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Since this thread has evolved into something else other than the usual genka-ism, I'll wade in.
Starfisher and Lecter are right on the money. No amount of apologia and wishful thinking is going to mask the fact that this game is empty of content. Disillusionment is not something that happens overnight.
The thing is, the world is passing VO by. Right now, this is the best game out there that features twitch space based combat, done in a very nice way. But, there is nothing monopolistic about this idea : another developer, with deeper pockets and more resources, can come up with a similar game and VO'll be toast.
Don't squelch an honest discussion about what many of the veterans (I know for a fact that our private BLAK forums is getting gloomier all the time) are feeling. I repeat, disillusionment does not happen overnight. Blanket repetitive appeal to "give the devs time" is not going to placate the restless masses. So I suggest people here air their concerns as honestly as possible so that the devs get a clearer idea about what their playerbase are feeling. This way, at least the community can do a service to the devs instead of cracking black jokes behind their backs.
By the way, I am subscribed. So, don't get me started on that.
Starfisher and Lecter are right on the money. No amount of apologia and wishful thinking is going to mask the fact that this game is empty of content. Disillusionment is not something that happens overnight.
The thing is, the world is passing VO by. Right now, this is the best game out there that features twitch space based combat, done in a very nice way. But, there is nothing monopolistic about this idea : another developer, with deeper pockets and more resources, can come up with a similar game and VO'll be toast.
Don't squelch an honest discussion about what many of the veterans (I know for a fact that our private BLAK forums is getting gloomier all the time) are feeling. I repeat, disillusionment does not happen overnight. Blanket repetitive appeal to "give the devs time" is not going to placate the restless masses. So I suggest people here air their concerns as honestly as possible so that the devs get a clearer idea about what their playerbase are feeling. This way, at least the community can do a service to the devs instead of cracking black jokes behind their backs.
By the way, I am subscribed. So, don't get me started on that.
Whoa! He's back! Schweet! /me looks for Holden ingame now...
And the devs know how to get ahold of me when they want to start advertising. Sometime soon they will have to decide whether to "Fish or Cut Bait", and I truly hope that it's Sooner™ rather than Later™.
A little advertising will get more money (paying players) coming in, which will allow more workers to be hired, which will make the game better faster, which will attract more players, etc.
And the devs know how to get ahold of me when they want to start advertising. Sometime soon they will have to decide whether to "Fish or Cut Bait", and I truly hope that it's Sooner™ rather than Later™.
A little advertising will get more money (paying players) coming in, which will allow more workers to be hired, which will make the game better faster, which will attract more players, etc.
I guess softy here owns at least 30% of the company.
Sadly, Leber was poor, so he only owns 20%
Sadly, Leber was poor, so he only owns 20%
It's Ok, genka. We still love your original post.
It's okay, I gave up on it. It wasn't attracting the right audience.
Maybe you should of tried posting it under a different name?
like so ?
See Lecter, when you say things like that it makes me wanna create a racing guild or learn how to program or learn how to model so STOP MOTIVATING!!!!
It's just depressing cause I'm too lazy.
It's just depressing cause I'm too lazy.
See now that's more like it.
I agree with both Holden and Lecter. RP can only go so far in this game, after a bit we kinda need some help from the devs.
Let's face it there are better FPSes out there, VO needs to come into it's own or it will be lost to the masses.
Let's face it there are better FPSes out there, VO needs to come into it's own or it will be lost to the masses.
The NSI was just another Uniue widget without the player-created story to go along with it.
I'm just wondering whatever happened to the "user-created Missions" thing when it was revealed that the Hive hunt and missing hydrospanner missions were created with them. Where is it? That's my question... we need RP related missions... which we don't really have right now.
I'm just wondering whatever happened to the "user-created Missions" thing when it was revealed that the Hive hunt and missing hydrospanner missions were created with them. Where is it? That's my question... we need RP related missions... which we don't really have right now.
Hi. I uhh.. completely missed out on this, until I read it just now. Anyway, let me cover two basic things:
1) I agree with Genka.
Not for the reasons he states, but he's correct.. Mining is pointless and lacks contention. Even then it's only a method of income, and has no other real value. He hates "SimJobs" and that's fine.. but some people do like exactly that. Those same hundreds-of-thousands of people who did a lot of "crafting" in EverQuest. But that's no excuse for it having no real purpose and not being tied into other gameplay. I make sporadic posts vaguely outlining the intentions, but no one's seen any real evidence of that taking shape, so frustration there is pretty understandable.
The faction system is broken. Nuff said.
Ships are too damned fast. It's not only that it becomes a super twitch-driven equipment competition, but also that it alienates international users on more latent connections (anyone seen Icarus lately? That was one of his main complaints). I've posted about the 5% overall speed reduction and other topics. I agree that I should never have sped things up. I'm not even especially clear on why I did. I just seemed to gradually do that to make variants "better" or something. Despite all the time I had spent arguing, exactly as Genka said, that speeding things up was Not Good. Oh well, I screwed up. Unfortunately, "fixing it" may piss a great number of people off, and leave us even worse off.
I'm ok with doing the 5% across-the-board speed decrease, which was discussed elsewhere. But I haven't done this yet. Why not? Well, let's cover that in topic #2:
2) The Goddamn Game Isn't Changing Fast Enough
Can't really disagree here either. But there are some reasons for some parts of it. I'll cover the above mentioned one, of why I haven't slowed all the ships down. A relatively minor change, it really would take me about 10 minutes to do. 10 minutes! Trivial, right?
No, not really. Because, unfortunately, we're in the midst of this gigantic client redux thing, which has side effects that touch on everything else. Ray has literally rewritten major chunks of the client to get the new UI to work. That means that whenever we actually *release it*.. it's totally going to be a mess. Any time you re-write a massive amount of code, everything breaks unexpectedly. We've learned this. So, given that we have paying users now and can't just go "uhh, the game may totally not work for a week or so when we release the new client" like we used to in the Test.. what can we do?
We can release an Optional client. Let people download the new version, test it out, but retain complete client-server compatability with the old version. Non-adventurous users continue using the old one, our hard core people try out the new version and tell us what's wrong. We spend a week or two debugging whatever crops up, and then push it out as the "real, final, release" version. Well, peachy, but what does that have to do with slowing the ships down? Or making more variants? Or making destroyed ships drop some percentage of their actual equipped addons, which we tried to do two weeks ago, before we realized it required..
Client Changes. As Ray's version of the client diverges further and further from the production version, new client versions become more problematic to do. Not impossible, we do have revision control and all that (for those coder types), but still problematic. Especially since most of the more "Interesting" features actually require a small protocol change here or there. And changing the protocol is a total no-go right now. To allow the above "both new & old clients work at the same time" scenario, we can't change the protocol. So, we're kind of in a client-to-server feature freeze scenario. Which, to loop back to the original point, is why it's tough to make changes right now that aren't *entirely* server side (hence, lots of work on Deliverator and the bots, right?!).
We've been in this.. kind of "new client limbo" for two to three months, and it's gotten more and more.. complex to release client updates as we've gone along. It isn't impossible, but we'd rather just get through this whole UI thing and get it over with, rather than spending a lot of time doing minor work (which may need to be reworked in the new client *anyway*.. which results in diverging source trees and more.. exciting complexity). Otherwise, it would take us twice as long to get this work *done*, and the UI holds up the cap ship stuff and.. half the other crap I want to do. So, it's a bit of a dilemma.
* * *
So, that somewhat explains the lack of actual client-side releases over the last few months, but it doesn't really show for "what's been going on for the last year". And most of all, it doesn't really say "What's going to happen.. and quickly".
For those who don't see that any short-term (say, by January) change is going to actually make any difference in the game, I don't personally agree. A lot of good points have been made about "just the way software development goes" and the like, and I can definitely appreciate that (ie, the scenario illustrated above). The difference between me and you guys (as far as I can tell) is that your belief/expectation/faith in us back at release time (Nov 1/04) was higher, and now it's lower. For me, it's the opposite, back in November, or three years ago, or whenever.. I had no idea when all these plans I had had might actually HAPPEN. Oddly, now, I actually see them starting to take place. I see the real potential of some of the work we've done this year, and I see that things can actually.. be DONE. My coworkers are asking me questions about how we want to implement complex scenarios. Not asking pie-in-the-sky like "So, if you made a great game in your imagination, how would it work".. but like "So, how do we want to do this, like, by next month". The reality of our progress is.. finally hitting home to me. It's ironic that it doesn't show very well to the outside world, and that's really my fault.. but, yeah, no use my moaning about that. Anyway, the point is, for the first time since I started coming up with the plans for this game back in the mid/late 90s, I'm actually starting to see them HAPPEN. And my faith is a hell of a lot harder to buoy up than most.. I've dedicated the better part of a *decade* to this project, and for most of that era it's been a bland engine or space-quake-with-mods. The prospect of it actually becoming something remotely close to my original vision is uhh.. well, it's pretty.. new to me, and really really cool.
I don't know what that's worth to anyone else on the outside. I mean, it's just me talking, and I don't really have anything to back it up that I can clearly point to and say "look!". The design wiki clearly worked out great for that (har har). But even with that, our progress would have been hard to define for the outside world (beyond what I write in the newsposts).
But, I can say this, it is our plan and my intention that within the forseeable future (the next couple of months) we will draw together the disparate elements of of the game, make it more accessible to new users and try to attract some attention from the gaming press (the only kind of marketing we can afford: free).
My original plan was for "Vendetta Online 2.0" to debut on Nov 1, a fitting release date for a redux. But the failure of that to take place was partially due to Software Development Life (as commented on earlier in this thread), and partially due to My Life, the latter of which I take responsibility for. Despite these setbacks, we ARE shooting for the above vaguely-defined goals. I've crowed a lot about how I want to put it all on the wiki and this and that, and it's all true, I do want that. But, honestly, I mostly just care about getting it DONE now. So, if I need to just talk to Ray one day about something instead of writing it up properly, I may just do that. We're kinda under the gun, and we know it.
* * *
To recap:
John agrees, game is broken!
John says, game will be better, soon! John has nothing to back it up with, as usual. Yay!
But, I don't really know what else to say. It's as close to the truth as I know.
Also, sorry I was kinda "away" and wasn't aware of this until mid-afternoon on Sunday. See earlier newspost.
1) I agree with Genka.
Not for the reasons he states, but he's correct.. Mining is pointless and lacks contention. Even then it's only a method of income, and has no other real value. He hates "SimJobs" and that's fine.. but some people do like exactly that. Those same hundreds-of-thousands of people who did a lot of "crafting" in EverQuest. But that's no excuse for it having no real purpose and not being tied into other gameplay. I make sporadic posts vaguely outlining the intentions, but no one's seen any real evidence of that taking shape, so frustration there is pretty understandable.
The faction system is broken. Nuff said.
Ships are too damned fast. It's not only that it becomes a super twitch-driven equipment competition, but also that it alienates international users on more latent connections (anyone seen Icarus lately? That was one of his main complaints). I've posted about the 5% overall speed reduction and other topics. I agree that I should never have sped things up. I'm not even especially clear on why I did. I just seemed to gradually do that to make variants "better" or something. Despite all the time I had spent arguing, exactly as Genka said, that speeding things up was Not Good. Oh well, I screwed up. Unfortunately, "fixing it" may piss a great number of people off, and leave us even worse off.
I'm ok with doing the 5% across-the-board speed decrease, which was discussed elsewhere. But I haven't done this yet. Why not? Well, let's cover that in topic #2:
2) The Goddamn Game Isn't Changing Fast Enough
Can't really disagree here either. But there are some reasons for some parts of it. I'll cover the above mentioned one, of why I haven't slowed all the ships down. A relatively minor change, it really would take me about 10 minutes to do. 10 minutes! Trivial, right?
No, not really. Because, unfortunately, we're in the midst of this gigantic client redux thing, which has side effects that touch on everything else. Ray has literally rewritten major chunks of the client to get the new UI to work. That means that whenever we actually *release it*.. it's totally going to be a mess. Any time you re-write a massive amount of code, everything breaks unexpectedly. We've learned this. So, given that we have paying users now and can't just go "uhh, the game may totally not work for a week or so when we release the new client" like we used to in the Test.. what can we do?
We can release an Optional client. Let people download the new version, test it out, but retain complete client-server compatability with the old version. Non-adventurous users continue using the old one, our hard core people try out the new version and tell us what's wrong. We spend a week or two debugging whatever crops up, and then push it out as the "real, final, release" version. Well, peachy, but what does that have to do with slowing the ships down? Or making more variants? Or making destroyed ships drop some percentage of their actual equipped addons, which we tried to do two weeks ago, before we realized it required..
Client Changes. As Ray's version of the client diverges further and further from the production version, new client versions become more problematic to do. Not impossible, we do have revision control and all that (for those coder types), but still problematic. Especially since most of the more "Interesting" features actually require a small protocol change here or there. And changing the protocol is a total no-go right now. To allow the above "both new & old clients work at the same time" scenario, we can't change the protocol. So, we're kind of in a client-to-server feature freeze scenario. Which, to loop back to the original point, is why it's tough to make changes right now that aren't *entirely* server side (hence, lots of work on Deliverator and the bots, right?!).
We've been in this.. kind of "new client limbo" for two to three months, and it's gotten more and more.. complex to release client updates as we've gone along. It isn't impossible, but we'd rather just get through this whole UI thing and get it over with, rather than spending a lot of time doing minor work (which may need to be reworked in the new client *anyway*.. which results in diverging source trees and more.. exciting complexity). Otherwise, it would take us twice as long to get this work *done*, and the UI holds up the cap ship stuff and.. half the other crap I want to do. So, it's a bit of a dilemma.
* * *
So, that somewhat explains the lack of actual client-side releases over the last few months, but it doesn't really show for "what's been going on for the last year". And most of all, it doesn't really say "What's going to happen.. and quickly".
For those who don't see that any short-term (say, by January) change is going to actually make any difference in the game, I don't personally agree. A lot of good points have been made about "just the way software development goes" and the like, and I can definitely appreciate that (ie, the scenario illustrated above). The difference between me and you guys (as far as I can tell) is that your belief/expectation/faith in us back at release time (Nov 1/04) was higher, and now it's lower. For me, it's the opposite, back in November, or three years ago, or whenever.. I had no idea when all these plans I had had might actually HAPPEN. Oddly, now, I actually see them starting to take place. I see the real potential of some of the work we've done this year, and I see that things can actually.. be DONE. My coworkers are asking me questions about how we want to implement complex scenarios. Not asking pie-in-the-sky like "So, if you made a great game in your imagination, how would it work".. but like "So, how do we want to do this, like, by next month". The reality of our progress is.. finally hitting home to me. It's ironic that it doesn't show very well to the outside world, and that's really my fault.. but, yeah, no use my moaning about that. Anyway, the point is, for the first time since I started coming up with the plans for this game back in the mid/late 90s, I'm actually starting to see them HAPPEN. And my faith is a hell of a lot harder to buoy up than most.. I've dedicated the better part of a *decade* to this project, and for most of that era it's been a bland engine or space-quake-with-mods. The prospect of it actually becoming something remotely close to my original vision is uhh.. well, it's pretty.. new to me, and really really cool.
I don't know what that's worth to anyone else on the outside. I mean, it's just me talking, and I don't really have anything to back it up that I can clearly point to and say "look!". The design wiki clearly worked out great for that (har har). But even with that, our progress would have been hard to define for the outside world (beyond what I write in the newsposts).
But, I can say this, it is our plan and my intention that within the forseeable future (the next couple of months) we will draw together the disparate elements of of the game, make it more accessible to new users and try to attract some attention from the gaming press (the only kind of marketing we can afford: free).
My original plan was for "Vendetta Online 2.0" to debut on Nov 1, a fitting release date for a redux. But the failure of that to take place was partially due to Software Development Life (as commented on earlier in this thread), and partially due to My Life, the latter of which I take responsibility for. Despite these setbacks, we ARE shooting for the above vaguely-defined goals. I've crowed a lot about how I want to put it all on the wiki and this and that, and it's all true, I do want that. But, honestly, I mostly just care about getting it DONE now. So, if I need to just talk to Ray one day about something instead of writing it up properly, I may just do that. We're kinda under the gun, and we know it.
* * *
To recap:
John agrees, game is broken!
John says, game will be better, soon! John has nothing to back it up with, as usual. Yay!
But, I don't really know what else to say. It's as close to the truth as I know.
Also, sorry I was kinda "away" and wasn't aware of this until mid-afternoon on Sunday. See earlier newspost.
Thank you very much for the post, Incarnate. It is really nice to know WHY things go as they do; it helps a lot with being patient.
Inc said: John says, game will be better, soon! John has nothing to back it up with, as usual. Yay!
That's OK. I think most of us have Faith™ that serves as the counter to your Soon™. Looking forward to the new V 2.0!
Regarding the So, given that we have paying users now and can't just go "uhh, the game may totally not work for a week or so when we release the new client" like we used to in the Test.. what can we do? problem:
Like you said I think the best option is to offer a new optional game client download that runs on the testserver. Really, a 300 MB download is no big deal for most broadband users. I bet even Martin will download it. Of course, you'd need to maintain two sets of updaters...
How better to enable your community than offer them options?
That's OK. I think most of us have Faith™ that serves as the counter to your Soon™. Looking forward to the new V 2.0!
Regarding the So, given that we have paying users now and can't just go "uhh, the game may totally not work for a week or so when we release the new client" like we used to in the Test.. what can we do? problem:
Like you said I think the best option is to offer a new optional game client download that runs on the testserver. Really, a 300 MB download is no big deal for most broadband users. I bet even Martin will download it. Of course, you'd need to maintain two sets of updaters...
How better to enable your community than offer them options?
Leber hit it spot-on.
My faith in you guys has never lowered. Ever.
And seeing you going every which way to try and cover all of the things that you missed while you were dealing with Life really makes me glad to know that it's a group of people who actually care about the product they're making.
You care about not releasing a client version that's so buggy it crashes the server every time someone tries to log in.
You care that we have opinions and you listen to them with an open mind. You even act on them sometimes, and when you do, you make sure we know that you have.
It does nothing but increase the faith I have in you guys. And I think the four of you need to remember that for each pessimist in the crowd, there's at least ten to fifteen optimists to counter them.
Thanks, John, Andy, Ray and Michael (and Waylon, wherever the hell you are...!). Thanks for the many hours of enjoyment I have spent on this game.
My faith in you guys has never lowered. Ever.
And seeing you going every which way to try and cover all of the things that you missed while you were dealing with Life really makes me glad to know that it's a group of people who actually care about the product they're making.
You care about not releasing a client version that's so buggy it crashes the server every time someone tries to log in.
You care that we have opinions and you listen to them with an open mind. You even act on them sometimes, and when you do, you make sure we know that you have.
It does nothing but increase the faith I have in you guys. And I think the four of you need to remember that for each pessimist in the crowd, there's at least ten to fifteen optimists to counter them.
Thanks, John, Andy, Ray and Michael (and Waylon, wherever the hell you are...!). Thanks for the many hours of enjoyment I have spent on this game.
Here here on all points, LeberMac and Celkan.
/me agrees completely with the above four posts.
Also, these long posts that you make explaining what is going on is one of the main things that keeps up my faith in this game.
Also, these long posts that you make explaining what is going on is one of the main things that keeps up my faith in this game.
Genka: Please don't bother to post. All you have done is gotten John to *again* tell us why things are as they are. Something most of us have known all along. Yes, I'm a Guide but am privy to no special information the rest of the community isn't privy to.
Thanks for the Insight/info Inc. =)