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hmmmmm now I have visions of TJ as some sort of inspector Clouseau
PS wow i forgot how much i adored these films. he died too soon.
ANNOUNCEMENT Community Update (22/10)
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hmmmmm now I have visions of TJ as some sort of inspector Clouseau
PS wow i forgot how much i adored these films. he died too soon.
Just chiming in with an opinion:
First off, there's no point in arguing about where we are currently at. Talking about why things are where they are is only useful from the standpoint of avoiding previous problems and moving in the right direction.
With that said, this is perhaps the best community update Frontier have ever posted, and has me very, very hopeful. Delays for features like fleet carriers is a bummer, but a new feature in a game already riddled with issues is just going to be more frustration. I honestly am not bothered by this at all.
For the first time in development, Frontier have come out and stated that they've significantly refocused their development on fixing the game, primarily driven by user submitted bugs on the tracker. This is a really, really big deal, for a number of reasons
First, the game is more fun when it works right, and when it feels right
Second, future feature updates will be improved by a lot of this stability work being done now. Building new features generally goes better when you have a more consistent, stable platform won which to build.
Bugfixing is easier with fewer features, so it's almost always to do this work sooner rather than later, as each time you add a piece of content to the game, that's one more system that hooks in and potentially amplifies existing technical debt.
But finally, this is actually a big indication that the financial state of Elite and Elite development is healthy. Namely, they're not "winding down" development like some people have chosen to believe, with the lack of big content updates this year. I've always felt that their focus on a really big content update for next year being an indication of good health, but this actually feeds into this. Creating new content is how you make money. If Frontier were desperate for money to support the game, their primary focus would be on getting as much content out as soon as possible, in hopes to get back into the black so they can handle technical debt, later.
This announcement is actually indicative of the obvious. Frontier are secure in their plans and the financial state of the game, and while making more money through content updates is good, they're realizing that reducing technical debt right now will have an amplifying affect on the value of future content updates, and they are confident enough in those future updates and their current cash-flow to make the decision to put in that work ASAP.
Making a decision like this for a development team is /really/ hard, and almost no company puts in this kind of work on a product that is already on its death bed.
I, for one, am really excited and hopeful about this, and plan on being as active as I can in testing and bug reporting
First off, there's no point in arguing about where we are currently at. Talking about why things are where they are is only useful from the standpoint of avoiding previous problems and moving in the right direction.
With that said, this is perhaps the best community update Frontier have ever posted, and has me very, very hopeful. Delays for features like fleet carriers is a bummer, but a new feature in a game already riddled with issues is just going to be more frustration. I honestly am not bothered by this at all.
For the first time in development, Frontier have come out and stated that they've significantly refocused their development on fixing the game, primarily driven by user submitted bugs on the tracker. This is a really, really big deal, for a number of reasons
First, the game is more fun when it works right, and when it feels right
Second, future feature updates will be improved by a lot of this stability work being done now. Building new features generally goes better when you have a more consistent, stable platform won which to build.
Bugfixing is easier with fewer features, so it's almost always to do this work sooner rather than later, as each time you add a piece of content to the game, that's one more system that hooks in and potentially amplifies existing technical debt.
But finally, this is actually a big indication that the financial state of Elite and Elite development is healthy. Namely, they're not "winding down" development like some people have chosen to believe, with the lack of big content updates this year. I've always felt that their focus on a really big content update for next year being an indication of good health, but this actually feeds into this. Creating new content is how you make money. If Frontier were desperate for money to support the game, their primary focus would be on getting as much content out as soon as possible, in hopes to get back into the black so they can handle technical debt, later.
This announcement is actually indicative of the obvious. Frontier are secure in their plans and the financial state of the game, and while making more money through content updates is good, they're realizing that reducing technical debt right now will have an amplifying affect on the value of future content updates, and they are confident enough in those future updates and their current cash-flow to make the decision to put in that work ASAP.
Making a decision like this for a development team is /really/ hard, and almost no company puts in this kind of work on a product that is already on its death bed.
I, for one, am really excited and hopeful about this, and plan on being as active as I can in testing and bug reporting
This is so brilliantly written that I'd like to make it a plaque for my wall!
There are quite a few fairly obvious ones that would be hard to miss.
I can scarcely play a session without getting trapped in a menu with no way out other than to relog, and the modules pane still doesn't work 100%.
Yes that is true, that thread certainly deep-dived! At times I wasn't sure whether I was reading a thread about a space game or an Introduction to String Theory
It took a month, but you're doing the right thing.
Now the apologists can come out, and apologize for your doing what we said needed to be done thirty seconds into the September update...
Out of production time, of course.
Then call me silly if you will but the delay of the FCs wasn't a direct result of the borked September update or the introduction of ARX imho.
Will stated that they're not done yet after the recent patches, that they'll concentrate on newer and long standing bugs.
The borked September update might be a part of triggering the FCs delay but the real reason has it's origin much longer ago, a lot of people have been complaining a long time already about the growing pile of unresolved bugs.
In sense of negativity imho ARX gets way to much credit, like the introduction of ARX was where it all went south, it went south way before that, years ago even, just check how old some bugs are in the issue tracker.
I see a tendency of people who don't like ARX use them as an excuse for everything wrong in the game.
Don't, it looks silly.
This, well said!
Well that is the thing, it would seem "bug ridden mess" is a bit of meaningless term in this case because its definition appears to be very much a personal thing and live in the eye of the beholder. Actual facts seem to point out to a developer record selling franchise who is still growing population after 5 years, hardly a typical characteristic of what someone could consider a "bug ridden mess". Unless you include in that definition reasonably successfull game franchises of course. I would normally associate "bug ridden mess" with a commercially failed product and/or probably abandoned or being heavily desserted, which is clearly not the case here (yet at any rate!
I guess we can all at least agree that there are bugs in the game that need fixing, no doubt of that, and that fixing those is quite likely to help support carriers and the new era.
Well at least you've put your big pants on now and acknowledged that there are bugs in the game, instead of trying to mask an opinion of "bug ridden mess" with statistics of how well the game has done. No one here is disputing that Elite Dangerous is/was a great game, but don't you want it to get better?
I'll take the third option, bugs or no bugs
Would be nice to know a little bit more about what you mean with "issues" - I think that a LOT of BALANCING could be done in the game in many part of it.
Could we get more information on what are your plans for the first december patch and what you want to work on and test in BETA exactly ?
Could we get more information on what are your plans for the first december patch and what you want to work on and test in BETA exactly ?
Not this time
Neat, find the portion of my post that says FC delay is the direct result of Arx. I even said that Arx isn’t a bad idea.
what I meant is that of the 2 updates aimed at the existing players, they implemented the one that further monetizes, and not the one that actually adds content.
also bug fixing isn’t a noble cause. It’s something they should’ve been doing all along
I'm happy with this decision... otherwise I would be dreading the December update. The fact that an extra 6 months are needed to work on it speaks volumes about the state it would have released in. That said, people are going to be spitting feathers if the update drops in June and fails to deliver a good experience.
Then I apologise for misinterpreting your post.
This sentence made me think you blamed ARX for the delay of the FCs "This year's fleet carrier delay has been brought to you by ARX, buy today!"
I agree with you that bug fixing should've been done much earlier and more frequent.
Imho Fdev concentrated to much on bringing in new content without taking time to deal with the bugs introduced with every new update, resulting in an ever growing stack of bugs.
I'm all for a time to finaly take care of the many bugs but it shouldn't have come to this drastic measure of postponing content.
while i was excited for fleet carriers and even started building funds for one, but, this approach is nice and i hope to see the multiplayer mining bug finally squashed. thanks for the update. the game is a lot of fun and i look forward to future updates.
So I've noticed, that is assuming you're the same 'Alien' who used to have a reversible avatar, and who led a number of vitriolic personal attacks on me in multiple threads on this forum, most memorably perhaps when I complained about the introduction of gimballed weapons being against the spirit of the game? And so. We meet again.
If not, I do apologise and beg your pardon; plainly you are being facetious.
No, my remark that I don't like flannel is not aimed at you, at least not directly. Please forgive me for not having been clearer and allow me to clarify anyway. My remark was aimed at the OP's announcement, which you quoted. The announcement tells the community nothing substantial beyond that FCs are not coming this Christmas after all, which can't be helped and I accept that. But I assert that the rest of the announcement is flannel i.e. there is no specific substance to it; it is just there to couch the bad news concerning the FCs. So my 'flannel' remark is only aimed at you if you put yourself in its firing line, so to speak.
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Must be playing a different game to me, never had an issue that has caused me to have to relog, the Sept update never caused me an issue but that may because I am lucky/special. Fdev has crumbled to a minority of the community that seems to be able to find and search out bugs, cry like babies, put up pathetic petitions, very bad day for the game.
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