Uber, Please Give Us an Update on Server/Offline/Saves

At least tell us that you're working on it.

Just tell us something.

They are working on it.

Yeah we know that. Would be nice to know a little more.

That's the real issue. This is the source of much ranting, flaming and annoyances.

We're not being given much information.
I loved Sorian's post about what he's been working on the past few weeks. But the fact that we don't even get a rough timeline on a lot of planned features casts doubt about the continued development and eventual implementation of those features.

So please Uber, listen to Brian, and everyone else who's asking for clarity. Tell us something. Give us a heads, up, some rough plans. Hell show us a picture of a blackboard sketch with ideas.

a picture of an overworked developer on his 7th coffee for the day
whoever is working on it: poor guy

They don't give timelines because inevitably they will miss some of them. If Uber came on today and said they hoped to get offline to us by next week, every fan site would have a news post confirming the hard deadline within an hour of Uber making their statement. Some people here like to make "confirmed" threads and news updates on very tenuous evidence as it is; just imagine the chaos if Uber started trying to give estimates like that.

It would at least show us that something is going on.

I think it would reduce unfounded speculation rather than increase it. There was one post in particular to do with saying flat maps which I think was unfounded, but I think that problem could be solved by forum moderators deleting or changing the title of posts which are highly speculative and are not in fact clever deduction based on what Uber has said.

A bit of care could be taken, as well as a range in terms of how much time it will actually take. Uber know how many developers are working on what, and must have some idea internally of how long things will take. Some may well make unwarranted conclusions based on what was said, but discerning members of this forum have shown they are able to tell the difference between something that's supported by what Uber have said, and pure conjecture.

Estimates can be provided with a proviso that they are only estimates rather than commitments. Uber could also reaffirm what it sees its commitments are, without putting precise timelines on it.

At the moment, the speculation is that PA won't have the save function or offline play because PA and HR share an engine and it's not mentioned as an HR feature. Perhaps Uber could either dispel that rumour by saying it's false or confirming it as true, or say they don't actually know. If Uber were more upfront with the plans for some features such as save, offline, and community hosting there would be less ground for people to come up with these rumours because the community would have already been informed about some important details, so don't need to (or even mistakenly think they need to) go into detective mode to try to uncover the truth.

The HR kickstarter mentions talking a lot to the community and that it's somewhat a joint development effort between Uber and the community, like it was in PA. So, let's see these words put into action, and detailed communication done about the remaining development of the game.

I don't want timelines because there's always a bust-up if something's missed.
But saying "We're on it." is really reassuring when Uber says it, because you guys are great at what you do.

I really think Uber could do a better job telling us what they are working on, but recently they have been very cautious because they were burned more than a few times by speculation. What we're seeing now is them slightly over-reacting to a few negative community members, but I think they will eventually swing back to a good middle ground.

As to giving timelines on development; this is something that a lot of people have asked about ever since the development of this game started. I can't really respond to it any better than these quotes from the best and most liked community member;

Got this link from a Steam user, this is the service used by PA...I think, and founded by UBER. IS it possible to remove PA from PlayFab? Does PA use Playfab? http://playfab.com/FAQ.html

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This is was taken from the Human Resource Kick starter page.


Will there be an offline version of Human Resources?
The initial goal for funding Human Resources will not have an offline version. We use our PlayFab service to keep our costs down, which gets passed on to you, and to supply us with lots of really useful distribution and gameplay features.
After the initial goal is met and funding increases, we can evaluate an offline version.
Last updated: Fri, Oct 3 2014 1:16 AM EDT
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Project Management, you learn to set dead lines, i am the I.T Manager for a Software dev company and we make projects, and we meet deadlines because if we don't we loose money.

That is what is going to happen here, any software company should have proper project management and time management in order to try and meet expectations for the company / owners and their customer base.

Notice how I'm not asking for a release date. I'm asking for an update.

However, as @mrguvernment mentioned, many times deadlines are required and needed.

I've been running my own web design and development firm for the past 4+ years now. If I told one of my web clients, "oh, I'll get it done sometime" and then never talk to them again and ignore all of their pleas for updates, I would get fired so fast. Hell, I wouldn't have even been hired.

Even though I don't know the exact date or time I'll get it done, and there's always the occasional difficulty that causes delays, I still have to give deadlines to my clients. And then I have to do what it takes to meet those deadlines. And when I give my clients deadlines, I always give them a date range to account for unforeseen difficulties and I don't promise anything that I can't deliver. And I always give my clients a timeframe that I am confident I can deliver faster than, so I can wow them by coming in before the deadline.

There comes a time where all of this "development is a moving target" bs needs to be tossed out the window and Uber needs to pick a target and stop stringing us along.

Yes. Development is a fluid process.

But, business is business as y'all keep on talking about in regards to HR. And guess what, all of that stuff you're saying about HR applies to PA as well.

Uber does need to set a deadline and deliver their promises.

If I treated my clients like Uber has been treating its community members (with constant neglect, lack of updates, and even downright trolling and attacking community members) then I wouldn't have made it past my first year of business.

They haven't given us any information on that for a long time, and even then it wasn't particularly formal.

A long time ago during alpha/beta they said

After quite a significant time passed we found out that they chose to halt work on the unit cannon in favor of other things. I guess my point is that plans change, and that things said a few months ago may no longer be true.

About the only thing I can confidently predict are the improvements to the system editor. Offline mode and better mod support are probably going to happen, but we have no idea when. Everything else is speculation. We may never see things like the unit cannon, or all that amazing jazz bundled with the chrono cam.

I don't even care much for uber giving us an estimated date at this point.

What would be nice is if uber were to post something like 'lately this guy and this guy have been working on the local servers' 'today this guy started coding this part of the server'.

This would allow many of us to settle down and may even reduce some of the rage directed at uber.

Come on if the starbound team can provide an almost weekly update like this, then a company like uber can too. There is absolutely no excuse for not doing this, especially since uber isn't attached to a publisher like eg ea.

New word of the year: Uber-slow

It's not the community's fault in any way. Uber really did this to themselves by not managing expectations in a timely manner. Think about the backlash to how balance was being handled. Initially it was said they wanted to do it "TA-styled" which was great, the community loved it. Time went by and balancing started, it was rough in the beginning but that was expected, as the numbers refined the community started to notice that it wasn't "TA-Styled" and trying to figure out why that was. Eventually it came to be known that Uber did not plan anything in particular in regards to balance and that they were feeling it out, essentially balance design by improvisation.

Sure we expected things might change, but when we were given an expectation from Neutrino himself about what was to come, why is it our fault when we're confused and upset about being delivered something different to what we were told? It's like my Barista metaphor;

So again, the problem isn't that things change, it's that we're told more or less to expect one thing only go be given another and not being told up front(assuming we're told at all).

The other issue is that it seemed that more often than not by the time things were "player-facing" in builds the decisions related to that thing had already been made about them and locked in before we even got a chance to comment. Remember when the Avenger was added? The Community was concerned about what it meant for the Orbital play and we were told it was "Only an experiment" which is a weird thing to call it when it turned out that they didn't seem to even try anything else and just stuck with it.

Or how about the Unit Cannon? Uber knew right from the beginning that a lot of people were excited about it, it was one of the big "Wow" moments from the Pre-Viz, second only to the Asteroid Smash at the end really. And all along people waited for it, finally the Alpha came around and the build-up of excitement to to getting the Unit Cannon started, but we ended up getting the Teleporter first, and while bummed because it meant we had longer to wait for the Unit Cannon, the idea that the Teleporter was a lot easier to code than the Unit Cannon was pretty apparent even to the layman and we accepted that while it wasn't a Unit Cannon it was still progress and a peek into what we thought would only represent a portion of the interplanetary mechanics, instead what happened? No word on the Unit Cannon at all once the Teleporter was done and it was eventually learned that the Unit Cannon was de-prioritized to post release due to complexity. Now look back at the timeline here and it's easy to see that the possibility that Uber wasn't honest with us is pretty viable. Heck, the Unit Cannon might have been pushed back even before the Teleporter was started, maybe the Teleporter was pushed up in response to the Unit Cannon being pushed back.

But that's only one option, what if after finishing the Teleporter Uber figured that was "good enough" and just cut corners by effectively removing the Unit Cannon from the plan for PA?

The Community didn't cause any of this to happen, we only reacted to what was(or wasn't depending on how you look at it) being presented to us and if you actually plot the course of all this stuff it's pretty obvious.

Now obviously full on transparency(Which Uber wrongly thinks is what the community expects) wouldn't really help, rather it would simply generate a new set of problems, admittedly one might argue that those problems are favorable to the problems we could have but that's a can of worms all in itself. But to say that there isn't some middle ground that while not perfect could go a long way to providing a better outcome.

Lets use the Able Commander Debacle as an example, What is the Able Commander Debacle? Well Uber wanted to reskin a commander and sell it in the Armory donating the profits to charity. A sound plan for sure, the problem start when the community found the Able Commander in a build and it turns out they had used the exclusive Progenitor commander for the Reskin. So the problem here is not only did Uber seem to completely forget to mention this to us but also allowed the use of exclusive content despite the reactions to what happened with the Delta. After several days of discussion and a community poll it was decided to not use the "Able-genitor" resulting in no commander being made available to purchase for charity due to a lack of resources(apparently the artists were busy working on HR stuff while trying to shove PA out the door by Sept 5th).

All round it was a sucky situation, it's not that people didn't want to support charity as much as that the community was displeased with the choice of commanders. Now imagine if, instead of embarking on this project without telling anyone, right at the start they said, "Hey, we want to reskin a commander to put in the Armory with the profits going to the charity and we want to use the Progenitor!" in the end, we might have still ended up with the same result of the "Able-Genitor" being pulled but and unless it happened quick enough we still would probably not have gotten a Charity commander at all, but the most important thing, the tone surround that discussion would have been MUCH more constructive, instead of people looking for explanations and feeling cheated they could have calmly let Uber know that while they love the idea they didn't like the use of an Exclusive Commander and worked towards a more equitable solution.

An even better way to approach it would have been for Uber to realize this was a great chance to do some community outreach and run a poll to decide which commander to select for reskinning and let me tell you, Community love feeling involved and even if the Progenitor or Delta had been present at least there was the very obvious way to voice one's opinion, but voting for a different Commander!

At the end of the day, it's great that Uber and other Developers can turn to Kickstarter as an alternate means to fund games, but they need to realize that you can't keep the community in the dark about things when you specifically told them that they could help mold the game right from the beginning, Uber needs to evolve their community interaction in the same way they've evolved how they fund games because much like game design itself, things can be interconnected in complex ways and you can't change something and expet everything else to work just like it did before.

Mike

You think everyone is happy when politicians makes announcements? No there are always going to be detractors. But the politicians don't just crawl away into a little hole, crying to their mum that everyone is being mean to me.

I'm sure someone at Uber reads the forums, but they just don't want to comment.

They comment on things pretty often. You can also see their names in red on the front page of the forum when they are online. There is just no reason for them to get involved in threads like this one that are designed to lure them into a pr trap.