Especially for those who plan to stick around (at least for the time being) it would be nice to have some kind of motivation.
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Exactly, I don’t wanna quit yet, but having all these people quit within the last couple of days makes it hard to continue, without even know what is coming up and when
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I don’t want to know what’s the future content.
Why?
A big majority are mostly expecting the “New bugs/exploits” coming with following patches and I cannot say they are wrong. Every single patch has added more items to the bug megathread.
Instead of baiting me with future content, I’d prefer they took the time needed to fix the actual content before pushing more. Future content is irrelevant if every new thing brings issues or breaks others.
I personally prefer a freeze on content and focus on bug fixing.
It has been very quiet the past week or so. They are either going to blow our minds with some big news soon or move on to something else and leave us all hanging Anthem style.
Maybe OP focused too much on just content, but WE need roadmap to see ETA on the fixes of problems you’re reffering too. Thats also purpose of roadmap.
Imagine roadmap with timeframes for example when they going to work on fixing furnishing, if its gonna be done before PVP balances and lag spikes etc. It belongs to roadmap. Roadmap is not just for new content
PS. dont hate me on WE, by WE, I mean two of us now XD
ETAs never exist in programming unless whatever needs the ETA is done and what’s left is coordinate with the people who are releasing it for when the release is starting.
That is not part of a roadmap but part of the development itself. Giving an ETA for something not fixed will be “The following months” or “The team is aware”.
Funny, because im a programmer and when I ESTIMATE i Give ETA to my clients in MANDAYS units. Literally it stands for “estimated time of arrival”.
Sure you can over/underestiate, but then u can see if they actually aware of problems when estimating, knowing the codebase and challenges,
What do you think ETA is? extact time and date? Cuz its not
No ETA on a roadmap. The roadmap should demonstrate the vision they have in mind with rough ETAs.
I am giving roadmap sessions to customers as i work with a software vendor and i can tell you that there is three key element to a roadmap which make them VERY valuable to the audience:
- The vision AGS has in mind for the game
- The high level plans they think about how to implement that vision
- Concrete user stories (things the gaming community will find and experience in the game, like features) and rough ETAs (like “next”, “planned”, “future” or similar).
And any serious roadmap has disclaimers that obviously, the content is subject to change without further notice. Still the information is something, giving the community a feel if the direction AGS plans to go is in line with a gamers expectation.
If you now argue, that they probably don’t know where they want to go, i don’t believe that. I think a person like Bezos would not allow that type of business making. There must be at least a “next” idea otherwise developers would not know what to code tomorrow…
Makes sense?
I agree I would be happy even to see backlog with priorities to see what’s their next target.
Well, ETA is not an effort estimation. It is a point in time by which you want to release something to your clients (ETA is time of arrival!).
When you give mandays to your clients, you do not answer any ETA question, you just giving them a rough idea when things might be ready at earliest but more so, you indicate potential costs as mandays are directly linked to costs but not timelines.
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Sure, I work in time/material so very often we underestimate, but at least client can see priorities. Soi basically when we esimate whole app for example we give ETA on MVP and mandays/cost on specific features. I would be more than happy just to see as mentioned before organized backlog by priority and status: TODO, WIP, Q&A, DONE
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Agree
Estimated Time of Arrival, indeed
I also work as a programmer, cyber security actually where we need to prevent before needing to act and fast.
ETAs might exist internally for superiors and you can say 4 days, 8 hours a day = 32 hours of completion and as a programmer you should know we are never risk free from messing with something else even if is not part of the problem we are fixing.
Have you ever seen the results of a missed ETA because circumstances happened and crap happened? Unlike NW where you pay once and that’s it, many have a monthly fee IF not pay for 24/7 customer service which includes waling you up at 3am because something might have happened and you MUST acknowledge the issue. Which is why the bug megathread exists.
Declaring a time frame and missing it (sometimes not even due to bad programming but fortuitous circumstances) is extremely damaging for companies which is why ETAs are basically non existant (For clients, I missed clarifying this before) unless you have the fix basically done, because is way too risky.
And as mentioned above, you never give a timeline, that’s a potential shoot in the foot.
The backlog comment, that would be a star key for the entire playerbase
Believe me, i know what it feels like, when you tell your clients you missed another deadline. But this is not a roadmap issue. That is release planning and how to communicate GA dates to customers. And at some point (way before the actual release), you have to give your client a date as they need it for internal planning.
But that is a B2B problem, nothing the gaming industry suffers too much from.
Still, a roadmap is possible without showing a single date, just by communicating priorities, a vision and a priorities list including “next”, “after”, “planned”, “ideation” or something like this.
Transparency is a must if credibility and reputation suffers, and this is a perfect example…
Oh, and ETA does not mean “Estimated DATETIME of arrival” so AGS has the full right and competency to say “Our ETAs are weeks, months or quarters” or even “next big update”, “future update”…
Oh no, I actually am not saying it’s impossible nor against a roadmap or ETAs
I originally was saying I don’t want to know the roadmap for future content but rather want them to freeze incoming content and work on the stability of what’s live.
And yeah, it does not means datetime but a trip around the forums you can see people do believe it is datetime. But with the forums current state, even an answer like “In a week”, “Devs are working on it”, “It’s in our list of priorities” will only receive hate and backlash.
Just play the game… I’m up to 135hrs in the game, level 39 soon (I’m a grinder, and didn’t focus enough on levelling). Already, I can say I got more than the money’s worth. I’ve spent much more in p2p games, or more expensive games and didn’t play as much.
This game is new to many non-grinders. They expected a Fortnite or something. It’s a MMO that wants to compete with WOW, ESO, etc… Games that have been around for ages, with players with more than 10,000 hours played.
The game has been released barely a few weeks ago. Give it time. And yes, many things changed since the EA. So, most of the features have not been tested for a year at least.
Plus, released before long vacations weekends, thanksgiving week, holiday weeks. AGS are humans and can take vacations too. That can slow down communication by a long shot.
If you already think about leaving the game, I mean seriously thinking about it, yer gone already. No need to extend the torture.
I have 314 hrs and While I still enjoy the game a roadmap would be good for people who are just watching week by week as more bugs are fixed, twice as many issues come along, server mergers were planned, but now from the looks of it a long ways down the road.
I recently deleted a character just to level a toon on a higher pop server (hello pluto) because my main toon is stuck on a dead one after using xfer and well was getting boring.
I have stuck up for this game for awhile, but even I would like to see some kind of light at the end of the tunnel before I lose interest completely.
Yes and No … 
A roadmap is a no-brainer … running into sh*t is reality though …
There’s always two (or more) sides to the story: development reality and customer expectations. And the glue between those, is communications. Honest communications. And - from my perspective - that’s what lacking. Not the fact that ‘you’ (Amazon) want to be able to deliver but being honest and upfront about it. Deadlines are there to break (or preferably, meet 
).
Anyway, as a casual EU-player who likes to hit the Market, this has been astonishlingly unsatisfying. Not that I’m giving NW a zero-rating because - as far as I’m concerned - it doesn’t deserve that. But, ‘enfin’, they released the game in a state that was ready for Acceptance, not Production.
Besides all that, like 100 hours in, I realized that it is about 14d ago since I really logged in, so yeah … Not a good thing if I would be any barometer …
Anyway(2), I am a PvE-player and enjoyed the gathering, crafting and stuff. But, to be honest, I was looking forward to getting into the PvP-end stuff. Haven’t reached it yet (see abovementioned) but I’m getting a bit desperate …
Just my two cents. Feel free to not agree
EDIT: horrible typos …
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