My apologies again then Maltavius - I should have known better to read too far into your wording, as ESL is extremely common in these forums. Let me at least compliment your written English that it was perfect enough that I assumed it was native. (I know you were not the one that said it was unplayable, as well, so those comments were not directed at you) I can understand the irritation at bugs; I started my career in SQA, and as a dev now they are the ever-present monkey on my back.
Look at it this way - he is a lot like an author that is working on a grand epic, handing off rough chapters one at a time to his buddies for private consumption and feedback. It is rough, but quite readable, and quite epic. He is maybe 2/3 the way through to completion, and he is taking George RR Martin levels of time to get there. As his private set of readers, some of us are saying "This would be a blockbuster if you just polished up this rough draft of what you have already!" and he is saying, "But I'm not done yet, I may need to heavily revise those chapters." He could certainly go back and polish them up, one at a time - he needs to at the end before he publishes, right? But there's a good chance as he continues, that he may not be happy with a chapter here or there, and he may heavily revise them before the end. Any time he spent polishing them before he decided to completely rewrite them is partially/entirely wasted.
That to me is what a beta is all about -
our primary function
to him is to review his work and help him guide it forward. Our enjoyment of it is secondary: it may make him feel good and motivate him that we like it, and it may help generate advance buzz for his work; but ultimately his goal is to complete the work, not make everyone 100% happy with the rough draft. Just before publication and after, he can focus on bringing everyone from 90% to 100% happy in his rewrites. It is enough for us to identify and document the bugs for his to-do list at the end*.
Where I think the disconnect lies is that people look at the current (and past) revs of the game, see that it is immensely playable but also flawed, and assume this game is finished and at the "make us completely happy" stage. People are not used to dealing with a half-finished product that appears to be finished. We've become used to highly-polished AAA releases that add highly polished content packs/updates that drastically add to and change the product, just like his updates. The difference is, we bought the AAA product, and those updates. There is a reasonable expectation that they be polished, and hell to pay if it is buggy. This is where my "not paid one red cent" comment comes in (and why donations are irrelevant). But for as alpha/beta testers, there should not be such an expectation. We're volunteers; its a free download; it's a work in progress. It's customary to polish at the end, and its not there. Ultimately, we're going to need George RR Martin levels of patience to see that final product. Que sera, sera.
*
As a minor example, look at the military patrol bug. I believe it was in the code for quite awhile, and it became such an irritant that someone else debugged the binary and found the exact problem, and this is all documented in Kavi. By letting the bug be, the community became motivated to solve the problem for him and saved him time that he used to add mine-carts. Now he can add a fix quite quickly since it has been root-caused; OR, if he ends up completely rewriting military-related thoughts, he can do that too without having wasted any of his own precious man-hours finding and fixing that bug.
One could make the argument, "well, that just proves he should add more developers, so someone can bug-squash while he writes features". Maybe so, but it's a moot point - he's made it perfectly clear he wants to solo the development.
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Topic: Maintenance releases in the future? (Read 3175 times)