This is a speculation thread -- or perhaps a retroactive speculation thread since I'm speculating about things in the past -- so keep in mind that I don't have any insider knowledge here.
One of the things I'm interested in is the production cycle and decision cycle that businesses go through. I notice, for example, that it's exactly two years since the South America pack was released and the capybara soared to its number one place on the meta-list. Similarly, it's been 20 months since the Australia pack was released without the platypus, and 16 months since the aquatic pack and the debates about giant vs. asian small clawed otters.
That got me thinking about some of the more surprise animals that are showing up in our animal packs too, and wondering whether they really were less demanded at the time the decisions were made, or whether we all just have short attention spans and have forgotten what it is we had asked for!
So I did a bit of searching through old forum posts, and lo and behold, I found posts from the past talking about the spectacled caiman, nile lechwe, and wild water buffalo by name. As well as several posts from late 2020/early 2021 talking about the need for more reptiles and ungulates. And as someone else pointed out in another thread, the lechwe and buffalo and caiman were all early mods that have a high number of downloads. Plus, for the spectacled caimans, the discussion was specifically around how they are very common in zoos, which tied into larger discussions about realism, etc..
None of this should necessarily change how people feel about any given pack or any choice within a pack. But it may offer some insight into how and when the pack was conceived and put together. (I had a similar reaction to the way I noticed the South East Asia pack being received at the time, since I knew that I'd seen so many of those animals listed as top requests -- until Frontier gave them to us and suddenly people were like "why are we getting that"?)
So I guess this has got me wondering if this gives us insight into Frontier's development cycle, and also potentially what it might tell us about the packs to come -- presuming that they may have made a decision about several packs at once to plan their year, for example. Should we be considering not merely our current wishlists and meta-lists, but also thinking back to what the conversations might have been 12, 18 or 24 months prior, and expecting to see selections from those? Were there "fads" in the forums that might have flamed out with time, but which still may be baked into the production pipeline? Conversely, does it give us a clue about how long it might take for any currently requested feature to actually go through the cycle of decision-development-production? If creative decisions for the next year are made every March, for example, then a fad that was popular in January-February may be more influential to what we get a year later than one that appeared in April-May.
One of the things I'm interested in is the production cycle and decision cycle that businesses go through. I notice, for example, that it's exactly two years since the South America pack was released and the capybara soared to its number one place on the meta-list. Similarly, it's been 20 months since the Australia pack was released without the platypus, and 16 months since the aquatic pack and the debates about giant vs. asian small clawed otters.
That got me thinking about some of the more surprise animals that are showing up in our animal packs too, and wondering whether they really were less demanded at the time the decisions were made, or whether we all just have short attention spans and have forgotten what it is we had asked for!
So I did a bit of searching through old forum posts, and lo and behold, I found posts from the past talking about the spectacled caiman, nile lechwe, and wild water buffalo by name. As well as several posts from late 2020/early 2021 talking about the need for more reptiles and ungulates. And as someone else pointed out in another thread, the lechwe and buffalo and caiman were all early mods that have a high number of downloads. Plus, for the spectacled caimans, the discussion was specifically around how they are very common in zoos, which tied into larger discussions about realism, etc..
None of this should necessarily change how people feel about any given pack or any choice within a pack. But it may offer some insight into how and when the pack was conceived and put together. (I had a similar reaction to the way I noticed the South East Asia pack being received at the time, since I knew that I'd seen so many of those animals listed as top requests -- until Frontier gave them to us and suddenly people were like "why are we getting that"?)
So I guess this has got me wondering if this gives us insight into Frontier's development cycle, and also potentially what it might tell us about the packs to come -- presuming that they may have made a decision about several packs at once to plan their year, for example. Should we be considering not merely our current wishlists and meta-lists, but also thinking back to what the conversations might have been 12, 18 or 24 months prior, and expecting to see selections from those? Were there "fads" in the forums that might have flamed out with time, but which still may be baked into the production pipeline? Conversely, does it give us a clue about how long it might take for any currently requested feature to actually go through the cycle of decision-development-production? If creative decisions for the next year are made every March, for example, then a fad that was popular in January-February may be more influential to what we get a year later than one that appeared in April-May.
Or just the opposite because of some very vocal discussions agains that!
