Four Years (or, Why free passes re: development have to stop)

I can see new cloaks in the add on store! The "fan boy cloak" and the "dissenter cloak". Will be the new faction system in game!!

 

Not a bad idea... And don't forget the whale masks!

 

and sheep!

 

Yes it is still true, however there is a big change which happened with the new CM and the forum update a while back.

You used to get a PM in your "Inbox" telling you that you had got moderated, with a Why and which rule you broke.

However after the change you instead get a notification in the "Alerts" and in that alert you get the comment.

The new way is much much much easier to miss. It is also harder to follow up on, or to check post factum. This since your PMs are saved as long as you want, but the Alerts are cleared after about 100 entries or so - and if you are getting a lot of likes or quotes then that 100 goes by fast.

For instance I still have PMs from being moderated in the fall of 2014. While my alerts only go back as far as Friday...

So a lot of the time when people nowadays say that they didn't get any notification, they usually did, but that they simply missed the alert.

For instance here is how that (one of many) moderation from fall 2014 looked like:
"
Spoon,

Your actions in this message ([link removed]) are not appropriate. We cannot allow users to be abusive, overly aggressive, threatening, or to "troll". Your message has been removed or altered.

Content Moderated:
[here was a quote of the moderated content]

Reason: Condescending/Patronizing

Rule Violated:
Act with Virtue:
Treat others as you would want to be treated. We are all people united under the same banner, with similar hopes and many different opinions. Show respect for one another, disagree with grace, and offer opinions with humility. And sheath those swords… there are absolutely no personal attacks allowed.
[link to the old rules removed]

Your account's access may be limited based on these actions. Please keep this in mind when posting or using our site.

Any concerns you have about this action can be forwarded to support@portalarium.com.
"
So I got to know which text had been moderated - which rule I had broken - link to said rules - and where to turn to if I wanted to make a fuss.

Contrast that with how it is today and if you get two sentances you are lucky, and if you get a why or which rule you broke you are even luckier.
It is usually:
"Post Deleted.
No personal attacks."
However since they no longer quote the offending passage, nor which rule was broken, nor link to the rules. Then you are left not understanding what you did wrong, no way to read up on how to conduct yourself and thus you are much more likely to incorrectly come to the conclusion that you didn't do anything wrong and go off to reddit to vent about it. This since ones memory of how amazing that post was, might not coincide with the reality of how it was formulated.

Problem with the old way was that it was definately more time consuming. It also lead to much more harassment of the volunteers and staff, since the PM was sent from their PM so it was clear who was who etc and people could just reply at the moment they were most upset. Plus since it educated about how to "appeal" you'd get much more escalations to dallas and other staff leading to long time consuming PM conversations with rule lawyering etc.

I think that the old way was much more proffessional, but understand that the drawbacks in the old system had to be fixed. However the new process does not foster a good forum culture in the way the old did.
As such a middle way between the extremes would be better for the long term.

 

I posted a PCMR meme and got:



Then perusing the forums I found an active thread that had an even more massive image in it talking about what states have laws that allow naked boobies to be on display in public. Lesson learned.... playing SotA because it's a PC game is obnoxious and does not contribute but titties rock! I'm actually ok with this.

 

It has always been said that community help writing game quests would be more trouble than help due to edits needed and micromanaging needs and that Lum doesn't have time for it. I am not as sure that there is not a way to get more game quests in(I'm not talking about player run quests because we need game quests/achievements, that is separate and up to the players). I want to hire help for Lum so bad. Imagine big titles like SWTOR

"To build Star Wars the Old Republic, the team hired in stages; first building a structure they thought that would work, before laying on staff. At peak, the team size was staggering: 280 QA staff. 140 artists split evenly between internal and outsourced staff. 80 engineers and programmers, 75 designers, 40 platform engineers and 30 producers to manage the team's workload and organize."

Wow if only we had just a tiny piece of that that here. I know it's a AAA title but *sighs*, still I wish this game to have all the chances in the world.

 

The ironic thing, however? SWTOR was a terrible game*. Sure, it did some things well and some things competently, and had a lot of content. But a great game? No, it was very theme park-y. Very WoW in space. Felt at all times like it was a game, rather than giving any sense you were really living in the Star Wars universe.

It didn't even feel very much like a Bioware RPG, which is what it should have felt like, beyond anything else. I guess I was coming at it from an original SWG point of view, so I had high hopes of again "living" in Star Wars. Guess it goes to show that even a huge team and 100s of millions of dollars can't buy a good game.

(*For proof, check out how many subscribers left in the first few months. Most of them! Truly amazing stuff.)

 

ahhh I really liked some things about it and I was never a subscription player, sometimes just a putterer here and there solo in between and playing and waiting here. . Some say the new expansions are going well. . Sorry off topic *hides in the corner*

 

Love your passion! I might encourage a little more patience. But above all things I love the love you give.

 

Some (many?) might actually see me as a heretic. I'm glad at least some people "get" where I'm coming from. Hard questions should be asked when necessary, but never to be mean.

 

I have no idea how the payroll budget looks since we are not privy to such information. However it does seem to me that having only one person working on implementation of the actual story and quests is certainly worthy of question by the community.

Again, I wonder if this is a matter of recruitment rather than finances. I guess nobody (here participating in this thread) knows.

Incidentally, what happened to Fire Lotus? I was under the impression she was working with Lum on quests.

And is Tracy Hickman still involved or...?

 

A question that goes hand in hand with that, and is maybe an even bigger question (albeit an uncomfortable one), is why wasn't this stuff worked on in more detail in year one? Two? Three? Four? We're entering year five at present...

 

Two... @Lum the Mad & @FireLotus. Plus whomever is necessary to implement whatever enabling technology they need.

Meant as a correction, not as a claim that two is or should be enough.

 

Apparently not. He provided his overall guidance for the main plot, wrote the book, and has moved on.

You can read whatever you want into the fact that Port was very quiet about this.

 

Not sure what other deliverables were or should have been assigned to Mr. Hickman... He's supposed to write another couple of volumes... I know the second in the series is 'late', but then so is the project by that measure.
Perhaps Portalarium has been quiet because there was nothing to speak of...

What has led you to believe that the relationship has changed?

 

I'm a little late to this debate, and this may have already been mentioned (I'm not going to read through 10 pages to find out), but I think a major source of the angst is that we were originally promised a deliver date of the first volume and physical rewards around October, 2014.

Now, I get that things change, problems occur, design creep sets in. But all tangible talk of a release date has evaporated. The appearance is that they're not even shooting for a release date, that they are content with perpetual development (which is fine to a degree, we expect each volume to be better than the last), but the promises made to get our money for the Kickstarter campaign have not been kept. Or even attempted to have been kept.

Is the issue that there's no more money left to deliver the physical rewards? Hence the seemingly endless development?

 

Not going to bother reading the other (removed word - Berek) comments in response to the OP, just wanted to commend @Canterbury for standing up for what he believes in and exposing himself to the backlash that comments like his, which are entirely valid and accurate, bring.

Doing so will likely negatively impact your experience with this game for the near future, and again should you decide to be this vocal and critical about the game. Keep doing it anyway. Negative feedback isn't intended to make fun of or bully the developers - they need people telling them what they don't enjoy just as much as what they do. Not everyone will be happy with something in the world, but you can make -more- people happy by receiving feedback from both sides and objectively picking a place close to the middle of the argument.

 

I agree with this statement only to the extent that if Portalarium discovers that a lot of people are willing to spend a lot of money for a particular feature, they will gladly implement that feature to ensure a continued revenue stream. POTs are the best example of this that I can think of. People who purchase POTs are usually interested in continuing to purchase decorations and upgrades, so to me as an outsider it sounds like a smart business move on the part of Portalarium.

I disagree that a single high level backer is able to influence the game development based only on their own investment. There are some very prominent high-level backers who sold their accounts in a huff because the game wasn't going the way they wanted.

 

Considering that Port already had an ready to use Engine & Editor called Unity and an already ready to use network code/addon called Photon + quite many almost ready to use textures, models & plugins etc. from the Asset Store it is indeed quite dissappointing what we have 4 years later in development.

The Teamsize of Port is about 37 last i counted, that's not too bad actually. Ofc. not everyone of that team is directly working on the game, but still, 37ish is a good number.
You don't need 100+ peeps working with Unity/Photon lol, that wouldn't make sense. If your team would be as big like the team for ESO, Guild Wars or FFXIV was, you would definetly also invest in an much much better Engine or maybe even just code your own

Not saying that anyone in the team is slow or something, but something in the overall planning of the entire project definetly went quite wrong.


There are still a lot of things missing in SotA and it will still take an huge amount of time to fix, polish and implement everything.
I mean, working on the "Performance" alone will eat up a lot of time already... And as everyone knows, the game really doesn't run that well. There are so many issues in Performance plus threading issues that always lock up the GUI thread, loading times, loading objects in zones and a lot more...
Sure, they might release episode 1 in 2017 or 2018, but it will be not finished, not at this rate...

 

That a particular activity proves to be a source of revenue doesn't make it good for the quality or longevity of the game. The sale of POTs is a good example, there are so many that few have more than a handful of residents, Portalarium sold as many as they could not only devaluing them, but also littering the map with them to the point that the world seems both cluttered and empty.

The crew at the helm has steered the ship down the course to easy revenue, but that has left them beholden to a realitively small group of backers with basically no option fund new development with new sales or crowdfunding. I wouldn't be surprised if the game goes fully F2P by launch at this point, finding a few more high paying customers is worth far more than the paltry sums they'll be getting from the heavily discounted sticker price by then.