let me rephrase that. Are you really alpha asking this? Have you not heard ANYTHING that was said recently or seen what we are doing? Really ?

From the same source, even the same paragraph : but when we expect to be under active development

Its the time when actual development on that part starts. Not when it releases

While it may not be completely accurate its also not a way to tell yhea this should release a date X

Posted By AlphaWolfofthepack at 5:04 PM - Wed Sep 18 2019

let me rephrase that. Are you really alpha asking this? Have you not heard ANYTHING that was said recently or seen what we are doing? Really ?

This. I'm at a loss with where to begin with the OP, really. Only someone who hasn't been paying attention and deliberately not watching videos or reading posts could hold anything like the views in it. And, to be fair, that's possible. I've lost count of gaming communities I've been in where people go off on some huge rant and it's simply because they aren't au fait with what's actually going on. My best advice to the OP is either read up, or if you're feeling down and out, maybe take a break and come back in 3-6 months.

Its a bit taken out of contex. I agree that some thing get delayed far to easy. I do know that development isnt easy to set in stone. Sometimes things arent possible the way you invision it or it just doesnt work the way you want it. Sadly this is how develpment goes. A game seldomly holds to a set time table and if it gets pushes then is hardly worth the time it took to develop it. I rather have them take a bit more time and realy make it good then a rushed game.

You have totally missed the point of my post.

THIS is the core of the problem

Can't imagine you people are naive enough to give SBS like $700K since DSS started! And I am afraid cash will flow once they start to sell virtual pixels of unsold land again.

AND this is some kind of form of pressure to put on SBS

Please, I beg you - demand progress before you fund another year or two of Studio's grocery bills.

SBS is delivering nothing, breaking most of their promises, yet people allow them to bath in money.

Seriously $700K and counting is what community think maps are worth? and those few pictures in the shop?

Because you can't possibly be talking about that pre alpha running witch a torch simulator that was shown recently.

Posted By DerryFH at 03:31 AM - Wed Sep 18 2019

You have totally missed the point of my post.

THIS is the core of the problem

Can't imagine you people are naive enough to give SBS like $700K since DSS started! And I am afraid cash will flow once they start to sell virtual pixels of unsold land again.

AND this is some kind of form of pressure to put on SBS

Please, I beg you - demand progress before you fund another year or two of Studio's grocery bills.

SBS is delivering nothing, breaking most of their promises, yet people allow them to bath in money.

Seriously $700K and counting is what community think maps are worth? and those few pictures in the shop?

Because you can't possibly be talking about that pre alpha running witch a torch simulator that was shown recently.

so basically you are saying that you don't want them to eat? so they can't continue?

Posted By DerryFH at 10:31 AM - Wed Sep 18 2019

You have totally missed the point of my post.

THIS is the core of the problem

Can't imagine you people are naive enough to give SBS like $700K since DSS started! And I am afraid cash will flow once they start to sell virtual pixels of unsold land again.

AND this is some kind of form of pressure to put on SBS

Please, I beg you - demand progress before you fund another year or two of Studio's grocery bills.

SBS is delivering nothing, breaking most of their promises, yet people allow them to bath in money.

Seriously $700K and counting is what community think maps are worth? and those few pictures in the shop?

Because you can't possibly be talking about that pre alpha running witch a torch simulator that was shown recently.

We do get what you are saying but just shot down the only argument you had why. The supporters of the game that are good for that 700k actually do believe this is progress. As do I.

Im following numerous games in development, most sink alot of money in a demo so they can show off something. But in general these demo's arent representative of the game. SBS did make two demo's Silverrun mine and the jousting. We do know they are demo's but the mechanics will be actually in the game. Im glad that SBS isnt sinking money in "early" unnecessary playable demo's.

and frankly that "torch simulator" showed that there is actual progress in the game client development.

The oddest part of your complaint, to me, is that you think $700k is a lot of money. That will have paid for 2 years, and it is what they have looking forward entering their 3rd year. I don't know how many employees SBS actually has, or what it is paying them, but, that's not a big budget.

I also don't know what, exactly, you think can be coded in 2 years time from scratch. Who knows, maybe things do go sideways and SBS goes belly-up and we never get a game. But there's no evidence of any problem that I can see. Yes, the schedule you posted would be ridiculously optimistic and, not surprisingly, we aren't in beta testing 2 years after the kickstarter. Oh, well.

Personally I get why they moved the alpha back to after DSS. But I really wished they would use their several millions to hire a view more people to get work done a lot faster.

Yes, I do believe the game will be released and that it will be a quality product. It may not be what was exactly promised, but I have faith they'll stay as true as they can without compromising quality. And yes, I have and will continue to support SBS.

No shame in that.

Sadly, I am no longer the "true-believer" I once was. Too many delays, cancellations and changes of direction have sapped all that from me. I was NEVER a proponent of giving dates for anything here because I feel their inability to hit any of them does far more harm than good. At times I have felt accidentally and or intentionally "misled" by the developers. And release dates seem as if they throw a dart at the wall and the dates on the dartboard are the most optimistic and ambitious dates ever seen in a development. I won't say lied to because I feel it was more using our enthusiasm to hype things way out of proportion than actual lying.

That being said, as of now I feel the domain selection is an unqualified success. One, it proves albeit late as usual, that COE can deliver on a promise and the promise can be engaging and fun and all that we expected from them.

Two, domain selection showed that the premise of the political part of the game is alive and well and in the hands of the community. The deals that were made to get the domain you wanted in my Duchy alone were so engaging it made me be very active, for me, on Discord since this began. It made me want to and gave me a reason to participate in my Duchy shenanigans as I have never done before. And much to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed it.

Three. COE needed to get something in the hands of the players we could actually interact with to show that there was some actual progress and not just more theory crafting and screenshots we could look at for 5 seconds and move on. And I feel the Domain selection did this in a HUGE way. Wow, Something they promised they actually delivered on and in my opinion was everything it was promised to be.

Four. Look how this success has invigorated the community. So much so, their very well designed cash gr.... :) I mean fun-raising event even has made me open my wallet up again after pledging NEVER to do so until the game was close to completion.

Five. The success of the domain selection has bought them much needed time with the community. I was as sour on this game as anyone over the last year. Now, because of it's success, it has bought them a huge amount of time with me. I will NEVER fall down the rabbit hole of being a "True-believer" again of any game but now I feel there is some actual hope the game MAY come out and be recognizable as what was promised us.

All that being said they have swung things around in my mind but not even close to what it once was. I need to see them build on the momentum of the Domain selection and follow it up with something else at least as substantial in the near future. I have no idea how much time they bought for themselves even for just me. I will know when it has run out when it does. But I hope they understand that this is just a band-aid on how low we had sunk and not rest on this one rather large success or in the coming months we will be right back where we were at our lowest point on here.

So, I have no problem at all with what the OP said. To him, the domain selection was just not enough to swing his confidence in the developers back to the plus side. For me it was BUT it is only temporary. I will say though that COE knocked it out the park with the Domain selection event. We see what they are capable of. We just need to see more of it and continue marching forward and building on the momentum of this launch.

SBS definitely has an issue with delays, but..I feel like the OP doesn't understand that MMOs take a while to make and many people didn't believe in the timeline they released in the first place?

Posted By Sohei at 09:44 AM - Wed Sep 18 2019

SBS definitely has an issue with delays, but..I feel like the OP doesn't understand that MMOs take a while to make and many people didn't believe in the timeline they released in the first place?

Unfortunately for COE, the unrest constantly missing dates has caused proves otherwise about people not believing them. Most of us have/had no idea how long it takes to make an MMO. Especially way back then when they posted their release schedule. We believed them for everything else they said back then. Why would we not believe them about the dates? Sure, if you're talking about now, I would be more cynical about the dates. But back then most of us believed them. And they expected us to believe them or why bother posting them?

Posted By DerryFH at 6:31 PM - Wed Sep 18 2019

You have totally missed the point of my post.

No... You have totally missed the point of the post you're quoting.

Let's put the full paragraph preceding that part of post in here for context, shall we?

To that end, below is an approximate schedule - not of when we expect the work to be complete - but when we expect to be under active development toward a particular deliverable or milestone. Providing a timeline in this format allows us to have an open, transparent, candid conversation about what and when we're working on something, while still giving us the freedom to make changes sprint-to-sprint and change the dates of our internal milestones to suit our development needs.

And while we're at it, let's throw in the equally important paragraph shortly after the rough timeline provided:

Now that you've seen the new, revised timeline I wanted to take a quick moment and talk about the "Cone of Uncertainty." The Cone of Uncertainty is a project management phenomenon... [which] means... that the further you are from achieving some kind of task the harder it is to predict with any accuracy the date, quality, or cost of completing the task or project and the higher the variance.

I get it, dude. Most of us are frustrated with the time the game's taking to develop. But at least get your facts straight before you go plucking pieces of a public post apart to suit the sentiment of what you're trying to say.

Should we be paying their grocery bills? I mean, think about it. Honest question here: Should we be paying a development team to work full time on a product we want them to make? We're basically commissioning an MMO that doesn't fit with conventional design parametres or marketing models, something that hasn't been made because pretty much every MMO developer either has a niche product that works, or is trying to emulate prior successes to further capitalise on the decaying herd of dead horses that compose the existing MMO market. Nobody is willing to get their toes wet with something like this. Except SbS, and us.

Yes, they've made mistakes, and not all of those are trivial. You can attribute those to malice, inexperience or incompetence as you desire - but the fact remains that nobody else is doing what they're doing. By all means, call out their mistakes and bring them to light as they're made. That's a necessary part of the process. Just make sure you have your facts straight, and don't go flying off the handle out of frustration. We're all sitting on it, and a lot of people in the community are biting their nails. But healthy criticism and destructive abuse bring very different influences into play on the development process. If we want the game finished, nobody's served by stirring resentment over things that cannot be changed.

The game's not out. The game probably won't be out until at least late 2020 - which, incidentally, is an estimate at least a few people made back in the kickstarter days from what I recall, and is probably still pretty conservative. But the game development's also not running on publisher or investor funds, and that means we're paying SbS's wage while the game is being made. That wage is a necessary element in the game's completion. Passion projects are not an easy thing to get to completion. They require certain conditions to remain stable, conditions not usually found without the assistance of the filthy rich. Short of being an act of deliberate fraud, there's no shame to be found in CoE's creation if every mistake contributes to a better approach in the future. You don't break new ground without making a few mistakes along the way.

Sorry if my tone's overly aggressive with this, but seeing people plucking information out of quotes like this gets really annoying after a while. Particularly when it's used in the sort of context it's being used in the OP here.