In a question like this, one must always consider whether resources are limited and to what extent. Assumption doesn't cut it. Either you know, or don't.
The problem becomes when people make assumptions that Frontier is incapable of assigning development resources to many projects because they don't have the staff, time, or finances.
IMO, suggest whatever you want- but criticizing the company because you don't agree with their list of priorities is foolish and counter-productive.
Hey, but by all means, do what you wish with your time, even if you are wasting it.
At the end of the day, there can only be a finite amount of employees, and the more things they work on the thinner they are spread so even if you gave frontier a hundred million grant to accelerate development there would still be internal project resource management required. Just look at star citizen for proof that money isn't everything.
Just to clarify one thing my question wasn't meant as a slight to frontier, its just a pragmatic point of view, they are a company, with a finite budget determined by revenue cashflow and contingeny reserves (IE how much to hold back for a rainy day), you can only put so many people in an office building (they are expanding so they are building a bigger new one), and that team can only work so many hours per week, push them significantly beyond that for sustained periods and it won't before they start burning out. (Trust me on that one I've burned out a couple of times.) So they can only do so much at one time, as can any organisation.
You can wash your car and phone your mother while doing that, but you cannot cut the grass while having a bath. Some tasks dovetail nicely into multitasking with each other while others are plainly impossibly incompatible with each other that they can only be done one at a time on an OR basis... I was wondering what parts of future development of elite my fellow forumites might think fell into the former category.
The requirement to develop store items seriously hinders the development of the game.
If they had to make awesome expansion packs to make money, they would be developing gameplay instead of grindplay.
I so hope you are wrong on that front, but on the face of it your logic is cynical but impeccable.[yesnod]
It really depends on what's being developed and how it integrates with other systems - the fact of the matter right now is everything is breaking everything and that should be the priority right now - no new development until you've got the runaway horse under control. Sort out the code so it doesn't break in 3 places when you fix one thing - this game is so broken right now that idk how they haven't just stopped everything till they fix this mess.
I think the whole beyond season being for free is to give them a chance consolidate the current codebase, some things will become patently obviously improved (like planets), while other things will be drastically improved but be well hidden from our eyes (such as server side optimisations and tweaks)
Last year there were a couple of experimental betas where Sandro was getting the dev team to have a play around with altered shield strength/altered shield booster mechanics.
Stuff like that isn't trivial. It takes designer and dev time to ponder over, discuss, then implement. Then they have to compile a new game build. And there's possibly back-end server stuff to change as well to suit the altered things in the front end.
This is the sort of thing which in my opinion can consume days, weeks, and sometimes months of developer time. Only Frontier can confirm that guess though.
Then there's the recent patching that's been going on after 3.0(.1) was released - 3.0.3 was released yesterday. Again, it's just a guess, but judging by the amount of time it took to produce the 3.0.3 patch, the work involved wasn't trivial - for whatever reason. And now there's going to be another patch to sort out the things which have gone belly-up in 3.0.3
All these needed patches do add up in terms of the dev time investment required to produce them. How this affects Frontier's schedule for further major game releases, only Frontier can tell, but my guess is these things do push major releases back each time.
I think Beyond is a continuation of that remedial work, where 2.3.03 was to try and sort the power creep in the insane ammount of shields that FDev had not foreseen players building using the engineers, 3.X is about fixing a rake of long term "one day we'll do this" issues. But once clear of the aforemetioned whackamole bugfix with a consolodated codebase planning to move into 4.X what would you anticipate dovetailing together as an efficient plan?
If they followed my instructions, and stopped listening to everyone else, then everything would be fine.
Loving the deadpan sarcasm meta humour there. +1 But if you've got good ideas that you've shared before please copy and paste them in here...
Isn't it more like, "Development of X breaks Y and Z, rinse and repeat as necessary".
Whackamoley!!!
In all seriousness I encounter this sort of thing in my professional life fixing oil rigs, an industry that has taught me to never underestimate the value of a fresh set of eyes on a problem, which brings me back to asking how would you do it?
It's not exactly a quick debate Jayridium
Many lengthy and boring books have been written on the topic. All we can really do is keep asking for the things we want to see, FDev are going to produce what they want to produce.
You are not going to figure out what's wrong with the frontier Development team from outside the organisation (no matter how much you think you know what the problem is... m0rl0ck
).
This wasn't ever under any illusion of being a forum derived development plan, I just had the idea to ask you guys how would you manage the development of the game as a thought provoking exercise akin to a crossword or soduko, a challenge that gets your brain working but the result of which has little or no effect on the real world.
