Open Letter to whoever decided on the upgrade to happen yesterday

[Luzino]

Dear whoever made the decision to upgrade just especially yesterday,

I could have written to you already yesterday, but I feared to break some forum rules with my wording if I had done - so I postponed it until I had camled down.

I understand how much effort you put into the game and the development. Really. Cause I now know how much time goes into planning just one little event. The thing is - I held one yesterday. One that I cannot just pick up again or repeat due to the setting I chose. What you did was to make all my efforts go to waste by NOT giving out a word about the upgrade until a minute before shutting down the server! Would that have been asked too much? Talk about the weekends festival had been going on for some weeks here on the forum so someone involved in the upgrade must have known about it. A warning a day or just a few hours ahead? Would it have been so hard to do? I can't believe you decided just 5 minutes before you shut down the server that "now" would be the perfect time so "let's get on it"?

Right now I have the impression I'm only valued if I find bugs for you, not if I try to add some fun to the game. You definately managed to spoil my fun and right now I don't feel like playing much. My mood is somewhere between outraged and crestfallen. To the extent that I don't even care about the improvements you made (just read the changelog). They sound like you put a lot of time and effort in it. Sorry, at the moment I can't bring up any enthusiasm about them. Maybe - and hopefully - a while later.

I have even given thought as to why you didn't say a word beforehand. Maybe fearing too many curious questions from your players? Sorry, make that testers. A "details to follow soon (tm)" might have done the trick. Or "let us surprise you". Or maybe even just a private message to Jaycol who handled so much of this event. He could have gotten in touch with the others organizing stuff behind the scenes so the whole thing could just have been postponed for some reason.

But it was surprise of the worst kind. I will try to get the new version to work so I can settle a deal with those who took part in my event and then? I don't know. I might not be around too much. Right now I don't feel like it. Which is sad seeing how much time I spent in the game enjoying it.

Please don't take this letter as flaming as I'm not intending to do that (I could have written yesterday then), but to show you what effect your decision not to give us a chance to postpone our events had. In the hope that you might consider changing your information policy for the future. Personally, I don't know if I'll hold an event again after this experience but I'm sure there will be others and I think they deserve better.

Thanks for reading. (And feel free to close this thread as I don't want to start a major discussion here.)

[ElWu]

Ey Luzino cheer up!

I know it's a LIL bit strange but it DID happen already so what could we do . .

Maybe devs are so stuck on testing they forgot EDITED : |don't have time to think| about players . .

(no irony intended - I know you're doing hard work)

Maybe just gotta cry a river, make a bridge over it and go on . .

Like my friend used to say

Cheer up !

And don't give up !

Rally was great and questions really interesting. Got answers for all

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

It is completely simple misfortune that your event happened on a weekend when we were ready for a release. We are too immersed in trying to prepare content to pay any attention at all to player events. Development of the game has to come first. The information policy is what it is and will not be changing any time soon. The time we spend "rolling with the punches" of building the game is no less than what we expect to see from players. We have "target dates" for releases and as you can imagine they are often delayed, so the release comes when it is ready and not when players or gms OR devs are.

I know this may sound horrible to you as you are angry/upset/whathaveyou but there really is no better answer than this. We cannot and will not spare the time to set our on pause while player events are held. This is when we had the time to get it done. No one is happy your event did not work out as planned and we wish you luck getting it done another time.

Remember time itself is not currently passing in Yliakum so next weekend is the same as last weekend.

Happy gaming!

[theirah]

yes, cheer up luzino. You can still have an even since they're planning to do finish the festival another day.

It might be nice to have a general idea of when an update might be though. even "update maybe coming up soon(tm)" a couple days before the update would be nice.

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

We cannot give you that as I expressed above.

[Xordan]

I can't believe you decided just 5 minutes before you shut down the server that "now" would be the perfect time so "let's get on it"?

That's exactly what happened.

If you wanted a rough idea, we've been planning this every weekend for the last month or two It might not have happened this weekend, it could have been last week or next week.

Talk about the weekends festival had been going on for some weeks here on the forum so someone involved in the upgrade must have known about it.

You assume we have time to read the forums. A lot of us either rarely do or stick to the technical/general/plaza areas. I had no awareness of it anyway.

[Siteri Kidachi]

If you can't finish it in the game, you could always finish it as a forum RP... if anyone buys or trades anything you could just meet up in-game to do it...

[Luzino]

Thanks for some reactions from the devs, I appreciate it. And by no way did I want to express that the upgrade should have stepped back, I would gladly have postponed my event if given the chance.

But please, let's not overdiscuss it. Devs made their point clear about giving out information and I accept it, no matter if I like it or not. What decisions I will make upon this statement - time will tell and is entirely up to me.

Peace, folks.

[neko kyouran]

I love it when a plan comes together.

[Talad]

What Xillix and Xordan reported is very true, if you really want to know, we had a deadline for this release on 22 May (yes, we have plans and deadlines!), and every weekend from 22 May up to today we tried our best to release, but at the last minute things were not good enough for really shutting down the production server, so we tried again, and again, and finally it happened. The decision is taken with some risk (see the current stability issues) and is based on the overall status of art, engine, musics, setting, and the 3 distros (win, linuix, mac). The decision is also taken based on how much time is left from the point of the decision up to the end of the week-end (when everyone of us has to restart to work on his real life job and so release is impossible). If we estimate that the time is too short, we postpone, but we really learn it along the way during saturday/sunday.

I understand this may spoil in game events, and I'm sorry for that, but if we announced 22 May and then failed 4 weekends, lot of people would have to post-pone the events for 4 weekends, so this is the less damaging solution.

I can tell you that a mmorpg project is really a beast with 100 heads, running very fast on a slippery ground close to the edge of world and willing to drop the devs into the void. The devs are riding that beast, trying to stay up and have all his eyes look in the right direction, so it doesn't fall down itself.