IIIuminaughty, on 17 May 2014 - 09:54 AM, said:
Hmm I just thought you would just buy the clan pack and move on... but I guess you had to tell the community
He and many others have it in their heads that if they gripe enough, PGI will suddenly wake up and go "Oh, hey, let's drop everything we're doing and follow these guys' ideas!"
Listen, folks...if you still think PGI is incompetent, apathetic, or disingenuous, you either haven't been paying attention or don't understand software development. The story of MWO has been revealed to us (albeit thru secondary channels). It is one of inexperience and unforeseen delays. The publisher mandated a Closed Beta build in six months, which is an excruciating crunch in development terms. The fact that they still produced a game that was so visually, viscerally, and fundamentally solid that many still refer to it as the only time the game was ever fun...well, that should resolve any case for PGI's incompetence. You can't have it both ways.
That six month crunch, however, had its cost. As the game grew, its increasing demands outgrew the support of both CryEngine and the initial UI. Both had to be rebuilt. That's 2013. Meanwhile money was diverted from the game, a handful of key pillars were reversed for various reasons (displeasing only the hardcore sim purists), and PGI found itself simply unable to marshal its very small team to tackle the other things it had promised while they fought to wring stability and performance out of CryEngine.
That's still where we are. UI2.0 has given us great community events, but bottlenecks (UI2.0, then Clans, then CW, right now 3/3/3/3 is consuming their time) will remain until the major features are all out. Then, hopefully, we'll hit a gap-filling phase where all the smaller stuff like collisions and Awesome tweaking and heat sink screens and player tutorials (yes, from a development standpoint, these are all little things compared to performance/stability/major features) can finally be tackled, instead of getting shuffled back by development triage.
MWO is a lesson in counting your chickens before they hatch, to be sure, but I can assure you that no game developer out there would bat an eye at this story. Even CIG, with four times the manpower, is going through this. If you don't like it, maybe some of you should have asked PGI just how many people they had
before spending money on them back in 2011. From the looks of it, not a single person ever asked that question.
If you care enough to complain, great. But "caring" is no substitute for knowing the story.
You want to wait before you buy, great. But don't call the vendor a slimy used car salesman when he's really just in need of a little more time.
Know the story.
Edited by Rebas Kradd, 18 May 2014 - 11:47 AM.