His post:
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I absolutely feel I can answer with 100% confidence that the development of a second game will no impact MWO in any way. Now let's remember saying it will not impact MWO development is not the same thing as saying zero resources will be shared or swapped.
For instance it might be the case that were completely finished developing an Installer and build process for MWO just as an example, if the resource who develops those aspects for MWO moves over to develop those items for our second project, it doesn't impact MWO development in any way. There are other examples that would be valid as well, at this point MWO is a mature product and even though we still have lots of work to do, its not the same type of work we have been doing these first three years.
MWO development is dependent only on it's own viability as a product and nothing else. As long as you the customer are supporting its development we will continue to develop it.
Since I will have more opportunities to answer this quesiton I will leave this question with that much information and move on.
There are a few glaring issues with these statements.
First, this suggestion here:
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This is clearly not true.
Unless it was planned that you would fire that engineer upon completion of that single task, putting him onto another project upon completion of a task for MWO most certainly will impact the development of MWO directly. You're not impacting the task he just completed on MWO, but you are directly impacting whatever NEXT task would have been assigned to him. You are removing development resources from MWO.
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I'm sorry, but this is clearly not the case.
MWO is not anywhere approaching a mature product at this point.
The user interface for MWO is a tragic mess, which negatively impacts every user of your software. There are elements of it which were clearly designed to some degree, but then never fully implemented, such as the list/icon buttons in the top left of the different selection areas. There is no way that you can possibly consider the current user interface to be "mature" by any stretch of the imagination.
Its user interactions need to be heavily streamlined, as they require far too many clicks and mouse movements to be considered efficient. Information is difficult to access, and mech building is cumbersome. The mere fact that it functions is not the same as it being mature, or complete. I think many of your most ardent supporters support the current interface under the assumption that it is only one step towards some better, more complete interface.
Likewise, your network code is still a mess. We have players desyncing nearly EVERY GAME. I am being absolutely serious here. I literally do not remember the last time I played a game that didn't have someone desync or disconnect. At least once every single day that I play this game, I suffer from at least one desynchronization from the server, with my client disconnecting and needing to re-log in.
Beyond those issues, you have still failed to deliver on the major elements of community warfare. Given that you previously described these as major pillars of the user experience, how can you possibly consider the current software to be mature, when it's missing those critical elements?
And clearly, given that you have still given us virtually no information about how any of that will play out, it's most definitely not just "the same type of work you've done these past three years". Community warfare is something that is supposed to be unlike what we've seen thus far. And it doesn't even exist in the game yet.
Russ, your current game is not a mature product at this point. It's been around for a few years, that's true, but the glacial pace of its development has prevented it from being at the level of maturity one would expect given that long of a development timeline.
There are lots of major things which need to be addressed in MWO prior to it being mature enough to be considered in the support section of its lifecycle.