Jables thoughts on communication.

I'm all for Uber putting out there what they are currently working on, and what they know will 100% make it in. But history has shown that the PA community can't handle being told something, even as a "wishlist" feature, and it then being removed (Unit Cannon, for example).

Edit: And of course there's nothing wrong with seeking input into which things the community would like to see more, if Uber has a choice.

@raevn the Unit Cannon is a terrible example of people being unreasonable, considering that it was a key feature of the kickstarter video, was talked about in dev videos for a while, was promised that it was coming for ages, , and then just sort of dropped off the dev radar entirely. It wasn't a 'wishlist' feature, not by a long stretch. It also doesn't help that it was dropped off without anything to replace it for planetary invasions.

If your logic was correct, we should have seen lots of posts on here complaining about experimental / mega units
missing from the game. We haven't - it was clear it was a wishlist item, they up front discussed it with us and decided not to go ahead with it.

History has not shown that the community can't handle being told something, history has shown that the community can't handle being told something without warning. Delta/Invictus debacle, Able commander, early release, etc all happened because rather than telling the community about it weeks in advance it was dropped on them without any prior warning.

When I said "Even as a wishlist feature", I was including those as well, rather than implying the Unit cannon was one. Poor phrasing on my part.

Anything that gets listed on a roadmap will be taken as fact that it will be in the game, hence why the Unit cannon is a good comparison. The issue is with things seen as facts being removed (regardless of whether that "fact" was real or not).

@stuart98 I don't disagree about communication without warning.

On the other hand, it IS fun to have something like the Annihilaser dropped onto us without warning (or at any rate with only prior vague hints about it)...

From a PR perspective, surprises can be good things, if they are good surprises.

But whoever is into this for the surprise factor should not be reading dev posts and voting on feature-wishlist boards. So we are back to the idea of publishing the roadmap in some form or other.

@jables why not follow star citizen as a guide? Their communication about development has been top notch.

Annihilaser looked awesome to the uninitiated but added nothing whatsoever to the gameplay and there were plenty of things the people that coded it could have been doing *cough*unit cannon*cough* that would have benefited areas of the game that actually needed it *cough*orbital*cough*. We didn't need a halley 2.0.

@raevn I'm not really sure what you're actually saying.

You said the community can't handle knowing about wishlist features, with the Unit cannon as an example. I pointed out the UC is a completely different beast than any kind of 'wishlist feature'.. so you, um agreed with me?

Not sure what you were getting at

Just trying now to think of an example where the community was told something might be coming and it ended up getting cut, and there was a firestorm (I can't...)

Music to my ears!!!!

@jables Do you have any idea who's working on balance, now that Scathis has switched to Human Resources?

Just this.

I think as long as people accept that they might not get every feature in the game right off the bat, don't think it'll cause as much of an issue as it has in the past. If there is transparency which looks like is going to happen now, then we all know what to expect, it curvs expectations on a much more reasonable level to where everyone is happy and they know where their at when it comes to PA.

Edit: This also prevents the out-cry of waiting for weeks or months on something and when a patch finally arrives, the features everyone was expecting isn't there, if people know a roadmap then we know what to expect with whatever the current patch is without being blind-sided about what to expect and then get disappointed when a feature isn't release with a new patch.

It's not a Halley 2.0. It's a game ender. It's Halley squared.

And it sold copies.

And it looked awesome.

Yes, there were higher priority items, mechanically speaking, but this wasn't a bad addition by any means.

Totally agree with you there, I don't think it was a bad addition by any means what so ever either, its still a frakking awesome thing to have

Because people totally wouldn't endlessly complain about it's non-existence if it were left out in favour of the unit cannon.

Personally, think a biome 2.0 is bit more important of an update than the unit cannon personally, but I understand it was part of the original kickstarter so probably should take priority simply because of that.

It looks cool but it doesn't add any substance. You can't tell me that you thought it added something to the gameplay after using it 10 times.

I haven't even used it once lol. I even avoid playing in systems that contain it. But I still think it's a cool addition.

I'm not debating that it was a cool edition. That's undeniable. That doesn't change the fact that it added absolutely nothing to the gameplay.

Over the asteroid?

No, but it does fulfil the older idea of the late game weapons shrinking the size of the map.

The current metal world is however....very good at it.