Alienized, on 03 August 2016 - 03:02 AM, said:
i wanna know how many people actually ran a company, beein responsible for people, getting bashed all time for good reasons sometimes but also alot of unnecessary things that made PGI going full fortress again.
I've started and operated two small companies, maybe a dozen employees. Not astoundingly successful but they paid the bills and are still operating. I've been in the military in charge of troops and allocated a few million dollars worth of funding while handling forty jackasses who thought my brains were ****. I've written code and my current day job involves doing so...window's open right now while I screw off writing this.
PGI is making changes...I'm just not sure why they're making the changes they're making. If they have the capacity to create this game (and I'm starting to think they no longer have that capacity) then they've got the capacity to make significant changes and shouldn't be wasting resources on things like a new minimap unless it's vital to implementation of a larger change. I don't think it is and at best they're hyper focused on something they "think" they need to move on to larger structural changes. If they outsourced immense amounts of the work (I seem to recall some of that was done) and have a tiny core of programmers incapable of making major changes then there's really no point in making any plans for this game.
That said, the vast majority of the big structural changes in constructing a global economy aren't super intensive from a programming standpoint. The framework of this sort of thing is entirely invisible and is purely text and mathematics, no animation required and is mostly database work. Deciding what to do takes time, designing the overall concept takes time, but all of this is something done by tiny companies regularly making tiny games on Steam or other places. Even individuals (teenagers/college students/etc) fascinated with programming produce games with more depth than community warfare has right now. It's not the graphics that make the game, and (even if it was) MWO already has perfectly good "looks".
Play testing? They essentially don't do any.
I'm nonplussed trying to determine where they allocate their resources, which is why I'm thinking they're financially on the ropes and incapable of further significant development. I also think the few remaining employees aren't interested in further development and are either depressed/not functioning at a significant level or have turned their attention to outside work where they hope for a better return.
In any other company the level of work being performed on this game wouldn't acceptable. Years go by and your primary income driver is wasting away without even minimal work being performed? Some of the fixes here are the sort of thing you grab one employee, set them on it, and tell them to have it finished in a week or a month. The recent database change is one of those.
Hotfixes? That's ...honestly it's pretty simple most of the time. PGI manages that fine. It's not something you spend all day on.
Content? The mech production that drives their sales is something that's straight out of the literature. The development of the mechs from a graphics/animation standpoint is half done and copied from previous mechs already and if they can't whip one out pretty quickly at this point they really don't have any business being in the game at all. It's a flippin' skin.
Maps? If they don't have a map creation tool I'd be...well I'd assume they're lying. If they're overproducing the maps so they can't put any out in a reasonable time (how many maps over how many years? seriously?) or don't want to expand on what they've got that's a different issue...Pretty maps are nice, maps that don't play well are a bigger problem than ugly and CW maps are frikkin' ugly anyway.
They don't want to spend their time expanding this IP. They're spending their time micromanaging instead of developing. That bodes poorly for absolutely any enterprise anywhere. You grow or you die. MWO hasn't grown a damn bit in years...mech packs and the CW nonsense aside (neither of which show any significant signs of sinking resources into the IP). There has been some refinement, yes, but not enough to justify the time spent on it.
If this is their day job they'd be fired if they had an employer. If it's not their day job they need to step up and admit it so there's an excuse for how slowly anything gets done. If they just don't give a damn...eh.
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