“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.” -Soren Kierkegaard
Sup! + Pax
Thanks to everyone who was able to make it to the Pax finals!! It was a blast and getting to meet both of the teams (and a ton of other players) was really fun! It was a lot of work, but the program went pretty well overall. Sorry to both of the teams about the tech issues we were having/sound issues. Those things happen, but I’m still sorry about them.
There’s been a lot of…”fire/passion” on the forums lately so I wanted to take some time to address some things. As I’ve stated before, we’re usually really busy trying to get things (like Pax) to happen, but we love to post when we’re able. We read MOST of what’s on the forums, but we seldom have time to reply to each individual thread.
So, I thought I’d try something. I’m gonna try to address a multitude of issues that have been raised on the forums in this post, rather than responding to each of the threads individually. As you can imagine, it’s much easier to respond to everything in one post/thread, rather than trying to keep up with multiple threads.
I’ll break it up into sections so it’s easier to read, as walls of text have a habit of not being very reader friendly.
LESSGO!
For the love of the game
Some have said that we (the devs) just don’t care about the game. This, I can tell you, could not be further from the truth. We LOVE this game like crazy. You guys may be frustrated that a feature isn’t in, or that something’s not perfect, but it DRIVES US NUTS. It keeps us up at night. We wake up thinking about them and writing “to do” lists in our heads as we drive to work every day.
Unfortunately we can’t just snap our fingers and fix everything. We have to take all known issues, prioritize them, and then start dealing with them an issue at a time. That process looks something like this: we do a design of the feature, requisite resources are requested, the feature is implemented, iterated upon, tested, polished, and then released. For a game the size of an MMO, these things take time. We’re not a small game that can move/change/adapt quickly. An MMO is more like a massive ship – it takes time to change direction. Many systems/pieces/features in the game also impact one another, so we have to be very careful in what we change and how.
We’re very passionate about the game, and we want it to be the best game possible. We love the players and we love the game. Just because you don’t get what you want, right when you want it, doesn’t mean we don’t care. We’re just very busy doing a LOT of things, because a TON has to happen behind the scenes to get an MMO built and updated.
Sometimes it may seem like we aren’t listening, or we don’t respond to your posts. But a TON of things could be at work. Don’t assume that just because we don’t change things exactly when you want them changed that we’re ignoring you or don’t care about your opinions and thoughts.
We aren’t Data
We get tired. Emotional. Fatigued. Excited. You name it. Ask any dev from any game, and they’ll tell you – they’ve been through it all in order to ship a game. And just like you (who are also not robots), we take vacations. We hit caps where we’re just so tired that we need to back off, recharge, take a vacation, and then come back to the project.
We have tough skin when it comes to taking criticism, but an overabundance of negativity on the forums can still take a toll on anyone. This is simply natural. It’s the same for the president (who I’m sure hears a TON of opinions about how he’s doing his job), any athlete who plays in the public eye, any artist, any performer. You want criticism so that you can improve, but you also have to develop a tough skin so that negative feedback doesn’t keep you from being functional. Sometimes this means you take a break from negative sources of feedback.
The Pax event took a TON of time/planning/prep from many people, and due to that, a lot of us are taking slight breaks right now. If you don’t see as much activity on the forums for a bit, that’s why!
