overallOriginally Posted by Gatester
overall
Actually, the most important question we as players should be asking, is about the engine beta. Such questions as:
How will players be chosen for the beta?
Do we have to be subbed to AO to receive an invite?
Do players fill out an application?
When will the beta begin? (The July 1st ish letter stated that over the coming months people will get beta invites, so getting close to a couple (2) at the end of August and the end of July newsletter mentioned very little of the beta other than more bugs Soon TM so it is likely we will have no news on the beta for August or September)
Can froobs beta test?
Will players be automatically chosen from information FC has on its players in regards to their computers?
Will we have to download anything?
How much will we have to download?
Do we have to register somewhere to report engine bugs?
Will this be a closed beta initially than an open beta or only a closed beta?
How long is the beta expected to last?
Can players take video during the beta?
How soon after the beta will the real engine go live?
Will there be any incentive/bonuses/perks for beta testers? (Other than the chance to be the first to see the engine)
When will hard questions like the ones I posted be addressed? Will these questions be ignored? Will you set up your own list of answers to questions administered by corporate to answer in regards to the engine and testing? Can the AO staff get more money, funding and staff to do more work in a timely manner?
We asked those questions about the beta in last month's update.. no one answered them. Historically, they don't give out details about important things until the very last minute and even then it is usually only partial information.
because if they don't waste the time making these there's a flood of "OMG FUNCOM HAET GAEM" threads
considering funcom fired everyone that was working on ao and everyone that wasn't fired is now part-time working on TSW/AOC (with the noteable exception of exactly two people) i'm frankly not the least bit surprised everything is taking as long as it's taking.
Last edited by Lazy; Aug 9th, 2013 at 13:04:04.
Wish the monthly subscription fee was proportional to the amount of people working on AO.
I'm also curious what the AO team have been doing in terms of actual work. Since FC imploded, it's easy to understand why things take time, but I'm thinking about the last 8 years. Not just the last year.
I mean, what exactly was accomplished by having 8-12ish (or whatever) people working every day on AO for 8 years? The result I have seen of their work doesn't seem balanced with the amount of resources FC spent on it. At times we went like 2 years without anything at all happening. Maybe in that time we got 1 patch that fixed a tree that was hovering in the air. So what was the big and expensive team doing all that time?
I mean, if I owned a company and I had 10 people working there every day for 8 years, I would have to conclude that there's something very wrong with my company if all I had to show for it was the content we've seen in AO in that time.
Tiny indie companies with WAY less people and resources have made several award winning and highly successful games each in that time.
I dunno. Everything about AO has always been weird to me since the day I came here in 2001.
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AO is taking forever to come closer to launch, but then, that's more likely something more sinister lying at the root of that problem. At least we're seeing way more progress this year than in the last, I dunno, 4 years.
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FC makes other games too, they are dealing with limited human capital while struggling to rebuild their company. The money that they get from monthly subscriptions and payments made for items purchased in game, doesn't all go towards making this game better but all of their games better. IE Accounts Receivable, and portions of it are distributed to make AO better.
They have many titles they still support... so I for one am happy that they keep the servers running.
I dont have to whine about missed deadlines, because it happens all the time in business, as long as you keep paying, missed deadlines are seen as ok. This business model is working for right now, and is good for the short term, but in the long term they will have to reinvest in human capital... so we have to deal with it for now, until the long term effects kick in.
And sometimes projects or parts of projects get shelved and picked up at a later date, its not the employees decision who directly works on said project but management, all having to juggle said resources. We as players are not in control, but many forget that.
So forum trolls all whine about things that they have no control over, because they think their voice needs to be heard.
We should all be happy they decided to keep the servers running, and occasionally chime in with shinies and hey look at what we did, or what we are allowed to show you. Sometimes it may not seem like much, but to those that are doing the work its a lot...
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New engine is aprox 15gb - or so FC stated.
Wrangeline has a pioint - even if there are few people working at AO departament, lets say 5, and their work is 8 hours a day, I must admit things are going extremaly slow. We have 18.7 patch (and I must say that 18.0 was Xan expansion), we are within same like 18.X since more then 2 years!
Despite having NONE information about % of progress about new engine (all we have are some empty words and 2 videos - Promo was failure imo), rebuilding world for AO would take a lot of time, but not 2 years, even if those 5 people are working in full time job. Same goes for NPE - 1 year and we havent seen nothing more then few screnshots and "things are going forward" stuff.
All those things makes me think that AO with ultra high payment fee is milk cow for stopping FC from sinking, so they use us as much as possible, to cover losses.
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You know, speaking of engine video. We haven't seen any actual footage of the engine in action since March 2012 and that engine video was simply a teaser and didn't showcase much of anything. I mean I know that hardly anyone works on AO and if the engine is reaching finalization within the next 6-12 months then shouldn't we be seeing stuff in regards to the engine? Or is that being held off till a beta release? Or will we simply not see any footage? I am leaning towards the latter.
More likely "corporate" FC will not allow any videos unless they're released by their marketing staff and, if there's a few visible glitches, they'll want them fixed before releasing anything.
----------------------------
Showing why AO forum is not to be trusted - on S10 inflation
I think we all know by now that the engine is a myth. There is absolutely zero evidence that AO is in the process of actually being revamped. Yea, we have seen the "teaser" trailer. Cool stuff. It didn't show much and could be propaganda just to keep us all paying. Any team could spend a week developing two shiny looking models of cities if all they have to do is swap textures/lighting.
A real engine update would take awhile, yes. But not this long. We have been told it has been in the works for well beyond the amount of time needed. Like a poster said above, many indie developers with even smaller teams have done more.
Honestly, if we all just stop thinking there is going to be an engine, we can move on and just enjoy AO until Funcom pulls the plug (which is probably code-named "18.7").
LOL what one video of 30 sec really and more of we are working on it soon beta. LOL
^ Exactly this
Wish the monthly subscription fee was proportional to the amount of people working on AO.
I'm also curious what the AO team have been doing in terms of actual work. Since FC imploded, it's easy to understand why things take time, but I'm thinking about the last 8 years. Not just the last year.
I mean, what exactly was accomplished by having 8-12ish (or whatever) people working every day on AO for 8 years? The result I have seen of their work doesn't seem balanced with the amount of resources FC spent on it. At times we went like 2 years without anything at all happening. Maybe in that time we got 1 patch that fixed a tree that was hovering in the air. So what was the big and expensive team doing all that time?
I mean, if I owned a company and I had 10 people working there every day for 8 years, I would have to conclude that there's something very wrong with my company if all I had to show for it was the content we've seen in AO in that time.
Tiny indie companies with WAY less people and resources have made several award winning and highly successful games each in that time.
I dunno. Everything about AO has always been weird to me since the day I came here in 2001.
Idk, I feel like if they had decided to start an 'AO from scratch' project and added a new engine with that, it would have been done a year or two ago. I'm sure I don't want to know how many months were spent by the AO team figuring out code that wasn't documented and was a clusterfck. TSW was completely developed during the "AO New Engine Coming Soon™" era.
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To be honest, I think the current AO should be scrapped. They could forget this whole business they're going through at the minute, and get to work on AO2.
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Last edited by AlphaTrion; Aug 14th, 2013 at 23:09:41.
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Honestly, the development of the engine has taken them longer to develop then when AO was first being discussed/on the drawing board up until when they announced AO will be getting a new engine.
If/when the engine/rebalance comes out...how many posters do you think will actually admit they were wrong and eat their words?
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