Smuggler Archive
Thread: Heh, how much Dev time do you think we will get now?
Message Edited by 01201986 on 03-09-2005 02:20 AM
01201986 wrote:
it makes sense in the capacity that much of the player base has been asking for kashyyyk for a long long time now. and they aregoing to put it in.
Let's do an experiment: Get a large portion of the player base to whine fora playable Mooninite species. I want to see that. By all intents and purposes and past history, I'll be rockin' in a 2-D hot pink avatar flippin' the bird to all the Jedi around Tarquinas
01201986 wrote:
it makes sense in the capacity that much of the player base has been asking for kashyyyk for a long long time now. and they aregoing to put it in.
It's from South Park
Johnny Cochrans famous "Chewbacca" Defense
ROFLMAO that was good
01201986 wrote:it makes sense in the capacity that much of the player base has been asking for kashyyyk for a long long time now. and they are going to put it in. /shrugMessage Edited by 01201986 on 03-09-2005 02:20 AM
No, it makes absolutely NO sense from the players' standpoint. Kashyyyk? A whole new planet to explore, which i'll have completed on my mount or in my vehicle in less than 2 hours. 100 Missions? I'm a slow player, lets say 2 - 2 1/2 weeks to do them all. Might do a few of them a couple times, but after that, I'm already bored with this expansion I'll likely have to spend at least $20 on (they probably will charge more, but what I read it doesn't sound worth more than $10. They could surprise me, i suppose, but i'm not counting on it)). So, our Development team will have spent months coming up with an expansion that, for the most part, will only keep a player's attention for a month.
And people, quit kidding yourselves about there being "two development teams." There's not. There's ONE team divided into TWO projects. Project 1, the CURB, is a necessary fix to a system that was nearing collapse. Project 2, this hodgepodge of an expansion, seems to be little more than a way to make a quick buck. This takes away from truly addressing the wants of the playerbase, i.e. having professions that bloody well work, that are integrated together better and help expand the overall Star Warsy feel of the game itself.
What, in all honesty, is the need to push out something that appears to be a half-assed expansion at this point in time? I mean, besides as a way to make some money and tie in with EP-3's release? Nothing. They could have, temporarily at least, combined the two "development teams" and had the CURB pushed out by late March/early April, or been able to provide WORKING professions a few short weeks after the CURB debuted.
Here's the kicker of the whole thing. They're going to be beta-testing both the CURB and the expansion at once. Anyone else think, after all the work goes into it, we're going to have months and months of CURB bugs unless you happen to have the expansion? Basically, if the CURB is not tested in an isolated environment, the results of the CURB testing could be adversely effected by the additional features and/or coding of this expansion, thus turning this "expansion" into almost a necessity. Can you imagine CURB launching, but still being unballanced in favor of players who have purchases the expansion?
Again, I think they'd be better off putting all their development resources into major project at a time, accomplishing said task, and then moving to another major project, or then dividing into several smaller projects. But what do I know? I'm just a Smuggler who can't Smuggle.
Orcajum wrote:
No, it makes absolutely NO sense from the players' standpoint. Kashyyyk? A whole new planet to explore, which i'll have completed on my mount or in my vehicle in less than 2 hours. 100 Missions? I'm a slow player, lets say 2 - 2 1/2 weeks to do them all. Might do a few of them a couple times, but after that, I'm already bored with this expansion I'll likely have to spend at least $20 on (they probably will charge more, but what I read it doesn't sound worth more than $10. They could surprise me, i suppose, but i'm not counting on it)). So, our Development team will have spent months coming up with an expansion that, for the most part, will only keep a player's attention for a month. Perhaps, but you completely missed or ignored the point. Many many players have been asking for kashyyyk for a long time, so to them, it makes perfect sense, and they are glad it is finally happening.
And people, quit kidding yourselves about there being "two development teams." There's not. There's ONE team divided into TWO projects. Project 1, the CURB, is a necessary fix to a system that was nearing collapse. Project 2, this hodgepodge of an expansion, seems to be little more than a way to make a quick buck. This takes away from truly addressing the wants of the playerbase, i.e. having professions that bloody well work, that are integrated together better and help expand the overall Star Warsy feel of the game itself.
For those of you who still rant on about the seperate dev teams...here. I took the liberty of pulling up Gordon Walton's comments about dev "strike teams".
Gordon:
As part of this reorganization we have set the team up as a series of strike teams, each working in their own development environments. These strike teams include:
Live - Responsible for service issues, bugs and small (in terms of development time) features and enhancements to gameplay. Many of the cool changes in recent publishes have come out of the Live strike team.
Infrastructure - This team works deep down in the engine room of SWG, improving the underlying technologies the game depends on. Most of what they work on you would only notice by the *lack* of bad things occurring and improved developer productivity, though they also work on features for Live that require longer development cycles.
Combat Upgrade - This team is working on upgrading our entire combat system to enhance the experience of combat within Star Wars Galaxies. Their mission is to make combat more fun, interactive, and Star War-sy. We have been taking extensive design feedback from the correspondents and alpha testers and are driving towards an alpha test which will open in a few weeks. Over the next six weeks we will be releasing more information to all players on the exciting things the Combat Upgrade will bring to SWG.
"Secret Team" - It's no secret that we're going to continually work on expansions, but we're not allowed to tell you right now what we're working on for our next expansion. It will be cool though, we can promise that!
Content (includes Spawning and Loot too) - This is a new team made up primarily of people who are new to SWG. They are working on new directed content while simultaneously improving our spawns and loot system. You've seen some of their work already and I expect their output to ramp up every publish as they get more fluent with their tools.
GUI Team - Another new team focused on improving our GUI. They are working with the Combat Upgrade folks and are going to be revising and adding new options for our standard game GUI.
Events Team - This team brings you the Live events on our service, but they're also working to bring many of their tools and goodies to the players so you can use them directly. Watch for new player-empowering elements to appear in future publishes. Note that the relative amount of features and content in a given publish may change, simply because some of teams above may be on a longer development cadence than two weeks. Some development efforts take multiple weeks or months to complete, and when they are ready, they will come in to the game in the next publish.
Quality Assurance - We have also expanded our QA team to support this increased development effort. This team is working closely with the developers to help identify and correct issues prior to publication of these new elements. With these new additions to our team, the goal is to continuously refine the quality of our publishes and the overall game. You can help us increase the quality of the game by checking out the new features on Test Center as they come online and using either the In-Testing forums or the /bug command to report any issues you might see. We really appreciate the help in bringing you a higher quality game!
Community - We have also worked to improve our communication with you via our website and boards. The new message board structure has allowed us to gather feedback on issues better and the website and launchpad have both seen a flurry of updates. Much of the content from the recent publishes has come directly from player feedback and ideas gathered from the boards and we hope to continue that trend. We have also expanded our message boards to include a customer service board and a community relations board, both of which allow you to give us direct feedback on how we communicate with you.
Customer Service - We have recently completed the implementation of CSR's to specific servers. In the pilot it was clear to us that this is a much more effective way for us to be closer to the issues and to fully understand service problems as they affect the various servers. In conjunction with this effort we also opened up the Customer Service Forums which can be found here. The addition of these two new CS programs has already had a positive impact on the service. For the future we plan on offering a look at what the issues are from the inside out. We regularly circulate our "same page" newsletter internally to communicate what issues we are seeing and how we are handling them. Our plan is to post a public version of this so you can be on the "same page" with us.
That "secret team" is the one that developed the expansion we are all arguing about. The "content" team would be the one assigned to our revamp. So I honestly don't see why you're getting upset over it. Was it a poor allocation of resources? perhaps, perhaps not. we will have to wait and see. but no one was upset about it until just now
What, in all honesty, is the need to push out something that appears to be a half-assed expansion at this point in time? I mean, besides as a way to make some money and tie in with EP-3's release? Nothing. They could have, temporarily at least, combined the two "development teams" and had the CURB pushed out by late March/early April, or been able to provide WORKING professions a few short weeks after the CURB debuted. It looks half-done cuz all we have is a page long article from IGN, you may or may not be right on that issue. Given that they do not know what the CURB will look like when it goes live, it makes no sense to have the professions done and ready for a patch only a couple weeks after the CURB hits. I would rather they do it right, than have to do it over again.
Here's the kicker of the whole thing. They're going to be beta-testing both the CURB and the expansion at once. Anyone else think, after all the work goes into it, we're going to have months and months of CURB bugs unless you happen to have the expansion? Basically, if the CURB is not tested in an isolated environment, the results of the CURB testing could be adversely effected by the additional features and/or coding of this expansion, thus turning this "expansion" into almost a necessity. Can you imagine CURB launching, but still being unballanced in favor of players who have purchases the expansion? Unbalanced in what way? maybe i missed the point. It could be a bad idea to test them both at once, only time will tell. but there is also no basis for saying the expansion "unbalances" the game. thats all the devs have been preaching for months, balance, balance, and more balance. again, i dont know how it's going to be, we'll have to wait and see
Again, I think they'd be better off putting all their development resources into major project at a time, accomplishing said task, and then moving to another major project, or then dividing into several smaller projects. But what do I know? I'm just a Smuggler who can't Smuggle. Perhaps they would, but look at what this approach has done. They have been putting new stuff in and/or changing things on what seems like once every couple weeks, maybe more. That holds players attention, and some of them are good things and/or major changes.(i.e. the base and TEF changes. i'm not a big fan of watching people kill my factions npc and not being able to do a thing about it, but that doesn't make it a small change. it was a big change)
Basically, I'm on the fence on this one.
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01201986 wrote:
NickHeel wrote:
01201986 wrote:
it makes sense in the capacity that much of the player base has been asking for kashyyyk for a long long time now. and they aregoing to put it in.
Let's do an experiment: Get a large portion of the player base to whine fora playable Mooninite species. I want to see that. By all intents and purposes and past history, I'll be rockin' in a 2-D hot pink avatar flippin' the bird to all the Jedi around Tarquinas
lol, lets try it
NOO not mooninite, i demand... the... Mr. Saturns!
BOING!