Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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Hi 76mm, quote:
ORIGINAL: 76mm Thanks for your post. While I can't argue with the logic of your proposed path forward, I am very frustrated with the starting point--ie, the state of the game upon release. When I bought the game, I knew that the AI would come later, and that NetPlay "wasn't quite finished". What I didn't realize was that after several months, the dev team would still be focused solely on "functional area fixes," with netplay and AI still over the horizon and no word even about the release of the single-theater scenarios. I understand, 76mm. In hindsight, I wish we had been able to delay the release as well. In fairness, there were far more issues than we expected, even though we knew and expected some of them based on the beta team's reports. Our expectation before release was that the non-NetPlay game was very solid and that our main focus would be NetPlay after not being able to finish it before release. As I've posted before we didn't fully appreciate the size of the rest of that iceberg until it was too late, even though we already had a great respect for the incredible complexity of MWIF. The blame for that does belong squarely on our shoulders and mainly mine. As I've said before, the blame does not belong with the beta team, some of whom were in fact trying to warn us about this probability. After release, we did try to focus on NetPlay as our first priority, fitting in other high priority fixes around it. Instead of focusing on other areas as wholes, we tried to focus on the most important issues across all areas with NetPlay as the main focus. This continued as our strategy for several months, with quick iterations of beta updates, until it became clear that it was not moving the game forward quickly enough . We had too many other issues still to resolve that would also impact on NetPlay. The new functional area strategy, which was recommended by the beta team and accepted by the community, is I believe resulting in more noticeable (and valuable to the player) progress and in focusing on one area at a time is allowing Steve to better decipher some of the more complex issues. That same focused approach will carry through to our next pass on NetPlay, which is due to happen once we finish the current Production Planning focus and the upcoming Naval Combat focus. Regards, - Erik
< Message edited by Erik Rutins -- 7/7/2014 7:42:24 PM >
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