PraetorGix, on 13 March 2017 - 10:09 PM, said:
Yes, the Skill tree needs improvement, and guess what? I'm even one of the most affected by this change, I'm one of the cheapskates with lots of mechs and very few modules. But no, something doesn't need to stay in development hell forever to improve. In live it could receive a lot more input and metrics and accelerate the process, no need for a longer PTS. Or do you think this bunch of crybabies are gonna be happy just because the tree stays in PTS 2 more months?
This is a major re-working to the daily experience of playing the game. It directly affects the value of the time already put into the game and the time players would put into it going forward. The feature was announced at MechCon in December, slated for release in February, and scheduled for only 1 PTS session before being patched in. We only got a second iteration for testing because the playerbase was vocal in its feedback and criticisms.
Would you agree that the intial process was insufficiently robust for adequately testing the feature, gathering and analyzing feedback about it, and revising before release? We wouldn't be having a conversation about a feature getting pushed back if an adequate process had been in place from the start. We'd just be completing the process as designed, on schedule.
As for iterating on live, the design had massive flaws that are requiring significant revisions. They'd either be setting themselves up for losing players or multiple rounds of refunds, both of which should be avoided. In the past, iterating on live has also occurred slower than compared with when they use the PTS. That's not tenable a situation with a change that's both this large in scope and required sizeable revisions.