Server Issues and Limitations

[Delsus]

Perhaps SE folks did the art work, and outsourced the rest of it to a North Korean or Chinese developer. If you have ever worked in project management, with complex vendor relationships, its very easy for the vendor to start dropping the ball, or leave you completely screwed. Perhaps the vendor fulfilled the contractual obligations with SE, and the result was the game we received at launch. Perhaps the vendor deferred or deleted any number of requirements from the project due to failure to deliver, and so what we got was half a product that barely works. Now the SE staff has scrambled to actually try and 1) understand the vendor code 2) begin to try and modify it to improve upon things.

It may sound far fetched, but we are dealing with this very scenario on one of the projects at my employer.

It would explain a lot. If it were true, it explains a whole lot about why the game launched like it did. i.e. - we poured X dollars into the vendor relationship, at minimum lets recoup what we can on boxed sales.

Meanwhile, stubbornly, rather than just kill it, they have endeavored to keep it on life support, with the far fetched hope that it may be profitable one day, IF they can get it into a better place with as few resources as possible. If they had a real solid number of people working on this project, it would be much further along, and thats a fact. I think they are throwing as few resources at it as possible in the hopes that they can push it out again on PS3 (boxed sales - more revenue recoupment) charge a monthly fee to a small audience that is just enough to cover the costs that went into getting it to that state, and cross their fingers that due to HOW BAD IT IS, people will say HOW FAR ITS COME and be blind to the reality that this sucker plays like its 1999.

That said I don't hate the game, but its in a woefully precarious place.

SE would never outsource a MMO that will be constantly updated for its life, which they want to be as long as possible, if they outsource the server builds, the servers are not SE's property and cant touch them, only buy new ones, there are plenty of companies with servers that just arent plugged in because they cant touch them and the vendors did not collect them after relationships broke down, there are also servers that are running and the company doesnt want to switch them off because they could be important.

Also with the software builds outsourcing them is just plain stupid for a games manufacturer, you know people who make games.

It is impossible to speculate what goes on behind the scenes because the possibilities are endless. Yes there are programming problems and network/server problems but these can be hard to find without starting from scratch, and poor programming makes it alot harder, if the programming is really bad it can take a team of 5 people twice as long as one person using good code to do one thing.

The problem is not the amount of staff its the quality of the origanal progamming which makes everyones life harder. If they want to work on the core programming they will need to pull people from other projects to keep pushing content and features out, so they will probably do that a bit later because it is needed.