Asheras wrote on Jun 2
nd, 2013 at 9:30pm:
Just because you aren't capable of determining the reason doesn't mean it is unnecessary or that the devs don't care. I've worked with hundreds of programmers in my career. Some good. Some bad. None of them ever "didn't care" about the quality of their work or customer satisfaction in the programs they were designing. I think those of you who say the "Dev's don't care" really aught to try harder. That is a pretty weak premise that doesn't hold much water.
Same with "they make unnecessary changes." Either you have no analytic skills, common sense, or you are just too angry to think straight.
The amount of care and love and craftsmanship put into the product is clearly indicated by the amount of low-hanging fruit that would have been spotted by anyone testing before deployment, was spotted and reported by many players after deployment to the preview server, and was additionally spotted and reported by many players after the crap was put into production.
Not only "game breaking" issues, but highly visible and annoying things like string table errors instead of NPC speech, the dialogue with the airship captain that persists after leaving the airship.
We know the developers can fix things that annoy THEM. For example, Artificer bolts are now summoned in chunks of 1000 instead of 100 because one year after roll-out, a developer played an artificer long enough to discover that summoning the thousands bolts necessary for play was annoying.
Or how about those decorative outfit skins that are obsoleted by the new cosmetic armor system AND cost a lot of customer good will AND broke things on deployment? Perhaps I'm too angry - was this change necessary?
There is a lot of craftsmanship and love put into the game - you don't have to look hard to spot it, but the many small and large errors that are avoidably introduced and then left for years and years are like mold on what was a nice looking loaf of bread.
It's very clear that Turbine thinks the rules do not apply to them, and Pet Projects will be put into production regardless of whether or not they address customer needs or wants.
When you're a company full of Experts that are Damn Good at their Job, what would be "just barely not bad enough to get fired right now, but we're going to talk about this next week, because it's bullshit" in any other company must be Awesomium at Turbine.
They need to hire less experts and more people who would like to learn how to do a better job making their customers happy by delivering a quality product that addresses existing and future customer needs in an efficient and sustainable manner.
A person who knows everything already will never learn as much as someone who is trying to learn one new thing every day, even if that one thing is what to NOT do again.
Make something nice, then step on it. If Turbine WOULD learn to stop at "make something nice" and not continue with "step on it", the game would be a much different product.