Cheers, thanks for that. One of the things I'm really having to battle lately is people suggesting large and wildly divergent changes to the game. Sometimes that's just a factor of folks not having a crystal ball to be able to read my intentions. Other times it's because they wish this game were some other blend of genres that it's not.
I'm not at any risk of succumbing to those sorts of suggestions, don't worry. But a nearly equally destructive thing has been happening the last week: I've been spending huge amounts of my time arguing for why something works the way it does or defending why I don't care to do it some other way. What I need to do is stop getting into those discussions. It's not a productive use of my time, and it means that everyone is getting fewer features implemented.
I'm a speed reader and I read pretty much everything that comes through mantis in particular. Some ideas just get shelved for later but I like them. Others I don't like and are tempting to get into arguments/discussions about. That's the part I need to stop doing, especially when it was an off the cuff suggestion from one person.
That's not an attempt to try to withdraw from the community, but I only have so many hours in the day and presumably you guys would prefer that as many of them as possible go to making new stuff for you rather than debating features I have no intention of implementing in the first place. So that's what I'm going to do.
That said, if a suggestion seems to be getting the cold shoulder and you think it deserves more attention, rally support for it! If a lot of players are all thinking something is a problem, that sends a clearer message and it's probably time for me to enter the discussion more directly. Beyond that... I am just finding that I can no longer respond to every single suggestion because there are so many coming these days.
The other thing I'd like to note is that I'm looking for ways to enhance the current game, not reinvent it. Very drastic shifts to how exploration or progression works, how crafting is balanced or similar, are not things I'm particularly interested in. I feel like those things are working well, and the main flaw there is that we need more spells (including diversity there) as well as more enemies, more missions, more things to explore and find, etc. Beyond that I have even more goals, but most involve the addition of new stuff and almost none of it involves the yet-again reinvention of what is already here. I think that's a misperception that some hold given how radically we kept changing things in beta; but the reason we kept changing ai radically in beta was to get to a solid design at this point where we wouldn't have a need to keep yanking the rug out from under players.
Put another way, our first post-release huge reinvention of ai war was version 4.0. We lost some players in doing that, but it was two years after the game had come out and it drew on lots of long term accumulated knowledge about he game at that point. Also AI War 1.0 was much rougher than AVWW 1.0. To my mind, this game has already seen its 4.0-style transition and I hope that what we see is continual refinement and expansion rather than a fundamental reinvention at some point. Never say never, but from where I currently sit that is where my head is at.
Anyway, so thanks for the kind words of encouragement! We have a pretty unique vision for this game and in a lot of respects only the tip of the iceberg is showing at the moment. Many of the new mechanics will need inevitable reinvention after being introduced (just look at elites this week), and heck various existing features will need polish also (anachronism and windstorm missions recently, for instance), but that's different from trying to fundamentally alter the nature of what is already here.
Hope that helps clarify things!
