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Development Cycle

Posted: Wed Jul 03, 2013 12:33 pm
by Domiano
First off, I want to acknowledge that I do not know the entire history of TomeNET's development. I do not know the current dev 'philosophy', and I do not know what the long term goals are.
That said, from recent events and events I have heard of, I do want to bring something up which I believe is simply a matter of good game development practice.
When a multiplayer game is unreleased, or in limited form of release, a large amount of balancing/re-balancing happens rather quickly. This is completely OK, and completely normal.
However, when updating a game that is regularly played, and not in some sort of alpha (such as tomeNET), updates can cause... issues.
Minor updates, or updates that do not significantly effect gameplay balance are not an issue I think. Additionally, updates that make a class go from 'completely irrelevant' to 'potentially useful' are fine as well.

However, when dealing with more significant updates that will likely significantly hamper play-styles, I believe that you cannot simply toss them out there without warning.

Roguelike characters can have an extreme degree of investment into them (as i'm sure we all know). Because of this, any 'unexpected/unfair' game play changes can feel especially devastating, since it can feel like an attack not only on future growth, but on all you have worked to accomplish.

This is now to say, however, that I think should keep the game static. I am merely trying to point out the fact that you have alienated me, and it sounds like other players like me as well in the past, with changes that came on too quickly.

TLDR: I request, as someone who has really enjoyed this game, And as someone as well who would like to feel that future time in this game would not be a waste of progress, that you implement a different system for such major updates.
EX: Plan ahead major updates, and have them roll out on roughly scheduled dates.

Re: Development Cycle

Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2013 7:47 pm
by PowerWyrm
The TomeNET policy has always been to (almost) never reset the main instance and plug any update on it. Probably because most players actually don't invest much in their characters or are skilled enough to rebuild a character quickly. I think the only reset in the last 15 years occured when TomeNET 4.0.0 was released, due to the fact that half of the game was redone from the ToME 2 code (compared to TomeNET 3 which was based on MAngband code).