I'm going to be blunt. The sky is NOT falling.
Given the blunt tone of many of my remarks, I can scarcely fault a blunt reply, can I? But I'll admit to being puzzled by "the sky is not falling" - I wasn't predicting doom and gloom. Is it you who are worried about the future?
You rebut my comments with "you have no clue whether the development of Elvenar is ahead of schedule, on-schedule, or behind schedule". So I'll repeat what I wrote - a list of facts. Does one need qualifications to list straightforward facts about the release process? I said:
Major misjudgments from the outset - without subsequent apologies nor correction. They misjudged player retention and based everything around neighborhoods. Then they started reacting - introducing Fellowships, trying to "correct" one thing after another, belatedly inserting elements into early game play that should have been there from the beginning. Feeling it necessary to add the Magic Academy - a "major game element" that somehow they couldn't envision in their initial strategy?
Your next point:
By your own admission you don't have a programming background....you likewise don't have any basis for judging the quality nor appropriateness of the programming effort AS compared to the rest of the gaming industry.
Did I compare Elvenar to the rest of the gaming industry? Hmmm...wasn't my comment
only about the one other game I play?
As to a programming background, I tend to defer to others - there are often players here who have much more specific experience to contribute. My own programming experience is pretty limited - a CS minor and a senior robotics project. It's this experience that influences my opinion of the Elvenar process. For our project we worked with Cargill programmers; they had an enormous robotics project in the works, and my professor gave us 3 small subroutines to complete for them. As students, they gave us access to the flow charts, etc - and I just fell in love with the process. We certainly had it drilled into us that coding is only as successful as the pre-planning.
With Elvenar, we don't have access to the planning - we only see from the front-end. And we often see substantial changes being introduced - some have been pre-planned, but others are specifically introduced as revisions/corrections. One doesn't need to be qualified in order to ask, "
why did Elvenar need this many revisions?"
Some of the causes for revision are just jaw-dropping. The neighborhood debacle is an epic Fail. This is what I had in mind when I wrote
I know would-be game designers whose ramblings-over-beer-after-class had a more cohesive structure than we've seen here.
This is a use of hyperbole to make a point - not a statement that I'm seeking "advice". The point being: the professional game designers here were so short-sighted that they structured the game around neighborhoods - and shockingly are continuing to do so via Tournaments. This failure to calculate retention probabilities wouldn't be acceptable in a university-level project, so it's a remarkably telltale error for a team of experienced professionals to make.
Even so, I'd prefer to just say "to err is human" and stop harping. That would be simple, if they had realized the mistake, and then set about correcting it straight away with a modest little acknowledgement. Instead, we're 18 months in, they've released Tournaments around failed neighborhoods...and still you suggest that I "can't know if they're...behind schedule". So there must be a schedule somewhere, stating 18+ months as the projected date for correcting neighborhoods? And an intentional schedule for Fairy stating "release new fighting units x months after"...Please. It's more likely, from what we've seen, that there's very little schedule at all. They're having to revise code- an exponentially more difficult task than writing original code. Sure, they have goals / targets, but hopefully they're aiming for bug-free code over timetables.
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