Daze wrote on May 9^th, 2014 at 6:37pm:


True, but It killed the will of many players... Wasting 2 to 6 Hours rebuilding a character just because a Derp Dev Wanted to leave it's baby in the game was the killer. ( and multiply that by the number of Alts... since all the people I know that were driven away by it had 15+ characters )

Meursault wrote on May 9^th, 2014 at 8:56pm:


It drove 6 people away from mine. 2 of them being RL friends... So I know it's specifically the crash and the nightmare of spending hours to try to repair the damages that drove them off.

One went back to play Civ and design new campaigns for ToAW, the other got more time to spend with her Kobold.

Groo The Wanderer wrote on May 9^th, 2014 at 5:31pm:

Very familiar story. "Shall I repair all the damage or just walk?" Most I know chose the latter, even similarly committed players.

DropBear wrote on May 10^th, 2014 at 7:05am:


Well said!

I don't expect them to do exactly what we say, but I expect them to listen to what we say because there is often crucial information there.

And the arrogance is palpable. Even if you turn out to be right, that attitude just turns every interaction into a confrontation.

Flav wrote on May 10^th, 2014 at 2:39am:


I can understand this perspective.
However, I actually didn't mind the concept of the enhancement pass as it freshened the game up for me.  It got people re-discovering and allowed a little more customisation.  Yes, it can be tedious I agree, but it is something new to discover if you were bored.

What I didn't like was the half-baked implementation.  Incomplete trees, unbalanced trees and a lot of things that did not work and did not get fixed with the same alacrity that exploits get fixed.  And most of these things were known during testing, but it was still pushed Live.

And the devs were impressed by Deadlock's PDF document showing all the trees.  How did the devs not already have something like this during development.  How do you do balancing and refinement without an overview document???  It explains a lot.  Each tree is allocated to a separate dev who develops in isolation.  The Turbine culture of working in silos is so dysfunctional.

So there were people who did take the time to study the trees and build a toon only to find out that things were not working properly or broken.   The players had to do the testing for them.  And instead of granting GM's the power to reset trees for free, people had to pay to reset buggy trees.  Now that is plain daft.  I would have provided a month or two of free changes to encourage people to play with it, find the bugs, report it and move on.
But nope, another potential positive was turned into shooting oneself in the proverbial foot!  Sigh.

DropBear wrote on May 12^th, 2014 at 8:47am:


I don't mind the change either... My problem is with how it was done ( scrap the old system and make a new one ) and ...

DropBear wrote on May 12^th, 2014 at 8:47am:


THIS.

DropBear wrote on May 12^th, 2014 at 8:47am:


Open Space Office is sold as the way to make exchange of ideas efficient... Since I moved to an open space I don't exchange much with my colleagues... Before when we were in small offices of 4/6 people we chatted a lot.

As for the PDF... They probably have a nice Powerpoint Slide that is so filled with things that it's useless.
( I have colleagues do that with network architecture... I told them that theyir overloaded PPT was so useless that I was going to redo it with layers ( for the various networks ) under Visio... since then they are all using my Visio. )

DropBear wrote on May 12^th, 2014 at 8:47am:


Honestly if they had done it the way people wanted it to be done : Fit the old system into trees ( it was possible ) it wouldn't have driven off so many.
And the time not wasted into making new enhancements could have been spent on fixing broken thigs or creating more trees.

DropBear wrote on May 12^th, 2014 at 8:47am:


Pretty much all of this.

I am constantly amazed at how Turbine apparently functions as an organization. The company has been around for quite a while now, but still has all the characteristics of a start up:

1) No overall plan worth talking about
2) No apparent documentation of how the game fits together, either internal or external
3) No professional standards for its employees (MajMal, with his background in TV, as the head of QA. No wonder the game is a train wreck from a quality stand point.)
4) A complete inability to communicate clearly and consistently with its customers.
5) Version control of its software is some kind of black art.

Finally, the level of hubris is simply out of control. Catch lightning in a bottle, obtain some initial success, and then just coast along with a "this is how we always have done it" attitude. At the same time, the competition is just getting better. The end to that kind of story is pretty clear, and we have a front row seat from which to watch the implosion.

doom doom doom do-da-doom doom doom doom!