Epic Weapon Quests and Why We Haven't Seen Them

[tom1301]

I (as a professional software developer) totally agree to Stevel11418.I (as a player) indeed appreciate the mere fact that SOE does focus on bug fixing and overall software quality and does not add more content which wouldn't have been thoroughly developed (remember back to 2004 having potions and poisons in the game with no description and no clue how they work?) while leaving hundreds of bugs in. That was, as far as i can judge about it, the only true decision.Thumbs up, SOE

[Emo]

so they are using fire as an excuse to cover up their inability to keep their promise. as if 1 or 2 weeks of fire could explain why so many feature listed in the promo of RoK are not ingame yet.

[denmom]

Emoec wrote:

so they are using fire as an excuse to cover up their inability to keep their promise. as if 1 or 2 weeks of fire could explain why so many feature listed in the promo of RoK are not ingame yet.

Actually, yes, one or two weeks of fire could explain, especially if the devs and programmers who were working on those features were affected by the fires.  Freeways and roads were closed down during that time, preventing anyone from coming down or going up to the north county.  Don't believe me?  Go look it up, Google it.  The proof is there. Have you been in that situation, where you could lose your home, family, everything you have in the world that's precious to you?  Where the physical, emotional, mental stress and pressure of that weighs so heavily on you that your ability to deal with work is impaired?  Have you ever been in a situation where stress from outside the work place (friends, family, home, bills, Real Life issues) impacted your work performance, let alone your ability to deal with others?If you were in that position, would you not want understanding?  Would you not want patience while you deal with what's been dropped into your life?I'm mostly a quiet lurker who'll now and then surface when I just have to say something, such as now.  And I certainly do not believe that SOE is as pure as snow.  There's tire tracks and footprints in said snowbank.  Just that this time, I won't throw rocks because I know how the fires have affected people.Being abusive to SOE and their employees isn't going to help matters.  All that the few moments of your meaness satisfied will do is lock threads and get nowhere fast.

[KayvennDisrael]

Sarafan@The Bazaar wrote:

Spaceweed wrote:

Hmm, a week lost due the fires means a 2 month delay to the epics?Call me a cynic , but it seems they were never going to make it into the expansion from a long way previously.  I'm all for adding 'finished' content at the first attempt, but don't try to blow fairy smoke up our fannies , and expect us to swallow it.

Yea I'm with you Spaceweed I'm finding that hard to swallow too. 1 week = 2 months? I am a fan of not putting things out til they are finished but this..... Since I'm not from the UK i'm not sure if I have a "fanny" but i'm sure that if I do it's blowing smoke rings after reading that.

It's been rumored that the epic weapon quests are no longer going to be a part of the Rise of Kunark expansion, is this true?

"With the fires we had here in San Diego we had our office shut down and we had a lot of folks displaced for a little while. When we came back we evaluated where we were with all the epics and where everything was sitting with the rest of the expansion. The decision we had to make was, what happens if we get this all out at the same time and do we have any alternatives? "

"What we were faced with was a bug count in which nothing had been touched in a week. When we are in our bug fix mode, the team is capable of fixing anywhere between 13 to 17 hundred bugs in a week, so losing a week is a big thing. At the end of the day it came down to well, we obviously need to focus on the overall launch of our expansion first. Epic weapons are something that yes, we've got a number of them in the bag, but the choice we had to make was, do we launch a game with 1500 bugs and epics that are 75% awesome and 25% less than awesome, or do we launch a game that's going to be as clean as we can make it and then push the epics out on an update? "

"So what it looks like right now is our updates are going to be launching just after the holiday season. We are very intentionally not wanting to rush them out the door at the expense of the quality of the both the epics and the expansion launch. "

I am not saying that those in San Diego did not have a rough time with the fires.  This is not even touching that specific part of this.  Here it states they were working on "Bugs" With the initial content and said the epic's quest lines would take away from that.  Well after playing the actual Live release and seeing how many bugs were actually in it.  I can not see this being a valid excuse.  WIth all the bugs i ahve seen i would say give them another 6 months to get it right.  they had all of the same issues from KOS and EOF.  After two expansions you would think they could get at least the repeated mistakes fixed and have a few new ones instead of the same ones over and over.  In regards to the epic quest lines be happy if they come out in 6 months.  Just my two cents.

[Savanja]

My personal thought is that they were likely pressed for time to begin and the fires were the nail in the coffin.As it was already said, it isn't so much the fires in and of themselves, it was the timing.  They had tons of people working on an extended schedule focused on the expansion.  They practically live at the office during a push like this.  They weren't just losing a handful of 8 hour a day manhours.I imagine that they could push the weapon quests out within the next couple of weeks, however, they might wanna give their poor burned out devs a bit of a rest and let them focus on the post release cleanup before cracking the whip again.

[Emo]

Pheep, epic = key feature of the expansion, it s actually the MAJOR thing that makes this expansion. expansion took 6~8 month to devellop but 1~2 weeks of fire cause the delays of such and important feature. shouldnt this have been the first thing they should deal with once the zone creation was done? and i m not talking about all the stuff not in game yet that were advertised (guildhalls, AA respect feature etc etc) fires = lucky chain of event that gave SOE an excuse for their delay.

[kal-l]

Emoec wrote:

Pheep,epic = key feature of the expansion, it s actually the MAJOR thing that makes this expansion.expansion took 6~8 month to devellop but 1~2 weeks of fire cause the delays of such and important feature. shouldnt this have been the first thing they should deal with once the zone creation was done? and i m not talking about all the stuff not in game yet that were advertised (guildhalls, AA respect feature etc etc)fires = lucky chain of event that gave SOE an excuse for their delay.

I wanted epics weapons to go in at launch as much as everyone else.  However, considering all the work that goes into the expansion and the fires causing a delay I'm not suprised they didn't make it.  Also, guildhalls were never planned to go in with the expansion.  They are in the works but were always intended for a later GU.

[Calthine]

Fire or no fire, it comes down to that if they'd put them in they would not have been done to the high degree of polish that we (and SOE!) are holding them to.  This thread would instead be filled with complaining on how they sucked and we'd rather they made stuff late than released garbage. You know it's true.Give  'em a break.(And guild halls were never promised for Kunark.  Into the Future Panel  "It was strongly emphasized that there is no eta; we were told the art alone might take a year."" />

[denmom]

I'm stepping out of this.Too many haters.And I have to wonder yet again if SOE so fails them time and time again why do they give SOE their money if all they are is disappointed with each update and expansion.  There are other MMOs out there to go play.Personally, I think they do the above just to have something to drive their drama llama herd through.

[Lilj]

Thanks for the interview Savanja. Not so good news is still better than no news I have a question though, when Gallenite says after the holiday season, does he then mean christmas? So we can hope for the epics somewhere in January or February?I have heard different holiday-days be called holiday season and not all have been christmas. Since I'm not american, I'm not completely sure what an american means when he/she says holiday season. It's meant as an honest question and by no means meant as a critique.Thanks

[Savanja]

Scott did not give us a firm date.  "After the holiday season" generally means after Christmas and New Years here, but I can't put words in his mouth.Hopefully we will get a better idea of when we can expect them soon!

[Lilj]

Savanja wrote:

Scott did not give us a firm date.  "After the holiday season" generally means after Christmas and New Years here, but I can't put words in his mouth.Hopefully we will get a better idea of when we can expect them soon!

That's completely understandable. Thanks anyways for giving me a clue about the holiday season There is so much content at the moment, I know I personally will have lots to do. I prefer the team gets time enough to make some really good quests-lines for the epics, instead of being forced to rush it.Better late than never!

[dawy]

Spaceweed wrote:

Hmm, a week lost due the fires means a 2 month delay to the epics?Call me a cynic , but it seems they were never going to make it into the expansion from a long way previously.  I'm all for adding 'finished' content at the first attempt, but don't try to blow fairy smoke up our fannies , and expect us to swallow it.Anyway, I'm a returning player from the original beta and looking forward to the game now it has some decent content " width="15" height="15" />  A lot to be said for letting a game 'mature' before playing it.  Just a shame new games can't start from launch, with the equivalent of the game 'plus' at least 2 expansions worth of stuff to do.  Would go a long way towards keeping a thriving community happy for a much longer period of time.I know I wouldn't have left easily 2 years ago, had the above been true.

Yeah i've got to agree while the fires did hit the beta theres no way they where ever going to make these quests into the launch of the game but hey i'm not saying this is a bad thing i'd sooner see polished content than half baked ideas rushed to live just to say that its in the game.

Unrest is a prime example of waiting for good thing to come

[ke'la]

Emoec wrote:

Pheep,epic = key feature of the expansion, it s actually the MAJOR thing that makes this expansion.

Key Feature? Um I think the Key Feature was the HUGE zones, followed by the Sarnak, Followed by Vashan's Peak, then maybe Epics. The thing is MOST players are not going to be going for thier epics right away they are going to either a)explore and quest or b)Grind as fast as they can to 80 to start raiding, both of those require a ton of work and they where working on both of those right up until launch.expansion took 6~8 month to devellop but 1~2 weeks of fire cause the delays of such and important feature. shouldnt this have been the first thing they should deal with once the zone creation was done?

Um they where not done compeltly with zone creation until about the time the fires started, Also I think there infact are a Ton of more importaint things to work on such as MoB balance, Spells/CAs, Iteamization, etc.)

 and i m not talking about all the stuff not in game yet that were advertised (guildhalls, AA respect feature etc etc)

Um the ONLY thing that was said to be part of RoK that was not are the Epic Weopons. Guild Halls(was in EXTREEM EARLY consept at FF in Aug, and they have NO IDEA when that will be done(think sometime next summer at the earliest). AA save tool was also said to be a Post-RoK thing, heck even the Map Revamp(wich Map zoom is only a PART of) was Post-RoK.fires = lucky chain of event that gave SOE an excuse for their delay.

It seems to me you have no understanding of the devlopment process. First off they where in "Crunch Mode" when the fires hit. That means that EVERYONE was working a Minimum of 16hr days(alot of the time 7days a week) many alot more then that. So 1 week of downtime = min 2 normal weeks of labor, add to that the fact that once something launchs Resouces get reallicated elsewhere, some to the Next Expaintion, others back to LUs, and others to Bug Squishing. So chances are where once they might of had 2 or 3 devs working on epics they now can only spare 1, so your looking at probly that one week of lost time about 200 man hours lost, just on epics assumeing they had 2 people working on them. Now the second they desided to delay them to post launch they stopped work on them and moved those people over to cetch people up elsewhere.

So now on Nov 14th you have 200 Man hours min required just to finnish development of the Epic Weopons(assumeing that they would had been done deving them at the end of the week they where evaced(wich is probly not the case)) Thats 5 weeks of labor for 1 person doing a Normal 8hr day, That alone would make them miss the deadline for getting it in to the QA que for the Frostfell Update. Wich means that it wound not beable to come out until the following update.

[Tokam]

ke'la wrote:

Emoec wrote:

It seems to me you have no understanding of the devlopment process. First off they where in "Crunch Mode" when the fires hit. That means that EVERYONE was working a Minimum of 16hr days(alot of the time 7days a week) many alot more then that. So 1 week of downtime = min 2 normal weeks of labor, add to that the fact that once something launchs Resouces get reallicated elsewhere, some to the Next Expaintion, others back to LUs, and others to Bug Squishing. So chances are where once they might of had 2 or 3 devs working on epics they now can only spare 1, so your looking at probly that one week of lost time about 200 man hours lost, just on epics assumeing they had 2 people working on them. Now the second they desided to delay them to post launch they stopped work on them and moved those people over to cetch people up elsewhere.

So now on Nov 14th you have 200 Man hours min required just to finnish development of the Epic Weopons(assumeing that they would had been done deving them at the end of the week they where evaced(wich is probly not the case)) Thats 5 weeks of labor for 1 person doing a Normal 8hr day, That alone would make them miss the deadline for getting it in to the QA que for the Frostfell Update. Wich means that it wound not beable to come out until the following update.

If you're having to work that hard that close to release to finish content then fires or not you are [Removed for Content].Fire your managers, hire ones that posses a calendar, and try again.

[Killerbee3000]

Tokamak, at first glance what you say makes sense, that they should do as much work as possible as long ahead of the launch as possible to make sure they have enough time to iron out bugs in last days.... but, its for some reason normal in software development that the team works on things, gets distracted by things that seem little at the stat and turn into major time consumers and so on.... and its not only mmorpgs... just look at the other pc games... go count hpw many have a 100MB+ patch on release day allready because the dev team was so busy in the last days even after the dvd where produced. now, you might find a game where that isnt the case... why? they are the ones that are so heavily focused on consoles that the dev's dont care about patching the pc version. no,  i'm not saying i agree with it.... but only saying it is that way....

[Echgar]

I understand that epic weapon quests are a topic players are passionate about, but please keep your comments constructive.  Making posts to attack, insult, or namecall each other and/or the dev team isn't going to make the quests materialize any sooner, plus it just makes for a mess the moderators have to clean up.

[Iad]

A week converts into months? Nice try with the sympathy.