How would you suggest the dev team get more resources so that they can implement more things faster?

[golstat2003]

One constant over the last few days is how fast we get changes made to the game. So far we've gotten maybe 1 or 2 pages/issues per year. At that pace any suggested change made (either on the forums or discord) could take years to implement when the devs decide to pick some up (if they decide to, really at their discretion).

 

Now we have had threads, announcements from the dev team asking for help for years, on the forums and Discord. Hell barely anyone even tests changes, to the point that some things that need a massive amount of testing (labyrinth anyone?) hardly get enough mass testing while in Closed and Open beta.

 

So the question is how else would YOU the player suggest the devs get more resources (aka people) to make the changes, test things, and create content/updates that eventually go into pages/issues? Saying pay people, as per my understanding, is out of the question as this project is remaining a volunteer one funded by donations. Sooooooo any OTHER suggestions I'm interested in folks stating.

[Super Atom]

We get a genie and wish for more people who want to spend their free time working

 

🤷‍♀️

[Glacier Peak]

Get the word out that they have requested someone with software experience to develop tools for them for the last six months now. 

 

 

[Vanden]

Blackmail

[TheMoneyMaker]

A heist!

 

One more job, and we're out.

[mistagoat]

We should offer to pay the dev team! To fund their salaries we could implement some sort of required payment system in order to access the game as a player. Maybe each payment would grant access for a limited amount of time, let's say about 30 days and then the player would have to pay again if they wanted to continue playing. 

I dunno, prolly a silly thought.

[Psi-bolt]

Without knowing anything about their agreement with NCSoft, the best way to improve the resources of the game is to provide them resources in the form of money.   Either provide a voluntary subscription or allow real money transactions for some in-game items. Both of those can be considered toxic by different groups of players.

[Ghost]

3 hours ago, mistagoat said:

We should offer to pay the dev team! To fund their salaries we could implement some sort of required payment system in order to access the game as a player. Maybe each payment would grant access for a limited amount of time, let's say about 30 days and then the player would have to pay again if they wanted to continue playing. 

I dunno, prolly a silly thought.

Silly thought that I don’t think is allowed per the agreement with NCSoft

[Forager]

It doesn't have to be money, but a competent candidate would need to get something out of it.

 

Students and interns will work for free if there's enough opportunity to learn and gain experience. Would working on this game provide that given it's age and the level of support they would receive?

 

If what you're offering is "fulfillment" then the candidate would have to share the developer's vision or be able to fulfill their own at the same time. I would guess a large percentage of the people that meet that criteria are already here.

 

Other than those two things, I don't know what else working on this game has to offer. So the very first step would be to identify what currency they do have.

 

For a passion product, any deadlines or schedules are self imposed anyway, so "implementing things faster" might not be as important as just "implementing things." The current rate of updates is pretty impressive as is,.all things considered.

 

 

[Forager]

4 hours ago, mistagoat said:

We should offer to pay the dev team! To fund their salaries we could implement some sort of required payment system in order to access the game

 

I think they tried that once...

[ShardWarrior]

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I am personally happy/satisfied with the content being developed and the speed at which that content is being rolled out.  I would rather not add more and more work for a group of volunteers to do.  I think it better they work on what they want to work on at the pace they are comfortable with to avoid getting burned out.  Adding more scope means adding more management and time.

 

Is everything they are doing perfect?  No.  Are there things I personally would like to see done that are not on the roadmap?  Sure.  That said, I understand this is a volunteer group doing this in their spare time.  

[Ghost]

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I am personally happy/satisfied with the content being developed and the speed at which that content is being rolled out.  I would rather not add more and more work for a group of volunteers to do.  I think it better they work on what they want to work on at the pace they are comfortable with to avoid getting burned out.  Adding more scope means adding more management and time.

 

Is everything they are doing perfect?  No.  Are there things I personally would like to see done that are not on the roadmap?  Sure.  That said, I understand this is a volunteer group doing this in their spare time.  

I’m right there with you in terms of being happy how much and how often things are rolled out.

 

Of course that could be because I don’t PL every new powerset to 50 the minute it’s rolled out, and then look around and say “when are we gonna get new powers?”

 

Theres still plenty of powers I haven’t even thought about trying yet.

 

Maybe if players actually played their new toons, or didn’t steamroll through all the new content as if they were competing for some kind of prize, they’d also be happier.

Edited Wednesday at 09:05 PM by Ghost

[Seed22]

1 hour ago, Ghost said:

Maybe if players actually played their new toons, or didn’t steamroll through all the new content as if they were competing for some kind of prize, they’d also be happier.

Ehhh only for new players. 

 

Been here since i4. This would only serve to make me not want to play faster tbh. Ironically, I am going to be picking up turtle WoW and enjoying a slow(though even then it'd probably take no longer than a month) grind to max level.  Then raiding and endgame shenanigans. 

 

I think the main difference will be that I havent played WoW in 12 years, making me effectively a new player. Im most eager to partake on this journey because it'll test my theory of is it simply burnout or is CoH one of those "Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle" games. 

 

It'll also give me perspective on that new player wide eyed view of a game. 

 

But to not derail the thread completely, there is no way to draw talent outside of hope. I would never, and will NEVER, recommend someone work on this game for free. There's no resume boosting activity here and it's just a headache to deal with the code.

[Luminara]

[MTeague]

I wouldn't.  For one thing, I don't need a whole bunch of new shinies. I'm quite pleased with where CoH is at right now.  For another, I think the dev team is quite capable of deciding for themselves when, how, and if to add more members.

 

Besides, there is often truth in "the more people you add to the project, the longer it takes."

[macskull]

In my mind there are two barriers to faster updates:

1. There's a single point of failure in the process for pushing patches during closed and open beta. Right now the entire patching process is handled by one person, so if that person has to drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time to find the Ark of the Covenant or whatever... everything stops. I've lost track of the number of times a closed beta cycle has sat without patches for literal weeks. That's fine for the live version of the game, but when a lot of the closed beta patches (specifically on the powers side) are pushed with bugs that make it impossible to accurately evaluate the changes, having to wait 1-3 weeks before the issue is addressed with another patch contributes greatly to tester fatigue. Hell, closed beta for page 2 had a whole bunch of changes to [redacted powerset] which ended up not making it to release, but there was not a single closed beta patch for those changes that wasn't broken in some way.
2. The way the closed beta process works on Homecoming leaves it susceptible to schedule slip and feature creep. Cryptic and Paragon would drop the entire update at once on closed beta and tweak things from there, so testers could jump in wherever they wanted to start. On Homecoming, things are added piecemeal to closed beta and it can often take upwards of six months between the first changes showing up on closed beta and the update going to open beta. It makes it hard to keep track of what's changed, what hasn't, and what's new when the process is stretched out over such a long period of time. The extended timeline is also probably seen as an excuse for a dev or two to go "oh we're nowhere near launch for this update and I have this feature that's almost ready to go, let's throw that at the testers and see what happens." If Homecoming isn't going to wait until they have the entire update's worth of content tester-ready before they push it to closed beta, they should at least have a clear and transparent cutoff date for new additions or major changes so the process isn't stretched out across several months.

There's also a third barrier which has more to do with a subset of the dev team than the Homecoming team as a whole:

1. The approach to powers balancing and tweaks is "numerical changes are boring." Numerical changes might not be the most exciting, but they're also the quickest to implement and easiest for testers to evaluate. Homecoming's powers team design philosophy results in changes no one asked for getting thrown onto closed beta, going through several wildly different iterations, and ultimately getting pulled completely in many cases, which is a waste of both tester and dev time.

Edited yesterday at 02:23 AM by macskull

[Starhammer]

Create a legally separate LLC that uses donations to fund hiring programmers, artists, etc per task on contract to create compatible code, art, animations, etc that can be then made freely available to homecoming for use in updates. I'm sure the lawyers and bean counters could figure how to make it work if they wanted to... then it's a matter of convincing the "Shut up and take my money" crowd to trust this second party.

[golstat2003]

16 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I am personally happy/satisfied with the content being developed and the speed at which that content is being rolled out.  I would rather not add more and more work for a group of volunteers to do.  I think it better they work on what they want to work on at the pace they are comfortable with to avoid getting burned out.  Adding more scope means adding more management and time.

 

Is everything they are doing perfect?  No.  Are there things I personally would like to see done that are not on the roadmap?  Sure.  That said, I understand this is a volunteer group doing this in their spare time.  

Pretty much howI feel about the speed at which they are doing things. But over the last few days I’ve gotten the impression that some folks think they are moving too slow.

[golstat2003]

All great responses folks. This was an interesting discussion. I’d actually bet more folks are fine with the speed of the updates than not, based on the comments in this thread.

[Ghost]

2 hours ago, Starhammer said:

Create a legally separate LLC that uses donations to fund hiring programmers, artists, etc per task on contract to create compatible code, art, animations, etc that can be then made freely available to homecoming for use in updates. I'm sure the lawyers and bean counters could figure how to make it work if they wanted to... then it's a matter of convincing the "Shut up and take my money" crowd to trust this second party.

That sounds like something a company/business would do to expand - not people doing this as a hobby.

[mistagoat]

39 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

All great responses folks. This was an interesting discussion. I’d actually bet more folks are fine with the speed of the updates than not, based on the comments in this thread.

I'm mostly fine with the speed of updates. This last one was a bit long and I probably would have prefered if it were split in 2 but not really a big deal. 

 

Where I think having a volunteer only team hurts us a bit is in the QoL, less interesting, nice but not critical department. The devs have said that they basically work on what they are interested in working on. That's gotten us new power-sets, new story arcs, new enemies and re-vamped enemies because those are interesting things to work on. I expect that most of the team would rather work on that sort of stuff as opposed to overhauling the character select screen to show more info or figuring out how add sort functionality to enhancement bins or any number of other less exciting QoL upgrades. I totally understand why this is the case, if I'm working for free then I'm at least going to work on something that's interesting to me. No shade on the devs here.

 

Money is what gets people to work on boring things and I don't really know how we'd incentive anyone to work on the mundane stuff without the sirens song of those sweet sweet dollarydoos!

[Seed22]

11 hours ago, macskull said:

In my mind there are two barriers to faster updates:

1. There's a single point of failure in the process for pushing patches during closed and open beta. Right now the entire patching process is handled by one person, so if that person has to drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time to find the Ark of the Covenant or whatever... everything stops. I've lost track of the number of times a closed beta cycle has sat without patches for literal weeks. That's fine for the live version of the game, but when a lot of the closed beta patches (specifically on the powers side) are pushed with bugs that make it impossible to accurately evaluate the changes, having to wait 1-3 weeks before the issue is addressed with another patch contributes greatly to tester fatigue. Hell, closed beta for page 2 had a whole bunch of changes to [redacted powerset] which ended up not making it to release, but there was not a single closed beta patch for those changes that wasn't broken in some way.
2. The way the closed beta process works on Homecoming leaves it susceptible to schedule slip and feature creep. Cryptic and Paragon would drop the entire update at once on closed beta and tweak things from there, so testers could jump in wherever they wanted to start. On Homecoming, things are added piecemeal to closed beta and it can often take upwards of six months between the first changes showing up on closed beta and the update going to open beta. It makes it hard to keep track of what's changed, what hasn't, and what's new when the process is stretched out over such a long period of time. The extended timeline is also probably seen as an excuse for a dev or two to go "oh we're nowhere near launch for this update and I have this feature that's almost ready to go, let's throw that at the testers and see what happens." If Homecoming isn't going to wait until they have the entire update's worth of content tester-ready before they push it to closed beta, they should at least have a clear and transparent cutoff date for new additions or major changes so the process isn't stretched out across several months.

There's also a third barrier which has more to do with a subset of the dev team than the Homecoming team as a whole:

1. The approach to powers balancing and tweaks is "numerical changes are boring." Numerical changes might not be the most exciting, but they're also the quickest to implement and easiest for testers to evaluate. Homecoming's powers team design philosophy results in changes no one asked for getting thrown onto closed beta, going through several wildly different iterations, and ultimately getting pulled completely in many cases, which is a waste of both tester and dev time.

This is the most succint and perfect way to describe the issues plaguing CB. When people go "Why arent more things getting tested in between cycles?" One, this isnt my job just like its not the HC devs job to post this stuff. I test as things come in IF i have time or feel it's worth it to make time for it(i.e. its not a partial patch with horribly bugged issues plaguing a set or arc or what have you)  Goes both ways. And two, this. The cadence is frantic and loose which I have been trying to convey for years but not as clearly admittedly as this. 

 

 

This also creates another issue in CB as the team goes, "Well how are we supposed to know if it's broken if you all dont test it?" You test it internally like any other dev team on the planet does? A lot of bugs that make it in are extremely obvious glaring bugs you can catch before in internal testing I feel.

Edited yesterday at 02:12 PM by Seed22

[Bionic_Flea]

5 minutes ago, Seed22 said:

You test it internally like any other dev team on the planet does?

 

They do, but it's hard to proofread your own work.  It's easy to miss that misspelled word because you know what you meant and your brain reads right past that. 

 

You also need to test things on multiple builds and frequently with multiple other players to find the problems.  That requires a critical mass of testers.

[Seed22]

17 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

They do, but it's hard to proofread your own work.  It's easy to miss that misspelled word because you know what you meant and your brain reads right past that. 

 

You also need to test things on multiple builds and frequently with multiple other players to find the problems.  That requires a critical mass of testers.

Yeah that I can understand. It just felt strange in this last page how many glaring bugs made it in and of course patch cadence is held up for the reasons mac outlined. Couple that with wannabe supervisors trying to police testing and you really get testing fatigue to an extreme degree.

[lemming]

It takes time to get more developers up to speed and I think that is actually in the works.   And I assume that they're putting in the work for the rest of it as well.

And yea, there are features that people want NOW, but overall, the game is still evolving and not at a speed where it becomes unrecognizable.

 

Testing is probably one of the failure points since trying to set up tests for a lot of items is difficult.   Especially since there's a lot of interconnected items that don't get tested because of in testing, most people just test the obvious changes.

How many people tested all the original Skull missions at various levels to be sure nothing got borked when they added the level changes?   And that's still a fairly obvious test.

 

And repeating these tests when something gets changed since if there is a code merge issue, you might go "See, this bug is fixed" while various other changes didn't get merged into the release on that because of reasons.