Elijah Newton said:
Just wanted to drop a quick line thanking you both for taking the time to respond. (despite truncating ThriKreen's response I found the whole of it a great read).
You are welcome - we realize there's a (very) large gap between what the gamer knows or hear about the dev process and what we actually experience for several years. Hammering away at a feature, a problem, realizing a feature just isn't fun, or not enough time to implement it, ideas hitting reality, dealing with publisher and fan demand, each other, families, or health problems (like my own emergency OR trip). Even just general software development isn't quite the same an experience - it's one thing to develop a program that is functional like a spreadsheet, another entirely to make it
fun when that can be so subjective.
We'll take any chance to dispel the misconceptions. Due to all that exposure, we start seeing connections and relationships between all the various parties, and how it relates to past history in comparison. Things a lot of people seem to ignore, either due to rose-tinted glasses, short-term memory or just out of ignorance. And knowing this, most of us are usually more tolerant of a game's short-comings as we all know we're like seeing 3/4 to 2/3 of what they intended.
Like for the online component of SimCity. If they had supported offline play, how would it handle if you were playing offline, then wanted to migrate to online or vice versa? Or they supported local server hosting for MP, but you stopped hosting and your other friends wanted to continue playing, how do you deal with that? Sure you could have migrate to another player, but if everyone was offline, how do you sync to the latest when you popped back on? Then due to the global server farm, they have to limit the size of cities since they wouldn't delete it right away, so that's a lot of cities in the database. Hence why there's a limit to 10 slots a player, otherwise they'd quickly run out of room. So, a lot of compromises.
A lot of us so called "corp shills/defenders/apologists" are more into correcting said misconceptions (especially those from certain people that skew facts to suit their opinion), outlining reasons why some things are the way they are.
We will call out bad decisions if asked, but people rarely ask that of us. Like, I wouldn't say SC's online component is the best way to go about it, I would have suggested allow for solo offline with no achievements, global market, etc., and have the online for multiplayer, ranked, global market and achievements. While I would keep both modes to have the same city size, to avoid the disconnect if you switch to online and off (to keep the experience the same), you could probably get away with at least doubling the city size since there might be less people occupying the global server farm's database. I haven't seen the numbers though, so I can't say.
But I will respect and defend the Maxis guys on making a game how they want.
And of course, since we deal with games all the time, we realize it's not the end of the world - if I can't play it right now, especially for an online game like an MMO or this, sure it sucks since I did pay for it, but I have other things to do, like the backlog of other games or busy making my own. Heck, I know many devs would just drop everything at 4pm to pick up their kids and spend the rest of the night with them and not touch any games.
Hope that sheds some more light behind the game dev curtain.
(edit, grammar)
