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[Kamamura]

Reading the dev blog, I understand less and less the rationale behind the priorities. One would think that implementing/fixing the basic stuff should go first, and complex, advanced and potentially problematic stuff later.

For example, I keep reading crazy stuff about undead, necromancy, spell system, witness reporting with multiple layers of added complexity (and, of course, bug potential).

Meanwhile, the game still lacks basic stuff (or it is buggy), like economy - salaries, hirelings, etc. The clothes bug would be nice to fix. Much effort should be spend optimizing the game, since many players report quitting due to FPS problems created by tracking dust/mist/vapor after a simple cave-in - how much worse will things happen after the game will also track stuff like who knows who is a werewolf and who does not (division of authentic and alleged information layers), who witnessed what when, and what chopped-off bodyparts have developed nice personalities.

Also, extending the development to one release per year brings practical problems - players will age and die too quickly to appreciate the final product!

[Andal]

Not trying to bite your head off, however, there are several threads in the General Discussion section about this exact topic. No offense, but we really don't need another one here.

Here's a major one, though others have been derailed in this direction.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=95698.0

[Mitchewawa]

A lot of the problems are fixable by players; cleanmap for dust and mod clothes out of the game to increase FPS. I'd prefer big updates with new and exciting features and challenges then bugfixes which are already fixed.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

To continue this terrible thread...

Kamamura:  Toady is a single enthusiast, not a software engineering company.  Therefore, he is prioritizing fixes and updates according to his own desire to create, not any desire to ship a product.

It's like this -- say you're building a house and all the furniture in it and all the landscaping around it.  If you want a fully functioning house that you can live in as soon as possible or sell to someone sooner than later if you give up you follow a very simple plan of something similar to foundation, gross landscaping, framing, exterior walls and roofing, wiring and plumbing, aircon, interior walls, interior fixtures, furniture, fine landscaping.

Toady is not building a house for living in or sale; he's building a house for the hell of it.  So he's building some furniture here and there and wiring up one room to see if he likes the way he's distributing the circuits.  The roof is half shingled because he mostly figured out shingling but got bored with doing up the seams.  Today he's enamored with getting a perfectly proportioned flower plot and tomorrow he'll rip up and redo the garage foundation because he found it settled a little off level.

So yeah, the priorities are messed up, but only if the goal is a product.  If the goal is to have fun making DF, he's doing it right.

[Vodrilus]

... and you misspelled 'weird'. 

[Kamamura]

I am amazed how many people are willing to step in and speak about the motives, feelings and goals of other people with so much conviction. It's as if they were them, until you realized they aren't, and poof, the magic is gone...

BTW it would be perhaps really good to kill this thread since other people already expressed the same opinion as I did (which, for some, might be an indication of it's validity).

[evileeyore]

I am amazed how many people are willing to step in and speak about the motives...

No one in the thread has spoken of motives.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

I did.  As an actual professional software engineer, it's fairly easy to infer quite a few things about Toady One's process by the way he's been building this game.