I take it at face value: the majority of CMDRs play in Open, by a significant margin. I already knew that Open had the most active playerbase anyway.
This is still not clear. FD stated that there are more players in Open compared to OTHER modes.
So it can be 40% in Open, 30% in Private and 30% in Solo. Meaning that 40% in Open and the 60% is divided in solo/pg. Keeping in mind that new players come in Open, play for some hours and possibly leave the game to collect dust. So this statement from FD is meaningless.
Considering the achievements that some other companies are able to achieve with limited development staff, I don't think that flat numbers of developers is the real problem facing ED....
On the topic of more devs not actually helping due to the mythical man-month, that's only an issue that occurs in specific scenarios. Specifically, the man-month warns that adding more staff late into a development cycle is counterproductive as they need time to familiarise themselves with what they are working on, it overall takes months before a new staff member can really begin to contribute to a project and until then they are simply a burden as other staff have to show them how things work and get them up to speed. Adding more staff to ED might not increase development rates for the next 6 months, but beyond that point they will get fully into the swing of things. On the "too many cooks spoil the broth" statement, that only really applies if the code is close knit enough such that everything connects together and it is almost impossible for someone to work without interfering with another's work, however ED is full of extremely disconnected elements that can have their own entire teams working on them without any issues arising with other teams' work. This limitation also mostly only applies to the fundamental code changes and not on basic content such as ships and modules which are basically models and a database entry and as such are very easy to go broad on in development. Considering how Warframe is able to handily sustain 250+ developers actively working on it without any major losses in efficiency and League of Legends had over 1000 developers working on it during its peak, ED could easily find sufficient work for all of FD's employees and more due to the sheer variety in its stuff.
This post summarizes everything perfectly in regards of development, but I don't know if 6 months is a guarantee that development will accelerate with more developers. I imagine the code is fairly complex and an there's all kind of game elements that affect the other element, and if developer doesn't have that overview, it can possibly brake other aspects of the game, creating bugs, more work for the senior devs and the cycle continues. I would guess it takes a 1+ year to start picking up the development speed.
And maybe this is what is happening now, new people in the team, because I can't believe that there is still the same dev team from 3-4 years ago working on new features, because not only the development speed has not increased, the quality has also not increased, I would say it goes downhill. (C&P was developed well? no)
Maybe developers and programmers in this forum would agree that the longer you stay on the project, the better and faster and more efficient you become at working with it. At least that was my experience in a few companies I worked in.
And that's where the problem lies, in management, in a clear direction of the game, a vision. It *still* feels puzzling what direction this game is going, a combat direction?
ED is a grower, not a shower.
ED grows widely... in girth I guess?
