Quote Originally Posted by OogaShaka View Post
What i don't understand is the way SE makes it seem like they have to move the earths orbit to do simple changes to 7.0 graphics . I have played many mmo's and even the worse ones of the bunch had sliders for most things on the characters. It's really not acceptable in 2024 and i don't want to hear about the sky is falling "spagetti code" that your team (looking @ you Yoshi) has had 14 ....YEARS to fix. It's disgraceful and your own fault if it's hard to adjust because YOU made it that way. ...end rant...
they have 14 years of tech debt and they get to do the dreaded "upgrade in place" that is the bane of many projects. ARR is a Big Deal in saving the game because most in-place updates fail catastrophically or are bandaids that do nothing. But having to make it in, like, a frantic two years means that decisions were made for then and not for "ten years from now", when the question at the time was if the game would even last another year.

So, would you like them to halt all expac and feature progress to work on the code? I think we all know what the general reaction to that would be.

This is the eternal tug of war of code updates - it would be faster and better to shut the project down entirely to fix everything, but they literally can't do that, so they have to try to work out how to make it better without breaking absolutely everything...over a decade after all the code was written, and quite likely that many of the original writers are no longer around to consult. They'd be reading gibberish and also knowing that any changes they make can cascade over a decade's worth of content. You also have all of the modelers, animators, riggers, texture artists, environmental artists trying to juggle this (over a decade's worth of visual content) and a new expac too. It also wouldn't surprise me if a good amount of the pain points that brought about this update was with their internal tooling, which probably would've been done at the same time as the game itself and likely has 14 years worth of bandaids plastered on top of it. Stuff like "characters don't physically hold objects in cutscenes" and "estinien putting his foot on a railing was really expensive" and such, though I can't say how much of that is the animators dealing with the quirks of their tools or the engine itself just noooooot being able to handle that nonsense gracefully.

It bugs me a lot seeing posts like these, and repeatedly seeing posts like these by people who clearly have never suffered the hell of this kind of process. I go on these forums to escape my eight-hour work days of dealing with thirty-year-old code that my team gets to try to re-implement with no documentation and literally none of the original programmers within the company to get help from, while also dealing with the quirks of the original system still being up, so our company doesn't completely fold.