Quote:
Originally Posted by waittilnextyear
I think abandoning the current title to concentrate on the next one would alienate a lot of the customers who are having issues with this version. My impression is that OOTP recognizes that it is a niche game and that customer loyalty is massively important for them. Most people are reasonable about accepting X% of imperfections in their product as long as the developers are responsive to decreasing that percentage in a timely manner. I doubt customers are as accepting of Y% imperfections (even if Y is lesser than X) if it means no support or possibility of issues being fixed. For this reason, customer support is always ongoing. That's why the dev cycle goes: development, testing, release, patching/support instead of just the first 3 steps.
I also think that a perfect version is something of a "unicorn" and will never be achieved. This was described more eloquently in an earlier post about how impossible it is to debug every permutation/configuration possible. There will always be a few people out there, whether through some fault of their own or not, who have incompatibilities and certain problems with hardware, settings, etc. Cashing in all your chips to focus on the next game sounds nice, but there will always be things to fix no matter how well the resources are focused. That is, I doubt the patching/support phase could ever be done without. Factor in the complexities of software development, the breakneck pace in hardware evolution, and the small studio at OOTP trying to navigate it all; I think the best that we can hope for is to use common sense (make backups of important files, don't act like a petulant child when asking for tech support) and hope the bugs that do arise are not crushing to deal with. If you are one of the unlucky ones that does suffer from a game-breaking bug, the hope is the developers address it as expediently as possible.
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I so very much agree with everything you have said here. However, I also believe that there might a middle ground that hasn't been very clearly defined in this discussion yet, but I think has been hinted at.
There will never be a perfect release, a completely bug free for everyone release. So, inevitably, some patches will be required. But what I have experienced in my short time as an OOTP customer/gamer is that the developers, for all of the right reasons, are eager to continually improve the game and give their customers what they ask for, to the extent that this is possible. But maybe we ask for a bit too much. Or, in other words, maybe the scope of change between iterations of the game should be a bit narrower.
This could mean, in practical terms, to the extent possible the developers should quash bugs and make subtle improvements on existing features in as limited amount of patches as necessary. But perhaps larger changes- almost entirely new features or significant upgrades of current features- should wait for the next iteration. I personally applaud the developers of this excellent game for being so responsive to their customers and for putting so much effort into improving their game continuously. But perhaps we've been a bit spoiled by this and have pushed them to be too ambitious in their efforts.
This is just my vision of what a middle ground position on this matter could look like. I'm not even necessarily advocating that this is what the developers should do. I think it would be presumptuous of me to advocate for anything really. I'm just expressing the thoughts that run through my head when I mull over what Lawn Loaf has said above.