Originally Posted by
Nusquam
I am referring to the Live team - the Lego team are completely separate.
Well, other people on the Live team have contributed to AO during the past year - creating art assets for the NPE, for example. I think what you perhaps fundamentally misunderstand here is that the Live team is a fraction of the dedicated developers that each project had in the past.
Essentially the live team divides manpower among the games based on their revenue and budgets. As AO is the oldest, it has the smallest playerbase and therefore the smallest budget allocated.
Why do you think there hasn't? We've just spent weeks training people in many aspects of AO - but remember Genele and Macrosun were only capable of working on AO - neither had any experience with AoC or TSW tools. In essence, they were dedicated AO devs because that was what they knew.
Most people who work on anything for AO will never post on the forums.
The poor decisions have very little to do with the current team. Besides that - AO is allocated the resources that align with its profits - I don't really know what else we can do. If the project becomes unprofitable in the long run, do you think it will be kept open on charity? There is some tendency for people to bring out the old "You've got to spend money to make money" argument here - which is all well and good - but the relationship between MMO player numbers and time is easy enough to plot on a graph and the only people who buck that trend are WoW and EVE.
We are chugging along. I suggest going back and reading the past year or so of community updates. We are pretty transparent about what we are doing, and hell, we even have a beta of the engine up and running (finally). It's not as though we're discussing things that aren't tangible in some form.
I can only suggest you read Michi's OP again. This is what we are working on. You can define that how you like (chug chugging!)
People seem to want some vague long-term roadmap which, in all honesty, seems to have been something that they were given in the past and has led to the type of skepticism I see all over these forums.
As for rebuilding AO from scratch as AO2 or whatever - I understand the wish but the reality is a bit different. A modern game on the scale of AO would cost millions that Funcom doesn't have (see quarterly report).
It's been discussed many times over the years - AO really does hold a special place in the hearts of most people at Funcom.