Not sure what you mean with this. You can't be saying you're aware of all the bugs and issues before you push things live? There are a few long standing bugs which have been around for literally years which really baffle me. I'd really love to come in for a week to see the codebase and try and fix some of them for you. As an example, there's what appears to be a floating point rounding issue which can cause text to jump around the screen on a per-frame basis. It's amazing to me that it has existed all over the game (main chat, TW logs, TB logs) for years without being addressed.
Either way I was referring to only judging your work from an internal perspective (both what you decide to work on, and the quality of what you produce.) If the players dislike the things you choose to work on, and/or the way you decide to implement them, it sounds like you're basically saying it doesn't matter as long as you think you did a good job (and presumably, as long as the MTX metrics perform well.) As a game designer, surely there's a desire to have a happy player base who are spending because they enjoy the game, rather than having an angry and addicted player base who spend out of addiction, FOMO, etc.
If you know how game development works or have a tech background you should know the myriad of reasons why not all bugs are fixed or why some things are fixed and not others. I appreciate the confidence, but I doubt youre a better engineer than every engineer we have at work and, for that particular bug Im sure theres a reason why it hasnt been adressed yet. As with all game development, we create, catch and fix bugs all the time before release and some still slip out, thats for a lot of different reasons, for example: we dont have time, they are not critical, they are hard to repro, they dont affect a large enough portion of the userbase, they are really hard to fix for non obvious reasons, fixing them would require touching really risky sections of code ... etc, etc. Thats just gamedev in general though, nothing particular to SWGoH. Bugs happen and bugs ship all of the time. You think the people who worked on Skyrim didnt know they were releasing a broken game? Of course they did, they were too busy fixing the bugs that were even worse, thats just the industry.
The reality is that if you spent one day in our studio youd have a lot of these questions answered within an hour.
Your second paragraph, that one starts going into specifics. Lets make sure we are using the royal "you" here, that means, the entirety of CG, the execs at EA and our partners at LF. Its not "me", Xavi, making every single decisions. I certainly make a few, but its a team effort and yeah, we are very judicious and have a lottttt of discussion regarding what goes in the game, when, how and why ... after all, we are the ones trusted with making the game, we play the game extensively and are the most successful EA mobile and SW game of all time.
rather than having an angry and addicted player base who spend out of addiction, FOMO, etc
I have seen this narrative make its way across reddit since we released the relics. I simply cannot agree with it but I can see some people have taken it as fact which is unfortunate because thats just not so.
It kinda feels like you don't feel you can be compared to anybody, then? Not fair to compare you to WoW, not fair to compare you to Marvel or other competitors etc. Your situation, your codebase, your team are obviously unique... that doesn't mean the players can't compare your product to others in the market. If, as it sounds, you're sticking on a version of Unity from who knows when, and the "risk" of updating will continue to prevent you to do so, then . Has there ever been any serious discussion or consideration to a ground up rewrite of the client? I guess you wouldn't be able to talk about it even if there was, but I bet there's a lot of people on the team who would love the opportunity to do something like that. There'd be nothing like getting to write a v2 of something armed with the knowledge of all the lessons your learned from writing v1 and it evolving over the next four plus years.
The whole "nothing is free" side of things is of course true, but again as I said before, I'd say the criticism is often on what you guys prioritise. You say to notice how things were during the marquees phase, but that's literally what the criticism is, right? Like you guys planned, designed, and released nothing but marquees for a while. Nobody asked you to or forced you to. You could have dropped a couple of those marquees for a legendary instead, or whatever. I think the silent majority favour the times where you are doing a few different things at the same time. Something for the newer players, something for the midgame, something for the endgame, something for the "tip of the spear". When you focus down on just one of those elements for a while, it gets dull for the players not in those categories. Again this isn't to diminish how much work the GLs no doubt were for you and the team, but for everyone who isn't in the 1% this last title update has nothing to offer them (at least for a few months). I actually kinda miss when Galactic War was non trivial and every day was a question of whether I'd be able to squeak through it and full clear or get stuck on one of the later nodes.
Comparisons are fine, you can definitely talk to me about what modes Marvel has shipped that would benefit SWGoH, or how FE Heroes release cadence should be studied, or what Dragalia is doing, etc, etc. I think non tech comparisons are fun and interesting. However, some comparisons dont work and the WoW example does not, neither does the Marvel graphical quality. Im not nullifying your point, I'm just discussing your examples. Of course we are willing and working towards improving our systems and engine, but I dont think youll be giving me a lot of games that are in our situation, because other than Clash of Clans and Fire Age, there arent a ton of games out there with our longevity in the mobile market, which means a lot of examples fall flat because their strategy just wouldn't work for us.
Like you guys planned, designed, and released nothing but marquees for a while. Nobody asked you to or forced you to
This is another phrase that comes out a lot. We create strategies based on the market, the numbers, our own intuition and desires as developers and other feedback sources. You have literally no idea who asks for things to be made and you are also implying things should only be made when we are asked to (either by fans or someone else)
Thing is release cadences are really, really hard and have to be planned in advance. Some theories are correct, some arent and pivoting mid development is often hard or impossible. Ive seen fans criticize every single release only to praise it weeks or months later, relics and grand arena being great examples. We are in the middle of creating systems that will allow for more stuff to do and I think the amount of characters well release this year will be fun and exciting ... but of course we cant tell you all ahead of time and it leaves people with nothing to do but speculate. Thats fine, thats the world we live in. We are in nigh uncharted territory for a game this size of this longevity, there is no tried and true path for us and as the level of investment from players increases, so does their sense of "ownership", which in turn increases the risk of toxicity and overreaction.
Again, thank you for your thoughts. I hope you realize Im not the games PR, just a team member with some insight on our process and a willingness to at least chat about it. A lot of your more precise questions cannot be fully answered in a public forum and Id love to chat about it in a pub once the apocalypse is over ;)
