A call for transparency

[Mack]

Amen Nipa.

Fair enough, Renshi.



I wonder if there is some truth to this. The only legit reason I can think of as to why things take so long is that somehow all of the existing code is super bad. They can't afford to lose time by creating a new game engine so they have to bring in new people to look at the code, which is definitely happening to some extent. I wonder if it makes a difference if you have 500 programmers or 1 programmer looking at bad code and trying to untangle the knot. It seems like the old "too many chefs in the kitchen" dilemma. But I also wonder, is bad programming the only thing to blame for how long things are taking?

Clearly SE in 7 months can't accomplish what most other MMO dev teams can do in 1-2 months. Aion just got another graphics engine. I'm not sure how long that was in development but I think it was less than 6 months.

Well its not just the programming right? everything seems to have taken a slow route so to speak. What I hope is happening is reprogramming and battle system overhaul and in the background there are teams working on a lot of content but the producer letters tell me too little is being worked on so far. I'm less worried about "too many chefs in the kitchen" as opposed to too many eggs in a single basket....well not really worried, but just sort of observing now, since I've basically lost all care for this game lately. I guess we'll see what happens.

[Neptune]

Well its not just the programming right? everything seems to have taken a slow route so to speak. What I hope is happening is reprogramming and battle system overhaul and in the background there are teams working on a lot of content but the producer letters tell me too little is being worked on so far. I'm less worried about "too many chefs in the kitchen" as opposed to too many eggs in a single basket....well not really worried, but just sort of observing now, since I've basically lost all care for this game lately. I guess we'll see what happens.

You know you have a point. The battle system blueprint, released a couple of weeks ago, shows a surprising lack of finalization. How it could take the team more than 7 months to complete their analysis of the battle system baffles me. What else is a good example of something very slow going that might be unrelated to programming?

[Mack]

Off the top of my head, for example, they mention including only two dungeons in this coming patch for content - that is one thing, how long does it take to make two dungeons really? they've been working on this game past its release for 7 months like you said, if they have different teams (well loaded teams that is) working on different categories you would think 7 months of work would get us at the very least 2 dungeons per given level (i.e., maybe at R20, 30, 40, 50, etc.). And its not just dungeons, they are still just "talking" about Chocobos...what is there to talk about exactly? why has no one been working on this stuff already? what about player housing for example, or player companies that were promised to us last year even.

I know all these have a programming portion to them but according to the developer's letters they have hardly touched up on them yet. Just seems to me like SE are in a state of "we already screwed this up so we'll see what we can salvage and move on"...as in they aren't willing to inject too much more equity into this project (or at least not more than necessary by their calculations and I bet it wont be enough). From where I'm sitting this game wont even surpass FFXI in overall subscribers, I doubt that's what they had planned when they were working on it, it still baffles me how wrong things went too. Its too bad really; I know some people will call me a troll but I'm saying it like I see it, I would have loved nothing more then selling my soul to this game for the next decade but I don't think its ever going to happen.

[whoopeeragon]

Off the top of my head, for example, they mention including only two dungeons in this coming patch for content - that is one thing, how long does it take to make two dungeons really? they've been working on this game past its release for 7 months like you said, if they have different teams (well loaded teams that is) working on different categories you would think 7 months of work would get us at the very least 2 dungeons per given level (i.e., maybe at R20, 30, 40, 50, etc.).

Call me someone who still has hopes, but I'm thinking that it's a mere mis-translation. Perhaps they wanted to mention that it will be two types of dungeons (rank 30 and 50 dungeons), not just two. But again, that's mere speculation; because if only two dungeons came out, not only will I be eating my words here, my respect for the developers will take a dive.

@Neptune: I think they only really started with the battle system revision around 4 months ago, when the player poll # 2 came out, since I believe that where they got the information from. (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't looked at the past topics on the lodestone in a while). Since that's where most of the 'community' cried out for a new battle system, and seeing how SE acts, I don't think they would have noticed how bad the battle system was until the community vied for it. As such, it leads me to think they started probably only 4 months ago. Just a thought. Not saying you're wrong, just adding a different perspective. ^^

But still....they are missing vital basics. LS management, kweh~, a way to give MWs stability. And my pet hate; why were there so little mage classes on release? Only two? T^T