Disappointment in the Update Schedule
By
8_Ball,
Posted on: 2006-11-21 24:55 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Release: 4/27/04
Issue #1: Through the Looking Glass (June 29, 2004)
Issue #2: Shadows of the Past (September 16, 2004)
Issue #3: A Council of War (January 4, 2005)
Issue #4: Colosseum (May 4, 2005)
Issue #5: Forest of Dread (August 31, 2005)
Issue #6: Along Came a Spider (October 27, 2005)
(City of Villains (released October 31, 2005))
Issue #7: Destiny Manifest (June 6, 2006)
Issue 8 - late Nov/Early Dec.
Anyhow, I don't want to sound completely unhappy. I continue to enjoy the game a lot. Given the hours I spend playing, the $24/month for the two accounts is a blip. But there is this vague feeling of staleness that creeps over it when the updates take so long (I7, I8) or feel anemically lacking on content (I4, for example; which was pretty much only PvP, which quickly manifested so many problems that took a while to fix that it didn't even feel to me like it added anything, even though today I *like* PvP quite a bit). I guess I just want to know what happened to the robust feeling of the updates from the first 9 months or so. Did CoV cause the slow up? And if so, does abandoning plans for more boxed expansions mean the update schedule will begin to look like it's robust former self, or after all the years of development and the 2.5 years of being live, is Cryptic just starting to siphon off resources from the game to plan for End-of-Lifing it in favor of future projects?
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Although I agree with you that yes it seems like we are getting fewer patches, let us not forget that:
i4 brought in a lot of new art work regarding costumes.
i5 also brought us 2 new power sets.
i6 brought us 3 new zones (yes even though it was planned for COV).
And i8 is going to bring us even more stuff. As I said in another thread, if they broke each issue in mini issues it wouldnt seem so bad. Since vet rewards took the most time, they should have Released Safe gaurd mission back in sept/october, then faultine in october/november, and Vet rewards in late november.
Issues: 8, 8.1, and 8.2 if you like.
But i think its too early to say these are signs that CO* is dying.
I'm growing increasingly frustrated with our devs not so much for the slow issue releases (which is irksome enuf) but in their seeming inability to learn from past overrreaching release estimates. Bugs are always going to pop up and will require extra time to work out, but any development studio is going to learn to build in sufficient time to make project deadlines. If you say something is going to be done by in four months, fer instance, what that should mean is "we expect to be done in 6 weeks, 9 weeks if all heck breaks loose" then release the final project ahead of schedule. Could any of us actually imagine an Issue coming out *earlier* than suggested? I think we'd all die of shock.
I'm also growing frustrated with the "better late than buggy" phrase that folks are tossing about way too easily to excuse our devs every time they slip a schedule. Of course we don't want them to release a buggy product but there is a third option, the non-buggy on-time release that we have yet to see.
Umber's Hall of Heroes & Villains
Here's a handy timeline!
As you can see, the distance between 7 and 8 is much less than 6-7, but about one and a half times as long as the time for 3, 4, and 5.
Yeah... the update schedule is slowing down. Rapidly. Well, I can't really say that. It doesn't seem to be slowing down. It seems to have hit first gear and then it appears to have been set on cruise control.
I figured that I7 would have been the exception... but it seems it's going to be the rule. Six months to a year between releases. At this point we won't be calling them by their numbers, we'll be referring to them by their respective years. At this point issue seven will be "the issue of 2006". It doesn't look like things are speeding up at any point, and I expect we'll see things like the invention system sometime before 2008.
It was made clear a long time ago... changes are simply not something to wait for. You either like this game as is or you don't and move on. But don't expect any changes.
Zeus - god of expectations
I guess I look at it as the game goes and grows the complexity makes it harder and harder to add meaningful content.
Which got me thinking: If the game were frozen, never to change, how many would stay and play anyway? Besides me.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Yeah... the update schedule is slowing down. Rapidly. Well, I can't really say that. It doesn't seem to be slowing down. It seems to have hit first gear and then it appears to have been set on cruise control.
I figured that I7 would have been the exception... but it seems it's going to be the rule. Six months to a year between releases. At this point we won't be calling them by their numbers, we'll be referring to them by their respective years. At this point issue seven will be "the issue of 2006". It doesn't look like things are speeding up at any point, and I expect we'll see things like the invention system sometime before 2008.
It was made clear a long time ago... changes are simply not something to wait for. You either like this game as is or you don't and move on. But don't expect any changes.
Zeus - god of expectations
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I thought we were supposed to expect the powers we like to change? 
(Oh I know what kind of changes you mean. Just having fun...)
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
A lot of the earlier issues were just content and the most of the programming changes were long in design before that as so were already prepared for from a technology standpoint. CoV hit and they then had to expand the levels and now they are introducing new technology in the form of veteran rewards that has to interact with NCSoft databases. The technical hurdles have been getting bigger and bigger. I think that after I8 and the holidays the release schedule should pick up as they will begin a story arc that spans multiple issues. Of course I9 includes inventions and that again is a whole new system not originally concieved for the game and has to be integrated into the exisiting systems. The deeper we get into the lifespan of this game the harder it becomes to make changes because the data and the lines of code only grow in quantity and more has to be considered with each expansion. When CoH launched it was under 1 GB installed on the hard drive, now it's over 2.5 GB. This makes it harder and harder to track down bugs.
Slightly OT: Secretly I always thought of The Hollows as a fairly recent addition to the game, but just looking at the dates it's clear they've been around quite a while. Weird.
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I'm also growing frustrated with the "better late than buggy" phrase that folks are tossing about way too easily to excuse our devs every time they slip a schedule.
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Ok, who bogarted my schedule, because I didn't get one. In fact I'm fairly sure I can make a list of the offical release dates given for this issue->
Wow, such a very long list.
It's software, these are significant additions, I7 bit into the time for this issue far more than they expected, I'd go on, but you'd take them as excuses rather than reasons.
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I'm also growing frustrated with the "better late than buggy" phrase that folks are tossing about way too easily to excuse our devs every time they slip a schedule.
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Ok, who bogarted my schedule, because I didn't get one. In fact I'm fairly sure I can make a list of the offical release dates given for this issue->
Wow, such a very long list.
It's software, these are significant additions, I7 bit into the time for this issue far more than they expected, I'd go on, but you'd take them as excuses rather than reasons.
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While reading this I couldn't help but imagine P-chan from your avatar grabbing the thread in his mouth and shaking it like a chew toy.
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I guess I look at it as the game goes and grows the complexity makes it harder and harder to add meaningful content.
Which got me thinking: If the game were frozen, never to change, how many would stay and play anyway? Besides me.
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I would be in for a few more months, but then I will have seen what there is to see and move on. With no anger mind you, I'd just be done. MMOs simply cannot reach a point where they are stagnant or people can and will leave.
I do wish the devs had made their September launch of Issue 8. This makes me fear we won't see Issue 9 until at least May. I'm resigned to the fact that we will get our anniversary respec with Issue 9's launch.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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Here's a handy timeline!
As you can see, the distance between 7 and 8 is much less than 6-7, but about one and a half times as long as the time for 3, 4, and 5.
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deleted for poor math skills
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Issue 6 to 7 was 7 months and I7 to I8 will be 7 months in the first week of Dec(though it looks like it will beat that by one week).
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I7-I8 will be SIX months.
Oops, you are right.
Yep...considering that I9 will be considerably larger than I8 I would easily wager a guess at a May-June launch for it...hell, by then they'll have to come up with new Vet rewards to go past the 3 year mark.
COH/CoV - Virtue
8 Ball - Lev 50 Kin/Energy Defender
The Canadian Fist - Lev 50 Ice/EM Blaster
Omega Ghost - Lev 50 Robo/Dark MM
Ghostfall - Lev 50 Arachnos Crab Soldier
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Yep...considering that I9 will be considerably larger than I8 I would easily wager a guess at a May-June launch for it...hell, by then they'll have to come up with new Vet rewards to go past the 3 year mark.
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They seem to have a fair size chuck of it under works already though, which is nice.
�Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!� - Thomas Gray
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Yep...considering that I9 will be considerably larger than I8 I would easily wager a guess at a May-June launch for it...hell, by then they'll have to come up with new Vet rewards to go past the 3 year mark.
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They seem to have a fair size chuck of it under works already though, which is nice.
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While thats true, theres no guarantee that any of that work they've done already will amount to anything. They'd done enough work on the skill system for elements of it to show up in the pigg files during I3 or so, and that never materialized, for a range of reasons.
I'm afraid I'm very skeptical of the ability/will of the devs to get new systems and updates out in anything approaching a timely manner.
Heroes
Dysmal
Lumynous
Sam Steele
Pluck
Wile
Slagheap
Pressure Wave
Rhiannon Bel
Verified
Stellaric
Syd Mallorn
Villains
Jotunheim Skald
Saer Maen
Jen Corbae
Illuminance
Venator Arawn
Taiga Dryad
Tarranos
Just 'cause I'm a nitpicker, I figured I'd check to see how many days there were between releases. Using Plasma's dates:
I0-I1: 63 days
I1-I2: 79
I2-I3: 110
I3-I4: 120
I4-I5: 119
I5-I6: 58
I6-I7: 221
I7-I8: 169
I split the odds for Cov/Along came a Spider and put that at 10/28/2005 and put I8 for tomorrow (doubtful).
Looking at the average for the fairly consistent numbers between I2 and I5, we were going at a little over three updates a year (117 days per update). For the average of I6 to my tomorrow "estimate" for I8, it's a little under two a year (195 days per update).
What does all this mean? I have no idea.
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Why could it be happening?
* CoX staff reductions to concentrate efforts more on newer titles (ie, the Marvel game)
* Increased game complexity (that is, issues contain features for both Heroes and Villains; also may include bugs caused by enhancing engine features, such as PhysX support and advanced graphics)
* Larger issues. (Although I'd say the issues have gotten smaller, not larger, saving the villain content of I7)
* Less "precoded" - that is, I have the feeling a lot of features, and perhaps even areas, were half-baked into the game and cut from the release scheduled and rolled into areas. For example, I'd bet that the Hollows and possibly the Shadow Shard were being worked on at least in part pre-release. Obviously PI and the RCS were. Of course capes were a work in progress even pre-release
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My guess is that you're right on all counts. I've been kind of suspicous that the CoV release brought in far fewer new subscriptions than Cryptic/NCSoft wanted, and that due to low growth potential (and possibly due to having to recover CoV's development costs), this directly led to far fewer resources dedicated to the CoX suite of games. Just a pet theory of mine. You could also guess that early design work on the Marvel game began far before it was announced (say...right after CoV was released?) and that this was responsible for fewer dedicated CoX resources. Or...even both. Or neither.
Regardless....
My guess is that this is more or less what we can expect in the future. It's a little sad - it feels like the 'golden age' of CoH was a long time ago and will not be revisited.
But, hey, free content is free content, CoX is an alt-friendly game, and our dev's seem to have some very engaging stuff planned for the next 2 or 3 Issues. I'll be around awhile, and my expectations have been...adjusted....to be in line with the current trends.
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* Increased game complexity (that is, issues contain features for both Heroes and Villains; also may include bugs caused by enhancing engine features, such as PhysX support and advanced graphics)
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Sounds most likely to me. I7 was mostly late because of Mayhem Mission tech and all that PhysX stuff, if I remember rightly.
The more innovation there is, the later the issue seems to come. Adding straightforward 'content', like zones and missions, doesn't seem to snarl things up in the same way. The new Faultline doesn't look like it played much of a part in delaying I8.
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Well given how each issue gets more and more complex so do the bugs. Also keep in mind there is a lot of text and dialogue that needs to written. Seeing all the spelling and syntax errors in the game with just English, now they have to deal with: French, German, and Korean. This could slow the developement - to test - to live process.
Didn't Cricket mention something about getting releases on a quicker schedule? What that translates into considering the release schedule of I7 & I8, I don't know.
I'm not going to attempt to predict future based mostly on release dates for I7 and I8. Before I7, things came at a more than reasonable rate.
When I7 came out, many people said "This is all for villains. I bet from now on, all issues will be for villains, since it's new, and CoH content will fall by the wayside."
And here we have I8, which is mostly for heroes. So they were wrong. You can't predict a pattern based on one event.
You can begin to guess or predict a pattern based on two events, but not very accurately.
While I'm not happy that the number of updates has dropped dramatically this year, I'm not ready to assume that this will always be the case. I'll wait until I9 to worry about it.
~Missi
http://tinyurl.com/yhy333s
Miss Informed in 2016! She can't be worse than all those other guys!
I would be pleased if they did not put out a public schedule, nor make promises of a release schedule so they can work on getting the game improved; ensuring the issues are as bug free as they can be and of course releasing them when they feel they are ready.
We don't need to know thier internal schedule; we should be pleasently surprised when a new issue is unveiled or more information is given about upcoming content.
We should not DEMAND that they produce results based on our timing but rely upon their timing to give us the content when they feel it is ready.
Seryphim : Virtue : Empath/Archery Defender
Fueur-Engel : Virtue : Fire/Thermal Corrupter
Release: 4/27/04
Issue #1: Through the Looking Glass (June 29, 2004)
Issue #2: Shadows of the Past (September 16, 2004)
Issue #3: A Council of War (January 4, 2005)
Issue #4: Colosseum (May 4, 2005)
Issue #5: Forest of Dread (August 31, 2005)
Issue #6: Along Came a Spider (October 27, 2005)
(City of Villains (released October 31, 2005))
Issue #7: Destiny Manifest (June 6, 2006)
Issue 8 - late Nov/Early Dec.
I wonder if this is the face of things to come? Updates were pretty consistent, pre-CoV. Despite massive rebalancing, power fixing, powerset changes, and so on, Issues rolled out every 3 months. Occasionally slightly longer, sometimes faster. (It's hard to call issue 6 an update, per se, since it really didn't add anything that wasn't part of the CoV boxed retail game, so whether the sub-2-month-window from I5 to I6 should be counted is open to debate.)
Assuming you disqualify I6 as an issue, since it was really nothing more than a "merge" of the Hero side with the boxed CoV game, heroes went about 10 months from I5 to I7, and now I8 is looking like its final time will be 6 months. It's disappointing, I'd say. Why could it be happening?
* CoX staff reductions to concentrate efforts more on newer titles (ie, the Marvel game)
* Increased game complexity (that is, issues contain features for both Heroes and Villains; also may include bugs caused by enhancing engine features, such as PhysX support and advanced graphics)
* Larger issues. (Although I'd say the issues have gotten smaller, not larger, saving the villain content of I7)
* Less "precoded" - that is, I have the feeling a lot of features, and perhaps even areas, were half-baked into the game and cut from the release scheduled and rolled into areas. For example, I'd bet that the Hollows and possibly the Shadow Shard were being worked on at least in part pre-release. Obviously PI and the RCS were. Of course capes were a work in progress even pre-release
Let's look at what we've gotten. One of my favorite issues was I3. From the CoX history page on wikipedia:
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Issue #3: A Council of War (January 4, 2005) - Epic Archetypes (Kheldians, split into Peacebringer and Warshade archetypes), the 5th Column enemy group is replaced by the Council, Ancillary Power Pools, new zone (Striga Isle), global chat (Completed in March 16, 2005), new task forces, new zone events (Giant Octopus, Ghost Ship, Clockwork Paladin), mission difficulty settings, and new "toxic" and "Quantum" damage types. Kheldians are particularly vulnerable to Quantum damage.
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Several events, mission difficulties, Kheldians, Striga, several zone events, and global chat. Looking back, that's a monster issue.
Or I2 - added badges, respecs, *six* new zones, capes, auras, exemping.
I guess the really pertinent question, though, looking at the history is: where do we go from here? I hope the devs understand how appealing the fairly significant, regular updates were in making people into fans of the game. We've replaced the regular issues, it seems, with periodic discussions with devs about long term plans - like Positron's letter. And while I love hearing about stuff coming, near or far, it seems clear to me that the rate of change has slowed dramatically. Given that the content isn't "doubled" - that is, it isn't like heroes and villains are EACH getting a zone in I8 - one has to wonder why the early, rapid update pace has slacked off so much.
Did anyone playing when I3 came out suspect we wouldn't see a single new epic AT two years later? And now it sounds like when we DO see one, it will be Kheldians rerolled for Villains. And I love Kheldians - I was around since launch, and Kheldians have done nothing but grow on me since they were released. I think they're a fabulous work of design on the devs part...
I suspect we'll never know. This qualifies largely as a rant, since I don't really expect devs to post about their staffing configurations or comment on this. I mean, it's obviously been cause for concern since I7 went really, really long... and yet, about the only comment was, "8 months? I sure hope it isn't that long" from a dev regarding I8.
Anyhow, I don't want to sound completely unhappy. I continue to enjoy the game a lot. Given the hours I spend playing, the $24/month for the two accounts is a blip. But there is this vague feeling of staleness that creeps over it when the updates take so long (I7, I8) or feel anemically lacking on content (I4, for example; which was pretty much only PvP, which quickly manifested so many problems that took a while to fix that it didn't even feel to me like it added anything, even though today I *like* PvP quite a bit). I guess I just want to know what happened to the robust feeling of the updates from the first 9 months or so. Did CoV cause the slow up? And if so, does abandoning plans for more boxed expansions mean the update schedule will begin to look like it's robust former self, or after all the years of development and the 2.5 years of being live, is Cryptic just starting to siphon off resources from the game to plan for End-of-Lifing it in favor of future projects?