LOLPATCH 1.16a

[Betelgeuzah]

Maybe I'm just being impatient, but I kinda agree that this game needs some monumental changes before it can compete with anything out there in the market.

Herein lies the answer.

This game needs monumental changes. This game is getting monumental changes. For the Spring, Class system rehaul, Combat system rehaul, Auction House, Jumping Mechanics, and the Companies are being planned. These are all monumental changes and/or additions, more or less.

But what do you people think about the development time for all of these features? Do you think they can be implemented gradually? Do you think their development will be completed in less than a month?

As far as the combat system rehaul goes, that can be developed gradually but the developers have already stated that they will release the changes in larger parts, not little by little. Companies may have been already largely finished but the developers have said that they want to develop content for the system before implementing it. The rest of the features do not have to be released in a completely 'ready' state, but the over-all structure (that takes the most time to complete) has to be in place for the feature to function properly (AH for example).

Now, someone may wonder what's taking them so long- it has been 6 months since the release already after all.

When was it that the developers started the development on these features in the first place? Why did they start the development so late? Why did they get nothing substantial done from December to February?

The first question is quite easy. Late-January to early-Feb is most likely the period they began the development on the features listed on Yoshida's first letter. Before that, they were mostly setting everything up, changing update policies and restructuring the dev team, as well as catching up on the development and features so far. It is not something you finish in a week, and even though it can be said that they could have been faster in the process, it would not be in any way surprising or unlikely that to get the development rolling again, it took them at least a month if not longer. The way Yoshida seems to handle the development is quite a bit different from Tanaka, so at this point I don't think Yoshida stepping up was only some kind of a PR stunt with seemingly no further consequences. Wada wanted him to fix the disaster, and that's what he seems to have set out to do.

So, now we know that although it has been 6 months since the release, they have been developing these features for only 2 to 3 months at best. Exceptions exist obviously, such as Companies that were most likely in development even before the release (which is probably why Yoshida seems to not be so modest about the feature, as it has been in the making so long) and the combat system development that probably did not start as early as the other development (mid- to late-Feb probably).

What can we tell from all this? These smaller updates do not matter in the big picture, as the development has been focused on getting the rehauls out during the Spring (probably starting on 1.17). Features that are finished in a matter of month or less and can be implemented gradually have been included in the updates so far, but they are not that numerous- as the dev teams focus is not to develop features that take less than a month to develop at this point. They are working on the UI gradually, so those additions and improvements can be added monthly.

Surely, once the rehauls do come they may suck or may be too small in scope. That time isn't yet though, for reasons stated above, and so far they have done a good enough job, although I am still expecting them to get better as they become more efficient working the way they have for these few months. I can see that this 1.16a is already better than 1.15b was, so they are definitely improving.

Further, even though they may get the rehauled features 'right', even more important is how they can shift their development towards efficiently polishing said features as well as implementing content and smaller additions as fast as possible. They are working on the larger picture right now, but that will not last forever- and when they need to implement a lot of smaller improvements monthly, their Q&A team may be overwhelmed, resulting in a lot more bugs getting through, and the development structure may be too byrocratic to allow for the necessary flexible development environment which is probably a big problem for Japanese companies as a whole.

A lot can go wrong, but so far so good.

And to clarify, this seems to be the way they are updating the game right now:

Mid-sized patch (1.15a) > Small patch (1.15b) > Mid-sized patch (1.16) > Small patch (1.16b) > Mid-sized patch (1.17) > Small patch (1.17a) > Large patch (1.18) and so on, roughly every few weeks.

So I hope all of you can at some point realize that every 2 weeks we are going to get a patch with pretty much nothing in it, and that it doesn't matter in the long run at all whatsoever. In addition, the mid-sized updates have been gradually getting larger, so we still haven't seen just how much they can get out of themselves in a matter of month.

*braces himself for the inevitable bitching in mid-April and 1.17a*