After reading all of this thread until page 22 up to now and all the other current threads it is all clear to me: the development team has been shrunk to a minimum, maybe because of "Jurassic World Evolution".
To tell the story FDev is wanting to tell, it would have been necessary to have the story (e.g. the adaption of the Thargoids) encoded or parameterized with the main 2.4 update. Now it looks like if the story is told with a series of minor 2.4.X updates, where the hardcoded parameters are changed to fit to some story.
This can never work even if they hide the changes from the patch log. This community has some decent intelligent people arround, if FDev had hidden the AX Missile 0.05 to 0.001 change, they would have found out by testing. A 50 times nerf they would have guessed quite accurate I am sure.
So we have to face minor updates in series and each one will give us something and the next one removes it. A carrot-and-stick policy but we are not horses and this is not a good approach for a game. It removes incentives to do the parts which are given to us, because we normally don't know when they are removed again so it is likely that all effort will be nullified.
So why is this happening like this? Because the team has to find a way to "tell the story" with very small manpower and thats what we get now: the minimal possible result which still can be seen as complete or mission accomplished. My conclusion from the current desaster (Thargoids) is, that the main changes in 2.4 are not in the part of the coding which would be the most time consuming. Instead it is mainly art work, some sound and music and text (GalNet). This would be an approach where nearly no code needs to be tested and a minimum of new bugs are created.
This is the way to go if there is only a minimum number of people left to do it.
And this destroys my hopes I had in the future of the game. The next major update (fleshing out what we have) will make the decision for me.
To tell the story FDev is wanting to tell, it would have been necessary to have the story (e.g. the adaption of the Thargoids) encoded or parameterized with the main 2.4 update. Now it looks like if the story is told with a series of minor 2.4.X updates, where the hardcoded parameters are changed to fit to some story.
This can never work even if they hide the changes from the patch log. This community has some decent intelligent people arround, if FDev had hidden the AX Missile 0.05 to 0.001 change, they would have found out by testing. A 50 times nerf they would have guessed quite accurate I am sure.
So we have to face minor updates in series and each one will give us something and the next one removes it. A carrot-and-stick policy but we are not horses and this is not a good approach for a game. It removes incentives to do the parts which are given to us, because we normally don't know when they are removed again so it is likely that all effort will be nullified.
So why is this happening like this? Because the team has to find a way to "tell the story" with very small manpower and thats what we get now: the minimal possible result which still can be seen as complete or mission accomplished. My conclusion from the current desaster (Thargoids) is, that the main changes in 2.4 are not in the part of the coding which would be the most time consuming. Instead it is mainly art work, some sound and music and text (GalNet). This would be an approach where nearly no code needs to be tested and a minimum of new bugs are created.
This is the way to go if there is only a minimum number of people left to do it.
And this destroys my hopes I had in the future of the game. The next major update (fleshing out what we have) will make the decision for me.
