Sarah moved from current project, update no longer coming?

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Balfuset790

Balfuset790
Monk said:
As a stickler for process, and as a business/application analsyt, it shocks me that places still expect devs to work without designs, functional specs and UML. It might be more work for us analysts but it always results in better code built faster. And when there is a bug, which I'm sure your code is perfect ;), having all that makes fixing things so much easier. I feel for you, what are these places thinking
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I remember studying UML once... *shudder*

Worst part of my degree, so glad I don't have to deal with it now!
 

Ralph Vargr

Ralph Vargr
yah-ta-hey said:
Unfortunately, we americans are very lucky to get 4 weeks at any one time. Sometimes it is impossible to go more then 2 weeks before the overlords get frantic because your job is not being covered. regards
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Both Congress, and ALEC for the state legislatures, are pushing the "Indentured Servants Act" through, for after 2016... :(

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Alien said:
Has anyone considered that due to her great work on the NPC AI, Frontier want her to do great work on something else ... in other words, Frontier want Sarah to make the game better ... anyone considered that?

(please forgive me for not reading 30+ pages)
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I did, many pages up, and so have others. Now you know.
 

Parmo

Parmo
Monk said:
As a stickler for process, and as a business/application analsyt, it shocks me that places still expect devs to work without designs, functional specs and UML. It might be more work for us analysts but it always results in better code built faster. And when there is a bug, which I'm sure your code is perfect ;), having all that makes fixing things so much easier. I feel for you, what are these places thinking
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An application/ business / systems analyst?! I thought that role went extinct by the same way as the Dodo! Shot to extinction!:( By the RAD sales people. They're still about but now peddle other short-cut magic wands called Extreme Programming, agile, RUP, Iconix, TDD, scrum etc. Just like they sold the 'Waterfall' 'methodology' to easily impressed and innovative-less management suits.
Things never change!
I feel for you too!
I'd give you a hug but I'm told not associate with the likes of you, you lot are deemed subversive!:)
 

Ralph Vargr

Ralph Vargr
Jack Schitt said:
True, from a purely development point of view. But what's dismayed many people here, as has happened many times before, is the apparent lack of forethought about how the community will react to a given decision. FD do the same thing time and time again. It's baffling. That's why I, and others, describe these things as fumbles or PR disasters.

This thread's very existence demonstrates it to be such.

Anyone who reads these forums, even the occasional skim, can't have failed to notice the number of "minions", "NPC buff" or "AI improvements incoming" threads and posts that have increasingly appeared here over the past couple of months. SJA's designs and the in-house build she mentioned a few times are hot topics and have been for a while. Whether it was right for her to be discussing non-public code in this way can be argued, but the genie was out of the bottle. Players were excited by it, talked about it, anticipated it.

It should have been obvious to anyone that there would be some sort of negative reaction if this build was held back, even temporarily. And yet no attempt seems to have been made to pre-empt or damage-limit the situation. OK, so we're not privy to the internal machinations of FD, nor should we be. From a community perspective it's not really relevant. What's relevant is that a decision, whether long-planned or spur of the moment, was made that was pretty much guaranteed to provoke a negative response from a significant portion of the game's fanbase.

Yet absolutely zero effort seems to have been made to avoid it. Again.



And, if true, that right there is the crux of the problem. If you're not going to give your PR team advance notice of something that's absolutely certain to set a fire under the community, then why have a PR team at all? Granted SJA's angry and now redacted tweets were a out-of-band problem that nobody but SJA could ultimately control, but even they didn't come from nowhere. Someone somewhere made a decision that's had two outcomes:

  • SJA has been moved between sub-projects.
    Whether this is an effective promotion, demotion, sideways transfer or defenestration doesn't really matter. That's between her and her employers, and if individuals within the community feel the need to sympathise with her obvious distress then that's a personal thing that's only really tangential to the development of ED and not something a PR team need be involved in.
  • A much anticipated code change that apparently improved the game's AI, and definitely fixed two long-standing AI bugs, has been delayed.
    Perhaps for a few weeks, perhaps indefinitely, we don't really know. But delayed nonetheless. And that is very much a PR problem, of which someone should have tried to take ownership before the news broke via uncontrollable channels and the crapstorm began.
Would any such effort have made a difference? Maybe, maybe not. Is there a chance it could have been handled really badly and made things worse? Absolutely, but that's no excuse not to try. That's what many of us on these forums have a problem with. It's this lax, "do it now, fight the fires later if at all," attitude that comes across in almost every significant decision FD makes.

It's not possible to appease 100% of a community all the time, especially when you have bad news about a much-anticipated feature. It might not even be possible to appease more than a small percentage. But to give the impression of having not even thought about it? Or, even worse, thought about it but dismissed it? That's just insulting.
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You have exceeded your rationality quota for the year. Stop Being Rational. :)

MI-5, and Special Branch will be talking with you shortly about the Official Secrets Act. :)
 

Parmo

Parmo
Samosa said:
What's more shocking is working for a company that insisted that all their employees be ITIL certified by the end of last year, for all the obvious ITIL reasons. Despite that, the highest of high management still scribbles vague diagrams on a whiteboard, suggests that their developer take a picture of said diagrams with their iPhone, and further suggests that their developer has everything they need in order to go forth and create the executive, internal, and public facing portals, backend code and database design described in said scribble.

I'm not saying that sort of thing happens to me, but sometimes that sort of thing happens to me!
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Oh Lord, ITIL! Poor mans CMMI!
So true, whiteboard and phone camera is all that is necessary for high quality software to be produced!
And I thought being a manager required 'excellent communication skills'!:S
 

Soliluna

Soliluna
Parmo said:
Oh Lord, ITIL! Poor mans CMMI!
So true, whiteboard and phone camera is all that is necessary for high quality software to be produced!
And I thought being a manager required 'excellent communication skills'!:S
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ITIL is the biggest joke in the history of management... and IT. When you have lost all connection with what your business is, does and needs to do: ITIL, a framework for those with no clue.

A bigger joke is how many companies rely on Assyst for their itsm needs.
 
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