Why remove Unit Wreckage?

I'm sure most everybody read the newsletter by now but just in case..

"After a lot of thought and a lot of observation, we decided to pull wreckage. It caused more problems than it solved but, more importantly, playing with it wasn’t fun."

Without doubt the worst thing that's happened in the last 100 years of mankind.

I just wish we could better understand the why, as usual Uber has only communicated the outcome and nothing about the mechanics /process that lead to a particular decision, makes it kinda unfair to us when you respond to concerns by say we should discuss it on the forums, because when we do that things eventually hit critical mass which is when you guys finally show up but all you end up doing telling us that we don't understand(because it hasn't been explained) and it's complicated but still not actually explaining anything.

This isn't even about telling us things that might change or about "managing expectations", this is something that has already been decided, why can't Uber go into more depth?

Mike

they dont have infinite time available ... asking them to explain everything in detail to us might be very timeconsuming and rather wastefull for when there is more important things to do ... after all they put themeselfes a deadline for 1.0 and the community showed already their concerns on missing ladder to which uber was forced to push release back ... we cant forget that uber is still a small team ... they can do only so much in a ammount of time ...

I think KNight raises a reasonable question and I'll comment from the general software engineering side of things:

With PA entering the polish phase and the T-shirts & models arriving, it should be pretty clear to everyone that "SOON(TM)" has become "VERY SOON(TM)".

As the clock counts down to release, a process known as triage becomes increasingly important, where the overall state of the software is being constantly assessed and difficult decisions are made as to whether to devote some of the remaining time to attempt to fix a issue, deferring a fix for to a later time ("punting"), or to remove the feature entirely ("cutting"). It's a balancing act that has take into account the entirety of the product (something that wouldn't be easy or even reasonable to communicate to us all) and the pressure only goes up as time dwindles. I can't speak for what goes on within Uber but, in my experience, these decisions are never made lightly since man-months or -years of effort and the satisfaction of the customer are at stake.

tl;dr version
1) Uber has just made a tough choice, but it's in the name of hitting the 1.0 release date with PA in as good a shape as it can be in
2) The pressure is going to continue to rise as 1.0 approaches and additional tough choices may need to be made.


(One other thing that I hope people will keep in mind is that Uber employees are required to be courteous to all of us. You can snark at them but they cannot respond in kind, nor can they necessarily talk about the details of what's going on internally. It's fine to express an opinion but, please, keep it civil. The level of interaction that we have here is rare and it would be nice to preserve it.)

japporo's post is good. +1 gold star to you.

Assuming they respond of course. I dunno about everyone else, but he communication we've gotten in the last 6 months has mostly been PR stuff, which to me isn't what we should be asking/settling for, not when things have been much better a year ago.

The catch here is that when we've asked for more info, we're told that we can't have it because of expectations, but that doesn't apply here, there is no expectation to worry about here because it's already happened so why not actually explain things more so we can understand instead of all of us bashing our heads trying to figure it out only to have Uber try and quiet us down after awhile instead of explaining it?

So then we should assume Wreckage's has less to do with the stated reason of "Not Fun" and more to do with "Not Fun but too much work to fix before release"?

Mike

the level with uber communicating to us is starting to fall off, thats what scares me.

the argument that talking about internal details is valid. However this did not stop Uber before telling us whats up and going on with some things. like the biggest instance is there has not been a stream in a while, which is a wonderful hub of communication and community fun.

The only communication from uber now is just agreeing with people on specific things (besides brad...hes awesome, and sorian...he does his own thing lol)

Ahem, more like. "It's not fun and would take too much work to make it fun with the time we have left."

Maybe its just me. But im starting to feel like they are a bit desperate to get this released asap, even if it means cutting corners.

That is my impression of the whole situation at least. I thought the whole idea of early access was to not have that rush, and to actually take the time to do stuff right. Because when you release the v1.0 and it gets reviewed badly. well then the game is hurt for life. The bad reviews on like steam and metacritic dont go away.

More communication and such would definitely be nice, even if it means stuff moves slower. Its even a good thing for devs at uber to get away from programming. In fact, there should be a week where they do no programming, where everyone at uber plays the game with random people online 8 hour each day for 5 days. Get a feel for the game, and what people are suggesting and such. Its one thing to play a few games online or just playing in the office space. Having to play this game for the next 40 hours over the course of a week, suddenly ill bet there would be understanding for ma

And if people are Uber are overworked, then take a week or 2 off, entirely from work or from the game, its not the end of the world. breaks are good, seeing stuff with fresh eyes can do wonders in any profession.

But we will see. Hopefully a 1-2 hour live stream soon with questions and stuff. that would be nice.

Normally i would guess it might be a money problem. but that cant be right hopefully. at least it would be nice to know if thats the case, we are running dry and have to release the game, then fair enough, i can accept that, ill take straight answer any day.

At any rate thats my thoughts atm for good or worse

It's kind of funny, in making my own mod for TA (on top of UH) I came to the same conclusion. Wreckage just encouraged a lot of behaviors that increase turtling and unfun gameplay. What I ended up doing was turning off unit collision on wrecks. They would still block shots, so the weapon type still mattered, but defenses weren't godlike and a couple dead units wouldn't create an instant pathing nightmare.

early access simply meant that people could buy into a early stage of the game ... it has nothing to do with the general pace of developement and they cant just get themselves two weeks off from the game as they set themselves a deadline ... also how do you know they may not damage themselfes further pushing back release?

Isn't that the same thing I said with semantic word differences?

Mike

Isn't that the same thing I said with semantic word differences?

Mike[/quote]

nope, nowhere in your recent posts have you ever mentioned uber having a lack of time ...
you focused on the question of why removing and not just fixing the problem
that is what i generaly read out of your posts

Isn't that the same thing I said with semantic word differences?

Mike[/quote]

I don't know.. you used but instead of and, it just made it feel a bit different, sorry if you meant it in the same way.

Just trying to say that it's not them being lazy, it's just that it could take quite a bit of work to get it just right and that they're already juggling quite a bit.

Also sorry for the "ahem" I feel that was a bit rude. :/

"Before Release" informs about the time frame as accurate as the community can be.

Mike

well ... oops ...

to be honest though squishis post gives a more clear indication of limited time ...
yours kinda has a tone of implying uber to be lazy ...

I'm assuming you're basing that on my overall attitude rather than the specific words used within that sentence here.

Mike

I would have been soooo much happier with a nice TA-like RTS on flat map(s) with a perfect pathfinding and deep strategic options.

Nobody asks them to make their life complicated -even more with a tight budget- by doing spherical maps.

If you remove spherical maps, you remove planet smashing, multiple planets and pretty much all orbital gameplay - some of the key defining features of this game that aren't present in other games in the genre. I think the response to the kickstarter can be pretty clearly seen as Uber being asked to do it. If that's not what you are asking for in this game, then you're really looking at the wrong game. It sucks that there's drawbacks - and there's risks anytime you push the envelope in a game - but the core features the game is built around aren't going to be the ones put on the back burner in favor of other ones.

Planet smashing is a gimmick. Orbital is not really interesting as it is.
Multi planet is a nice idea, but if the drawback is to have essentials features removed, I don't think it is worth it.

I've backed thinking that, as Uber claimed, the team was composed of RTS veterans, and if they wrote any feature on the list, they would be able to achieve it with the same level of accomplishment than the other game they have done.

So far I don't feel like there is anything in PA that is really extra-ordinary for a RTS.
Sure spherical maps & multi planet is unique, but does it worth all the drawbacks? Not for me.