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Play the game
Devs, please take this suggestion in the spirit intended and not as criticism or anyone thinking you are doing a crappy job (for 4 guys, you are doing good)...
I assume you guys log game time in dev and test working on various features, but I'm not sure how much game time you might spend in production. If you already do what's suggested below, then feel free to ignore it.
This suggestion is about game play in production: create some new characters and play *on* production -- even just a few hours per week. I would suggest you divide up and start a new character for each of the following VO player "roles":
1) Trader - Do trading in UIT space. Now try it virtually anywhere else (grey space is particularly hard due to so few station choices). Compare making money by trading, escorts, and procurements.
2) Miner - Try mining and now since the price updates, try making a good profit at it.
3) Nationalist Military -- Try this from the Serco side first, since it has been argued many times that Serco is *not* disadvantaged. Or better yet, one person try both sides and compare. Make sure to do BS, BP, and CtC.
4) Pirate - This is a valid and needed role for the health of the universe, and needs to work as well as all the others. Don't sit in B-8, but actively try to find and chase down targets. Try to pirate in UIT and compare that to nation space.
The immediate concern may be that devs flying around shooting people is counter productive, but it's really no different than me or any other player flying around shooting people.
Needless to say, if you accept this as valid testing, it should be done anonymously and with normal ships available to normal players -- no Bunchies UFOs, etc :).
I assume you guys log game time in dev and test working on various features, but I'm not sure how much game time you might spend in production. If you already do what's suggested below, then feel free to ignore it.
This suggestion is about game play in production: create some new characters and play *on* production -- even just a few hours per week. I would suggest you divide up and start a new character for each of the following VO player "roles":
1) Trader - Do trading in UIT space. Now try it virtually anywhere else (grey space is particularly hard due to so few station choices). Compare making money by trading, escorts, and procurements.
2) Miner - Try mining and now since the price updates, try making a good profit at it.
3) Nationalist Military -- Try this from the Serco side first, since it has been argued many times that Serco is *not* disadvantaged. Or better yet, one person try both sides and compare. Make sure to do BS, BP, and CtC.
4) Pirate - This is a valid and needed role for the health of the universe, and needs to work as well as all the others. Don't sit in B-8, but actively try to find and chase down targets. Try to pirate in UIT and compare that to nation space.
The immediate concern may be that devs flying around shooting people is counter productive, but it's really no different than me or any other player flying around shooting people.
Needless to say, if you accept this as valid testing, it should be done anonymously and with normal ships available to normal players -- no Bunchies UFOs, etc :).
Yes, I do this. Lately every couple of months for a week or so. I particularly did this quite a bit when I was setting the new prices of things.
I've always wanted to do this more, but oftentimes it's very difficult to justify when there is a major problem outstanding or some other fire that needs my immediate attention. But doing this is essentially my "reality check" on the state of the game. I have long lists of things to add/change based on this. Unfortunately, the long lists I generate often don't trump the fires (such as.. "oh crap the server stalled for 6 hours and we don't know why" from a couple of weeks ago.. lots of debugging there to figure it out).
Anyway, I take it in the spirit intended, and I understand. I've gotten a lot of criticism over the years, from people who think I never play.. I do (but they'd never know). I used to play a *lot*. These days, I'd like to play reliably a few hours per week, but even that has just been impossible sometimes.
I used to encourage the other guys to play too, but eventually gave up.
Anyway, playing in production a critical part of game design for me. I'll be playing more in the near future, when I start digging into the economy a bit further. I know full-well there are problems, I just don't have the time/resources/energy to fix them all quickly.
Also, I don't particularly care about problems in gameplay that is outright being replaced (CtC) or totally expanded and reworked (BS, the Serco-disadvantage thing), so many of those criticisms are ignored.. simply because I know where we're headed and that it's all irrelevant anyway. I'm not going to worry too much about the nasty paint job on a car, when I'm replacing the entire car in the near future.
I've always wanted to do this more, but oftentimes it's very difficult to justify when there is a major problem outstanding or some other fire that needs my immediate attention. But doing this is essentially my "reality check" on the state of the game. I have long lists of things to add/change based on this. Unfortunately, the long lists I generate often don't trump the fires (such as.. "oh crap the server stalled for 6 hours and we don't know why" from a couple of weeks ago.. lots of debugging there to figure it out).
Anyway, I take it in the spirit intended, and I understand. I've gotten a lot of criticism over the years, from people who think I never play.. I do (but they'd never know). I used to play a *lot*. These days, I'd like to play reliably a few hours per week, but even that has just been impossible sometimes.
I used to encourage the other guys to play too, but eventually gave up.
Anyway, playing in production a critical part of game design for me. I'll be playing more in the near future, when I start digging into the economy a bit further. I know full-well there are problems, I just don't have the time/resources/energy to fix them all quickly.
Also, I don't particularly care about problems in gameplay that is outright being replaced (CtC) or totally expanded and reworked (BS, the Serco-disadvantage thing), so many of those criticisms are ignored.. simply because I know where we're headed and that it's all irrelevant anyway. I'm not going to worry too much about the nasty paint job on a car, when I'm replacing the entire car in the near future.
Be careful what you wish for, he used to wipe up the galaxy with me for a mop. He's quite fiendish.
Incarnate, I respect everything you just said. We all understand that there are plans for the near future and changes you would like to make and so forth. However, we are paying for it, literally. I talk to players online about the situation, they all (including me) say the same thing: I hope it gets better because I don't want to have to leave VO. One player even told me: "I just asked for a roid texture enhancement the other day! :p" I mean, without a doubt we would check up on it in the future, but I think the point is while you make your changes you should throw in a couple more of the player relevant problems as well? I think Vardonx was trying to say that, too ... just so you can see through the eyes of a player.
current state of the game problems and improvements are good to keep in mind while moving onto the bigger picture in order to keep current players happy, but it does take from the often emphasized limited resources and time the devs have. If some improvements that could be made now would be kept, sweet. If they'd be a moot point in a few weeks or a month anyway, I'd rather they didn't blow a week or two on it. Guess it's just doing what you can and trying to balance it.
Armonia: I get that, and I do what I can, when I can. I have to balance out a bigger picture, and I try to drop in immediately-relevant stuff.. sometimes things take longer, or unexpected problems crop up.. or whatever else.
I mean, I have a promo in early December. Possibly several thousand new people pouring in during a short period of time. If I don't rework the newbie experience before then, the capacity to handle them, a stable game.. what's the point of having a promo at all? Oh sure, it helps, but if I can make some of those people stick around.. that's what's best for the game, the company, the big picture. And that takes precedence over trading wishlists or gameplay bugfixes, because it keeps us alive.
Let me put it a different way: I almost never get to do "changes I would like to make", as you put it :). Practically everything I do is driven by immediate need and reaction to a situation, a condition that has evolved.. something immediately relevant to the company's well-being that I must take advantage of. As a result, our direction seems to play hopscotch to an outside perspective. We say "Faction changes in October!" and then suddenly do a bunch of economics changes and.. asteroids? What?
But I know there are a few things that I could do to make newbies continue to give us a look. And I know that it dovetails with the FF/Faction-Change stuff which requires new newbie zones anyway.. so I alter course a little bit here and there to try and maximize advantage where I can, and minimize damage. But without any perspective on what I'm heading for (or avoiding) it all looks rather scattershot.
At this point I have the experience to know that if I wasn't as nimble at course-changes as I have become, we would not be here. But I also know that isn't necessarily apparent from the outside.
The truth is, what I want to do is usually pretty close to what the players actually want. I just don't get to do what I want most of the time: I try to make the most responsible overall choice based on the reality that presents itself. Oh I have a vision, and a direction, and we do stick to that if you were to draw an "average" line through all my zigzagging.. it still goes the same way. But there is a lot of back-and-forth.
Anyway, the helpful thing in all this is communication with you guys, which I usually do through newsposts. But I have been working my ass off recently, and it hasn't been viable. I have a newspost scheduled for this week, so hopefully that'll help. But, for now, we're doing what we're doing, and we'll get back to fixing the game (and by The Game I mean the relevant game) as soon as we possibly can.
I mean, I have a promo in early December. Possibly several thousand new people pouring in during a short period of time. If I don't rework the newbie experience before then, the capacity to handle them, a stable game.. what's the point of having a promo at all? Oh sure, it helps, but if I can make some of those people stick around.. that's what's best for the game, the company, the big picture. And that takes precedence over trading wishlists or gameplay bugfixes, because it keeps us alive.
Let me put it a different way: I almost never get to do "changes I would like to make", as you put it :). Practically everything I do is driven by immediate need and reaction to a situation, a condition that has evolved.. something immediately relevant to the company's well-being that I must take advantage of. As a result, our direction seems to play hopscotch to an outside perspective. We say "Faction changes in October!" and then suddenly do a bunch of economics changes and.. asteroids? What?
But I know there are a few things that I could do to make newbies continue to give us a look. And I know that it dovetails with the FF/Faction-Change stuff which requires new newbie zones anyway.. so I alter course a little bit here and there to try and maximize advantage where I can, and minimize damage. But without any perspective on what I'm heading for (or avoiding) it all looks rather scattershot.
At this point I have the experience to know that if I wasn't as nimble at course-changes as I have become, we would not be here. But I also know that isn't necessarily apparent from the outside.
The truth is, what I want to do is usually pretty close to what the players actually want. I just don't get to do what I want most of the time: I try to make the most responsible overall choice based on the reality that presents itself. Oh I have a vision, and a direction, and we do stick to that if you were to draw an "average" line through all my zigzagging.. it still goes the same way. But there is a lot of back-and-forth.
Anyway, the helpful thing in all this is communication with you guys, which I usually do through newsposts. But I have been working my ass off recently, and it hasn't been viable. I have a newspost scheduled for this week, so hopefully that'll help. But, for now, we're doing what we're doing, and we'll get back to fixing the game (and by The Game I mean the relevant game) as soon as we possibly can.
Incarnate: be sure to tell the playerbase about your upcoming promo. It would be cool to see what VO is like with more than a hundred players.
mission: I really don't know how fast they'll come in or not, this is the first time we've done this kind of promo. But yes, I'll post about it beforehand. If we're lucky, we might even get mailing-list usage beforehand.. we'll see.
And it would be cool to block off a few hours to go n00bing in a target-rich environment.
Seems to me like ALL the changes address player-relevant problems. We've recently seen player suggestions made in a few short hours. Many of the other changes they've made address the much larger issues - but are part of the infrastructure and may not be instantly recognizable as part of the "big picture". Of course VO will get better - it is constantly getting better. Many times the progress doesn't appear to be rapid, but it is certainly steady these days.