Behind the Scenes of MPQ : Please tell us more

IceIX

mohio wrote:

Since arktos has posted a couple times here I now think I'm wrong, but the way I originally read the OP was like this: give us some behind the scenes info so we can know in general how long it takes to do x,y,z. So, release a new character : two days to pick the next character, 2 weeks to brainstorm abilities, 2 more to pick the 3 best and tweak to be ready to test. 3 weeks for SE to code the new abilities and do first pass on bugs, 3 more weeks of testing/bug fixing, ready!

The problem with giving timelines like this is that it's so variable. An average *would* obviously be mathematically be doable, since obviously we could pull numbers from start/finish dates on any particular character. But that'd be a horrible metric to give since it's just that, an average. And then when any new character slipped *over* that average, people would kvetch. We've had characters take 2 weeks from "Let's do it" to "in the game on QA, balance time". We've had characters take 8-12 weeks to get in due to new mechanics needing to be engineered, or a half dozen art passes, or any number of other things. But it'd be unfair to everyone involved to pin down a time for that since there are so many little variables that can influence those sorts of implementations. As well, in those 8-12 week situations, it's also the case that we keep cranking out other characters and such in the meantime.

Basically, it's actually an actively difficult thing to pin down timings on any particular facet of work since every single implemented feature, whether a character, Event, or tweak is its own little piece in a huge, constantly shifting puzzle. A puzzle that then changes size as a result of plugging in another piece and therefore changing the man-hours allocatable to other in progress tasks. It's rare that we, internally, can say *for sure* that a given feature will be in the game more than 3-4 releases away. Things like adding in stuff to help with EU ending times could have come earlier, but it would have meant that the Anniversary Week was something less than it was. Or that the Gauntlet just didn't happen. So it's a constant balancing act of "what is best for the game right this second" versus "what we need to get in for long term health". The whole process of developing a Live game is a totally different beast compared to normal production of a boxed game. Since we've got "unlimited" time, there's never a point where something is considered "feature creep" and outright cut. Which means that trying to schedule an ever growing and changing mass of dev-designed features, licensor requirements, and community feature requests is like nailing jelly to a tree (without the aid of liquid nitrogen). Every day. In other words, it's a lot of fun.

Nonce Equitaur 2

How about "Which existing characters will likely see a change of some sort within the next year?"

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

mohio wrote:

Since arktos has posted a couple times here I now think I'm wrong, but the way I originally read the OP was like this: give us some behind the scenes info so we can know in general how long it takes to do x,y,z. So, release a new character : two days to pick the next character, 2 weeks to brainstorm abilities, 2 more to pick the 3 best and tweak to be ready to test. 3 weeks for SE to code the new abilities and do first pass on bugs, 3 more weeks of testing/bug fixing, ready!

The problem with giving timelines like this is that it's so variable. An average *would* obviously be mathematically be doable, since obviously we could pull numbers from start/finish dates on any particular character. But that'd be a horrible metric to give since it's just that, an average. And then when any new character slipped *over* that average, people would kvetch. We've had characters take 2 weeks from "Let's do it" to "in the game on QA, balance time". We've had characters take 8-12 weeks to get in due to new mechanics needing to be engineered, or a half dozen art passes, or any number of other things. But it'd be unfair to everyone involved to pin down a time for that since there are so many little variables that can influence those sorts of implementations. As well, in those 8-12 week situations, it's also the case that we keep cranking out other characters and such in the meantime.

Basically, it's actually an actively difficult thing to pin down timings on any particular facet of work since every single implemented feature, whether a character, Event, or tweak is its own little piece in a huge, constantly shifting puzzle. A puzzle that then changes size as a result of plugging in another piece and therefore changing the man-hours allocatable to other in progress tasks. It's rare that we, internally, can say *for sure* that a given feature will be in the game more than 3-4 releases away. Things like adding in stuff to help with EU ending times could have come earlier, but it would have meant that the Anniversary Week was something less than it was. Or that the Gauntlet just didn't happen. So it's a constant balancing act of "what is best for the game right this second" versus "what we need to get in for long term health". The whole process of developing a Live game is a totally different beast compared to normal production of a boxed game. Since we've got "unlimited" time, there's never a point where something is considered "feature creep" and outright cut. Which means that trying to schedule an ever growing and changing mass of dev-designed features, licensor requirements, and community feature requests is like nailing jelly to a tree (without the aid of liquid nitrogen). Every day. In other words, it's a lot of fun.

You perfectly answered my OP question. I'm sure this post would satisfy many guys' curiosity and indeed explains a lot of things.

It might be obvious that you work for the best of the game, as it is common sense, but it's better when YOU say it.

I'm improving in diplomacy, you're improving in communication.

Win-win !

GothicKratos

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

How about "Which existing characters will likely see a change of some sort within the next year?"

That technically was addressed in the QnA, I believe. Didn't they say that old character reworks were likely, just not a priority?

Unknown

In other words, it's something they want to do, but they don't know when an opening in their schedule will arise so they can do it. Lol.... Long way of saying they're not psychic.

yogi_

arktos1971 wrote:

So, we've been listened to for the LRs.

Psylocke has just shown up.

Hey, D3P, I hope you don't get bored with these, cause here's another one :

THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LR"s have been the same for how long now...I hardly think we've been listened to; it's purely a practical outcome to something they had to do.

The reason she's in there is because they had to pull Patch and Punisher (and Spider-Man) out due to them not being in tokens and there are not that many 3*s left to choose from to use as replacements (once you remove the newer characters from the mix). I think dev Will mentioned this removal of characters at some point and I imagine the same for 2.5 day PvP but obviously many more options remaining there.

The connected reason to this is that I am expecting that some, most or all of the currently featured characters in this set of LR's (and maybe part of the next set) will be out next season, so they are getting a last run before going.

If this theory holds true, I would expect to see it for future months / seasons and a likely more continued rotation of LR's, but it won't be because we've been asking for it, otherwise it would have happened long long ago.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

GothicKratos

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I hate to say it, but you're both wrong. They're a business. They're metrics driven.

Unknown

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I think it is possible in this day and age to give constructive criticism without becoming a "complainer"
I mean do we really want to be the person at the grocery store who yells at the cashier until they get a free gallon of milk? Is that one way to get what you want? I guess but the cashier and his manager hate you, the other customers in line are annoyed at you and think you should be thrown out for causing a disturbance AND are pissed that such a tantrum actually got you free stuff. And before long someone else learns that they too can yell at the cashier to get what they want, and it all devolves into constant yelling and complaining, because the people who don't want to deal with that stop going to that store.

I may have let that analogy get out of hand, sorry. Lets be better than complainers. I know we can.

NorthernPolarity

GothicKratos wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I hate to say it, but you're both wrong. They're a business. They're metrics driven.

Being metrics driven doesn't have anything to do with how much you're willing to expose your development process.

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I think it is possible in this day and age to give constructive criticism without becoming a "complainer"
I mean do we really want to be the person at the grocery store who yells at the cashier until they get a free gallon of milk? Is that one way to get what you want? I guess but the cashier and his manager hate you, the other customers in line are annoyed at you and think you should be thrown out for causing a disturbance AND are pissed that such a tantrum actually got you free stuff. And before long someone else learns that they too can yell at the cashier to get what they want, and it all devolves into constant yelling and complaining, because the people who don't want to deal with that stop going to that store.

I may have let that analogy get out of hand, sorry. Lets be better than complainers. I know we can.

I'm skeptical that a general internet forum can ever not have some form of complainers, unfortunately.

GothicKratos

NorthernPolarity wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I hate to say it, but you're both wrong. They're a business. They're metrics driven.

Being metrics driven doesn't have anything to do with how much you're willing to expose your development process.

That's not the point I was trying to make (I was only responding to the quoted text, specifically), but actually, honestly, sure it is. Both ways, actually. On one hand, there are plenty of things in the business world that are "unethical" or "poor business" that are actually good business, but bad press - not to imply this is the case - but you're basically volunteering for one of the millions of groups of professional complainers. On the other hand, if a company is on the ropes (as some would say D3 is), shedding some light on their processes can alleviate some of the stress.

Unknown

Well, even if it was planned for a long time, and they did not have to listen to us for the change of characters in the LRs, I just wanted to let them know I was happy, and if they could go on improving LRs, that would be nice.

Today I could play 2 LRs completely, because the MMR was quite low, and it was fun.

Unknown

I prefer the old Arktos

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

TLDR: Complainers are why we can't have nice things.

"Complainers are why they try to make nice things!"

There, I fixed it for you

I think it is possible in this day and age to give constructive criticism without becoming a "complainer"
I mean do we really want to be the person at the grocery store who yells at the cashier until they get a free gallon of milk? Is that one way to get what you want? I guess but the cashier and his manager hate you, the other customers in line are annoyed at you and think you should be thrown out for causing a disturbance AND are pissed that such a tantrum actually got you free stuff. And before long someone else learns that they too can yell at the cashier to get what they want, and it all devolves into constant yelling and complaining, because the people who don't want to deal with that stop going to that store.

I may have let that analogy get out of hand, sorry. Lets be better than complainers. I know we can.

I agree with your core argument but the analogy does not represent it well. I mean milk is something that you can live without and you can replace it easily. Some things in this game offer you no other choice. PVE scaling is a good example. I want to play PVE because I want to improve my roster, but that scaling is hurting me bad. I'm trying to transition and I get punished for leveling some of my 3* instead of being able to do a bit better.

Now, there has been many threads pointing out reasonably that there is a problem here. There has been no replies for this specific topic yet. I don't blame them, they can't reply if they don't talk about it first. But that worries me even more, because knowing that they don't even acknowledge the problem, means that they are not considering it yet. No matter how many thread and posts we see about this issue it just goes by until the next thread brings it up again. Because, someone will be frustrated enough from time to time to come here and release tension trying to get an answer.

What do you do in this case? Is silence supposed to make you feel better? I've heard too much silence drives people insane. So, maybe some of the posts will cross that line and start complain and whine because they are desperate for an answer. I'm not saying they help, but they do bring more attention to the issue. Remember before CMags got nerfed? I think all the whining fulfilled its purpose. If it was just 1-2 casual threads talking about it, that would not be such a big deal.

History in this game has taught us that if devs don't see whining and screaming they do not consider it a problem. That's why you see so many complainers around.

EDIT: Spelling

Unknown

TheUnwiseOne wrote:

I prefer the old Arktos

How so ?

You prefer controversy and conflict ?

Don't worry, you may see me yelling at D3P again in the future.

For the time being, I'm patiently waiting for improvements, and there are quite many. I don't see the reason to complain.

Now, if you want a public bash, tell me I am an idiot

Unknown

So now we have Dr Octopus, Daken and other new characters in the LRs.

This is a neat new thing amongst the terrible times we are going through with all these PvEs...