Dwindling Confidence

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Calan Caitin, Apr 6, 2019.

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  1. Boris Mondragon

    Boris Mondragon Avatar

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    I got one in mind but it has to do with @Sol Stormlin and the pillory on my ship. That torture device is fully functional “Grins”.

    R/Boris/El Pirata/Black Sails Forever
     
  2. Sol Stormlin

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    *hides*
     
  3. Superbitsandbob

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    My confidence was hanging by a thread after the announcement that future PvE content would mostly be small story driven bits and they would be relying on the players to flesh it out with their own dungeons (which makes sense now looking at the lack of any PvE content or scene updates). I'm not even sure who will be creating episode 2? Episode 1 has loads of unused, generic scenes where literally nothing happens in them and we are talking about a new land mass with what, more procedurally generated generic scenes.

    The move to "working from home" pretty much severed it. The usual crowd keep suggesting this is a good thing but in my experience it very rarely works long term. The last patch issues are probably an example of this. While it might give a fussy feeling in the stomach to see the devs at home with their dog it's very different having a team together for the working day where they can instantly bounce ideas off of each other and develop the game together, irrespective of the technological advances in the way we communicate.

    And I think that is part of the problem. That comfort. Things feel far too comfortable when I look at the devs. The dev streams for example. Great idea if done properly but is it really good for the development process or the perceived process to see a dev at home with a dog cam who keeps suggesting that things are working a certain way or that something was fixed only to find that it was not? To say give us more money and we will post you stuff when they can't even get the stuff to people who's money they have had for months/years? It's been suggested that it's great to see him fixing bugs in real time but is it really if he thought it was all fine or working as intended?

    This now seems like a development process where some people are making a game for some friends who are happy to keep throwing money their way. When you look at the Anthem development saga, no one wants development to take that toll on a persons mental state, but this process seems to have gone completely the other way.
     
  4. Earl Atogrim von Draken

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    I am having fun *shrugs*
     
  5. Sean Silverfoot

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    I'm enjoying the heck out of the game and look forward to being here for a number of years.
     
  6. Jefe

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    My take on it is this:

    - They have said that they are officeless right now and when they plus up for the release they will go back to having an office. As they mentioned, officeless is a fair amount cheaper.
    - They are working on tech to simplify creation of content and more items and tools. That can be made use of by future quest developers and it is also being made accessible to the players.
    - While the tech is being developed then people should be working on episode 2 plot and also planning new office and new personnel. Those steps will most likely be kept out of view of the players for now.
    - They probably want to make sure things are concrete before announcing the plus up.
    - During the time where they run silent on some channels, people will get dismayed.
    - Since they appear to intend to fund with their current mechanisms, then this is a race between being ready to go for the big episode 2 push and waning interest.
     
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  7. Mishikal

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    Much of the above are general suppositions on your part that aren't backed by reality, however.

    For example:

    a) Working from home has been scientifically proven to be more productive (As someone who has worked from home for > decade, I can confirm): https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/working-from-home-makes-you-happier-less-likely-to.html (An aside, if you watched the Y! debacle, I have the inside info as a former Y! WFH employee on why Marissa Myer's metric was flawed and her decision was utterly asinine).

    b) The last round of issues were caused by a few things: a) Unity being broken (not SOTA) and b) The SOTA build engineers being on vacation, so people unfamiliar with the build were having to do it. I.e., the broken terrain was a bug in Unity (vs SOTA) that would not manifest in SOTA until after a 7+ hour build had completed. Since the devs work on a development instance and not a full build, it didn't show up in what they were doing. Certainly a lesson to be learned there, but it's unfair to kick that back on the SOTA devs.

    c) If you have been on the livestreams (sadly, limiting the audience of the information) the goal with Episode 2 is to do something rather different than Episode 1, but it depends on the newer Unity versions that are coming out. Those allow them to build significantly larger scenes than we have now (I agree with the complaint about many of the current zones.). Hopefully that change can eventually get pushed back to the Episode 1 lands, and those scenes can be rebuilt.

    d) On the bug fixing, keep in mind @Chris is not the sole developer, and much of the stuff he's fixing during the livestream isn't normally in his purview. The livestream's really a good way to get hot button items fixed fairly quickly. I'd personally like a better process around bug reporting/fixing, but that's a separate discussion, and more engagement from additional developers. However, I also recognize they are a small team, and only can work on a few different things at once.
     
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  8. Brass Knuckles

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    I like the game, I think the new dungeon system will be special. BIG if here if they don’t stand in the way of it being so. What the game needs most as of right now is a deeper player base so if they focus on stuff that brings the masses into the game I’ll feel better about it’s chances. If they stick with the tiny population they have now then I’m gonna worry.
     
  9. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    Respectfully, this is highly debatable, subjective and relative to the industry. Moreover, the study your article is referencing was done in China, not the United States. Having worked in Beijing and Singapore, I can assure you the "corporate culture" is completely different than the United States. While I can appreciate the corollaries Dr. Bloom is trying to draw from his research here, it is flawed (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf).

    Furthermore, it has been shown that WFH doesn't work for everybody and isn't a good fit for certain industries (https://www.forbes.com/sites/louismosca/2017/06/29/working-from-home-dont-allow-it/#75d4234c6f9c). For example, I worked in finance for over a decade and was under no obligation to ever go to my firm. I could work wherever I wanted so long as I was generating revenue and getting my work done. This was a good fit for some, but not so much for others (myself included, honestly). While I cannot speak to the Yahoo example (I would love to hear your personal experience on this), The Atlantic does a good job of explaining why the WFH innovator, IBM, changed their policy back in 2015 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/when-working-from-home-doesnt-work/540660/).

    Now, I am not arguing that this new "nomadic" WFH model isn't a good thing for Portalarium, only time will tell if it is. It does however, make me wonder why it wasn't adopted sooner if the purported benefits are so great. I'm not so sure that they are, but not having any evidentiary support to back up my supposition, I admittedly am speculating.
     
  10. Mishikal

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    Oh, it's certainly industry specific for sure. But at the moment we're talking about Port/Technology firms in general.

    I was mostly working from home starting around 2004/2005. At that time I was working for a private university in the group that ran all the application infrastructure (email, LDAP, DNS, Kerberos, etc), and living in on-campus housing. I was literally only like a 5-10 minute walk from my office. But it just really started seeming rather pointless to go in, it just distracted me from getting real work done. My manager had no problem with it as long as I came in for meetings (also, often pointless and a waste of time. ;) ). In early 2007, I started a new job at a startup. I was then living about a 15 minute drive from the office, and going in. However some life circumstances intervened in late 2007, and I needed to be permanently working from home at least for several months to a year. My management was fine with that, particularly given my proximity to the office. A few months later, the startup was bought by Yahoo! in a large buying spree. Yahoo! of course at that time had a very reasonable work from home policy, and I did periodically go into the office (I was about a 45 minute drive away from the office, or a train ride). Given that work from home was standardized at Yahoo!, they had their network and ability to connect set up quite well. There were a few different options, such as the VPN. Another option (and definitely the most *used* option) was their SSH jump host.

    So getting on now to Marissa Mayer. Thankfully my company was no longer with Yahoo! anymore (They'd sold us to yet another tech firm before she took charge, and they too were fine with WFH). Ms. Mayer, if you check the articles published at the time, did the following to come to her conclusions:

    .

    Now, when I read that, I just busted a gut laughing. Of course there were few people using the VPN... The vast majority of people used the SSH jump host, so they'd never show up in the VPN logs (The SSH jump host allowed public key auth). So she made a massive decision deeply affecting the state of the company she was running, on entirely flawed data. That essentially set the tone for the rest of her tenure at Yahoo!

    As for working from home -- I've been 100% since mid 2007. I've worked for a number of companies large and small since that time (The startup has had 5 different owners, counting Yahoo!, headquartered all over the U.S. No one has ever had any complaint about this in relation to my work, other than to say I work too much and need to take a vacation. At some point, the startup
    went entirely remote (No offices at all), and that worked out just fine. I left them back in 2017 for a different position, also at a company that is 100% remote (and has been since 1999).

    At my current job, we are spread out across the globe. 2 of us on the west coast, 2 in Texas, 1 in Maine, 3 in Florida, 1 in Utah, 1 in the U.K., 1 in Ireland, 1 in Bulgaria, 1 in France, etc. The person in Ireland actually moved there from Los Angeles a few years back.

    I definitely agree with you that not everyone is suited to work from home, and time will definitely tell with Portalarium. The thing is, the world has started adapting more and more to the WFH lifestyle for companies. Tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin have rooms you can rent out for meeting with clients. There are "co-work" places all over. Chris mentioned on a livestream a while back that there is a company that's offered to let them share space with them for free, and there are some employees who go in there. So they actually have a spot now where they can all meet if its necessary. Also, Chris has noted they routinely have team lunches, and I imagine a lot gets hashed out there. Additionally, there are services like Zoom if you need to do some on the fly collaboration and want to be able to share screens, etc (My coworkers and I routinely do this with clients and each other when its needed). Also, pretty much every IT company utilizes or runs an instant messaging service and dedicated chat rooms (Trillian Server, Slack, Mattermost, etc). This allows timely communication as well, and is definitely the medium I use for team communication the most.

    Honestly, so far, I've been pleased with the effect on Chris at least. He's getting some major pain points addressed because he's interacting directly with players on a near daily basis, and learning what the major pain points are. He's realized things like the crafting system sucks (It was so hilarious watching him boost his Carpentry skill to 200 trying to make it so he could create pulp faster and then raging about the fact it didn't have any effect on the speed or quantity).

    What I would really like to see is for the developers to have mandated time playing the game. A lot of them literally don't play. I think then what we see is a lot of ideas that look great on paper come into existence, but the actual reality doesn't end up working well. With @Chris being more active in the game, he's discovering these things, and he's also able to get feedback directly from those who are playing the game. In the IT industry, we have a name for this concept -- "dogfooding". The basic idea is, if you're going to be selling a product, you better be using it, too. And it's an important idea. If you don't know you're own product, it's really hard to grasp the issues your end users encounter.

    Time will definitely show how it pans out, but I'm hoping it's overall for the good. Chris has also been very clear that they do fully intend to have an office space again in the future, once they have Episode 2 better planned out and need the additional headcount for the implementation. Right now, they're simply not ready for more people to come on board. There's an additional issue there of the time it takes to train the new individuals with the specifics to the SOTA product and they don't want to start that process until they're sure they have a full line of work for them to be doing.

    Also, on the bit about scenes. Chris is currently reworking Deep Ravenswood, so there's at least some work being done (although that zone wasn't exactly generic). I wish they would do a few things:

    a) Make more of the existing scenes unique

    b) Implement an idea someone suggested the other day -- Make it so (if you want) you can scale up a scene to something higher. They have different levels of mobs for all the different tiers. I.e., skeleton -> large skeleton -> hardened skeleton -> elite skeleton. It should be entirely possible to, say, convert a Tier 2 scene to a Tier 5 scene by swapping in the related NPCs for that "family". This could give players (if done right) an incentive to go explore and use a "lower" tier scene.

    For Episode 2, Chris has stated that their goal is to make very large, non-procedural scenes, possible multiple "scenes" as one actual scene. There is new technology in Unity that is supposed to allow them to do that. They don't want to try and retrofit the episode 1 area into that technology at this time, so that's part of the purpose of the new Episode 2 lands. There was even an idea that possibly some day there is no "world map" and "scenes" (Outside of speciality scenes like basements, mines, dungeons (player and the rise, ec), just one massive playing environment. And it sounds like someday they do want to go and rework Episode 1 into this new framework, but not until they have it figured out in the Episode 2 lands.

    :)
     
  11. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    @Mishikal This is why I always enjoy your posts! I learned more from your response than I have in months from the devs, lol. :)

    Also, your personal experience with Yahoo was a fascinating read and appreciate you sharing. It's amazing such a decision was made in such an arbitrary manner, but it happens all the time. Look at what happened when all the former top AOL execs took over AARP...disaster! ;)

    You and me both brother, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't agree with the OP. Even if all the things you shared come to fruition and there actually is an Episode 2, it's the quests/story/lore that I enjoy the most and this doesn't seem to be an area they are focusing on any more. I could be wrong (and often am, just ask my wife :)) but if they were going to "ramp up" to overhaul the quest system, shouldn't it have happened by now?

    I do agree that Chris is working his butt off and think you really hit the nail on the head here:

    :D
     
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  12. Superbitsandbob

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    a) That is just very debatable based on so many factors. Watching the livestreams and how things currently are, in my opinion it's made things too comfortable. Debatable though.

    b) Fair enough.

    c) My issue was not the size of the scenes but that they are pointless in the majority of cases. There is no reason at all to visit most of them because they are painfully generic with mobs randomly sprinkled around. Nothing interesting happens in them. A new Unity build may well allow them to create bigger scenes but bigger scenes containing what? There are so many scenes in Ep.1 at the moment that need attention and the current lack of content updates outside of fishing rods and dungeons pieces is not a Unity problem and doesn't give me faith that Ep.2 will be much different. A scene needs something going on aside from just placing mobs whether it is an interesting boss fight, NPC's or NPC led quests or some other interesting mechanics.

    I think part of my failing of confidence is watching some other, similar games currently in development. You often get Q&A's with the art team, sound team, quest team etc and they contain a lead and some minions in each department. You could argue that the SOTA team is smaller on purpose but none of these games have anyone on the team with Richard Garriotts profile (admittedly his gaming chops are from some time ago) and the image at the moment feels as though it is a team that can only manage to tick over while still putting out cosmetics to buy. Which is not a criticism by the way but some transparency if this is the case would garner a lot of good will. Maybe as you say doing some streams or videos based on what the rest of the team is doing would be a good idea.

    Dungeons also feels like a red flag. It smacks of we either can't because of lack of finance/manpower or we are not focused on the quest/PvE side of the game and need the players to fill that gap. Maybe some transparency again would help.

    d) On a number of occasions I have heard Chris say "I thought I had..." or "I'm sure I did that...". I do think it is a great idea to have a dev streaming and talking about the process but at the moment when I watch the chat it feels as though it is the same players who are really invested both financially and emotionally in the project but are challenging nothing. It's all back patting and a lot of can you fix x housing thingy or can you stack jump potions. It's a waste of Chris' time in the grand scheme of things.

    On a general note (not replying specifically here), the "I'm having fun" /shrug response sums up the current development of the game in a nutshell. I think it's lazy to see criticism and dismiss it in such a way, as outside of obvious trolls, most people bring these things up because they see potential and are just frustrated that it's not being met. It's frustrating to see patch after patch of either cosmetics or fixes for cosmetics.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2019
  13. oplek

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    From what I understand, they're pushing this release to be as "stable and smooth" of a release as possible, so they can send out an email to a couple hundred thousand people to try to "recapture" them. I'm like, "n-now? You even say that the dungeon system is only like half done, and it's buggy and incomplete." I suppose that there's no great time. But you'd think that'd come after one of the core game mechanisms - quests - was sufficiently polished.

    They've put a lot of effort into bug fixing and performance. I wish they'd put that kind of effort into making the game more fun. They seem to just assume it already is. I remember a telethon long ago where Starr seemed incredulous at the idea that fighting wolves over and over wasn't itself fun. That stuck out in my mind.

    The email blast is a good idea, but they've effectively got one shot at it, before they'll hit massive diminishing returns. They've done a number of QOL improvements, sure, but I don't think we're there yet.

    It's the kind of decision-making I've now come to expect from them. Ideas that have potential, but are ultimately poorly executed.
     
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  14. Drilikath

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    a. No Comment.

    b. Putting out crap builds is rookie 101, try before you drive kind of mentality. AKA run the dang thing check what you can you know QUALITY CONTROL. Shroud has none.

    c. I take it you are not a developer. Unity might have some constraints on how things work, But if the game/scenes/"LOADING" where all done from the beginning everything could have in an essence been back end loaded and your "Scene" size cane be infinite.

    d. IF ONE MORE PERSON COMMENTS ON THE DEV TEAM SIZE....... So because the team is small these DAY 1 bugs/glitch and GARBAGE that have yet to be fixed we just have to take it. HELL NO!! Size does not matter. It is how you use it. Bug fix should have been number 1 priority BEFORE release. it was not. Pushing content that is GARBAGE was the goal. Now they finally want to fix things. A lot of players can still point out game breaking stuff, but the fix still has not come. Same with the tier 6 stuff. No real testing happens because even on QA the day of/after patching the live server they put out an entirely new build that breaks everything. This one falls into answer B.

    Make SOTA Great Again................. Not that honestly it ever was. It has all the ability to be. But with individuals like @DarkStarr running the show and adding in his 2 cents where it does not belong. I feel that Sota will be doomed.....
     
  15. Gregg247

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    It was only a year ago (prior to the employee "purge") that we were getting 3 generic scenes a month completely revamped. It was really exciting. Each month, we'd find out that placeholder scenes like The Hallowed Plains, South Midmaer Way, and South Boundless Forest were getting totally re-done, with new enemies, new challenges, and, in some cases, blessings that were good for 3 days, which encouraged players to revisit those scenes often. I bought a new village deed specifically because of the new look they did for Yew. I loved the elven theme of the town so much, I just had to live there. This became my favorite part of every build. The artists and designers working on these scenes were doing some incredible work!

    Unfortunately, those days are past (at least for now). I really think they were heading in the right direction with that plan, as the variety of these maps gave us plenty of new things to do. Each scene/town had its own story and lore, and visiting every one of the many, MANY scenes in this game was a goal of mine at the time. (One thing I think they can/should do now is to make each scene automatically adjust based on the player's AL level. Most other games do this, and it would make a beautifully crafted Tier 2 scene challenging and enjoyable even if your character is now AL100.)

    TBH, I'm not really interested in all the new lands in Episode 2 since we have so much land in Episode 1 that has yet to be fully fleshed out. I would rather see improved scenes in our current lands, scaling to keep those scenes pertinent for each player throughout their time in New Britannia, and a fixed quest system that encourages questing rather than chases players away.

    We have a great basis for success just in Episode 1. I'm afraid we're wasting its potential and instead shooting for Bigger! Newer! Re-Skinned!
     
  16. Elwyn

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    You may like it, but others absolutely hate it.

    1. Not every class balances the same way, I tend to play classes that have some flaw or another with soloing, usually with being attacked by two or more mobs at the same time. Scaled instance fights often become a half-hour of drudgery no matter what level I'm at--if I can beat them at all.
    2. No matter how much you level, the scene will be exactly as hard, so why even bother leveling?
    3. AL doesn't correspond inherently to character strength, it's only based on much XP you have received. Character strength comes from the skills you can equip at one time. Some will go for 100+ GMs (most of which can't be used at the same time), while others will take just a few skills to 120+

    There might be some argument for skill caps inside a scene, like an 80 cap when you would already be overpowered even at that skill level, but a cap is not the same thing as scaling.
     
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  17. Mishikal

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    I would rather see the ability to manually scale a scene, if you wanted. As I've noted here or elsewhere, I forget, they have different levels of all the same NPCs, so you should be able to say hey, i want to run this as a tier 10 scene, and get elite skeletons and bad-ass liches and all that jazz...

    That would make scenes much more worthwhile/interesting to go back to. The game has dozens of low tier scenes that (when I came out of the outskirts finally with my secondary avatar) were entirely too low level for me. I.e., the rate at which you level surpasses the tiers of most scenes already, just doing the outskirts. I went straight on to some of the "lower" tier 5 scenes after the outskirts.

    being able to manually tier up low level scenes would mean I would have some reason to go and explore them for XP/fun.
     
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  18. Alexandra Cornfellow

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    This sounds like a cool idea! I'm uncertain how difficult it would be to implement, but it sounds good.

    Hehe, I clearly need some lessons then, I get my butt kicked on low level scenes all the time--perhaps it's an age thing.
     
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  19. Mishikal

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    Yeah, a lot of it is just the fact I've been playing for well over 2 years, and I know how to spend my points to maximize what I can do later, along with what tier 5 scenes have some relatively easy to kill NPCs that are high xp. ;)
     
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  20. Mangar

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    If have but one phrase: Wolcen: Lords of Mayem please check it out.
     
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