Release of Shroud of the Avatar postponed again

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Lord_Darkmoon, Dec 4, 2016.

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  1. Ristra

    Ristra Avatar

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    @Chris has wonderful art skills! for a coder
     
  2. meadmoon

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    Then you hired the wrong people for a small company. Lesson learned.
     
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  3. Ristra

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    I can see that list of skill required for employment growing very large. Inventing a slow time machine would be much more feasible than finding the jack of all trades in current tech. Let alone a full team of them.
     
  4. meadmoon

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    Yet it happens all the time and has in every company I've worked in for the past 15 years. You don't hire people with a laundry list of skills, you hire creative people who can learn a laundry list of skills.
     
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  5. Ristra

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    Yes, yes, you are right, higher people willing to learn and cross train. Let's get code from someone learning. Or art from someone that does great stick figures and is willing to make something 3D. Even if it doesn't match the art style. Break out of those introvert shells and start working those empathy skills to be a community manager.

    It could work.
     
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  6. meadmoon

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    And it does...all the time.

    You do realize that people become skilled at things by doing them, right?

    I'm a graphic designer and I write all the Ruby code for our UI now. I taught myself and one of our developers reviewed my code, gave me pointers, and I got better. Our product didn't blow up because if it -- everything was just fine.

    I do all the UL and ATEX certifications for our company as well. I knew nothing about that 4 months ago. I read, learned, and the cert bodies were more than willing to correct me when it was wrong. Now I can do it without error. No dystopian outcome, no zombies were unleashed because if it -- everything was just fine.

    I could go on.

    If a company can't allow their employees to get out of their comfort zones and learn on the job, then they will fail and as far as I'm concerned, they should fail. A loser script is just that -- a loser script.
     
  7. Ristra

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    We can see for sure that they do in fact have people doing things outside of their original job title. It's all pretty moot though. This task that task. Doesn't matter.

    There's always the arm chair leadership pointing out that people are on the wrong task. The task that matters most to you is not the task that matters most to me or anyone else who is emotionally invested.

    It's pretty illogical to expect a full retooling of skills to focus on a different set of tasks depending on the discomforts of the forums. Specially when the cause of discomfort likely has a fix in the works. Or as Chris very effectively pointed out a while ago. 9 pregnant women can not have a baby in 1 month.
     
  8. LoneStranger

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    There's a reason why the term "Programmer Art" exists. :)
     
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  9. Canterbury

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    Yup, as I've said many times, when a game is persistent, people tend to see that as launched. Doesn't matter what the maker says, or how many times they say it, the perception is, "There's no going back... this is live."

    Given there's perhaps another year before the game is officially launched, going persistent when it did could be well construed as a mistake although, that said, they might not have been thinking late 2017 launch at the time.
     
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  10. Net

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    I still think this game needs about a year worth of Polish before it is ready, most of the scenes are clones, there is tons of bugs, the combat system ,the crafting system ,agriculture, all need major polish, I have strong suspicion the story will need a lot of work too.
     
  11. LoneStranger

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    I'm could be going out on a limb, but if they didn't go live and entice people to start dumping money into the game at an increased rate, the announcement whenever in 2017 might have been a dirge rather than a celebration.
     
  12. Canterbury

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    Well, that's certainly the flipside, ie: that they did know, so turned on the live button and pulled in more cash, knowing what was ahead. I'm going to err on the reverse, however, that before persistent they didn't know it would push back again.
     
  13. StrangerDiamond

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    Ahem... *cough*
     
  14. Ristra

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    Ahem...*coooooooooouuuuuuuugggggggh*
     
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  15. TEK1

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    Agreed, there is nothing about the game that is not launched. It just happened to be released in a poor incomplete state which to me biggest sin since that was the #1 reason for doing entire Kickstarter/crowdfunding. Now all that is happening is Portalarium coming up with new ways to sell their gold standard premium currency while under the banner of "early access".
     
  16. Blake Blackstone

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    Everyone repeat after me. Shroud of the Avatar is a Patreon type funding model! Now say that 100 times.

    Note: Of course, no one knew that until ~2 years after the Kickstarter.
     
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  17. Cypher Black

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    Fact: a lot of what we have asked for in these boards has been implemented. Had Port shut us of out the development and built the game behind closed doors, without input, I have little doubt that SoTA would have been released long ago and many of us would have hated it. Implementing our suggestions takes time, apparently alot of it. So as I said at some point in the past, enjoy the journey and don't get hung up on the destination, we will arrive soon enough and then we will just just stand around wondering what all the fuss was about. (Back to the mines... all of you!)

    Cypher Black
     
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  18. meadmoon

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    A few did. They seem to be MIA, however...
     
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  19. DeftAvatar

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    I don't know what Portalariums's definition of "beta" is, but if it's the traditional "feature complete, content complete, but still full of bugs" , then there is *no way* SOTA will be at that phase come mid 2017...

    ... UNLESS they have made some controversial changes:

    * Removed the single player story.

    * Removed SPO/FO mode, enabled full PVP.

    * Removed most of the yet-to-be-uncloned scenes.

    At the end of it you'd have what? A decent(?) spiritual successor to "Ultima Online"? Probably what they should have Kickstarted in the first place... But 20/20 hindsight and all that...

    Not saying I'd be happy about it, though I shouldn't really complain since on a cost-per-hour-of-entertainment basis I have received fantastic value ($4k+ spent, 600+ hours played since persistence). (Interesting, considering I initially only pledged for the "epic" single player, story-focused game).
     
    Last edited: Dec 4, 2016
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  20. Umuri

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    You just highlighted exactly why portalarium can't do that.
    #1. It took you TIME. That's something port doesn't have. Not just time, but familiarity with coding concepts, balance concepts, efficiency concepts.
    #2. You learned ruby UI. Grats, good for you, it's a good skill to have.
    that is absolutely NOTHING like AI programming(one of the big bottlenecks) or code complexity optimization(another big bottleneck in performance). Which requires background in map theory, ideally multithreading architecture, and fuzzy mapping at minimum. Given that you've a ruby programmer I'd wager a fair 50/50 bet that your concept of data structures is 101 or 201 level at best. Good enough to produce code that runs, but most of your code probably runs in n^2 or nlogn at minimum complexity when it could probably get down to logn. A useless distinction for most applications, but not for something like the areas they need work on here.
    #3. Even if you've learned enough programming to be useful to tackle a JIRA or two, you now have to learn the codebase. You can't just "dive in" and cowboy fix a code bug for the most part. Why? Because it may have cascading changes. Because you might fix something that creates 3 more bugs that to someone who took a month to really learn the codebase would never have done.

    Yes, you can re-allocate people, to a point. That point is HEAVILY moderated by how deep into the codebase someone is allowed to work and how sectionalized/predetermined their input is.
    No one's saying you can't cross train people. What they're saying is that the level reached by crosstraining, is not a good return on the yields it will give.

    You can train anyone to be a code monkey in 4 weeks.(Not a slight, they're the backbone of the industry and essential for efficient programmer usage). Guaranteed, i've done it and used to get paid to do it. However for every 4 codemonkeys you need a real developer to closely direct and curate it so they produce something usable.
    Same how you can train up someone in the basics of digital art in a month or two, but you need a real art lead to direct them closely to get any real results.


    Lets say for the entire art staff, 3 have the minds to easily be crosstrainable in higher level computer concepts like pointer abstraction and virtualization of function calls. You're talking 1-2 months minimum to crosstrain(and thats pushing it) before they could produce something usable even on small things without generating more work/oversight in the long run. It's not that they don't have time spare on some workers sometimes, but i doubt they have that much to spare before anything useful even gets done.



    Now don't get me wrong, the delay is annoying, but i'd rather a delay than them releasing crap.
    However the delays we know would happen when they decided to go live early.
    They bottlenecked themselves, by forcing thier already small staff to have to deal with the constant maintenance persistence requires. And in return, we get a situation no one's happy with.
    Players aren't happy persistence isn't being tended to with enough love, and devs aren't happy features are delayed because they have to waste time trying to fix the fallout from persistence exploits that they could have ignored if we hadn't launched.

    I bet if we just all signed on for another wipe, you'd notice a lot more features get through the pipeline since they wouldn't have to deal with this crap as much.
     
    Last edited: Dec 4, 2016
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