Gameplay Design Rants (tm) - Fail Faster, the Dev Cycle

[nonsonogiucas]

Slightly off balance in either direction? Tweak , effects won't be severe enough to require other actions.
Indestructible? Fix asap, no need for other measures as nobody got their stuff wrecked.
Too easily destroyed? Fix asap, roll back server to pre-patch to undo the large scale damage.

A good way of describing how a test server works. Despite the fact that a real test server does not need rollbacks (that can be cumbersome) but merely resets.

Have occurred to you that the title of thread is "Fail Faster" and so the subject of the discussion was "shorter dev cycle"?

Imagine a shorter dev cycle taking place in the main server (and that is what JC promises). Imagine a tweak of come mechanic every week. Imagine a rollback every third day of every other week (maybe not so much as 50% of tweaks would need a rollback, but lets just assume)... Don't you see a lot of people getting pissed because of all the time lost because of rollbacks? I do... doesn't mean it is true or completely unavoidable, I may be wrong and probably am... I hope.

Now if Salem had opened the beta, say, 3 months ago, that would be pretty standard stuff but there are player right now on the server that play a week to raise humors of 1 point. They play the game like it was a stable game and not at all a beta. Are you telling me that rolling-back even only half of that work would pass as a totally painless operation?

[Feone]

Slightly off balance in either direction? Tweak , effects won't be severe enough to require other actions.
Indestructible? Fix asap, no need for other measures as nobody got their stuff wrecked.
Too easily destroyed? Fix asap, roll back server to pre-patch to undo the large scale damage.

A good way of describing how a test server works. Despite the fact that a real test server does not need rollbacks (that can be cumbersome) but merely resets.

Have occurred to you that the title of thread is "Fail Faster" and so the subject of the discussion was "shorter dev cycle"?

Imagine a shorter dev cycle taking place in the main server (and that is what JC promises). Imagine a tweak of come mechanic every week. Imagine a rollback every third day of every other week (maybe not so much as 50% of tweaks would need a rollback, but lets just assume)... Don't you see a lot of people getting pissed because of all the time lost because of rollbacks? I do... doesn't mean it is true or completely unavoidable, I may be wrong and probably am... I hope.

Now if Salem had opened the beta, say, 3 months ago, that would be pretty standard stuff but there are player right now on the server that play a week to raise humors of 1 point. They play the game like it was a stable game and not at all a beta. Are you telling me that rolling-back even only half of that work would pass as a totally painless operation?

Of course not. It's a last ditch measure to fix major damage.

I assume the devs do some preliminary testing of their mechanics before they implement them on the server, a patch causing issues strong enough to warrant a rollback should be rare. Not a weekly thing. Of course a true test server isn't a bad thing, but I reckon the extra work may not be worth it for now.

[Icon]

WoW did this, you could basically replicate your current character to the test server and ***** around, report bugs, waste time.. I really don't play much anymore, haven't alot since the wipe, the current mechanics give me diabetes. I would do this in a heartbeat, and probably alot of other bored old heads would as well