When can we expect the first post-release bugfix update?

[HellishFiend]

Just curious. 

[x4000]

Most likely tomorrow, for beta.  Most likely not for another week or more, for official -- there's no sense in flailing.  DLC-centered updates will also be coming a few at a time over the coming weeks, but the prime development focus here now is the puzzle game, so it's not going to be the same pace it was leading up to the expansion release.  But, I'd still expect at least bugfix releases at least once a week, possibly twice or three times a week.  I still play AI War on the weekends myself, so I can never resist fixing stuff after those sessions in particular -- part of why AI War will never fall out of active development.

Anyway, hopefully that is reassuring and not scary -- I'm not abandoning AI War by any stretch, but I also want to make it clear that for the first time since June of last year (when we were doing prototypes of the puzzle game) it's not my sole and primary focus.  So the focus during the next couple of months, aside from the few DLC additions each month, is mainly going to be on polish and bugfixes, rather than continual large extensions.  The game will keep growing during this period, just not at a blazing pace -- we need to figure out a way for the community to express what they as a group would most like to see changed or added (bugfixes aside), too, so that we can be sure that the most widely-valuable stuff comes first.

And then, 10 months or so from now, we'll hit time for the second expansion, and the game is going to start leaping forward in a blaze of glory once again.  And then be on a slower path for a while... and then another blaze of glory 10 months after that.

Anyway, the short answer is that I'm planning on putting out the first beta patch tomorrow; hopefully I can knock out a good number of the bugs that have cropped up since release.  If anyone has ideas on how to handle a "what would we collectively like x-4000 to look at out of the way-to-many-to-look-at-all-of-them suggestions," I'm all ears!  I try to look at most of the suggestions, but there are so many that I could spend that as a fulltime job.  I need a filter of some sort. 

Thoughts on that?

[HellishFiend]

Thanks for the quick response!

Well, as far as DLC is concerned, the first thing I'd like to see is the "Riot Starship". The reason I'd like it to be first is because it's functionality is something that we previously had, and then lost (dreadnought multi-shot).

As far as bugfixes are concerned, my primary wish is to have the co-op construction assist thing fixed once and for all. Since I mainly play co-op, it greatly affects me for my ally and I to not be able to properly assist each other. Also, if we could have the allied control node functionality fine tuned and perhaps expanded, that would be terrific as well!

As far as rebalancing is concerned, I'm overall pretty satisfied with how things are looking right now. Though I would maybe like the Sentinel Frigates to receive a bit of a buff or a reduction in energy usage, as I think they were too harshly nerfed during beta and now are too costly for what they do.

[HellishFiend]

As far as a "filter" goes, maybe us regulars can put together a poll or something to decide which suggestions and rebalances we'd like to prioritize. 

[x4000]

Yeah... it would be nice to have something where people can just upvote anything, perhaps.  Or, maybe a community-driven poll is really all that is needed, where people can submit write-ins and then the poll controllers can update those.  We had such a thing a ways back, but then we went into hyper-development mode again and it became useless because they were all new feature suggestions that were somewhat tangential.  I guess the main thing is that I'm only going to do so many new ships a month -- there's no hard number, but let's say I plan to average between 1-4 ships a month, with occasionally going higher.  It would be good to have a poll for these, but they aren't the only thing

On the flip side, there are a ton of little tweaks to this, that, and the other that I think would particularly benefit from a poll, too.  Mainly because there are so, so many of these.

And then beyond that, with bugfixes, I'm not particularly worried about prioritizing those -- no need for a poll -- as of course my hope is to keep that list as short as possible.  Some of the really minor ones tend to hang around, but anything of significance has to go.  With a game of this level of complexity, stuff of significance is going to crop up from time to time, and that's cool -- hopefully each week that can be flushed out in betas pretty much, and then the DLC can be generally monthly (anyone who has the game from anywhere now sees the access to the beta updates in their main menu, and can easily download the latest, so that is helpful).

[HellishFiend]

Thinking about it some more, I think what I may do is just start a bimonthly nomination/poll process wherein one week we'll nominate suggestion threads for high consideration, and then the following week we'll place them all into a poll and vote on which ones we feel are most important. You can make use of that data as you will, and then the following week we'll start the process over, doing a week of topic nominations followed by a week of polling.

How does that sound? Anything about it youd like done differently? Do you feel that it would be useful enough?

[x4000]

Yes, I think that's really good.  I'll still troll through the suggestions at times and do the really quick ones that may not be on the list, or ones that no one has mentioned but that I think have special importance for whatever reason, but that would be really helpful for me to gauge how interested people are in specific features.

Of course I won't be able to do every favorite just because it's a favorite -- sometimes people want things that I don't agree should go into the game, or that would take a huge amount of programming effort beyond the scope of a monthly DLC update at the moment -- but in general I try to do what people are most interested when I can, so that would be quite useful.

[HellishFiend]

Sounds good. I'll work on starting that up sometime soon. 

[x4000]

Many thanks!  I really appreciate it, and I think everyone else will, too.

[Shardz]

There are still a plethora of suggestions in the forums that have been piling up over time, as well. Perhaps global to the suggestions forum could be user ratings, not votes just yet, to boost ideas that users like the best. I mentioned something along the lines of dynamic atmospheric anomalies that sweep the galaxy and Chris mentioned that perhaps the next expansion would include something like this. It might be helpful to us knowing how many slots for certain things that can or will be available in the next expansion or whether it will be theme based or not. Perhaps it will focus more on global additions and settings rather than more ships or feature a new game play mechanic to multiplayer that leads to another huge can of worms. I think Zenith Remnant was really well balanced in content and it featured a ton of everything really. Perhaps the first step in gathering content would be some sort of poll as the whether or not we want another massive general addon or a more focused theme based product this time around centering around something large and game changing. Just a couple thoughts anyway...

[raptor331]

I think I like the poll nomination idea, It brings out suggestions to where people in the forums notice them and can put in their idea. Its a good way to percect an update in my opinion.

[Shardz]

I like the poll system, as well. The only thing I was trying to get at is there have been a ton of ideas stacking up already that would somehow have to be brought to light again. I would think those would take priority over new ideas overall since they have been put on hold until the next release or whatever, but either way, there's going to be a lot to vote on initially. Perhaps five ideas per week on a percentage ratio might work as that would give everyone some time to log in and check it out and if there are five great ideas presented then that would be represented, as well. Say there are five suggestions to vote on; each item would receive 0-100% from each user with a cutoff percentage of like 50% (or whatever) or under not to include it. The only thing I'm thinking is, will everyone come on each week and vote? If there are only 15 voters...that sampling rate doesn't seem high enough to make a concrete decision.

[x4000]

Lots of good points here.  Main thing is, I don't think that seniority really implies value as far as ideas go.  Whatever people are most interested in, whether it was suggested today or six months ago, should be what gets attention.  There are some very old ideas that may just never get done because the newer ideas are more interesting, or whatever.  But, hopefully we'll find some equilibrium with whatever approach is selected.

[RCIX]

I was instructed here to discuss the poll votes thing --

I vote for (excuse the pun) the two votes thing listed in the nomination topic!

[HellishFiend]

Yeah, two votes sounds good to me too, though I may up it to three if there are too many ties in the first week of voting.