New Executive Producer's Letter, July 11

[lawrence]

Executive Producer Jessica Mulligan has just published a new letter to the community. Among other things, she gives us an interesting insight on internal processes in regards to reporting, testing and implementing bug fixes and changes.

Link to Jessica's letter: http://www.ryzom.com/?page=news&id=873

Feel free to use this thread to discuss the article, or to any ask questions you may have.

[alexrowe]

It has been 2 months since ATS was locked for tests "outpost" does any one have a clue when they are going to put them on ATS for "us" to test them.

[basicart]

Why not let us hunt named then untill these new higher mobs are ready to be releced alot of high lvl peeps are very bored with digging cos thats pritty much all ya left us with.

[virii]

Originally Posted by basicart

Why not let us hunt named then untill these new higher mobs are ready to be releced alot of high lvl peeps are very bored with digging cos thats pritty much all ya left us with.

Yeah it's true but most of us have atleast 1 melee tree to 250 and all magic to 250 now so there is nothing BUT to dig left

[mrshad]

Fair enough, Jessica, thanks for the information.
You are quite right, the latest patches have been relativily worry free.

Could you maybe, just for our own entertainment, if nothing else, post all of the fixes in the patch, and not simply the ones you think we will find important?
You never know what we will think is important

Thanks again!

[iphdrunk]

Ok, I don't want to sound harsh, but....as usual, the end of the Executive Producer letter has a link to "discuss it" so unless I'm mistaken, you are expecting feedback, either good or bad. Usually, I try to give positive and useful feedback as much as I can, but not this time. Why? I'm shocked about the emptiness of the letter.

We already have had a nice lesson on software development in http://ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12565 with nice Gantt diagrams, and careful and detailed explanation of the patch process. Although some players may think that the average player doesn't care/want to know about it, others may and Xavier's article was good and fair enough.. once.

So what about this letter? a letter to re-explain that the patch process in lengthy and that it takes time, and 'the more you test a patch, the less changes of having side effects has' ok. I shoud thank you again for giving us a nice course "Basics of Computer Science 101". Maybe next letters will be on ... let me guess... the use of a debugger... or the differences between analysis, conception, implementation, testing... or basic Gantt diagrams...

I, for one, thanks and appreciate the improvement on the dev->player communication, but if I may... let's also improve what kind of communication

I'll stop ranting now.

The article also refers to questions that may arise, so let's ask a few:

* The article focused on the patch process, and bug fixes. This seems also to be the criteria in the 'in development' sections, where mainly all issues are related to bug fixes, ui minor improvements and translations. What are the features that we can expect before and after chapter 3/outposts?. I asked in an old Q&A. "will we see minor fetaures before outposts" and the answer I got was 'yes '. Does increasing the stack to 999 count as a feature?

* Do you consider cost-effective to add new content to the game for high level players, or are you focusing on having a stable framework/core game?

* If, as one of the main conclusions of the article, the release cycle of a bug fix in a patch can go up to two weeks, is it unreasonable to state that the addition of new content will follow the same speed -- if the same Q&A criteria is applied to the addition of the new content -- ?

* How do you plan to streamline and reduce this?

* With such a well thought and defined patch release cycle and awesome test team, can players expect a reasonable bug free implementation of outposts? (-- no need to answer this, kinda unfair and rethorical question --)

[omsop]

i have to agree it is best not to rush patches out the door before they are ready, BUT... before they removed something from the game Like named Mobs which us high lvl players used cause really they are the only things which gave us XP in large teams, they should have worked on the new mobs before hand & once they were tested then they should have introduced them into game & changed the spawn times of named @ same time. but to remove the High lvl team hunts altogether was just wrong, Basic was right, we have no large teams now for hunts, for any reasonable xp you have 1 melee/ele & 1 healer, so what else is left for us High levelers? DIGGING, omg, this has been proved to be the most boring & tedious part of the game, but its all we are left with.

[alexrowe]

LOL I would not be surprice if they nerf or take away something on harvesting.

[forever]

Looking forward to the last Spring Cleaning patch with nearly 35 pages of items.
I hope this will free up some of the dev team to work on new content

Keep up the good work

[mmatto]

One or two paragraph about outposts in every letter would be really nice even if the main topic in letter was something else.