Support Petitions Poll

I actually have to agree with Caco - today, time is money - you want special care and assistance (which can take a very long time to sort out) pay the devs (buy some prestige) and give them some food on the table.

Its not that I advocate that people without prestige consumption should not recieve help, however to be fair to those who do pay at this point, they are right in expecting their added resources are put into developing the game (ultimately, its not all about prestige,  it is the reason why many of us pay year after year).

If it is a bug, what's the difference between a paying / non-paying customer reporting it?

We're not talking about special requests here, we are talking about bugs that affect game play for everyone.

I'm a prestige user and i don't care if they answer my petitions or not, i just want them corrected. :D I don't want special treatment either, I'm sure devs can prioritize any and all reported petitions according to, I don't know, severity, game play, # of players affected by, reproducibility etc.

We just need to trust them imo, that's why we, me at least :), continue buying prestige.

edit: typo


Edited by Arakamis - 02 May 2013 at 17:37

Caconafyx wrote: Personally, if I were the Devs I'd put little or no priority in to answering the petitions of anyone who has not bought prestige. Those that have bought prestige pay the Devs wages (unless we all want to be bombarded with banner adverts). Those that haven't bought any (not even a couple of £'s worth of prestige) are just freeloaders that should be grateful for what is a great and free game to them. But that is just me, and a lot of you should be grateful I'm not running the game

If you were in charge and that was the dev mentality i'd happily leave this game and find another one of the 1000s to play, as would most other players...

For the record I am unemployed and have been for longer than I care to admit, but even I can find £3 for a little bit of prestige.

Banner advertising works well in games with huge player populations. Smaller MMOs like Illyriad do well because a small number of paying players is integrated into a community of free players. The community itself anchors the paying players and encourages them to continuously invest small amounts of money over a long period of time. There is little point to risking the ire of the broader community over something like banner ads, because it could erode the dedication of the player base for a miniscule gain. You'd need dozens of free players exposed to banner ads to compensate for a losing even a small handful of long-term paying players.

To the OP, I'm an engineer, and I'm forced to agree with Stormcrow. Even basic coding isn't that interchangeable, because only familiarity with the existing code allows you to be productive. Once upon a time my company outsourced bug fixing for a complex product, and the initial results were heart-stoppingly bad. More bugs were generated than resolved, because the third party was incentivized to close tickets quickly rather than to thoroughly understand the code and implement adequate (and adequately tested) bug fixes. It might seem counter-intuitive to non-engineers, but the Mythical Man-Month is a well known principle in high tech. I would encourage you to Google "the mythical man-month" to understand why throwing more short-term resources at a late-stage technical problem is like trying to drown a fire with gasoline.

SC, I would comment that I think many of these problems should have been caught earlier with better testing. I've been in plenty of situations where there was big sales pressure to release an update, but we got burned (almost) every time we pushed code out the door before it was ready. I know it's hard to test in a live environment, but I've seen enough Illy bugs that should have been caught at the unit or feature test level in closed nightly regression testing.

Additionally, one effective method I've seen to allow for bug fixing help is to have adjacent module owners do one day per week of paired programming, or at least do a weekly code review. Then you've always got at least one extra person available who can immediately and competently jump in and help hunt down root causes and implement fixes. We called it the "hit by a bus" problem--what if Billy is hit by a bus tomorrow? If there's nobody to pick up his code, then you've got a serious problem with flexibility.