Kim Chee
Caldari
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Posted - 2007.07.03 21:56:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Derovius Vaden
Originally by: Akita T
Developers changing stuff and not documenting the changes.
This is simply not possible, major changes can be easily documented, but if someone realizes that the guy who wrote the XYZ mission forget to put a space between the and ship (theship) and changes it, he should not have to log it. Why? Its inconsquential, and a waste of manhours.
Not entirely true. Any software project that has more than one developer or a handful of source files will be stored in SOME kind of revision control system. I've used several of them, and pretty much every one requires that you stick a one-line comment when you check in any changes.
It would be fairly simple to have a dev do a "cvs log -d 20070624 20070630" to a file and pass it along to an editor who would clean it up a bit and remove anything they didn't want us to see yet, and then stick that on a web page. I can't imagine it would take more than an hour to edit, and an hour a week to keep the community informed isn't going to break the bank.
Originally by: Derovius Vaden
Quote:
Promises made long ago, stuff we loved hearing about, promises that were not kept and stuff that never came out.
This is the same as any other company, people live beyond their means in terms of content. CCP dev's will all sit around their round conference room table and brainstorm ideas for content. The really good ones get handed to the PR guys who write it up in the dev blogs to get the playerbase all riled up and happy. When the ideas get down to the people who actually have to code/implement these things, they laugh their happy little Icelandic butts off and toss it in the waste bin as either (1) a threat to the balance of the game (2) coding nightmare (3) physically and psychologically impossible.
Again, with proper management, the PR guys would have been stopped before the page went public and the dev team would have been consulted, knowing they'd have to actually implement whatever DID get released.
Yes, the real world isn't perfect, and things don't usually work that smoothly... but if you don't TRY to do it right, you can be sure it won't get done right.
As for transparency and devs responding to posts directly... I think CCP is doing a great job there. The only other games I ever recall feeling like the devs actually read and cared about the community said was City of Heroes, and for a time, Vanguard.
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