Droid Engineer Archive

There was so much talk about you making DE's your "Top Priority" yesterday, insinuating that you were spending a lot of time talking to the DE dev and correspondant to come up with some answers for the volumous questions that hit this DE board after "the plan" was posted.

The result.... Kurt comes and asks us to put our concerns in one thread so he can read them... Let me save some time:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=32197

I have to say that I am disappointed that after all that build up, and promises for some answers, he seems to have ignored/never read an excellent thread started by Sintrosi that asked for the same basic thing he is asking for now. It REALLY feels like a big delay tactic, TH. You do not even acknowledge in your post that you read that thread. Definately makes this sub-community feel like they are wasting their time.

TH - you need to realize the axiom: "underpromise - overdeliver" - not the other way around.

I'm going to cut and paste my response to another thread here as you are doing the exact same thing, note, I realize that neither you, nor Hoshi were ranting:

In all fairness, TH isn't the developer, he's a liason...a polite and amiable face for SoE to show to the public on the boards.

It's completely alright to be irritated about things, but getting pissy doesn't help anyone or get things fixed. Once people start letting their tempers and emotions control them, that's when things decay even further and nothing will ever get accomplished.

This is the main problem I've seen for quite a while from the DEs. Even at the beginning, when the issues were first being discovered by the majority of players, everyone ranted and complained. People need to learn that getting upset and copping(sp) an attitude with the only direct contact we have to the SoE developers at this point (the correspondants are to a degree, but TH is a more "direct link") is silly and very self-defeating.

You can't expect him to read through every post we have, nor can you expect him to give you specific deadlines or fixes...he doesn't have them. Sony has long maintained that they will not give exact dates for fixes/patches/updates etc, because then they would be required to provide them at that time...and that's simply something they can't assume will always workout. Having done much work on software projects, be they games or otherwise, I know first-hand that problems will come up and completely throw your time-table off kilter...and there's nothing you can do about it. The sure-fire solution you have one day could end up having far reaching repurcusions across multiple other modules that you weren't aware of when you came up with the fix. This is what happens in large group projects, if your hand isn't in every single piece of code then you HAVE to wait and rely on the other parties to provide feedback about how your changes might hurt their code.

And it's great that many people (yourself and myself included) simply want the list of BUGS from Gorantoth's thread fixed, but that's not everyone. There are quite a few DE who DO want combat droids and new droids and new modules, so saying that those are wanted by the DE is incorrect. Thus the new thread started by TH. It was SUPPOSED to be a place where everyone could post the information about the specifics of what they felt were needed, kind of like a poll so they could get an idea of the major consensus...yet that degraded into people telling him he should read the other threads and such. That's not constructive in any way, he didn't ask us to provide feedback on what we thought his job should entail, so there's no reason to give it.

If everyone would just stay calm and answer the questions without trash-talking SoE and the contacts we have from them everything would go a lot smoother...instead we belittle them at every turn, they get conflicting information from various groups within the professions, and then, when they try to get an overall consensus of everything, they get blasted for not reading the forums. How many of us have read every post in every profession forum and have retained the information we read from one day to the next? None of us, that's too much information for one person to process on a daily basis.

What people don't seem to realize is that they want the game to succeed. No one on the SWG team is sitting around thinking "I wonder how I can make this project fail so I don't have a job anymore." Just because you don't agree with the ideas at all times doesn't give you license to blast them in an unconstructive manner. These boards are famous for the flame-fests that arise from people just completely slamming ideas they don't agree with rather than just ignoring it, or posting why they think it's a poor idea. We all (myself included) need to grow up and realize that the players and SoE are on the same team, a team trying to make SWG better and turn it into a lasting and successfull RPG.

I Understand your point, Jonas... but it really does not address the underlying issue:

After the "DE Plan" was unveiled, threads starting popping up all over about people's reactions to it. In order to bring order to chaos, Sintrosi went ahead and created a thread to collate everyone's concerns. A mere couple days later, TH comes along, and completely duplicates the effort. It disempowers Sintrosi COMPELTELY, and tarnishes TH's reputation for not having read the thread his correspondent created for the very same purpose. So sadly, what his questioninsinuates is:

1) He doesn't look for posts started by Sintrosi and read/reply to them

2) After saying he would make us his top prority for the day, and mentioning that he was going to coordinate with the DEV and the correspondent, the result is : "So, what are your issues anyways?" Back at Square one

It just means that myself included, many people will not bother to add opinions to threads like SIntrosi's since they dont seem to be read/absorbed anyways. If its not a DEV posted question, what is the point?

And, YES I understand that there are thousands of posts, and poor TH (Who is overall doing a good job) cannot keep up wioth them all... thus... correspondents! He should skim through the forum, see an "issues" thread started by his correspondent, and make sure he reads that.

And if he DID read that thread, he should have put in his question that he read it, and needed FURTHER clarification.

- Perception IS reality. No way around that one, I am afraid.