Hey folks,
So, I LOVE that you all are here, giving your experiences, sharing your feedback, and so on. This is so incredibly useful and helpful. And honestly, the more people we have doing this, the more likely we are to discover underlying patterns and problems. So I love that we have a big crowd.
BUT. There are 100+ of you, and one of me. I have a ton of work to do this weekend to get Quests to where they need to be, which is my top priority. I also need to make the trailer for the game. And I also need to get things cleaned up so that ideally we can do a press preview build on Monday. Because launch coverage really does matter, and we're already cutting it way later than ideally we would with the press.
SO. This is where you come in. If any kind souls want to help collate information and get those into concrete mantis tickets that Keith and I can react to, that would be immensely helpful. I really do wish I could read all the first impressions threads, and in the past I have been, but now they are getting so numerous and so lengthy that I just get overwhelmed. And when I'm overwhelmed, my productivity drops... and it's a vicious cycle.
To really program at peak efficiency, I have to be able to just sit and focus for a while, and that means kind of ignoring the forums and mantis and then coming back, finding out what is new, and repeating again. But when half the feedback is scattered throughout 50+ (literally) posts in the forums, and we only have like 20 new mantis tickets, a lot of which are not related to the forum stuff, I am bound to miss things. A lot of things. Possibly really important things. This scares me as the developer, and wastes your time as the tester.
The TLDR: If folks can work on helping sort through everyone's feedback -- your own, your peers', whatever you have time for -- and help to get that stuff into mantis as individual tickets, that really would help. There's some discussion about ways in which combat could be improved in terms of shots speeds for enemies being faster, for instance -- and a lot of people agree there. But then there are others that go "NO, I'm barely surviving as it is!" And that's cool, that has an obvious, easy solution: the higher difficulties need to tune those elements that the one crowd feels is too easy, and we'll leave Normal difficulty alone.
Normally I would come through, process what everybody is saying, then come to that conclusion, then either do it or have Keith do it. But at the moment... you really need me focused on the coding, for the next couple of days at least. I'm not asking anybody to make this their fulltime job -- please don't -- but as a group, there are a lot of folks here, and if everyone pitches in a little, it would really help me out.
Thanks for reading, and any help on this!