Paul Vebber
Posts: 11430
Joined: 3/29/2000 From: Portsmouth RI Status: offline
|
AS I've said several times, recent events have reduced the time available to several key individuals involved in the Lost Victories/SPWaW v7 end game and delayed it. Beyond our control, what can I say?
We hope to be around the bend here shortly but we are not making any official announcements about when it will be released. We are getting finished as soon as we can, but there are only 24 hours in a day. Lost Victories and SP:WaW v7 is coming but we can't say for certain when. We hope by the end of the month, but it depends on the ability of the key people involved to get it done, and right now we can't control that entirely.
As to the "bugs" problem, I've written missives about the problems with making a silk purse out of a sows ear before. There is only so far we can go to take a 5 year old DOS game and make it competitive with current expectations.
I am currently spending most of my time working on Combat Leader - a fresh ground up rework is the only way to solve the "bug" problem - (most of which aren't, they are limitations in the engine to meet players preconceived notion about how things should work, but I've given up trying to argue about it...)
I would be interested in hearing what show stopping bugs are still present that have people tossing the game - the exit button is too close to the end turn button...you've got to be kidding me??
There are some latency issues with the online game producing out of sequence results. Happens to most flight sims too. There are odd problems with occassionally teh game being warped by some fluke of windowsinto teh wrong play mode, cuasing timers to appear and online type problems to crop up in non-online play. None of these problems has been repeatable, or a significant detraction form play (you exit the game reboot your computer and try again).
There are several hundred thoussands data elements in the OOBS, some of which are wrong. Efforts to discuss what is "right" has produced threads hundreds of posts long on what "right" is. The answer is ALL teh data in the OOBs is "wrong" because NOBODY knows what the "real" metrics should be. SO OOB "bugs" range from typos to disagreements, but in all cases are easily changed by the user.
Similarly the vast majority of "bugs" regarding combat results can be addressed using the pref settings.
There was a window of nearly 2 months where I sent the MC:NA patch to anyone who asked for it. Not many did. If more had we more had we might have handled it differently, damned if we do, damned if we don't post it.
What are the "Known cat 0 and cat 1 bugs" did we shipped MC:NA with? I've explained the "time rate of bug discovery" several times. 50 guys play testing for 200 hours find 10,000 play hours worth of bugs, 1000 players playing 10 hours find those same number of bugs in 1 day. PLayers want the game now, we either delay it forever and sell nothing, or fix the bugs we know about in teh time we have and "know" that more bugs will found, but the more complex the software, the more intractable the bug hunt becomes.
The "Bug" issues are not about "sweeping things under the bug" but what has become a 24/7 job to constantly respond to reports of "strange things happening" reported as the game being "broken". Repeating the responses for the upteenth time. While obviously there is a need to report "real" bugs, there is a grain of truth I think to the tone and content of many posts "killing the goose that lays the golden egg". That is a problem that is not going to go away, and it will take continued education of the gaming community about the issues with games of increasing complexity, being increasingly IMPOSSIBLE to bug-proof.
My open participation and level of engagement on this forum was in many ways an experiment. At times my presence here was almost 24/7. From a business standpoint that experiment was effectively a failure. That level of effort was not rewarded in a business sense, so there is little incentive to continue, or repeat it.
Well we did our best on SP and the MC's. The players have spoken with their wallets and the answer is - move on. They have kept us afloat, and for that we thank those of you who stuck with us.
We will continue to support SP:WaW with periodic bug fixes - but not on the scale we have - don't expect a 7.1 for at least a year, we just have too many potentially paying projects now to guild the lilly on something that the community is not supporting with their wallets, what ever the reason. We went WAY overboard supporting the game in the hopes teh community would respond. a few of you did and we are very thankful, but most out there did not.
Maybe because we suck. Maybe because the game sucks. That is for you folks to argue about.
I am going to work my butt off the next few months to make Combat Leader the best game I can make it. You will either reward that effort, or not. Those of you comparing wargames and wargaming companies with "mainstream" games better adjust your expectaions though, because wargames will NEVER be comparable to mainstream games. We working to get as close as we can, and we hope to improve.
SP:WaW has been a large part of my life the last 6 or 7 years, but its time to move on. COmbat Leader is shaping up nicely and there is much to be done there.
Here's hoisting a cold one to those of you who have supported the effort, contributed to making the great game many feel it is. I'm no longer involved in SP:WaW development. To those of you that feel the game sucks, well, hopefully you will find the new games more to your liking. We can't please everyone though. Some will always be disappointed.
The torch is passed. You folks have demonstrated you can carry on smartly. The leaders are out there, you know who you are.
Those of you who say that content on a forum like this has little influence on the buying habits, appear to be correct. I had hoped that was not the case, and apparantly wasted far more time than I should have trying to prove it wrong, but the proof is in the bank, and it appears that presence on a forum like this is not a very good time investment.
Feel free to prove me wrong...I hope eventually someone does, but for now I have a lot of work to do and will be around the Combat Leader and Close Assault forums reading your thoughts, PLEASE post them there, I will be reading them, but time spent significantly engaged responding appears not to be time well spent.
_____________________________
|