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Goblin Squad Member

yeah that's right it was that easy lol common team what ya got?

Goblin Squad Member

Giorgo wrote:
No need. It has been answered in recent blogs and developer posts. After the rush of getting EE launched, they will provide us with a "roadmap" as part of the ongoing crowdforging development.:)

This is actually satisfactory.

CEO, Goblinworks

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This is a totally legit request. We need to have some public discussion about our prioritization list so that we can engage people in Crowdforging.

Let me say a few things about this topic in general.

First, there are big issues involved in making this level of plan transparent. There's nothing we are hiding but we need to work really hard to craft the right description of what people would see when we release such a report. There are a lot of people who will not understand that our priorities are flexible and that as our assessment of the challenge of various tasks changes we would be reprioritizing our work. This has the potential to create "you lied" threads that we don't want.

Second, I want to talk about the idea of a "list" so we're all on the same page.

There is no list.

Instead, there's a series of scoped objectives starting with the widest scope and the longest timeframe, narrowing to the most specific scope on the shortest timeframe.

Widest Scope

The widest scope are things like "get all the races and all the classes from the Pathfinder Roleplaying game core book into the MMO". No details at this level, just objectives. This is the level the original Design Document was written to address. It doesn't even have ETAs or responsibility assignments. Most of our first year of Dev Blogs address the kinds of things at this level of scope.

I don't think there's anything on that level that the community doesn't already know about.

2015 Plan
The next level is a broad outline for what we're going to do over the next year. It pretty much looks like this:

Q1: Outposts & POIs
Q2: Settlements
Q3: Siege Warfare
Q4: Formation combat

For 2015, there's not a lot of Crowdforging to be done at this level. These are our 4 quarterly goals and we need to do these things to build the game we want to build. We may not have explicitly spelled out those goals before but they should not be a surprise to anyone. We've said all along that our goal was to transition to Open Enrollment at the point where Settlements could contest for Territory, and that schedule takes us right up to January of 2016.

Now you'll note that none of those goals is included in "get the races and classes from the core rulebook into the game". Those quarterly goals are scoped to the quarter but within that quarter there are also other things being worked on like the aforementioned core book content. There is also a certain amount of bug fixing and polishing of existing features in each quarter. And there are things like building analysis tools, more customer service tools, working on the website and the forums, etc. which are also included. However, none of that stuff is explicitly scheduled at this level.

There is some amount of Crowdforging that can happen with those aspects of the plan, but it doesn't happen at this scope. It happens at the next level.

Next Quarter

About 30 days before the end of the current quarter, the team does a planning exercise to determine what they will attempt to complete in the following quarter. They have to leave some time unallocated because its impossible to tell how much of the current quarter's work will get finished and if something has to be moved forward to the next quarter there has to be room on the schedule to make that move.

It is at this level that a lot of choices have to be made about what each person on the staff will be working on. They are all mutually interdependent so its very rare that people can just work on "what they want to work on". Instead, collectively, the team has to decide what to tackle and estimate the time commitments for art, design and programming for each thing on that list.

Here is where we can have a lot of Crowdforging input, and we will. This is a time where we can share with the community a list of things we could work on and ask to help us prioritize that list. Community feedback can also help us determine that we need to add something to the next quarter's list that we hadn't planned on putting there.

We haven't figured out how to do this yet in a way that involves a large enough slice of the community to be fair. We cannot just have the same active 30 people on the forums "represent" the wishes of thousands of players. This is something we are going to spend a lot of time trying to systemize in the next few months and it will remain a work in progress probably forever.

Current Quarter

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and no development plan survives contact with real life. We are operating a live game and that means that we need to be able to stop what we had planned to be doing and fix things that become broken, or seize an opportunity to implement a feature to address a glaring but unanticipated need. So even though we start the quarter with a plan that plan is not likely to match what we actually do to 100%. 50% might be a good goal, and we might congratulate ourselves if we got to 75% of the plan.

Some of this can be Crowdforged but in a different way than the quarterly planning because the decisions to make these kinds of changes are often made in realtime rather than after a process of looping in and getting community feedback. On the other hand they're likely to be made because of input we're getting from the community and we need that feedback to make good choices. This is another systemization process we need to work on and formalize.

Right now we have a team of people who are working really hard to get their checklists complete for the start of Early Enrollment and I'm not going to slow them down to work on some public discussion of their work planning process. When we get past this current stressful period we'll be able to do a lot more of that. So expect us to revisit this topic in some depth after Early Enrollment begins (and by "after" I don't mean "the day after" - think weeks, not days).

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Thank you, Ryan. This is the kind of meat that I--and I suspect others--enjoy oh-so-very much.

Goblin Squad Member

Thank you Ryan. Thank you Goblin Works.

Goblin Squad Member

T7V Jazzlvraz wrote:
Thank you, Ryan. This is the kind of meat that I--and I suspect others--enjoy oh-so-very much.

right sausage meat lol.

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