3.3 Release

FindingHeart8

I imagine the developers handle working on multiple games at once, with mtgpq sadly probably a lower priority than the others, maybe even the lowest.
They probably leave Brigby in the dark until maybe a couple hours before we are informed, and it's Brigby's job to basically do damage control until they decide to finally release their updates at their leisure.

I'm the head of the Marketing Department for my company, and I've fired people for underperformance; ironically they were still doing better than mtgpq's marketing team.

James13

It always baffles me to see how people seem to assume a very small developer is supposed to be running marketing.  It seems to escape people we are talking about roughly two dozen employees total for the entire company infrastructure (all levels/apps/roles).

GrizzoMtGPQ

@Brigby there's a hole in the schedule on 3/7 that looks suspiciously like a release. Are you really not going to confirm that this is planned and not leak even a single preview card from RNA? Get us excited man, come on!

madwren

James13 said:

It always baffles me to see how people seem to assume a very small developer is supposed to be running marketing.  It seems to escape people we are talking about roughly two dozen employees total for the entire company infrastructure (all levels/apps/roles).

Just for the record, James is close here.  LinkedIn shows 27 employees claiming to work at Oktagon Games.

This also marks the only time LinkedIn has provided me with anything useful.

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FindingHeart8

James13 said:

It always baffles me to see how people seem to assume a very small developer is supposed to be running marketing.  It seems to escape people we are talking about roughly two dozen employees total for the entire company infrastructure (all levels/apps/roles).

I've seen small companies function well, filling these functions, with less than that number of employees.

However, in this case our bar for satisfactory marketing is incredibly low, basically just "talk to us."

We cut Oktagon slack in the past for leaving us in the dark because they were picking up another company's project and new to the system.  This isn't "new" anymore.  This is a conscious choice on how they've decided to interact with their player base.  

Gabrosin

My guess is that the developers are barely keeping their heads above water.  They've got to manage a growing pile of bugs and strange interactions between cards.  They've got to take what the paper game produces and continually translate it in new and innovative ways into the game's confines, and I can't imagine they get a lot of head start compared to the paper release.  They don't have nearly as much design space to work with, and the more complex they make things, the harder their own jobs will be.  Meanwhile they have to figure out how to monetize all of it and keep the lights on, and produce new events, and handle infrastructure things like the new leveling system.

Committing to releasing something on a certain date becomes a problem because if they fail to hit that date, they're angering their player base substantially.  They're already pushing things out the door with a cursory amount of testing at best.  They can't possibly have a comprehensive testing framework in place because that takes a lot of time and energy and if they did, we wouldn't keep seeing old bugs re-emerging with new releases... these things would be caught by the automated tests.  And they can't just shut down for a few months to put those tests in place either.

All that said, it's shocking we can't get mechanic previews or individual card spoilers, even if they wind up having to tweak things after the release.  It's possible they're further behind than we think they are.  They do seem to have been able to split off time for some other tasks, so maybe it's not quite as bad as it seems... but it seems pretty bad right now.

This is another area where they might be able to mobilize the community.  Allowing some veterans access to a beta app where the new cards are available to play, in exchange for some rewards in the main app, could give them some relief when it comes to being able to test and balance their new creations.

Tourmaline

Almost every game out there of this scale has a beta program. Its mindboggling to me that it doesnt seem to be a priority here. 

naabaldan

Regarding the Release 
I'm in the state of being ready for the next Release. The Set is complete. I own enough of everything to get all masterpieces and Level all new pws instantly after availability.
There is no need to spend money for this game until the new Sets availability 

Regarding development and bugs
What I can say from reading official posts and reading between the lines is
The core of the game was rewriten to handle a lot of issues that were hard to be handled in the past. I guess the game was never designed to handle 2500+ different cards
And Tons of abilities 
You need a clean dynamic object oriented structure to allow such a complex game. And the game is stabile. In rotgp I did like 400 casts in one round with no Problems  But than ... The app freezes and terminates without any notice. I Figure the reason is a hardcoded Limit of 500 entries. That is the odd side they have to deal with.
What does that mean for us?
First of all we have to wait until the redisgn is done. When this goal is reached we will see New Sets available much closer to Paper Release  Less Bugs and a faster app
IT is worth waiting for

Brigby

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

Matthew

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

Awesome, thank you for the news!

OmegaLolrus

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Gimme dat sweet, sweet Simic lovin'.

...

And I guess the other guilds too. Whatever.

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Scifibot

I am very excited to see that there will be something else to Whale upon.  Thanks for the update that's great news indeed!

Brakkis

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

You guys realize you can announce upcoming patches, especially ones with new sets, more than a week before they drop right? You can and you just choose not to. Building hype is a thing.

GrizzoMtGPQ

Brakkis said:

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

You guys realize you can announce upcoming patches, especially ones with new sets, more than a week before they drop right? You can and you just choose not to. Building hype is a thing.

For real. Why wait till the last minute? We would have been gushing over these cards for weeks if you’d have let us. Such a shame.

Tilwin90

No card previews in advance? No spoilers? 😔 Oh well better get ready for the new set anyway... 😉

Edit: I do admit I find confusing the lack of previews and spoilers, unless the design of the cards goes in parallel with the implementation itself. But one important part of any paper set release is the spoiler season. This way the community gets to theorycraft and discuss potential uses of cards, where of course things can turn out differently when we actually get access to the cards.

I also understand the concern of "revealing cards too early" when the balancing hasn't been done yet... especially since we have the habit of going crazy over expressing our discontent with how whatever card looks super overpowered or underpowered or whatever. But breaking communication in this direction and not revealing anything until the release is here is worse in my opinion. I hate this wait/dead period of silence...

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Mburn7

Brakkis said:

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. I'm already working on the Pre-Release Notes and it should be ready to be posted later this week, which means if everything goes according to plan, then the 3.3 update should hopefully arrive next week!

If anything changes though, then I'll be sure to let everyone know as quickly as I can

You guys realize you can announce upcoming patches, especially ones with new sets, more than a week before they drop right? You can and you just choose not to. Building hype is a thing.

We've been asking for this for every set Oktagon has worked on (Hibernium, for all their flaws, was pretty consistent posting the card gallery 2-3 weeks before release and spoiling new abilities and stuff)

The standard excuse is that they don't want to have to change something after spoiling it and piss everyone off.
We keep saying that it's ok, but some higher up doesn't seem to care.  *sigh*

ManiiNames

There is some real work involved in making the screenshots.  I know that creating ~140 SS, cropping them appropriately, generating a preview / full-size image, storing them somewhere and then creating hyperlinks for everything is time consuming.  Then having to do it again because José updated something across X number of cards.  That's probably why they dumped it all through Facebook last time, it was something they were familiar with and FB is already designed to hold and publish images.