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Never forget this simple truth about developers.


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47 minutes ago, dragonkain.3984 said:

Too hard to implement = We're too lazy.

It means exactly that and nothing else but that.

 

This comes from your vast experience in video game development, no doubt. Please tell us more about how project management works.

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1 minute ago, shrew.3059 said:

 

This comes from your vast experience in video game development, no doubt. Please tell us more about how project management works.

Can, but won't. You clearly don't deserve that, but if you really want to know you'll have to pay me for such knowledge.

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2 hours ago, dragonkain.3984 said:

Can, but won't. You clearly don't deserve that, but if you really want to know you'll have to pay me for such knowledge.

 

I guess since your post doesn’t substantiate, or even explain, your claim in the slightest, you don’t believe anyone deserves to know what you’re on about. Weird way to communicate, but you do you.

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There is thing that is really too hard to implement for devs, because the engine or the codebase is not made for that and it's will need a total overwal of the whole codebase of the whole game.

Or it's ask too much assets, like creating a new race will ask to recreate every armors, voice lines of the game..

 

Some things are really too hard to implements.

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I don't work in the games industry, but my job is, indeed, developer, and has been for more than thirty years.  I have (lots of) colleagues who are younger than my career.

 

Granted, I would never actually say those specific words, mostly because they aren't, as such, true, especially without further qualification.  What game companies don't publish (because for most of the audience, it would be 137% gibberish(1)) is a detailed analysis of why this or that feature is too expensive or too risky or whatever (mostly all three) to implement, so the audience tends to assume that they mean just a flat "it's too hard".

 

(1) Most of what any field's experts say when presenting detailed information about their activities is 137% gibberish to non-practitioners.  There's nothing special about developers in that respect.

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37 minutes ago, shrew.3059 said:

 

I guess since your post doesn’t substantiate, or even explain, your claim in the slightest, you don’t believe anyone deserves to know what you’re on about. Weird way to communicate, but you do you.

It's just one of those cryptic posts where someone complains, but they don't tell you why because even they know their complaint or the premise it's based on is absurd to begin with. 

Edited by Obtena.7952
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I'm sure this thread is brought to you by someone who has knowledge and experience with information systems architecture and scrum development.......

 

/s

 

35 minutes ago, Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

I don't work in the games industry, but my job is, indeed, developer, and has been for more than thirty years.  I have (lots of) colleagues who are younger than my career.

 

Granted, I would never actually say those specific words, mostly because they aren't, as such, true, especially without further qualification.  What game companies don't publish (because for most of the audience, it would be 137% gibberish(1)) is a detailed analysis of why this or that feature is too expensive or too risky or whatever (mostly all three) to implement, so the audience tends to assume that they mean just a flat "it's too hard".

 

(1) Most of what any field's experts say when presenting detailed information about their activities is 137% gibberish to non-practitioners.  There's nothing special about developers in that respect.

 

 

I have presented well-informed posts wherein I present technical terms in lay terminology.  I'm sure you can considering that 30 years of "development" work means you have a PMP cert at the very least.

 

 

 

To bring things back on topic:

 

Too hard to implement means that the project failed to meet the strategic, financial, and risk assessment criteria to be considered prospectively successful.  There are limitations and constraints in every problem that must be solved, no matter what industry you're in.  As such, it's necessary to design systems within the constraints. 

 

If resources were infinite, then the "lazy developers" statement can hold weight.  Resources are not, in fact, limitless.

 

strategic analysis involves identifying a project's alignment with the overarching goals of the organization as well as capitalizing on the strengths (core competencies) of the organization.

 

Throughout the first look of EoD, I noticed that ArenaNet went full HAM on the cooperative aspect of their gameplay design.  The cooperative nature of GW2's open world gameplay is a huge strength of theirs.  

 

Another thing is value-added, which involves more than just monetary metrics.  An easy, intangible value of the game that can be identified is player enjooyment.  Will the project bring value to the game in terms of its intangibles (such as fun to play and cooperative-in-nature).  Projects that don't bring much value shouldn't be pursued, because they cost money while bringing little to the players.

 

Cost analysis and return on investment are the financial factors that must be taken into account.  Pretty self-explanatory.  Again, resources are not infinite.

 

Risk assessment means a lot of different things depending on the industry.  For information system development, sunk costs are a huge thing.  How modular is the project and what can be recovered and used elsewhere if the plug must be pulled?  What are the critical   paths?  A critical path is one in which there can be no delay, else the entire project will fall behind.  Tasks that require a previous task to be fully completed before beginning is a common example.  What is the impact of diverting resources of the project away from other projects?  Humans cannot do multiple things simultaneously, nor can they occupy two disparate spaces simultaneously.  In essence, the developers working on the proposed project cannot be working on other projects.  There are many other considerations; this one is the easiest to identify.  

 

 

 

There is much more involved with "too hard to implement" and further information can be gained by attaining an MBA in project management.  This is just the barebones look at what goes behind the phrase.

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1 hour ago, WindBlade.8749 said:

Or it's ask too much assets, like creating a new race will ask to recreate every armors, voice lines of the game..

 

This is technical debt.  Implementing something that creates more work to update existing systems and creates more work for every system going forward easily scales exponentially.  Pretty soon, you can be buried in so much technical debt that you're doing nothing but updating things to match everything forever, until the last black hole in the universe dies out.

 

4 hours ago, dragonkain.3984 said:

Can, but won't. You clearly don't deserve that, but if you really want to know you'll have to pay me for such knowledge.

 

Seems like it's easy to hand out this knowledge for free.  Takes no effort so not worth charging.

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6 hours ago, Rogue.8235 said:

I have presented well-informed posts wherein I present technical terms in lay terminology.  I'm sure you can considering that 30 years of "development" work means you have a PMP cert at the very least.

 

I had to look that up.  And no, I don't have one (for the audience, it's a certification in project management).  I'm a developer, not a project manager.

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Gee if only devs made all programming decisions themselves, as opposed to having a project manager and management telling them something isn't cost effective, or viable, or good for the product.  Not being able to do something could mean that you're lazy, or it could mean that you're being told not to by powers that be, or even that it really isn't worth the effort for the return. That is the payoff doesn't justify the investment.  These types of generalizations help no one.

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12 hours ago, dragonkain.3984 said:


That's a consiquence. They had plenty of devs when gw2 just began, excuse for not giving us what we want was always the same, so your argument is null and void.


As others have pointed out, you do not speak for everyone. Everything that I have seen them reveal so far have been things that players have requested over the years. 

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Nothing is impossible, some things are just prohibitively expensive.

 

As for the reveal itself, I had quite a chuckle at some points and the cynic voice in my head, kept pointing out how they keep saying that something is so interesting, amazing and beautifull with no details on what it would make it so, but overal perception for me was good. so far it sounds like solid expansion.

 

Which considering other expansions I have seen recently is definitelly superior to promising game changing changes and then delivering nothing of it.

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You can implement anything. But at what cost? No matter what technology you use there is always a trade off. Throwing more people at a problem doesn't necessarily solve the problem. There is a process most software houses use when deciding to work on a product and this differs between businesses.

 

So, let's think about this, let's say someone breaks your car window. The garage tells you they can fix it, but it's going to take until the end of the day as they need to remove the broken glass from the door and get the replacement window. You don't want to wait so you cut a piece of perspex to the shape of the car window and use duct tape to secure it. Both solutions fix the window, but with the rushed solution, now you can't take the window down and you have shards of glass rattling around in your door, causing damage, and you have no guarantee your fix is going to last. 

 

I recommend reading about tech debt as it's an interesting subject. No matter what software project you work on, it's inevitable as you always have constraints. But you should be clear that you will incur the debt and that it needs to be paid at some point. 

 

I have experience of this kind of thing happening. A change made a 12 months in the past suddenly came back to haunt my team. We spent another 6 months fixing what we did due to poor requirements previously. 

Edited by Tiamat.8254
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As a software developer/engineer myself I can confirm that this is absolutely not true.

 

Too hard to implement == We already have tight deadlines to meet with the currently planned stuff and the new request(s) would need too many changes with the current architecture/implementation to be a reasonable time/resource investment.

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