The folks at Pirates of the Burning Sea have posted a dev journal detailing the complications of the AvCom revamp.
Aether wanted me to share with you a bit about how the AvCom Revamp looks to me, the Producer. It looks like a bunch of work, is how it looks!
MMOs change all the time. Known fact. Almost the definition of an MMO. We buff/nerf outfitting for balance; we add new ships; we even add new features. We’re set up to deal with the fact that we’ve got a live game that could need a hotfix at a moment’s notice and possibly the next batch of changes up on Testbed but even so we’re working on the next batch of changes beyond that. (It’s been a learning experience to get efficient at that but we just about have it down now.)
How do we deal with a major change that touches almost every aspect of the game and needs multiple milestones to complete? New features, we just don’t give you access to until they’re ready to go. Balance changes, we try to push in batches so we can see how one set does before making another set of changes. For the AvCom Revamp, though, our usual process is insufficient. We couldn’t begin the process without breaking the entire game and having it stay broken for some unknown number of months.
Read more here.
