Development Cycle Archive

Well thats nice you thought of us to tell us,dosen't help but its still nice.

Though I must ask one question.

Why dont citys appear on my map to see how many is on the planet?

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Greetings…

A quick statement on the player city cap. We have always had the intention of starting with a small number of cities, then increasing that number as time goes on. We can increase the number with a hotfix; it will not require a full monthly update.

I’d like to spend a moment discussing why we took this approach. The most important reason is the idea that we didn’t want to put something out only to have it break horribly or end up in a state where it had to be nerfed. Player Cities are a huge system. Huge. We’ve tested it for thousands of hours, had hundreds of people help us on test center, and even delayed the publish by an extra week to ensure we got it right. But there are still risks in rolling out a system of this magnitude to live servers. I empathize with those of you who currently can’t place your city hall. In our view, it seemed a better course of action to start smaller and grow rather than rolling out everything all at once.

We love player cities, and want you to experience them. The goal is not to restrict the fun to an elite group of players, but insure weget it right. We are currently evaluating when we should roll out the next city increase.

Blair

Producer

First!! Thanks for the update! I'm glad you took this approach myself, I dont' want to see 100 littel 6 person cities all over the place charging tax on everyone.

Hotfix. Now we're talking. I certainly recommend sooner rather than later, and perhaps double or tripple the allowed building slots.

I think a large part of everyone's contentions, aside from the low requirements to actually placea city halland the very low cap, ist the fact that intially we were being told that those of us who missed the boat would have to wait at least a month for the next big patch in December.

The fact is that many of us have been waiting to build our own cities since reading about them prior to the game even being released. Then after months of waiting, they go in game yet the majority of us were then told to wait another month.

A month is a long time...It's almost 1/12th a year. j/k

I would just like to know WHY you waited tilll the day before the patch went live to tell us about the limit? Iwouldn't have hada problem with it, but alot ofus got their hopes up these past few weeks waiting for this patch to go live, then at the last minute had them dashed because of this unforseen cap.

A little advanced warning would save alot of hurt (and cancelled accounts) in the future.

First off thx for commenting Blair....

I guess as one of the town owners who has been planning this for 4 months, and was not able to place a city hall, I feel like this. I feel I have been robbed a chance to become a city.... Now I know I will eventually get one when you guys figure this out, but...

I feel it is unfair that certain towns get a head start on the rest of us.... Thoughs towns will have a better chance to survive since they were one of the firsts.... Because of this, I would have been upset, but overall more happy than I am now, if you guys would have just delayed it more and figured this out, because of this hugly unfair advantage some of the towns/people are getting because of this cap....

This is how I, and i'm sure many other feel.... next time I would sugest you wait to release something until everyone can enjoy it at the same time (not counting test center of course).

Thank you again though for commenting, hopefully it will not take you guys that long to lift the cap

I will admit that I did not like the limits on the player cities cap, in fact I still don't. But it made me realize something last night when we tried to place our city hall for our guild and our friends but was unable to. One by one every one of them banded together to make it happen, they did what had to and what they wanted to because they wanted to see it work. Our friends and our allies helped us realize our dream and one by one they all moved with us to Dantooine where we founded our new city, Twilight. They have shown me what it is like to be in a community and how the effects of a simple obstacle and bring people together to work towards a common goal. It may not be something we wanted, but it wasdefinately something we learned and worked to overcome with a smile on our face and a warm feeling in our hearts.

Any guesses on how long until the first 10 cities get taken over by squatters who can't wait for the hotfix?

This should be fun to watch.

Awesome news!! Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just picked up my city hall today!! BOOOO YAAAAA

Blair, while I truely am happy to see a response to this matter, I still feel wholey convienced that the Devs are not thinking through on thier choices. I am confused by you saying we didnt want a huge project like player cities to go F.U.B.A.R. but then tell us you have spent thousands of hours testing and even delayed the lauch to insure quality then you release a small half product? I am confused by your coding here, as a person who can write and understand computer code along with all of my cadre of friends all of us scientist (we work for a university) and all hold advanced degrees we can not figure out how it is your coding gets so wacked out even after testing? The point of a test or a run through is to insure the functionality of a program and the test center is a brilliant way to do this, why doesnt it work? Since computers can not think they do not mess up the programs themselves, simply put the answer is a 1 or a 0 true or false, on off, yes or no. Does the program function? 1 or 0? does it mess something else up in the process ( a constant problem in any program, new adds = more bugs), if yes go back to that code and see why, this is all reverse code engineering taught in intro to computer programing and object oriented programing. I really really hope that you make it so we can have more player cities very very soon, else I know you will never get my self or my collegues buisness again, and I am sure you will see an exdus of others as well who feel truely cheated by the system after putting in so much time with no reward, promise after promise broken and a constant catering to the uber elite leaving us the working casual gamer hung out to dry. Please! I really love this game and so do my friends but this is really the last straw for us and many other, please dont let us fade off when the fix is so simple.

Plain and simple Blair... you should have told us right from the start. Because you didn't, many of your customers are feeling stressed out (because of all the planning/work they have already put into this) as well as betrayed or lied to.

All the posts we were seeing told us that anyone could make a city, there was never a mention of any type of caps or limits.

You should have simply told us.

Thx blair for making a post on this, of course this is a hot issue right now and it's nice to see the devs drop a word in on why...

But, I think what the major gripe from many of the people who missed the bus on player cities is not as much as the player city cap itself (which yes I'll get to that shortly) but the method in which player cities were released. With the cap number being as low as it is, especially on the big 3, I think making it a foot race as soon as the servers came up was not the greatest method of starting them, especially after being in testing for as long as you speak of. And yes, announcing the city cap with very very little warning, made alot of the people left out this first time around feel slighted.

I understand the reasoning behind giving the "advanced planets" a higher cap, I believe your wanting to spread out the population a bit more than the mass concentration we have on the big 3, but to expect large groups / guilds of buildings, some with 3 digit amounts of members, to pack up and move on the drop of a hat is a bit much, heck just moving a fully furnished PA hall would be a huge chore in and of itself.

I guess this is more of a rant than reasoning, and I apologize for that, your work is always appreciated devs, but I think alot of the complaints here are more about the way player cities were executed rather thanthe city system itself.

Blair, I'm sorry ... but you clearly just don't get it. You don't understand why your customers are so disappointed in the way you handled this.

You talk and talk about how you want to improve communication with your customers ... but you didn't ask for ANY feedback about the idea of a phased implementation of PRC's. If you had, you would have gotten a lot of reasons from experienced, intelligent players about the positives and negatives of this approach.

When you did implement it, you threw the patch out there with less than 24 hours notice to your customers. Again, a total failure of communication that displayed an almost total ignorance of what kind of information your customers are looking for.

Finally ... the inadequacy of your testing methods to actually test whether the code is good continues to be a crutch your organization leans on every time it pushes code to the Live servers in a controversial way. Improve your QA & testing processes, don't use them as excuses for throwing your customers a huge curveball.

This is why your customers are so disappointed ... not because this was a bad idea (it was), not because it was so poorly handled (it was), but because you guys simply don't seem to get it, despite your promises that you're trying to.