I will try to reply, don't take my words as 200% official PS devs something, but at least use them as indication.
As said already, I think there have been different threads similar to this one, so, this is not a new request.
First, please don't take this as a rant thread, I honestly would like to see PS evolve, but I also see some problems in matters of organisation.
I honestly agree with you that there are organisational matters. A lot however depends from the circumstances, which are not always the happiest one. We have always to keep in mind that what it is behind PS is a group of people that are devoting part of their free time to something and what arises in the real life is (at least imho) more important and has higher priority. When something happens there, the contribution to PS is minimised.
Another good point is that people have a tendency to help in their first period of contribution and then, they fade away for unknown reasons, making the organizational plan less stable and reliable. Summary: often you don't know how much trust you can put in a new team member because you are not sure he is going to stick with the team long enough.
Here I would like to address some:
The processes are too closed. You barely know what is happening right know, on what the devs are working. If this work would be more open, the community could give much more feedback, even before things "go live".
True and false. I think the development is rather open. You can check what it is going on reading the history of the source code commital, however, the art is always a surprise and I think it is nice to have *some* surprises like that. Anyway, the things have got quite open also on that side, since in the website you can see some sketches about future things.
It is important to involve the community in the development, but the community is big and you need to have a clear target to follow, which might get slightly deviated by some suggestions, but you can't always listen to everybody or you will end up swiging and changing things every 5 seconds.
A lot of wishes from the community are taken in consideration, and the community feedback is important for bugs and for appreciation. I think the new features are based on what the players would like and the fact that there are new features instead of just bugs correction (which would be necessary for having a better base) is just because we have a strong community.
So connected to this issue is the problem that applications are much too long in the queue, without "somebody looking at it soon" ;-)
So maybe more people should evaluate applications.
The fact is, there are no more people.
We are already quite overloaded and it takes time and you want to have people that do a good job, becauses otherwise you end up just correcting what the other people have done wrongly.
And you don't want to waste time when there is already little time.
Actually it seems far too much is only the responsibility of Talad. More things should be delegated too other Devs or as said the community whenever possible. Anyhow anyone has to know exactly what his/her responsibility is.
We know which are our responsabilities. Or is the community that should know who is doing what? In that case, It hink it is enough to ask. There are no secrets there.
It is true that Talad is the "bottleneck", but this assures a quality that you can't find in any other game and also it assures a really important thing. Things will not fall apart. If Talad finds people that is reliable and talented, you will see him delegating things. But he is the "owner" of this project and he can't just give things to the first that comes, otherwise he will have to follow him/her and check everystep he/she is doing.
I am the first to hope that some tasks would be speed up or delegated, but I understand the thought behind this prudence and I would just hope that there would be strongly committed people in the team, like some of us are already (and we all know who are the pillars here!).
A quote from Karyuu:
"Other NPCs are involved, and their involvement needs to be approved by Talad. Hopefully approval of the new quests won't take long, as well as loading them into the game."
Why does this have to be approved by Talad? Why not other people who maybe are not so overworked? I suggest to transfer such tings to the matching department, or a work group.
Because certain things are pretty delicate and at the moment there is nobody with the perfect knowledge to fulfill such task.
The setting should be much more detailed. If there is more, release it. I do not mean to release huge spoilers if there is a big story going on, I mean different details about the world. Like descriptions of flora and fauna, politics, who is who - things your character would know if he lived a couple of years in Yliakum.
The setting department has been scarce of people for a really long time. Finally, some valid member has started to appear and things have started to move also in that direction. Why there are few people there? Because the setting department focuses on a really delicate part, you need not only talented people, but also people with the right set of mind. And it needs time before the person is ready to be actually 200% productive. It is also true that some good applications have been slipped away for some unknown reason, and I am really sorry for this, but I know that not everything can be done unfortunately in a perfect way.
About your suggestions, I honestly see a bit dangerous creating community working groups, simply because you need reliable people (and I know there is) but then the ones that are excluded will start to rant because they are excluded (even though, if they would participate they would contribute nothing at all).
But, I am open to discussions (however, I am not the boss here
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