No more patch updates before Fleet Carriers?

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askavir

askavir
LeoBartlet85 said:
Did you seriously think that 2020 was going to be some massive bug fixing year with the carriers as the cherry on top?

They only came out with that end of year waffle about delaying the carrier to fix bugs because the carrier wasnt ready for a 2019 release.
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Precisely.

For FD the "open letter" was just a perfect scapegoat to hide the fact that FC's were not, again, ready for release. Or does anyone seriously believe that FD had the FC's nearly ready but because of some youtubers "open letter" decided at the last minute to postpone their release by another half a year and do bugfixes instead? :D :D

And by the way, how is the bugfixes marathon going so far?... Almost half way to the FC new deadline, and there was only a tiny patch so far...
 

SpaceScania

S
Frillop Freyraum said:
I think I got the gist of your words, but remember: not all of ED's longtime fans were big fans of GALnet, CG's and II's - at least in their last implementation without much connection to the actual game and being mostly just meaningless fluff.
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I agree with this (except for GALnet please bring it back Frontier!) Indeed if Frontier had replaced CG's and II's with something more deep and involving I would have cheered from the rooftops. CG's get repetitive and boring, but not even having them is worse. My personal thoughts were that II's were supposed to be the stopgap to tide us over until Q4 2020. They had to figure out a stopgap that required minimal dev resources (like a straight up copy and paste of Prof. Palin and the "advanced" multi-cannon). But even the stopgaps have been abandoned.

Frillop Freyraum said:
Just a reminder, in case you believe you would speak in behalf of the community. The community is very divided about many aspects of the game. But it was a majority of this very same fans who urgently suggested the delay of FCs in favor of bug fixing, me included btw...
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I am very confident that a large portion of the player base feels frustrated with the lack of new content for Elite over the last 12-ish months. It's not hard to find such thoughts both from prominent members of the community as well as on reddit and the forums. I too agreed that we needed more bug-fixes (though I think that Frontier's decision to basically abandon the current game for a whole year largely led to the major QA issues this year). I am troubled by two things:

1. Frontier's announcement last year that there would be basically no new content until Q4 2020.
2. Frontier scrambling and doing a pretty poor job dealing with the fall-out from that decision.

I may be wrong and maybe this is what Elite needs. But even if that is the case I feel Frontier has not dealt with the consequences of that decision very well. I think a lot of long-time players feel similarly. I certainly hope this never happens again.
 

thistle

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Frillop Freyraum said:
I really hate to point you to one of my least favourite 'content creators', but here's the 'open letter' in question (I'm pretty sure it also was discussed on the forum as well, I just can't find this thread right now):

Source: https://youtu.be/cEQ7nHmYnhw
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I think Old Duck's valid point is those requests in the open letter did not include postponing the release of Carriers. Yamiks made that point in I believe his first video after the announcement of the delay to carriers.
 

thistle

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I've said before I suspect once the September update broke so much fdev realised adding carriers would just cause problems. I just agree with Old Duck that there wasn't a demand in the open letter to delay carriers, rightly or wrongly it was a request for a variety of things to do with communication and beta/testing etc to make the game better. The RESULT may have been the carrier delay, but I doubt they were connected. The decision had probably been made by then.
 

SpaceScania

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Frillop Freyraum said:
also @ AtomicMegaNerd

I think all of that is true and not really contradicting. We are all longing for new content, just the approach is different. My personal stance is that it would have been insane to drop new content on the mess the game was at the time the delay was announced (and debatable if still true).
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Totally agree. I almost think fleet carriers are irrelevant to my larger point? Most of the Elite's development resources were pulled into this secretive "New Era" project. A skeleton crew was left behind to get Fleet Carriers done and keep the game going in the interim. It wouldn't surprise me if the ratio between "New Era" and Current Game was 95% to 5%, though we can only speculate. The evidence that the crew left behind was too small is overwhelming. The results speak for themselves.

My core argument here in one sentence: Frontier left too few resources behind for the current game, including fleet carriers and bug fixes, then failed to deal with the aftermath in a satisfactory way.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Hopix said:
I routinely see people posting here saying that the game is broken because of bugs, so I think at least SOME people did.
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People urged Frontier to release a beta of the next update (at the time that was to be December's Fleet Carriers), so that we wouldn't end up with a broken mess of a game like we did in September. Nobody said, "Please delay Fleet Carriers for an entire six months and focus on fixing a couple of bugs instead."

Now if somebody comes onto this thread and says, "Sorry Old Duck, but that's exactly what I wanted!" (and they can prove it via a previous post), then perhaps I'll eat a crow. But until then, I'm sticking to my guns.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Stephen Benedetti said:
Hey @rootsrat, thanks for asking.

As mentioned in the post that you linked to "We are now planning for Fleet Carriers to be released in an update in the second quarter of 2020". Now that we are just about to start entering that second quarter, the next update is going to include Fleet Carriers, which we expect to have more news about very soon. I can also confirm that this is not mutually exclusive from the other development work going into the update which will include some bug fixes. It is always more efficient to combine content and fixes into a single update, in order to reduce the time spent preparing and deploying those releases.

Thanks for your patience.
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Hi @Stephen Benedetti - thanks for the reply!

Just to clarify things a little, information about FC being included in the next update was the most solid piece of info we got in a while - and it was thrown casually by you in the midday stream :D Therefore I was a bit surprised to hear that, considering I was expecting at least 1 more bugfix update before FC land. Now, my understanding of this was that in 2020 we'll get 2 or 3 updates focused purely on bugfixes and then an FC-focused update around mid-year (my bet was July), with only small portion of fixes in it, then followed by the New Era at the end of the year.

Now it seems that FC will be a part of a bugfixing update, which BTW is awesome - FC were delayed for a loooong time and many people (me included!) can't wait to check them out and finally get some new content that more veteran players will be able to enjoy. Looking forward to more info on them! :)

As a side note, I also hope we'll get 1 or 2 more bugfix focused updates between FC and NE and that we'll see CG's, II's and Galnet slowly introduced to the game in the meantime as well.

o7

::EDIT::

P.S. Thanks for taking the time and replying after hours. Much appreciated - that's what I call above and beyond! (y)
 
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BDelacroix

BDelacroix
This sounds like a process change to agile with a sprint set to 3 or 4 months each with the sprint review as open beta (how else do you get the customers to view what's done on such a large project?).

If so, I wish them luck. It is very difficult to get all of the stakeholders to move to the agile way of thinking. We are having the same pains where I work.
 

aRJay

aRJay
Frillop Freyraum said:
One of the most intelligent species on Earth. But Trolls, sure. You must confuse them with magpies.
You are moving on very thin ice. It just cost me less than 30 seconds to find a comment that proves you wrong.
But for that I had to dip into another Yamik video <yikes> and cite a comment from there.
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Crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers are all part of the same family Corvids and are most of them rated as very intelligent.

Just an aside, nothing to do with your discussion.
 

RooksBailey

RooksBailey
I am somewhat surprised that people thought that Frontier was going to break with its long-established pattern of only releasing quarterly patches to suddenly rush out a series of bug-fixing patches, something Frontier has never given any priority to, even when the game was still being actively developed. Now that the game is in maintenance mode (but for the promise of fleet carriers, virtual abandonware), I have zero expectations for bonus bug-fixing patches, especially in light of how the last patch that was little more than busy work for Frontier. The only question for me is this: Will the FC update arrive at all (I mean, pre-New Era) and if it does, will it be earlier or later? Right now, I suspect as late as possible as Frontier has been stalling for time since last year. I figure a beta in May with the launch of the FC update in June.
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Could all this be because FCs are coming sooner(TM) than our pessimistic forecasts had predicted, so there is no time for a further big bug beta beforehand ? :unsure:
 
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