Can you imagine.......

[Jabezz]

........the nightmare of having to please a large consumer crowd, your customer base, all the time. A customer base spread all over the world from different backgrounds, different cultures and more importantly different aims and objectives in your gaming product. It's not like we have purchased a consumer product like a refrigerator that 99.9% of folk are going to use the same way.

Its a monumental task and to be honest is an impossible task. FD are never going to please everybody all of the time but I will say its definitely not from lack of trying.

I personally can't fault their efforts. Do they get everything right all the time, no they don't but that's part of development of any product. One huge plus point they have is that their communication with us is first class, look how quickly they have reacted to the outcry of due to the modded NPCs, and gone the extra yard to explain what the bug is and their forward plan on it. Even the front line programmers come on the forums from time to time and explain what they've been up to. I have not seen that kind of customer interaction before, you have to commend them for that.

So look at the game itself, how do you go about achieving the correct balance in a game where there are several 'careers', PvP, PvE, folks who want full on ninja AI, folks who can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, players who want a story line or players that don't want anything linear.

Then you have everyone's wish list, we all have one. I am not a programmer, I have no idea what's involved in programming a high end computer game so for me for example when I'm talking about having material storage included in the game (definitely a good example of something they got wrong), surely that's just a few lines of code?!! In reality it's probably way more complicated than that. Look at the great explanation Mark Allen gave about the bug which was letting NPCs create their own mods! He lost me when he started talking about cache pointers! The game is complex but it's easy for laymen like myself to be the armchair critic, the back seat driver who could do better.

Yes this post reads like a so called fanboy post which I dont usually write and as I said at the beginning FD make mistakes and shouldn't be totally immune to criticism, hell what company wouldn't make mistakes on a multi year project like this but step by step we are going in the right direction and I'm personally looking forward to the next several years of development. If FD keep on putting in the kind of effort they are putting in now with the game and the community it's going to continue to be a great game.

 

[Demascus]

........the nightmare of having to please a large consumer crowd, your customer base, all the time. A customer base spread all over the world from different backgrounds, different cultures and more importantly different aims and objectives in your product

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

 

[Jankules]

........the nightmare of having to please a large consumer crowd, your customer base, all the time. A customer base spread all over the world from different backgrounds, different cultures and more importantly different aims and objectives in your gaming product. It's not like we have purchased a consumer product like a refrigerator that 99.9% of folk are going to use the same way.

Its a monumental task and to be honest is an impossible task. FD are never going to please everybody all of the time but I will say its definitely not from lack of trying.

I personally can't fault their efforts. Do they get everything right all the time, no they don't but that's part of development of any product. One huge plus point they have is that their communication with us is first class, look how quickly they have reacted to the outcry of due to the modded NPCs, and gone the extra yard to explain what the bug is and their forward plan on it. Even the front line programmers come on the forums from time to time and explain what they've been up to. I have not seen that kind of customer interaction before, you have to commend them for that.

So look at the game itself, how do you go about achieving the correct balance in a game where there are several 'careers', PvP, PvE, folks who want full on ninja AI, folks who can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, players who want a story line or players that don't want anything linear.

Then you have everyone's wish list, we all have one. I am not a programmer, I have no idea what's involved in programming a high end computer game so for me for example when I'm talking about having material storage included in the game (definitely a good example of something they got wrong), surely that's just a few lines of code?!! In reality it's probably way more complicated than that. Look at the great explanation Mark Allen gave about the bug which was letting NPCs create their own mods! He lost me when he started talking about cache pointers! The game is complex but it's easy for laymen like myself to be the armchair critic, the back seat driver who could do better.

Yes this post reads like a so called fanboy post which I dont usually write and as I said at the beginning FD make mistakes and shouldn't be totally immune to criticism, hell what company wouldn't make mistakes on a multi year project like this but step by step we are going in the right direction and I'm personally looking forward to the next several years of development. If FD keep on putting in the kind of effort they are putting in now with the game and the community it's going to continue to be a great game.

Very very well said sir
+1 rep

 

[Envy661]

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

+1nd so hard. This comment deserves some praise for being so spot-on.

 

[kofeyh]

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

lol; crowd-funding is notorious for think big, deliver small (or not at all). For a small team Frontier do okay. Could they do better? that's arguable. Maybe. But they don't have the ridiculous millions that is backing SC for example (which could and would pay for a sizable massively experienced development team) and yet Frontier have managed to actually build a workable game people can pour thousands of hours into.

The numbers of game franchises that can claim such degree of investment from players, and be this far along with a bit over 2 years of live release in place, is a very short list.

 

[Adept Geraden]

folks who can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag,

Hey, I resemble that remark.

But seriously, on the storage front. There's a lot more to it than just however many lines of code it takes to implement. There's "design" to consider. As in, how many loop holes will it create, that we will abuse. Many have been thought of and pointed out here on the forums over a long period of time. I'm sure there are many others that FD have pondered, that haven't occurred to us forum'ites yet.

 

[PiLhEaD]

....crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted.....

Just out of curiosity, can you list all the crowdfunding promises that were retracted? I'm not talking abt the DDF, as that is not the same at all.

As an aside if your politicians deliver on 40% I'd say you're doing well.

 

[Cargobane]

"Lack of a Plan" sound likes the OP flip-side.

A Business that does not have a finished Product (with Set Features) but only a future Soon Coming Set, of In Progress ideas, will never be Finished. And so the cycle of promise, sell, build, is always self-defeating (for the Business). If you know what I mean.

 

[barcode]

Just out of curiosity, can you list all the crowdfunding promises that were retracted? I'm not talking abt the DDF, as that is not the same at all.

As an aside if your politicians deliver on 40% I'd say you're doing well.

They never can. They always confuse what was promised with what they imagined.

As far as I'm concerned, I was backing a more modern version of those Elite games I used to play on my dad's Amiga, and so far Frontier have delivered exactly that.

 

[CMDR Zhon Daeli]

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

Curious, have you ever designed and developed a software application?

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

Show us some *evidence* for your claims.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Also, claims of "retraction" & "failure to deliver" are pretty dodgy when the game is only 18 months into a TEN YEAR development cycle.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

"Lack of a Plan" sound likes the OP flip-side.

A Business that does not have a finished Product (with Set Features) but only a future Soon Coming Set, of In Progress ideas, will never be Finished. And so the cycle of promise, sell, build, is always self-defeating (for the Business). If you know what I mean.

There is a plan, as you'd know if you had ever tried reading Newsletters & Dev Updates from around 2013-2014.

 

[hiciacit]

Just out of curiosity, can you list all the crowdfunding promises that were retracted? I'm not talking abt the DDF, as that is not the same at all.

As an aside if your politicians deliver on 40% I'd say you're doing well.

The offline mode maybe? Pretty big one that too ...

 

[Kayweg]

Agreed, very difficult task.
Mind you, they chose their own trade, and they're not doing it for coupons either.
I am sure they were pretty aware what they are getting themselves into. Afterall, they've been doing it for a while.

 

[ilo]

where can I find pollonium?
+rep!!

 

[VR jefranklin18]

IIRC that was not actually an original Kickstarter pledge but was requested by users. They agreed to add it but had to retract due to there focus on the server-based BGS.

 

[CMDR Zhon Daeli]

The offline mode maybe? Pretty big one that too ...

All software starts out as an idea, but oft times don't end up like that idea when they ship.
Sometimes realities of production get in the way and most times when a program gets to the prototyping stage, we find that that idea makes for bad implementation, would force unacceptable compromises, or simply isn't workable.
Customers don't see this process because it's all internal, inside the development company, but with the introduction of crowdfunded software, it’s turned into a problem for both developers and users.
A user backs a product based on a slick pitch and expects the product to deliver on the promises of that pitch.
A developer, on the other hand, treats an idea as a starting point and expects things to change during development.
This disconnect is what causes trouble.

Just because ED was promised an offline mode, does not mean it will have that feature come release.
Have a look at the DDF's, there's plenty of things in there not the game; either because they aren't ready to be released or aren't workable.

Frontier did state they would try to provide an offline mode as it was requested by the backers, it wasn't initially pitched with the promise of offline though, IIRC.
It was an idea, a requested feature but the realities of production got in the way and they found that including an offline mode would compromise on the quality and focus of the product they wanted to deliver and they felt that simply wasn't acceptable.

This is the nature of game development, it's also the nature of software development as a whole; it's simply a reality people who aren't in the industry need to understand and accept.
However, to be fair, the onus is on the developer to let their backers know from the start that some features may or may not be present on release and not make willy-nilly promises left and right.

 

[barcode]

When I was in high school, I saw Morrowind on sale at a local game store, so I grabbed it. It was an impulse purchase and I knew almost nothing about the game save for the fact it was an open-world fantasy RPG. It very quickly became one of my favourite games, critics loved it and it's widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time.

A few years later I happened to find some details of the original design document online. Barely half the planned features made it into the final game. If Bethesda released that document to the public, there's no way it would have been so well received. Critics and gamers alike would have savaged it for "broken promises" and "false advertising", regardless of how the end result turned out to be..

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.

 

[digitalscream]

Yeah I can imagine 90% of businesses world having the exact same problem. On the flip side the majority of businesses were not crowd funded under a set of promises.... which half were later retracted and only delivered on 40% of the ones promised. That's what a politician is suppose to do.....

Having been part of many, many large-scale development projects, I can say that most of the successful ones deviated significantly from their original design before implementation (for many reasons - problems with the design that didn't arise until later, outside influences etc). That has nothing to do with the talent or ability of the developer (or the designers), but rather the fact that some things are simply unforeseeable when nothing (or not enough) has been built.

Conversely, the ones which stuck rigidly to the original design often failed because of the problems inherent in the original requirements.

If you view initial design requirements as "promises" which cannot be broken, then you'll always be disappointed. If you view them as design goals, then you'll be a much happier person when it comes to this sort of thing...

 

[Cargobane]

We'll see what Season 3 brings...