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I'm gunna agree with Shape, Lebermac, Andreas, Incarnate and Doukutsu! Wow eh?
But not nuthou5e, because nuthou5e is just a stupid hanger-on?
Thanks for the response Inc.
I bring this up because it's been a recurring theme I've been hearing from many players. I have not initiated the frustrated rants until now, but I have agreed with them and they're there.
Better to get this out into the open where it can be discussed, rather than letting it fester.
It's also been a bit of a thorn for me since I used to direct people to this game and say:
"Yeah, its not done yet, but the skillbased combat is awesome and they have regular updates, so while it currently lacks in content, you probably won't notice. You'll be too busy with the newest features"
Now I have to tell people that its a very cool idea, and then kinda trail off.
There have been around 10 more people who I got to start playing, who loved the gameplay, but just sorta petered out when they felt that there was nothing new.
Updating gives a feeling of life to a game, even if its just a small addon.
I bring this up because it's been a recurring theme I've been hearing from many players. I have not initiated the frustrated rants until now, but I have agreed with them and they're there.
Better to get this out into the open where it can be discussed, rather than letting it fester.
It's also been a bit of a thorn for me since I used to direct people to this game and say:
"Yeah, its not done yet, but the skillbased combat is awesome and they have regular updates, so while it currently lacks in content, you probably won't notice. You'll be too busy with the newest features"
Now I have to tell people that its a very cool idea, and then kinda trail off.
There have been around 10 more people who I got to start playing, who loved the gameplay, but just sorta petered out when they felt that there was nothing new.
Updating gives a feeling of life to a game, even if its just a small addon.
I have to agree with Shape, a lot of little updates is cooler than one big one, and I myself, have found myself so bored, I have grinded my bounty up to 9.7 million, hehe.
But seriously, I do try find other games to play, but I lose interest really fast, Vendetta always gave me that hook cos there was always new ideas and new stuff talked about, I know you guys have it hard, and seeing new stuff on the test server is nice, but really, the sooner we get more *content* and scrtipted NPC missions, and story line stuff the bettter.
But seriously, I do try find other games to play, but I lose interest really fast, Vendetta always gave me that hook cos there was always new ideas and new stuff talked about, I know you guys have it hard, and seeing new stuff on the test server is nice, but really, the sooner we get more *content* and scrtipted NPC missions, and story line stuff the bettter.
Curse of the size of the dev team. And, I suppose, curse of them talking to us in the first place. Now we all expect to be pampered, when even with the relative dearth of dev comments of late, we still get more attention than most communities do.
Whenever we're in a period of regular updates, most of what gets added is unrelated and not tied together. People bitch. Whenever we hit a drought, people leave the game and bitch. I really don't envy Inc about now - there's literally nothing he can do to make this situation better but keep on trucking and hope to god the new update reviatlizes everything. For a game that's been one long gamble, it seems that each new one the stakes get a little bit higher...
Whenever we're in a period of regular updates, most of what gets added is unrelated and not tied together. People bitch. Whenever we hit a drought, people leave the game and bitch. I really don't envy Inc about now - there's literally nothing he can do to make this situation better but keep on trucking and hope to god the new update reviatlizes everything. For a game that's been one long gamble, it seems that each new one the stakes get a little bit higher...
I'd spill out my life for the devs, I trust them, and I'll wait. (but cookies do help =D)
Starfisher, yer missing the point,
the devs are competing with larger groups, their only advantage is that they can pull the smaller update thing.
I don't want to sink into a "Poor Devs" theme, cuz honestly I think they can beat this, and to expect anything less is to do them a disservice.
the devs are competing with larger groups, their only advantage is that they can pull the smaller update thing.
I don't want to sink into a "Poor Devs" theme, cuz honestly I think they can beat this, and to expect anything less is to do them a disservice.
As we've explained in the past, the small updates have largely stopped for two reasons:
1) Owing to the client fork, we can't do any quick updates that require client changes (like *all* balancing tweaks, warp-timing/energy-usage, etc).
2) Secondly, after the experiences developing the border patrol, trade, and ctc missions (ctc is a mission from a programming perspective), it was determined that we needed better tools if we ever hoped to make missions more complex than these, or at a rate of more than 1/month. Now we have a domain-specific-language for defining interrelated group-missions. There are a few more bugs to work out, and some things won't work ideally (player/npc grouping) until we get the new UI in place, but what this means is that I could write a new Border Patrol mission that works correctly, includes capships and npc wingmen, and only takes a couple hours to write *and* debug! With a couple more hours, I cold make a system contested with recurring take/hold battles that go on with players or not. The nation deemed to be in control of the system could have some bonus like the NeutIII. A new CtC mission will be equally easy.
It has been a long road from there to what we have now. A more experienced programmer (or one who had done something similar before and didn't want to improve their approach) could likely have gotten here sooner. But I doubt Guild could have found any programmers with more than 12 years of professional experience (20 amateur), in the Milwaukee area, willing to work for less than their rent, go into debt, and spend 90% of their waking time working :p
1) Owing to the client fork, we can't do any quick updates that require client changes (like *all* balancing tweaks, warp-timing/energy-usage, etc).
2) Secondly, after the experiences developing the border patrol, trade, and ctc missions (ctc is a mission from a programming perspective), it was determined that we needed better tools if we ever hoped to make missions more complex than these, or at a rate of more than 1/month. Now we have a domain-specific-language for defining interrelated group-missions. There are a few more bugs to work out, and some things won't work ideally (player/npc grouping) until we get the new UI in place, but what this means is that I could write a new Border Patrol mission that works correctly, includes capships and npc wingmen, and only takes a couple hours to write *and* debug! With a couple more hours, I cold make a system contested with recurring take/hold battles that go on with players or not. The nation deemed to be in control of the system could have some bonus like the NeutIII. A new CtC mission will be equally easy.
It has been a long road from there to what we have now. A more experienced programmer (or one who had done something similar before and didn't want to improve their approach) could likely have gotten here sooner. But I doubt Guild could have found any programmers with more than 12 years of professional experience (20 amateur), in the Milwaukee area, willing to work for less than their rent, go into debt, and spend 90% of their waking time working :p
I agree with OP here, even tho its an unfinished game its the updates that makes us play and test and have fun on the VO universe. I have started playing again after rumors of an update and its symptomatic for several of the older players, they pop up at update time. I really enjoy the game atm, but i join in the choir in this thread.
Even tho we sometimes get like all whiney and stuff, its because we love the game and its developers so much. You guys ROCK! no doubt about it!!
And your impecable reputation to deliver the Goods© is just amazing (allthou it has been a bit too much Soon™ in the recent past)
I really hope that what you have been cooking on the last months really comes out as solid tools, foundations for things to come and be built upon feature after feature..
Even tho we sometimes get like all whiney and stuff, its because we love the game and its developers so much. You guys ROCK! no doubt about it!!
And your impecable reputation to deliver the Goods© is just amazing (allthou it has been a bit too much Soon™ in the recent past)
I really hope that what you have been cooking on the last months really comes out as solid tools, foundations for things to come and be built upon feature after feature..
get some interns.
Shape: I was unclear, sorry. I meant to say that Inc and co. can't just make a radical course change at the moment. If they were to cave to pressure and make some trivial update to keep us all happy, they'd slow the eventual changeover to a more rapid update system.
From monmeranth's post, it appears the current lack of updates is a direct result of the devs trying to get to the place you're asking them to go. True, we've been hearing that they've been going there for a long time, with all sorts of delays and false starts, but that's where the curse of being a small team comes into play.
From monmeranth's post, it appears the current lack of updates is a direct result of the devs trying to get to the place you're asking them to go. True, we've been hearing that they've been going there for a long time, with all sorts of delays and false starts, but that's where the curse of being a small team comes into play.
take your time incarnate.
Do it right.
I'm sick of the whiners, But then again I have all that time in alpha to look back on and I console myself that the payments I make now also cover all the free time i played.
I'll be paying until you shut down the servers or turn it back into dance dance space bass fishing.
Do it right.
I'm sick of the whiners, But then again I have all that time in alpha to look back on and I console myself that the payments I make now also cover all the free time i played.
I'll be paying until you shut down the servers or turn it back into dance dance space bass fishing.
shut down teh' servers? never! I'm sure we'd be able to rig something up.
I will second most of the stuff that has been said by Shape.
I understand it's hard to develop a game with just four developers, but I also think you should involve the players a bit more in the developing process itself. Ship design is an area where it could be easily implemented.
I try to direct people to this game, as many of you probably do, and like Shape, my marketing talk is sortof moving over to "Soon(tm), as I don't want to lie to people about the games features, although I'd wish more people would play it and bring you some money so you could develop it more efficiently. What I also see as a problem is the feeling many of us get; That we are paying for waiting for an update when we've used up the little content there already is in the game. I haven't played for about a month now, yet I do pay my monthly fee just to keep this stuff running.I just get bored.
My honest opinion (although perhaps one of a olschool gamers): Just fuck the graphics. They are on a level which I already recognize as mind-numbingly good. I can't think of anything to improve there, except for some retexturing of some ships.
What I find important in most MMORPG's is that the players themselves create the content by just playing the game. Missions are not a solution to people being bored. They add a "oh, a new mission, let's check it out." and after the 10 minutes required, you're off where you started: Out with nothing.
It's very hard to implement stuff like in Escape Velocity and alikes in a MMORPG as those games had storylines who were strictly bound to them being singleplayer. In a MMORPG you can't just spawn stuff out of nowhere and expect it will remain intact until the player whose mission spawned them get's there and does what he is supposed to. One approach is to spawn stuff that isnt visible (nor physically present) to other players than the one conserned, but that sortof eats the realism in it.
What I think you guys could lay your time on, is more outfits, not just weapons. Also ships, which by preference could be tweaked. The game just lacks personality because there are the 5 ok ships that everyone has and the 5 proper guns for them and that's about it. I don't see any universal warlords terrorizing systems and planets with their huge capital ships. I don't see any massive and organized space war. No crazy weirdo pilots using weapons no one thought were usable. When was the last time you saw economic warfare between players because of that the supply of ammunition for the local player clan's favorite weapon was stopped?
The real challenge is not making huge amounts of static content for the game that will entertain people for five minutes and then throw their interest for the game in the trash bin. The challenge is to define the enviroment and the prequesites so that the players, even against their will, create a system of trade and war in which they are stuck.
I need a reason to stop ships from coming to my favorite system. Not a mission that tells me General X wants me to do so because someone wrote it on a piece of paper.
The reason has to be something that will affect me.
I also think it's important not to think of the system as a too big one, as even small groups of players can make a difference.
I don't know if anyone of you ever played runecape (graphically minimalistic MMORPG), but what I liked in it, having played it for about two years constantly, was the personalities people developed in-game. You could walk into a dungeon and start killing off random monsters, and when you got hurt there was always this heavily-armoured-but-not-high-in-skills merchant that would offer food(which could heal you) for a totally overrated price and still sold lots of stuff just because people needed it like hell. in RS, people could mine their materials (which at higher level ores took near to forever) and smith them into stuff the other players would use. Pretty much 100% of all the items that were used alot were player-made, and many made a fortune doing mining and smithing although it took alot of time.
Some people who were desperate for money would do a so-called "Taxi Service", that is; They would let the player click "follow" on him/her and take the player to a location that was requested by the player. Some even developed it into a form of escorting market and guaranteed the paying player would live at the end of the journey. This also spawned a small-scale industry in the taxi market, resulting in networks of "taxidrivers". If you knew the right people, you could PM them and let them send a "driver" over to take you where you wanted. The prices were often high for the fast services but usually people considered them worth it due to the point-and-click interface of RS and the constant loading times between "sectors".
in RS, you could trade all items with players, although some were of extreme value and others of almost none. Refining of raw-materials was one of the biggest businesses.
RS also had so called "General Stores" to which you could sell any item, although the price was never very high. Very often when someone made a huge amount of a certain item, like a craftable artifact, the prices would sink to a laughable level, resulting in some people stock-buying it and depositing them in their banks for later reselling for a better price.
A big market was making food; It could, as stated above, be sold for very high prices if you were in the places where people needed it. Cooking took time, required high cooking levels for the really good stuff and you had to market it yourself to get a good price. Yet it spawned a big market. It was often later on in the development accompanied by fishing, an activity that was similiar to mining, except you got fish instead of ore.
Last words of this terribly long and annoying post:
Create an enviroment, not missions. You need to get a bigger user-base if you're seriously into this and that won't work with a new mission that lasts for 5 mins. Possibly not missions at all.
I understand it's hard to develop a game with just four developers, but I also think you should involve the players a bit more in the developing process itself. Ship design is an area where it could be easily implemented.
I try to direct people to this game, as many of you probably do, and like Shape, my marketing talk is sortof moving over to "Soon(tm), as I don't want to lie to people about the games features, although I'd wish more people would play it and bring you some money so you could develop it more efficiently. What I also see as a problem is the feeling many of us get; That we are paying for waiting for an update when we've used up the little content there already is in the game. I haven't played for about a month now, yet I do pay my monthly fee just to keep this stuff running.I just get bored.
My honest opinion (although perhaps one of a olschool gamers): Just fuck the graphics. They are on a level which I already recognize as mind-numbingly good. I can't think of anything to improve there, except for some retexturing of some ships.
What I find important in most MMORPG's is that the players themselves create the content by just playing the game. Missions are not a solution to people being bored. They add a "oh, a new mission, let's check it out." and after the 10 minutes required, you're off where you started: Out with nothing.
It's very hard to implement stuff like in Escape Velocity and alikes in a MMORPG as those games had storylines who were strictly bound to them being singleplayer. In a MMORPG you can't just spawn stuff out of nowhere and expect it will remain intact until the player whose mission spawned them get's there and does what he is supposed to. One approach is to spawn stuff that isnt visible (nor physically present) to other players than the one conserned, but that sortof eats the realism in it.
What I think you guys could lay your time on, is more outfits, not just weapons. Also ships, which by preference could be tweaked. The game just lacks personality because there are the 5 ok ships that everyone has and the 5 proper guns for them and that's about it. I don't see any universal warlords terrorizing systems and planets with their huge capital ships. I don't see any massive and organized space war. No crazy weirdo pilots using weapons no one thought were usable. When was the last time you saw economic warfare between players because of that the supply of ammunition for the local player clan's favorite weapon was stopped?
The real challenge is not making huge amounts of static content for the game that will entertain people for five minutes and then throw their interest for the game in the trash bin. The challenge is to define the enviroment and the prequesites so that the players, even against their will, create a system of trade and war in which they are stuck.
I need a reason to stop ships from coming to my favorite system. Not a mission that tells me General X wants me to do so because someone wrote it on a piece of paper.
The reason has to be something that will affect me.
I also think it's important not to think of the system as a too big one, as even small groups of players can make a difference.
I don't know if anyone of you ever played runecape (graphically minimalistic MMORPG), but what I liked in it, having played it for about two years constantly, was the personalities people developed in-game. You could walk into a dungeon and start killing off random monsters, and when you got hurt there was always this heavily-armoured-but-not-high-in-skills merchant that would offer food(which could heal you) for a totally overrated price and still sold lots of stuff just because people needed it like hell. in RS, people could mine their materials (which at higher level ores took near to forever) and smith them into stuff the other players would use. Pretty much 100% of all the items that were used alot were player-made, and many made a fortune doing mining and smithing although it took alot of time.
Some people who were desperate for money would do a so-called "Taxi Service", that is; They would let the player click "follow" on him/her and take the player to a location that was requested by the player. Some even developed it into a form of escorting market and guaranteed the paying player would live at the end of the journey. This also spawned a small-scale industry in the taxi market, resulting in networks of "taxidrivers". If you knew the right people, you could PM them and let them send a "driver" over to take you where you wanted. The prices were often high for the fast services but usually people considered them worth it due to the point-and-click interface of RS and the constant loading times between "sectors".
in RS, you could trade all items with players, although some were of extreme value and others of almost none. Refining of raw-materials was one of the biggest businesses.
RS also had so called "General Stores" to which you could sell any item, although the price was never very high. Very often when someone made a huge amount of a certain item, like a craftable artifact, the prices would sink to a laughable level, resulting in some people stock-buying it and depositing them in their banks for later reselling for a better price.
A big market was making food; It could, as stated above, be sold for very high prices if you were in the places where people needed it. Cooking took time, required high cooking levels for the really good stuff and you had to market it yourself to get a good price. Yet it spawned a big market. It was often later on in the development accompanied by fishing, an activity that was similiar to mining, except you got fish instead of ore.
Last words of this terribly long and annoying post:
Create an enviroment, not missions. You need to get a bigger user-base if you're seriously into this and that won't work with a new mission that lasts for 5 mins. Possibly not missions at all.
Ananzi: The surest way to make a late software project even later is to add more programmers (especially incompetent ones). Read The Mythical Man Month some time.
Dragu: You're thinking of missions in the sense of most MMOs. Our new mission system is *all* about creating an environment. When players don't take the missions, THEY HAPPEN ANYWAY! This means that there are convoys and pirates, hive bots and assault forces, doing their thing with and without players. This was a prerequisite to remaking our economy into something that is *much* more visibly influenced. Very soon you'll be able to blockade a station and watch its prices go up. The pay for escort missions through that blockade will also rise (already does) until it's attractive enough to players that some of the goods start getting through. Soon, the stations will send out mining parties as well, and when they're mostly being destroyed by the Hive, the price of ore and items that are made with it will rise in the area and the pay for Hive-Hunt missions will increase. Soon (and I mean soon, not Soon(tm)), we'll have a real border conflict going on that affects the economies as well. Now... what exactly should we be doing to improve the environment?
P.S. I still find the escort, pirate and hive-hunt missions fun, and I've played them a helluva lot longer than 10 minutes (not to mention- there are no suprises for me).
Dragu: You're thinking of missions in the sense of most MMOs. Our new mission system is *all* about creating an environment. When players don't take the missions, THEY HAPPEN ANYWAY! This means that there are convoys and pirates, hive bots and assault forces, doing their thing with and without players. This was a prerequisite to remaking our economy into something that is *much* more visibly influenced. Very soon you'll be able to blockade a station and watch its prices go up. The pay for escort missions through that blockade will also rise (already does) until it's attractive enough to players that some of the goods start getting through. Soon, the stations will send out mining parties as well, and when they're mostly being destroyed by the Hive, the price of ore and items that are made with it will rise in the area and the pay for Hive-Hunt missions will increase. Soon (and I mean soon, not Soon(tm)), we'll have a real border conflict going on that affects the economies as well. Now... what exactly should we be doing to improve the environment?
P.S. I still find the escort, pirate and hive-hunt missions fun, and I've played them a helluva lot longer than 10 minutes (not to mention- there are no suprises for me).
Momerath:
ever hear about the one-man business? he escaped beaurocracy into bankruptcy. Mindnumbingly efficient at doing so too :D.
I kid, I kid. I've worked in a cubicle, and man does stuff not get done... FAST
ever hear about the one-man business? he escaped beaurocracy into bankruptcy. Mindnumbingly efficient at doing so too :D.
I kid, I kid. I've worked in a cubicle, and man does stuff not get done... FAST
Given how stuff isn't getting done fast with a small dev team, might we just say that things are never, ever done as fast as you want or expect regardless of the number or talent of the individuals working on them?
You guys really have no way to judge how fast things are getting done, Starfisher. I think if you could see the volume and quality of our code, you wouldn't think that at all.
Yes, programming tasks *always* take longer than you think (even when you're really pessimistic... so you might as well be optimistic). This is largely because you can't know what problems you're going to run into. After 20 years of coding, I occasionally write something that 'just works', but the common case is to run into some totally unexpected issue that takes you longer to fix than it took to code the whole project (and you can hardly believe how simple it was once you see the solution).
And finally, as I feel like I've said a hundred times, we've been building TOOLS! Tools that will allow us to make *visible* progress more quickly. Tools that are almost finished. I replicated the border-patrol mission with the new system in about 20 minutes; I know of bugs in the original that took longer to find. We value maintainability in general, because it's extremely important to our goal of updating the game for many years to come.
Yes, programming tasks *always* take longer than you think (even when you're really pessimistic... so you might as well be optimistic). This is largely because you can't know what problems you're going to run into. After 20 years of coding, I occasionally write something that 'just works', but the common case is to run into some totally unexpected issue that takes you longer to fix than it took to code the whole project (and you can hardly believe how simple it was once you see the solution).
And finally, as I feel like I've said a hundred times, we've been building TOOLS! Tools that will allow us to make *visible* progress more quickly. Tools that are almost finished. I replicated the border-patrol mission with the new system in about 20 minutes; I know of bugs in the original that took longer to find. We value maintainability in general, because it's extremely important to our goal of updating the game for many years to come.
Well, and I really mean no offense by this, just pointing out the information the userbase has to go on, this will be the second time a "mission editor" has been developed. I've been working in software development for a small startup-ish company for the past year, and believe me, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the difficulty of coding anything of complexity. Given the past history of this game, it seems that coding Vendetta is no different from coding voice recognition stuff - it just never gets done as fast as you want or expect, regardless of the quality or quantity of people working on the problem.
I'm sorry if I gave offense. I don't mean to say that you're slacking, but that realistically, we can't expect miracles with a speedy, flawless release of any new software.
I'm sorry if I gave offense. I don't mean to say that you're slacking, but that realistically, we can't expect miracles with a speedy, flawless release of any new software.
Yeah. The whole mission editor thing was pretty depressing for me too. But, anyway, I do understand that people feel like the game is stagnating, and that that's hard to take. We do what we can. Some things go as planned, some don't. It'll sure be nice to have the development-client be the same as the production one again, so we can actually.. DO stuff when we want to. We've wanted to add like 20 features over the last few months and gone "uugh.. that would require a protocol change.. dammit..".
Anyway, I have to go write a newspost now. woo.
Anyway, I have to go write a newspost now. woo.