Ogonna wrote:
Quote:
You have to stop thinking of it like a game and think of it like a business....
Of course it's a business. And the game developers have their right to earn money from this game.
My only issue is that they almost never issue bug fixes. There are bugs that have been in the game for years and never been fixed. For even the simplest bug fixes you're expected to wait days or weeks for them to correct it.
If a game is profitable, as this one clearly is, there should be serious attention to detail, making sure the game is running smoothly, and customer service. Sadly the people running this game do none of that.
We've released content updates (and countless bug fixes) for years - along with hiring a QA tester to prevent more a while ago.
It's worth keeping in mind an MMO like Super Mechs is *not* something we can just touch and fix when aware of an issue.
Trying to find an issue we can't reproduce can be weeks or months of potentially fruitless work (the codebase is *huge*, keep in mind we support many platforms, a huge amount of devices, it all is scale-able and is divided across multiple systems so we can keep online during massive growth, something other games are notoriously bad at surviving
)
Just getting a fix in for something can, depending on where it lies (even after reproducing it, fixing it AND applying it) can cost up to 2 weeks simply because it means having to prep it for all the different platforms we support to prevent incompatibility, though sometimes its much faster (e.g. the drone fix was in just one of our systems, so once we knew how to reproduce the issue it was gone within hours
).
There's a simple reason most smaller game companies don't even try MMO's, and a simple reason why even larger ones have major issues with them - everything is difficult. A "quick restart" can destroy the game if not done properly, some fixes can create dozens of new bugs.
I'd say it'd be a nice challenge to find another web/mobile MMO at our size (we've grown significantly but we're still quite small in comparison to many others) that offers social systems (usually too risky. Smaller ones can just have the dev monitor it, most our size opt to outright remove them and perhaps re-add them once the cost of staff is inconsequential), has response times within 3 days (or even a week
We beat the industry average by days actually! Even among the companies that do offer a support system, which many dont, we're about thrice as fast).
In the end we've a team of devs now, a team of artists, a QA tester, two community managers, a forum (soonly this will be improved), a support desk and we track errors that show up in our game actively (if we do get an error log, it's automatically shoved right infront of our devs
).
These things are difficult for a small company like ours that can not afford the luxury of opening everything up (as we do need a source of income) but also has to deal somehow with platforms that take days to a week to approve an update while we have to update and support all of ours simultaneously (admittedly with a margin these days thanks to great architecture).
Remember that even just a year and a half or so ago, the server would crash about 3 times a day and sometimes stay off for half a day or more in a row ?
Can you remember the last time we had a server outage beyond daily maintenance?
...Remember when just half a year ago, the server slowed to a crawl frequently?
...the only reason I do is because I used to have to take shifts with Ilona making sure people are called when it goes wrong. Yikes.
We've always had problems.
But we're growing (quite rapidly), our approval rate is extremely high (we've some of the best ratings among games on multiple platforms
) and we're working hard to get better and better. There's really less issues than ever before, even if we do have a new one pop up now and again, the game has really never been this stable. We grow our team (and the quality of our services) more each time we gain a spurt of players.
As for the topic, we have plans to make the situation much better, but LovelyDeath makes a good point. We do need to fund the game - we've added countless of new ways to earn mythicals (for years it was 0, now there's campaign, the small chance in normal boxes, events, daily bonus and the new gifts given occasionally.) and will continue to move towards making the game as accessible as possible to all players.
In the end we'd like everyone to have fun and enjoy this game, we're not near done on adding more of that for *every* player.
It's pretty easy to forget how far we've come, there.
Hope that explains.
