We need a progress report.
Geebus
Member Posts: 142 ★★
There has been next to no meaningful information on the progress of development for too long. For years the community received devblogs on a monthly or bimonthly basis only to have those posts dry up within the last year or two. It is safe to say that there isn't much of a window into the development despite many promises in the past for greater communication.
The updated roadmap is a great step in the right direction. It gives people an insight into what is coming down the road. What it doesn't do though is show progress and explain setbacks. To do that, we need those monthly devblogs to return. It isn't enough to know that development is ongoing or that there have been setbacks. We need the specifics. We want to know what has been accomplished, and ever increasingly. what is holding you back.
What I want more than anything are regular devblogs that explain what progress has been made. I doubt it would be hard for someone to go to each of the departments and ask them for a write up of what they are working on, what they have accomplished, and what is holding them back, all to be compiled into a devblog at the end of each month. Folks wanna know what is going on and this sort of thing would certainly go a long way towards solving that issue.
Comments
If anything you want to know is actually being done, there would be devblogs.
Can anyone explain why are they not working on the performance optimization and gameplay mechanics rather than focusing on adding useless factions like the Aussies? Its beyond me what these people are doing.
I would assume that they are working on both. I've never understood why people always assume that one form of content has to come at the expense of another form. The folks making new models and textures usually aren't the people who are making fixes for the game.
That said, this is an example of exactly what I was talking about with communication. They seem to focus on showing off the new flashy stuff too much to the point where people can easily assume that they aren't bothering to do anything about the other aspects of the game that have always struggled. Like I mentioned in the OP, there used to be pretty regular devblogs that would talk about upcoming changes and, very often, these posts would also detail work being done on the less exciting parts of development.
Even more so there are tons of bugs and issues that have been around forever that never seem to get fixed. I don't doubt that it isn't from lack of trying but this sort of thing doesn't get explained to the playerbase very well. When someone sees a bug that has been around for years, they assume that the developers don't care to fix it. A lot of these conclusions could easily be alleviated if the developers explained in depth why these issues aren't solved. This sort of stuff has been done in the past to pretty good effect. There was a post in the past on reddit where someone on the dev team explained why vehicles perform so poorly on hills. I wish I could find it because it was such a good example of communication done right. I can only imagine what good it would do if the developers were to explain what is being done for optimization or even better what is holding them back the most with optimization.
There is also ex-owi employee explaining to players how "it's just too late" to go back through older maps to make some fences/rocks not collide with heavy vehicles.
There is also the likes of T-90A and BMP-2M which can't possibly take too much time(since they only need a turret swap), assuming they had a modeler working on it, yet they still are not in game.
Weeks later there is still no information on upcoming or ongoing development. More and more it seems that the development team is settling into a trend of only releasing information in the form of changelogs shortly before an update. I genuinely don't understand how this can be screwed up. You don't vow to increase communication then gradually reduce it to what could hardly be considered the bare minimum.
Whoever is in charge of communication desperately needs to step it up or at the very least explain this absence of information. Some communication, even if its just to say that there is no news, is better than complete silence.