轉貼自: 官方網站的天堂討論區
Greetings! Before I get started I’ll allow a few moments for y’all to hurl rotten fruits and vegetables in my direction for being so silent for so long. Once everyone has gotten a turn and I’ve had a moment to reduce the chance of infection, we’ll get underway.
Ah, excellent. Now here we go.
Where has Fracas been?
We are six months into 2008 and I haven’t been around the forums much. There were things I talked about at the beginning of the year that I haven’t followed through on yet. Meanwhile y’all are still waiting on Episode 6 and well, it’s still not here. So, with this big violent storm of nothin’ going on, what is going on?
We have been having issue after issue with getting Episode 6 off the ground. When we got around one obstacle we’d run smack dab into another. I’d rather not get into the details here but, in short, this update requires a lot of technical updates in order for it to even launch. It’s only after we got past that were we able to dive into the complications we’re used to seeing when working on a new Episode. All in all it’s been a rough trip but the content is currently on QA and we’re making good progress.
Meanwhile, while in between sessions of trying to get our new content to work, I focused heavily on what happened with Lineage in 2007. IMO last year was a lot of fun. We had a ton of events, interactions with you the players, and we got to create some new LoA content. All in all it was a great year to be Fracas, the “Hound at the Helm”, who gets to create content, design events, and hang out with all y’all (plural form of “y’all”).
Business wise though, Lineage needed more. It still needs more. A summer full of events and community involvement wasn’t enough to keep players from leaving due to the lack of “real” updates. A year’s worth of data was undeniable proof of this. So, with this in mind, I took a few steps back and starting putting my efforts into the power-pointy, excel-heavy aspects of the job that could influence such changes.
What’s happening
We have had some internal changes to help improve things around here. Firstly, although this is sad for us to announce, Crickette is moving onto another product full time and as such will no longer be working with us on Lineage. We wish her luck as she gets to dive head first into some other game whose name I’ve chosen to forget to help dull the pain. The silver lining here though is that she will no longer have to divide her time between three entirely different titles. Likewise neither will her replacement who will begin transitioning in immediately (and who will be introduced later).
We have also made another hire, a fellow named Young, who is sitting right behind me as I type this. Young has only been with us a little while but has already greatly increased the efficiency of our communications with NCK as well as our ability to obtain and translate Lineage related materials. It’s hard for me to express how exciting and helpful it is to have a partner in crime over here and I can’t wait to see what we’re able to pull off in the future.
Lastly I’d like to say that, like I mentioned above, our communication with NCK is better than it’s ever been before. They have taken a very active interest in our territory and are working hard to help us improve things. This includes helping us get caught up as well as addressing some of the issues that are exclusive to North America (Mac users, I’m looking at you). Next week Young and I will be flying over to Korea to sit with the live team and discuss the history of LoA – what we’ve done, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, etc. We are both very excited about this trip as well as confident that the plane won’t spiral into the ocean and blow up. Don’t take that way from me, I need that confidence in order to get on and take my seat.
Meanwhile QA is testing both Episode 6 and Lineage U content. We will be launching both of these updates at the same time in order to expedite our need to catch up. We are currently targeting August for our publish to PTS.
What happened?
So, yeah. That update we did a few weeks back where your weight gauges got borked and healers started turning pink. Nobody minded any of that, right? Hmm…
Talking about this is somewhat awkward because there’s not a lot I can say. Essentially we had to publish a patch before X date/time or the world would end. Think Y2k but with imps instead of pillaging anarchists. When we faced the choice of either having a broken weight gauge or having the world blow up, we chose the broken weight gauge. That’s the call we had to make and I’m sorry we had to make it, but that’s the way it happened.
As for the healers turning pink…hmm. That one did “sneak” by us due to the time we had, but I admit I’m happy that it happened. Remember a long time ago when I said I would enable dual pink with Episode 6? Well I was putting it off because I was waiting for this change to happen. Dual pink w/o healers turning pink is, well, lame. Granted I would have loved to implement it all at once with great flare and fanfare, but that’s not how it went down.
Basically we had very little time to get an update out there and the update happened to have a lot of neat E6 things already baked into it. Any changes you’ve seen are tastes of what’s to come, and we apologize for the way it all happened.
What’s next
Well, more of the same I guess. Things will continue bubbling internally but externally there will not be much to see for a little while longer. I regret not being around for y’all as much this year as I was last year, but I hope y’all can understand why. Things are happening even though I’ve given you no reason to believe it. I hope to be back in your faces again before too long.
