alyssah wrote:Well! In that case you are qualified to answer my question. Is character animation coding more difficult than altering stats? Could a moderate coder alter stats successfully? Did Nevrax alter stats practically overnight? (Remember the issue with tp tickets).
So how much time was spent drawing up the models, making the animation work, produce it for viewing & present it to us in a poll? And it's wasted time now. Don't tell me that other items wouldn't have been a better choice to spend time on. But then again that is planning & consultation.
How is that unfair criticism? They have wasted time that could have been avoided. If your TTRPG team was that well organised ........ Sorry, I don't mean it personally but it get's up my nose when people defend Nevrax, apparently just for the sake of it. Divide & rule is always a great policy when you are in trouble.
I'm only skimming the thread really, but I'll take a stab at this since I have experience in programming and have done a lot of reading on game design (though I have never worked on any large-scale game projects).
In the first place, a common problem in a team environment is that everyone will be waiting for some problem to be solved, and certain people may have nothing to do. For example, the QA team might need new content to test, or the art team might not be able to move forward until the technical team comes up with some specifications. Or the technical team might be waiting on the design team to implement something. An important thing to realize is that different people have different jobs, and in some cases it's not even legal for them to perform other functions. Rebalancing is probably not something the artists on staff do, and assuming they are done with art for the outposts, they may not have much to work on. Even the programmers may be waiting for input from designers or management before they go ahead and make changes. If they have nothing to do, they might as well work on this!
I would say that 80% of success in a development team is group dynamics and communication - believe me when I say that 5 excellent solo programmers may be totally unable to make anything worthwhile together. 5 mediocre programmers who can work as a team will accomplish much more. It can be frustrating, but the fact is that management and resource allocation issues become very very important in groups. Rushing forward without taking those issues into consideration is a great way to ruin a project, and I have seen this first hand. Sometimes even though everyone is ready and able to move on a situation, it's best to hold on for a week and make sure everyone is on the same page. What would be a small, careless error in a simple personal project can cost millions of dollars (or in Nevrax's case, the whole company) in a bigger team effort. Because of these things, it is very hard to judge Nevrax's priorities in cases like this - we don't have all the information.
Finally, designing a set of new graphics does take less time than altering stats. It is important to understand that implementation is just one part (often a small part) of the development cycle. It's true that actually changing individual statistics is easy, but a given feature has to start with design. First you have to identify the problem, then you have to figure out whether it's worth the resources of dealing with it, then you have to decide how to deal with it, then you have to implement it, then you have to test it to make sure it is working as desired, and then you have to finalize the implementation. In the case of game balance changes, the design elements alone can take months. It is very easy to make a simple suggestion, but understanding all the consequences of that suggestion is extremely hard. Having programmed some games much simpler than SoR, I can attest to the fact that making a "small" change in statistics can completely throw a game out of whack.
And in a MMORPG there are variables to consider that single-player games don't remotely have to worry about. It's hard for me to think of a single-player game in which one class isn't stronger than another, or in which there isn't a "power-tactic" or exploit that makes the game a cakewalk. With a single-player game, this doesn't much matter - in fact, a lot of people (such as myself) deliberately choose "weaker" characters for the challenge or flexibility. I can think of at least 3 ways to become insanely powerful in Morrowind at level 1, with just a few hours of effort. Imagine if even one such strategy existed in a game like SoR? The environment only has to accommodate one person - and the programming for the "community" sorts of elements of a MMORPG is as daunting a task as the game itself. Then there's the network and internet stuff, the fact that there's a persistent server and a number of user clients, etc etc. A normal game doesn't change - if bugs are found, they can simply be patched away. Nothing new is dynamically added - the main code is only altered in the case of patching, and not in any significant ways. On the other hand, these guys have to keep up with maintaining the game as it is, handling the inevitable ripple effects of recent changes, consider implementation of new changes that drastically alter the game, and still deal with everything the single-player developers deal with.
An animation change is wholly superficial. There's not much that can go wrong, because really all they're doing is swapping out assets. A game mechanics change is
much harder.
