I know how hard you are working, you, being the developers.

But where is the new stuff that makes the game fun? I know you want everything to be as polished as possible before it’s released to player base. But I'm starting think disturbing thoughts here like...

I've been dedicated to VO for some years now and will continue to be so.

This is not a whinny "I'm gonna quite if you don’t..." bithc session.

But I erm... “we” need fun stuff, even if it's not perfect. Believe it or not, finding quirks in new stuff and bithcen about quirky new stuff is more fun than belly aching about non-existent or sooooon to be stuff.

Know what I mean?

So I was thinking... if you poll the community at large, and we strongly indicate that we would rather have imperfect new stuff versus non-existent or sooooon new stuff, would ya? Could ya?

That’s all, thanks.

mutorcs...

the problem with this is that, well, you are going to stay dedicated to the game wether there is new stuff or not, newbies, while there are not many, probably like the little that there is now, more than a bunch of stuff that doesnt work at all and leads them to dead ends. thats why stuff that is finished is better than stuff that isnt

or at least thats a reason

what would be nice would be for that suggestions forum's "read before you post" to actually be a poll of some sort so that the player base could rate their features by order of importance.

lets say you're allowed ten vote points, you checkmark those ten you feel are the most important i-want-soon items and then the overall top raked items would, in theory find their way in the priorities of the devs.

except planet landing.

because... you know... planets are large...

No to pseudo-democratic suggestions priorization.

We are adding stuff, but we have to keep a method to our madness. If we just flail about adding things willy-nilly, then we end up with more situations like Mining. Where people first go "oh wow this is so cool" and then after a few hours/days go "ok, but what's the point". Game development has to have an overriding vision that guides everything, otherwise it ends up being a complete mess with no point, no soul, and lots of conflicting code that wasn't designed properly from the start. And frankly, our game has had enough of those problems. So, we're very specifically trying to tie things together, give everything purpose and meaning, intelligently make the game into what it was always intended to be.. and do it right.

Case in point, my recent post to the General forum on the shields (the 1.7.7 thread) and why we've added them. I've wanted to add more epic-oriented missions for ages, but without any actual epic *targets*, it would have been pointless. Everyone would go solo their leviathan boringly for 2 hours and get the snazzy dropping of whatever and go get the great item. Then it's devalued because everyone has one and it's all a joke, no real organization, effort or meaning are required. There is nothing "difficult" or "interesting", just stuff that boringly takes longer.. the antithesis of what we want. Thus, fixing the one problem is required in order to progress down that particular path. And that's just one of many, many paths to many features we all want. Everything has dependencies and problems that hold up other features, it's all a big flow chart of conflicts and holdups. Plus *everything* is guaranteed to have bugs.. Michael was very excited about his new deliverator code, but it didn't start leaking memory and crashing the lisp subsystem until he put it into production. Now he's had to spend the last week trying to debug and figure out why, rather than working on the Next Big Thing (for him, the economy.. which is another thing that blocks about 50 new gameplay projects). Time debugging goes with the territory, an unfortunate reality of software development that cannot be avoided.

For what it's worth, I will be posting more of our direction in the near term, which should enlighten people a bit. We have a whole new.. project organization system, and it's intended to be public, but we're still getting used to it.. so I haven't posted it as of yet. All in good time, like everything else.

Fair enough, however please consider the polls thing. It could be useful, no?

btw I luv the game and thanks for all the hard work!

mutorcs

Actually, I've always wanted user polls so people could nominate the suggestions they find the most worthwhile. It would make it easier for me to read the forum and concentrate on the stuff that more people think is a good idea, rather than wading through large arguements and so on.

However, this would not necessarily impact our actual development timeline. Like I said, we do things in a particular order for a reason, but if we can drop in something much-requested in a short period of time.. we usually do.

Excellent and informative replies as always Incarnate... and take as long as you need as far as I'm concerned.

Just keep plugging away please. :)

We'll get there... soon(tm). ;)

EDIT: Speaking of things much requested, (well like 5 people have indicated their support, with no dissenters) that can be dropped in easily... could we get EC-107 availability (for those that have earned it only) in Sedina D-14 already? ;P