Yea i agree, nice post Neph. But With Star Citizen, the devs list all the goals, and keep people updated on whats happening, and what they are working on. Granted thats also another game that people think will never happen. Its like gamers have zero patience.
I have to admit im one of them. I would rather play a buggy alpha than only be able to see streams or read about it.
Speaking of that is the game even in early alpha yet? im guessing not? i just had read something about Beta being in 2017 so wondered if they were in alpha yet
It's not inaccurate to say that we paid to be testers. However, internal testing always comes before consumer testing. This has been the norm for video game testing for over a decade. It seems really bizarre to me that people had such unreasonable expectations as to when we would have our hands on the product.
We will be testing a mostly finished product. The majority of the people who paid for testing aren't educated enough on the technical systems behind the scenes to provide meaningful feedback. If we had access to the build commits from a day to day basis, a lot of it would probably look like jibberish to the majority of testers. As it stands, there isn't really a practical reason for us to have our hands on the game right now. Aside from telling a dev "it doesn't work", I doubt I'd be able to debug why the code behind opening and closing doors doesn't work, the same with most people.
The pre-alpha testing phase will likely be a nearly finished product, lacking some polish. Alpha will be a more polished version of that with targeted testing of specific features. Beta will likely be 95% stress testing, 5% fixing relatively small scale bugs from reports collected by a large number of simultaneous users.
Comparing this to a typical dev cycle in any industry, even the MMORPG industry, does not seem appropriate. Particularly in the earliest days, the team was clearly not the picture of efficiency -- and not necessarily as a result of things in their control. The team isn't located in a central location. Throughout most of the development period they have been a skeleton crew managing a wide range of responsibilities that a larger team would deal with more efficiently. And they're building one of the most complex (if not the most) types of games around. There are certainly things that I think they would probably do differently if they had the chance to try it again, but we're primarily in some pretty uncharted territory here.
That, coming from a guy who certainly appreciates the feeling of contributing early on and waiting throughout this process.
Nydan said: I guess my problem is one of expectations. I work in an industry with 5 year development timelines. We start testing about 1 year in. We start what would equate to alpha 3-4 years in. Beta about 4-4.5 years in. This game is 2.5 years into development and no one that paid for tester access, "pre-alpha", has gotten anything. So at this point I expect "pre-alpha" to last about a week followed by a month or two alpha and then a month or two beta. And for those of us that paid early we paid for tester access, not pre-alpha. It was billed as "tester". We dont even have a date yet. So yeah, severe buyers regret here and the reason I cut my monthly donation off a while ago.
You didnt pay for tester access. You paid to be a contributor to a product you hoped would one day become a reality. Testing it earlier was a perk. IMO if you paid to be a tester so that you could get into the game earlier you didnt invest wisely.
Nephretiti said:Such is the nature of the business.
For the most part (not always), in the past a studio would have a desire to make a product. In order to do so they had to finance the project. Sometimes they have/had enough to fully finance the project. This includes paying the engineering staff, the art staff, design, customer service, etc. That's a lot of people and probably most of the financing. They have to pay for development tools. They have to pay for marketing. It's a lot of money. The more successful games spend/spent more money than the lessers - understandable. Issues began when big name publishers started offering development funds to studios. The publishers don't actually make the gamers - they just market and sell the product for the studio. Later, some of the publishers also created studios to create some other games. Sometimes you had a highly successful studio that turned to publishing. But don't be confused: the industry is driven by the publishers. As a result of publishers offering to finance entire projects they also started including demands into the studio's domain: they wanted say-so on hiring. They wanted all kinds of things. Like publish dates. This means that the publishers were able to dictate to the studios when a game was released and even other things like Beta's etc. Not just when, but if. They wrote themselves into the development cycle. Something I beleive was a mistake. Nonetheless it happened that way. Games were being produced long before they were ready. Ship-withs exploded. The marketing hits were devestating in some cases. And this really was usually the result of the publishers pushing titles out before completion. On the other hand, Publishers sacrificed millions of dollars for top-notch games. They wanted a return on their investment. If a game slipped it meant a few things to the Publishers: it meant there was some bad management at the stupido - so they would force people out. It meant that the return investment was going to falter - though there was no reason to believe this at all. So the Publishers made SURE they could tell the developers that they could push titles. We have all seen the results of this.
VR has gone a different route. I applaud them. They kick-started so that they can be as fully funded as possible. And since they went this route they get to make all the rules. Good for them. They are able to take the extra time to create what they envision without interference from folks who are only after the dollars.
BUT! I hate this word. BUT! VR loses something in the process. What they loose is the task-master standing over their shoulder yelling "Hurry it up!". VR does not have to answer to this fictitious monster, demanding that VR push content before it's time. However this opens up a new issue: they do not have to answer to this ficitious monster. They can make a sudden design change that can slip the ship-date without consequences. It seems to have happened already. This is not always a bad thing. ANY slipping will most likely result in a better game. I approve of this. However, it is also a marketing hit. We try to avoid those. I have seen several discussions in EQ2 lately discussing VR and Pantheon. The nay sayers all take the same stand: the game is a hoax and will never really be shipped. The fans of VR/Pantheon always respond with "have you seen the live streams?" which invariably, shuts the nay sayers up.
There is a fine line we have to walk here. Improved game-play at the cost of a little more time. There is no finite line. It moves, constantly. It starts at a different point for each of us. All I can suggest is patience and trust. You either have it or you don't. If you are reaching a point of distruct or whatever you want to call it, I would suggest you step back a bit. Take a look at everyhting else Community has done lately. Re-read the lore. Take a look at the maps. Check out the wiki. Take a shot at some Fan Ficition - all of you seem to have some great ideas - write them into a story and share that way. Give these guys a break and wish them well. They have yet to see the hard work - it's coming.
This is a very good post Neph, thank you and you are spot on for the most part but I just wanted to add that we do, in fact, have our internal "overlord" that cracks the whip and forces timelines/milestones to be met, several of them actually (CEO, Chairman, Directors, Producer etc.), while still allowing us full freedom as we move forward and stay on track.
The recent missed testing target was a mistake on our part, we shouldn't have given a timeline so far away thinking it could be met when we didn't actually know, we just assumed something so far away would be easy to meet and it would have been if there wasn't a spanner thrown into the works right near the end of that timeline, which was unpreventable and forced us to push testing back.
It's good we caught it but bad for you folks who were expecting us to meet that timeline. We will be more careful in future to not release dates unless we know we can meet them. This isn't a bad thing either but in this day and age the slightest delay can bring in a whirlwind of negativity, accusations and bad press due to a bunch of other games failing and greedy companies taking peoples money and running, so sadly we, and others, get lumped into that category way too easily when something is delayed or withheld but we are mindful of that and will be more careful in future.
Great post my friend, thank you :)
Nydan said: I guess my problem is one of expectations. I work in an industry with 5 year development timelines. We start testing about 1 year in. We start what would equate to alpha 3-4 years in. Beta about 4-4.5 years in. This game is 2.5 years into development and no one that paid for tester access, "pre-alpha", has gotten anything. So at this point I expect "pre-alpha" to last about a week followed by a month or two alpha and then a month or two beta. And for those of us that paid early we paid for tester access, not pre-alpha. It was billed as "tester". We dont even have a date yet. So yeah, severe buyers regret here and the reason I cut my monthly donation off a while ago.
Tester and pre-alpha are the same things my friend, it was a wording inconsistency on our part but was corrected with one of the pledge overhauls.
We have said that we want a long beta to capture as many issues as possible prior to release and pre-alpha and alpha are the very important stepping stones to get us ready for beta, so while I can't give time frames you can expect them to take as long as needed to get the game ready for each phase.
The whole game was basically scrapped and we started fresh after the first year of development, so we are sitting roughly around the 3 year mark currently, for reference.
You also have to keep in mind that on average an MMORPG with a team of hundreds can take anywhere from 5-7 years from conception to official launch, we don't have a team anywhere near that size as you know and work remotely spread out across the world but by using Unity we can bridge that gap and speed that process up a bit to bring us in line with a more manageable and typical development time line. We are currently on track and meeting all of our internal goals and milestones.
Liav said:It's not inaccurate to say that we paid to be testers. However, internal testing always comes before consumer testing. This has been the norm for video game testing for over a decade. It seems really bizarre to me that people had such unreasonable expectations as to when we would have our hands on the product.
We will be testing a mostly finished product. The majority of the people who paid for testing aren't educated enough on the technical systems behind the scenes to provide meaningful feedback. If we had access to the build commits from a day to day basis, a lot of it would probably look like jibberish to the majority of testers. As it stands, there isn't really a practical reason for us to have our hands on the game right now. Aside from telling a dev "it doesn't work", I doubt I'd be able to debug why the code behind opening and closing doors doesn't work, the same with most people.
The pre-alpha testing phase will likely be a nearly finished product, lacking some polish. Alpha will be a more polished version of that with targeted testing of specific features. Beta will likely be 95% stress testing, 5% fixing relatively small scale bugs from reports collected by a large number of simultaneous users.
No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.
Nydan said: I guess my problem is one of expectations. I work in an industry with 5 year development timelines. We start testing about 1 year in. We start what would equate to alpha 3-4 years in. Beta about 4-4.5 years in. This game is 2.5 years into development and no one that paid for tester access, "pre-alpha", has gotten anything. So at this point I expect "pre-alpha" to last about a week followed by a month or two alpha and then a month or two beta. And for those of us that paid early we paid for tester access, not pre-alpha. It was billed as "tester". We dont even have a date yet. So yeah, severe buyers regret here and the reason I cut my monthly donation off a while ago.
Image taken from the KS: The three main specifics in this Kickstarter note about the Paragon's Pledge are help with any type of game testing, be willing to spend time submitting detailed bug reports, and also mention of "very early access" to the game as a tester. I would put that emphasis on "game." Very early access is vague and open to interpretation. If pre-alpha is 3 months, alpha 6 months, and beta is a year then I'd consider a year and 9 months prior to release very early access. In comparison to alpha/beta, it might not be as big of a jump of early access, but the whole point of the testing is to test the game anyway, not be early access.
And, more importantly for me, the perks I'd receive from pledging/donating were a bonus, and I knew up front that it was a HUGE risk and I may see no return on investment/donation at all. However, it was put up or shut up time and I wanted to put my money where my mouth was to pledge to a "Virtual World" MMORPG that I had been clammoring for for years.
And it's fair to cut off your monthly donation, for the sake of transparency, I don't donate monthly either; however, if you have severe buyer's remorse today, versus 2+ years ago, or especially after the Kickstarter/transition to this website, then I'd strongly suggest to reconsider exactly where the project was at that point. Your donation/investment looked to be at a for sure loss; however, now, the project may have not met the timelines that you, I, or I'm sure most followers would have like to have seen, but we can now legitimately talk about Pantheon in realistic anticipation for its release of pre-alpha, alpha, beta. And, more importantly all signs are pointing to a successful release with a quality development team versus having only the faintest hope of seeing its existence early on. Now, we just have to be patient - as hard as that may be.
*edit - One final point too as I saw you had added a future post of 3.5 years. As you know, the dev team was nearly completely overhauled around Jan 2015, so your original point that I quoted in here on 2.5 years isn't too far off.
Kilsin said:No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.
I love this... I can't wait to get into this buggy world and DC constantly. Just to play, even a buggy world would be amazing. Haven't submitted a bug report in years since I worked at Nintendo!
BRING ON THE BUGS BABY!
Kilsin said:No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.
Sounds awful. Looking forward to it.
Nymphey said:Kilsin said:No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.I love this... I can't wait to get into this buggy world and DC constantly. Just to play, even a buggy world would be amazing. Haven't submitted a bug report in years since I worked at Nintendo!
BRING ON THE BUGS BABY!
I'm glad to see the enthusiasm, that is what we will need in all of our testers! :)
Hyperium said: (Kilsin) I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based .... I think this is the closest thing to an update we've had in awhile.
I am working on getting you folks more regular (albeit small) updates, so leave it with me, my friend :)
Liav said:Kilsin said:No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.Sounds awful. Looking forward to it.
Hahaha, glad to hear it ;)
Kilsin said:Liav said:It's not inaccurate to say that we paid to be testers. However, internal testing always comes before consumer testing. This has been the norm for video game testing for over a decade. It seems really bizarre to me that people had such unreasonable expectations as to when we would have our hands on the product.
We will be testing a mostly finished product. The majority of the people who paid for testing aren't educated enough on the technical systems behind the scenes to provide meaningful feedback. If we had access to the build commits from a day to day basis, a lot of it would probably look like jibberish to the majority of testers. As it stands, there isn't really a practical reason for us to have our hands on the game right now. Aside from telling a dev "it doesn't work", I doubt I'd be able to debug why the code behind opening and closing doors doesn't work, the same with most people.
The pre-alpha testing phase will likely be a nearly finished product, lacking some polish. Alpha will be a more polished version of that with targeted testing of specific features. Beta will likely be 95% stress testing, 5% fixing relatively small scale bugs from reports collected by a large number of simultaneous users.
No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.
Thought you guys were hiring quite a bit of new people to help with stuff like that? Did that not pan out?
Mathir said:Thought you guys were hiring quite a bit of new people to help with stuff like that? Did that not pan out?
Testing at stages of software development like this doesnt generally manifest in having fewer and fewer bugs as more and more come on board and more things get completed. More people means more things being added to the game by people new to the project who don't have the same historic knowledge of the code and workflows of that particular project. More people means more is getting done, but it can (and mostly does) mean more issues, more bugs, more inconsistencies and more conflicts. The number of issues doesnt decline with more staff. At least not initially. The more that's added, the more the issues compound upon one another because there are more moving parts that collide in unexpected ways.
Like anything else, the more complex it is the more can go wrong. This isnt a negative thing, it just is. And it has to be managed and resolved.
It's like saying that because you and your buddy know how to make 6 great steak recipes you can now buy a building, hire 5 more chefs, a couple of prep cooks, a few bartenders, a dozen waitstaff, a couple dishwashers, a liquor distributor, a food distributor, an accountant, and an advertiser, and you're going to have a finally tuned restaurant. Not even close. You have to find the strenths and weaknesses in everything, get people doing the things they are good at, fill in the gaps, get them used to your management style, and iron out all the peronsality kinks as you get them all trained the way you want them to work. It'll be a rocky ride for awhile as this process unfolds.
Mathir's question was a good one, and people did assume that staffing up would mean significantly faster progress.
Most of us, myself included, assume that there is indeed faster progress even if it is behind the scenes. But to some extent Pantheon is like a religion (I know - quite fitting given the name) and we need to take a lot on faith.
If it is too early to get anything even mildly specific along the lines of we hope to get to pre-alpha later this year, would it be unreasonable to ask for a more generic summary of where we stand now along the lines of "We are working on improving and developing the ..... which is going very well because we have more people all dedicated and working very hard at it."
Kilsin said:No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.
I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.
As i start training to be a games programmer this year this sounds awesome, to me anyway. will be nice to get some hands on time with a real buggy mess. :)
Aatu said:No Alpha yet. They are in "Pre Pre-Alpha"
More like pre pre pre avante-alpha alpha
seriously can we as a community please stop using the term pre-pre-alpha. And any derivation of it.
I move that instead we all start using closed testing, VIP- testing, supporter testing, open alpha, and closed and open beta.
When people complain about how they have a terrible selection of dances, just say, 'man were like 7 phases away from launch'
please I beg you all to consider this!