needs to be much more open communication on what's coming down the pike. A vision document before coding comes through and then some input.
As it is, we have a program coming that will be beta tested for just obvious bugs, no input on any major changes since they will be coded already. A la JTL beta, where all we did was look for bugs, any major revisions were left by the way side.
AnXdiety wrote:
To further expand on my previous post in this thread is why are 200+ players elevated above the rest of us that have full access to the documents and the information currently any different from the rest of us that pay the same money per month?
After reading the rest of this thread, how can you ask that question with a straight face?
I'm serious. This thread is the absolute acme, the pinnacle, the best possible demonstration of why there's small, focused groups that aren't allowed to talk about stuff with the rest of us until the process is pretty well along.