I understand that things come up -- the server update took longer than expected, etc. That's all cool. However, three months ago I purchased a one-year sub based on promises made in a promo e-mail.

But the promised:

"-New Trident Variants.
-Major changes and fixes to Deneb Dynamic Warfare.
-Improvements to existing conquerable stations, and perhaps some surprises..
-Significant changes to strike forces, factional defenses, temp-KoS and other areas.
-Further updates to the Oculus Rift and VR experience.

----->****All of this is expected in the next 30-60 days <3 *****<----- "

from June 30

Turned into:
-server migration
-https
-"prototype" economy in N2
-PCC stuff
-two weeks of "livery" updates <--- lol

The in-game momentum and hope after that e-mail was strong. People were online just to grind and get ready for the big wave of cool shit. But after ~12 weeks of unrelated updates things are **really** slow.

Again, I understand that being 30 days late isn't unheard of from a development perspective -- and that shit happens. Those aren't the answers i'm looking for. After talking to a bunch of vets, the prevailing opinion is "lol that shit will never happen" or "yeah soon(tm)" or "we've been waiting for that for years now".

So the big questions are:
--Should I still be expecting any of those updates?
--If so: what's the timeline?
--If not: wtf?

And the worst part is, now we're stuck with buttcast69 for another nine months. Damn you John Bergman with your "half off premium subscription" email! Damn you to hell!

@genka

Lol

Yeah welcome to VO, a promise to deliver a feature is really the promised timeline x 2 + 100 days.

LULZ

This thread is probably giving Dr. Lecter an orgasm.

I'm not in the "will never happen" boat, but I do usually double or triple any estimates GS gives. Making accurate time estimates is hard.

I'm not in the "never will happen" boat either. I think that one sank a long long time ago. I'm just in the "never will happen"'s life jackets now.

I know it's a sad sad thing to say, but I'm ready to give up on this ship altogether. You can only put up with so many broken promises before you lose faith; and only lose faith so many times before you realise you are running with a losing team.

Yeah I'm with yoda on this one.

thank you for posting this, I was wondering rar

joylessjoker:

something something O-face

Pro-tip: you can avoid future dissapointment by lowering your expectations. Play the game as is or quit. Complaining about the slow progress is pointless.

you can avoid future dissapointment [sic] by lowering your expectations.

If it worked for greenwall's love life, it can work for VO.

Playing vo for future enhancements only fosters frustration. Enjoy the game as it is and adapt as it changes.

Or just move on and play something else like Elite Dangerous. Elite is a damn good game and they actually deliver on their promises.

I was handed a big shit-sandwich this summer, and have done my best to eat it and keep the game online.

- After returning from a conference, I abruptly learned that our entire game/web-server cluster (of 13+ years) would probably need to be migrated somewhere else, sometime nebulously soon. Aside from the server-capacity hardware, this is a hugely complex nest of interlocking services, from billing to gameplay to administration, some of which hadn't been touched in a decade.

- A few days later, I also learned that our office (also of 13+ years) was losing our fiber internet access (within.. a week), as our ISP's CEO had had a stroke and decided to shut down his company (sadly, Bob passed away recently). This included our historical /27 of address space (with external services IP-locked to it), and a huge amount of secondary infrastructure impacts. This was completely unrelated to the colo, which is totally different. Just.. hooray for timing.

This completely canned all of our planned development, and further delayed goals related to improving our finances (like iphone and steam). At any given time, it seemed like we had just about resolved things.. until another shoe would drop. I can guarantee it has sucked a lot more for us than for you guys; although I understand you feel un-informed..

But, unfortunately, I've been in a catch-22 position when it came to disclosing what's been going on. In some cases, my relating specifics in a public environment (like a newspost or newsletter) has some significant risk of the disclosure getting back to.. someone involved in my problems, and making my problems a hell of a lot worse. Soo.. I don't say anything and just try and fix the issue as fast as we can. I'm being careful and "limited" about what I'm saying, even now.

So, yes, this BS is still on-going. We just learned our webserver (and, critical-billing server) is going down next week. At some point. We do not have redundancy yet, it's just been too time consuming to build that out, and we have no freaking money to throw at these issues. But I'm going to try and make that happen this weekend. I had to pull Ray off of development this past week to finish up website-related work on his end, so I can try and cobble together a fallback case.

Assuming our infrastructure stabilizes before long, we hope to get back to the plans we already laid out at the beginning of summer. Hope. That's all I have to offer.

Well, I'm not going anywhere. And I never got around to mentioning it, but I really like that new Vulture skin you introduced with the livery. Now my vultures can be properly orange and green.

If it helps, here's a better sandwich than the one you've been eating.

I hope all goes well for you john bergman, :( that is way too much shit at one time to be thrown at someone. R.I.p bob. Rar

There are silver linings to all of this. We have cleaned up and improved a lot of our server infrastructure, during the process of moving it around, which is good long-term. We probably have a lot more capacity and game-scalability now, if we get slammed with a million-people-per-week iPhone feature (there's a lot of elastic server capacity in Chicago, including Azure and others, that we now have sub-millisecond latency to employ). We've fixed a number of problems, made stuff more secure, etc.

Our office internet is now better than it was before, and cheaper, and I managed to convince Level3 to give us our address space back (although it took like 2 months).

Most of the server-work we had planned to do at some point; just.. not all at once, over this particular summer, with a bit of a gun to our heads. But, stuff happens, that's life.

I still have infrastructure I have to move yet, some of our intranet, internal-documentation and game-administration tools, primary DNS, etc. But a lot of the biggest stuff is moved. It just hasn't really "settled" yet, heh. When you move in a hurry, things get missed.. growing logs that aren't being rotated, or monitoring/alarms that have to work differently now, whatever else. Cleanup is inevitable.

Inc, thanks for the update.

Have you taken the Myers Briggs?

Miss you Butt!