Stardock's effort

I have absolutely no concept or frame of reference to say that those are good, bad or purple values at this stage in the game.  No fucking clue.

you say so...

I have an opinion, that the gears shoud be changed since the release. The general consensus as of now is that the game is fairly stable (the bigfixes paying off) and while the game is exploitable still, it offers reasonable challenge and as someone said 'my old tricks aren't working anymore' (the balance/AI effort is paying off).

The trend of having 15% or less on cosmetic/ui is stable (exception was 0.951, that had 19%), and it is reflected in opinion, that the game's UI is severely lacking, there is not enough visual differences among factions/units.

If I was to give advice (which I wasn't asked for) I would swithc the gears, so more effort would be put on making the gameplay easier, more fluent (UI, cosmetic), more spectacular (better fx, better animations), and less on fixes (focus on major ones only for a time beeing).

and by the way, you should consider swearing a little less, it hurts my feelings to read so many fucking's, shithead's, asshole's on the forum that is supposedly for and by strategy gamers that boast higher average level of intelligence as compared to fast clicking ability of RTS players and eye-manual coordination of the FPS players.

OK, given the brilliance of comedians such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Dennis Leary (to name but a few) I am REALLY interested in how you can possibly justify that higher intelligence = less swearing ...

While I appreciate the analysis, I'm suspicious that the number of entries in changelogs correlates to the amount of effort they're putting in. I know you tried to correct it with a rough factor of two here and there, but I'm still not sure it tells us anything useful.

Were it up to me, I would put all the effort on UI issues (including things like handling better units that finish their pre-assigned move and have leftover movement) and AI.

OK, given the brilliance of comedians such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Dennis Leary and Jon Stewart (to name but a few) I am REALLY interested in how you can possibly justify that higher intelligence = less swearing ...

lord xia is awesome, adults swear all the time ^^ there's nothing unintelligent about making full use of the english language. it's often used in a positive context.

Fallen enchantress is a fucking awesome game ^-^

*giggle* Sorry that I hurt your feelings, but I am going to continue my language as is. Feel free to ignore my post.

@pommalley, I guess analysis is too strong word for what I've done. this is just some numbers pulled together for fun. The only reason I think changelog entries are  comparable in workload is that there are some changelogs that have great variance of entries share (fixes took almost 70% of the log 0.952, content 35% in 0.915 or 0.95, AI unmodified 36%). Secondary as a programmer, I know that making a change worth of changelog entyr can take several seconds, or fe hours but never more than that, if there is more work it usually means more than single thing getting fixed/implemented, and hence is split into several entries to keep the code change manageable)

@xia I've too much respect for people to ignore them when they swear. I ignore them only when there is little more than swearing. It still hurt my feelings. I shouldn't have made that comment though (despite my feelings), it derailed my own thread

Well, to stay on topic, I just don't think you can conclude anything from this data.  I don't think the weight of every entry is time/work equal.  Also not working in this field, I can't say that the data presented is meaningful in a way that correlates with a verifiable conclusion.  Does the number of entries equal the manhours of work?  Wouldn't some entries represent some things that took minutes and others hours?  What is the appropriate percentage breakdown each category should have?  Compared to what?  Is there a standard?  

What people need to get is that the "content" part of the game is done. There might be a spell added, or an item, but mostly the 100 champions, the 100 quests, the 400 items, the 100 improvements, the 100 monsters, the 200 unit desigs, the 1000 tiles, the 450 effects - that's finished now. They're not going to go back to the drawing board for any of that for these patches. These patches are improving the main product by fixing blatant problems, such as crashes or balance issues.

If we see any significant game mechanic change, or content addition, it will be in the form of DLC or an Expansion.

@xia, I answered above, I think that by and large the entries are equal in terms of workload (with the exception of balance, and AI, the first because they are mostly easy to do (xml only), and the latter because Frogboy tends to put single entry after one weekend worth of work.

@HF, exactly, and yet you could see by the annoucement that they are putting more work into DLC - maps, and they plan to do significant enhacement (1.1) before christmas, and early next year another content pack (expansion)

This suggest that they are going to pour more effort into content (increasing further from the current 30%) resourced freed after most critical bugs fixed. and leave current trend of 15% effort spent on cosmetics.

I might guess that since the business model is to sell content (DLC = money, expansion = money) they start to capitalize on the work done during last four years.

I'd argue, that they start a little too soon. with 50k copies sold, the investement has already been paid off (and 100k sold WoM certainly helped the cashflow during that time), and they should for a short while focus on polishing the game before returning to the drawing table and adding more content. I do hope that 1.1 will focus on that as much as I'd love to see summoning fleshed out and multiplayer DLC.

wait what, are we intelligent, I had no idea ... can I get out of this club again?

Nice list, always hoped for better UI, I always say, half a game is composed of the UI, since that is the part that tells what the game is doing, to the player.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Sentinemodo, have you looked at the number bug fixes in 1.01? And that is just what they could get fixed in the last two weeks, it is far from all of them.

The 1.00 release version was riddled with almost as many bugs as the late betas and I know if I was at Stardock I would be putting everything I had into getting that number down so that the game has a more reliable feel to it. And I'm not talking about crash bugs, I'm also talking about whether I can rely on the UI and gameplay, for both the player and the AI, the AI in particular has many bugs on what it can do, such as the auto complete buildings on load, settling on swamps, settling beside monsters without the monster noticing until the area comes into player visibility, etc.

Although if I was at Stardock I would have fought tooth and nail to push release back so that these problems could have been fixed for 1.00...

Fight themselves?

~ K