Oh christ... the mayhem...
First: Vhab, people think you are part of Funcom/AO's community relations because your posts still look like a Funcom employee... given the different colored post body and username, not to mention the glaring AO logo in your avatar, what do you expect? Have the forum mods change your account back to a normal subscriber if you don't want people misconstruing your posts for something coming from FC/AO. Also, instead of invalidating people's ideas for a 'fix' that will never happen, could you please be so kind as to enlighten us about AO's development practices... or lack thereof? Since you don't work for the company anymore and all...
Regarding McKnuckle's post about 500 players and the $7500/mo in revenue... you're naive if you think 600~ votes on a forum poll that was closed after two weeks equates to the amount of actual paid accounts. This branch of the company is barely profitable because there's so few employees working on the product, which in turn worsens the condition of the product. A normal company would care about this. One that assumes their eventual demise is near, does not. There's also advertising, the item shop or whatever, and other people who just have their accounts on autopay and forget to login to cancel if/when they notice the charge on their CC. Surprised no one's mentioned this
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...tock-exchange/
Also, the devs SHOULD feel bad if the game isn't working and the community is complaining. This is called taking ownership and pride in your work. If you built a chair for someone, and that someone complained to you that one of the legs seemed wobbly, would you A) Have integrity in your work and accept the challenge to do better and refine your skills as you go along, fixing the chair and now it reclines too.... or B) Do as Funcom has: Put a few ribbons on the top of the chair, cut a hole in the seat, and sh*t all over the floor, exclaiming "YOUR INPUT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US. PLEASE FILE YOUR COMPLAINT THROUGH THE "NEW CHAIR EXPERIENCE" CUSTOMER SERVICE HOLE."
Now imagine if you paid on a regular basis for that sh*t-covered chair.
If your answer isn't A, then you probably are/would be a terrible developer.
Let me regale you with my own experience working with a half-baked product launch (note: for people that already hate me, this is probably a good place to stop reading).
The company I develop for has a SaaS product that spans across 10 application servers and 9 databases serving over 15k clients. For the last year, we've had a dev team of around 5 or 6. We run a 3 week development cycle now, crushing around 60 bug/feature addition tickets per cycle. However, when we launched the new version of our product back in July of last year alongside a new marketing site, I didn't look at the dozens of bug tickets coming in as discouraging, it was an engaging challenge and the knowledge I've gained from the experience has been invaluable.
The day we launched the marketing site, I came in at 4am to prepare a few things since I'd been on the project for a month at that point, and the person who had been developing on it for the last year took a month off (not a month of vacation, mind you, he went to the Army Reserve training for a month). Things didn't go smoothly, as you might have expected. I left work 21 hours later at 1am (before you think I did it for overtime--I'm salaried), feeling on top of the world because of the things I was able to accomplish in that time span considering the large amount of issues pouring in. I think I've maybe taken a maximum of consecutive 4 days for 'vacation' in the last year.
Those remaining issues were still there when I got into work not 8 hours after I left to go home and sleep. Know what I did? I crushed those too because that's how a boss developer operates. Fix whatever catastrophic bugs are preventing the new engine from going live, then push the engine live, then work on feature enhancements. Not difficult.
Or hey, shut down the AO branch, outsource the stupid game so the community can fix it and restore it back to what it was. (AKA revert to revision 14.x or whatever was before SL, I'm sure some asshat CR poster will correct me if I put in the wrong version, rather than responding to any of the legitimate complaints)
Since this is really too long to care about, here's the highlights:
Vhab, tell us the dirty dev secrets.
McKnuckle, stop being naive, Funcom is making money and they give no sh*ts about AO, or the future of the company really.
Lazareth, you're a boss.
AO Devs, stop being terribly inefficient. It's not your fault the company has conditioned you to underperform while still making the same amount of money. It's your responsibility to keep this boat afloat, the C-levels aren't going to write code. If you don't want to do it, quit. If you have a disdain for the customer base (very likely at this point), quit. If you don't want to stay late giving the people who a largely responsible for your paycheck a better version of the product they're paying for, quit. Because you know what? If you quit, then someone who actually cares about the work they output might be able to get your job, and they might be able to produce something more worthy than a pithy monthly report before they head off for yet another week long vacation.
ugh this game. I'm gonna try to make this my last post. Pretty sure this one post is bigger than the entirety of my posts on this forum in the last decade. You were great AO.
Also gonna quote this because it's what made me want to post in the first place, exactly echoing my thoughts. Except instead of 8 years it's been spread over 13.