Sadly I must say I am really disappointed in the lack of response from GMs. I can understand people being under heavy deadlines and busy but I would also say that other things (like petitions) shouldn't be put down on the priority list as far they seem to have been moved. There should be a better balance in my opinion.

From my point of view I would rather see a Badlands deployment delayed until 2014 and some user support now.

So I post this question for folks.

What are your thoughts?

=Allamagoosa (Angry and Confused)

If you have a petition open that's still affecting gameplay, update it. Noone's ignoring exploits, but you do have to actually go through the proper channels.

Thanks.

-Luna

This is why you need to go through the petition queue and only post about bugs that are affecting your account. We don't go through third parties on these things. The issue you are talking about was addressed as soon as it came up, directly with the player whom it affected and no one else. 

Now if there is something else happening, or if it is affecting your account, you need to open a new petition explaining, please. 

GM Luna

Luna, when I joined game I used to see a GM in chat at least once a week or so, it encouraged me to stay illy. I don't remember seeing a GM in last couple of months. All I am saying is few more visits from GMs would be definitely appreciated.

There has been some discussion and debate about the ongoing decline in the number of active players in the game. While there are probably a large number of causes, I'm quite sure that there are two main ones:

1. Announcements of "new things" that never seem to appear (new schools of magic, Broken Lands, and probably others I'm not aware of).

2. Ongoing inability to resolve player concerns (i.e. continuously ignored petitions).

I've chosen to continue in the game despite these issues (for now), but it seems quite obvious that others have chosen to look elsewhere for their gaming fix.

I understand that many petitions filed have been misunderstandings. Certainly I have filed some that were ignorance on my part. Although if a petition is a mistake of the filers part I would think you could more easily and successfully address the bug and close it out. 

But when petitions are filed for repeatable problems that are clearly bugs and I see that petitions are chronically Unassigned I get discouraged. The closest I can get is "Acknowledged and Under Investigation" but "Unassigned". I update the petitions to no result.

I gather most of my petitions are not received well by the GMs as many are New and Unassigned and some are coming up on 1 year old but the petitions that are true bugs that prevent me from acquiring cities shouldn't be ignored and I wish the GMs were doing more to address them.

Thanks for taking the time to respond to the forum although to be blunt I wish you would take a look at my recent petitions.

Cheers,

-A

@ abstract, no matter how you spin it many people agree the petition system should be of 'primary' concern to devs.  Above Broken Lands.  

Also this game isn't free if you pay for prestige.  And people who would buy prestige but don't because they have some bug that leaves them with half a city don't tend to buy it.  

The people who complain are the ones who actually care and would like to see this game be successful. The ones who don't complain just go elsewhere.

I think Luna has acknowledged that there is an issue here.  I have a lot of confidence in the developers and believe they will be able to develop a means of addressing this.  But if we don't let them know how much it bothers us, they might not make it a priority -- so posting this gives them the opportunity to be responsive, and I think it's a constructive thing.

Some Vicx players have several outstanding petitions - many of which affect gameplay quite a bit (troops vanishing, queues not starting etc, buildings downsizing when nothing is in negative and full warehouses) and it's very discouraging to players to see the petitions sometimes acknowledged (sometimes not) but nothing done.

Difficult to imagine many of the players with long outstanding petitions will bother with Broken Lands at all under those circumstances.

Aieee!  He has used the forbidden word that must not be spoken of.  Smite him!

Not lost, have been surveying Rill Archipelago from above:

And I have to state, that Illy is one of  the more stable games online... there are games with less complexity with far more downtime.

Yes, I myself have some open petitions, but that happens. Most minor petitions often would result in quite some work, and I dare say, those might be seen, filed under "as soon as we find the time", and there they stay 

Of course there also are problems which block important features, thus there should be a way to push those in front of the minor ones... (a difficult task, as everyone sees his problem as the most important... ).

Updating the petitions, as mentioned by Luna, might not be the intended procedure, but is a way to annoy the GMs into answering...   I can imagine a HUGE load of updates as soon as Luna posted this 

I disagree.  The system needs more disciplined operators.

ps- if its getting waaay more attention than what you wanted, it's because you posted to the forums   :P

I sure hope the shine is not off the apple for Stormcrow and Thundercat, because one of the things that delights me about Illy is the joy they take in creating the game.  I hope that they are still enjoying themselves as much now as they were when I began playing more than two years ago.

If you don't know what is wrong with your system (ie. you do not address bugs), then how can you implement new code?  Is the problem confined to some rarely used subroutine or is it in a core module?  Is there a flaw with a core module that your "new stuff" heavily depends on?

The quoted text is many times how management views software development.  It's not how software development works.  If it's broke, you didn't create it right.  If you didn't create it right, it does not make sense to add code without knowing if the house of cards will hold up.  At what point will the whole thing collapse under it's own weight and would that be a "good business strategy"?

Deliberately choosing to gain new customers at the expense of current customers is called "churn".  It's a sleazy business strategy.  In the long term, that strategy always fails.

Salarius wrote: The quoted text is many times how management views software development.

indeed.  because management must concern itself not only with the quality of the system, but also with paying the developers to work on it.  customers do not pay for quality they cannot perceive.  if developers would volunteer, management might be much more relaxed about it.  lacking GM TC's participation in that plan, however, illyriad would have to become open source to be the recipient of such community largesse, and while that might appeal to some, it's not really a decision we can make.

Salarius wrote: It's not how software development works.

it is, actually, which is why this thread exists at all.

Salarius wrote: If it's broke, you didn't create it right.  If you didn't create it right, it does not make sense to add code without knowing if the house of cards will hold up.  At what point will the whole thing collapse under it's own weight and would that be a "good business strategy"?

i hardly know where to begin.  this "broken" piece of software is still working well for hundreds/thousands of players.  should every perceived bug halt development?  at what point would the development team achieve this nirvana of perfect knowledge required to proceed?  is illyriad "broken" because it allows armies to walk over water as they would land?  is it "broken" because players can multi-account until they're caught?  quality is a continuum, not a switch.

Salarius wrote: Deliberately choosing to gain new customers at the expense of current customers is called "churn".  It's a sleazy business strategy.  In the long term, that strategy always fails.

hmmm.  i rather appreciate some churn, actually.  we sometimes call it "new blood".  it's the rate that can be counterproductive, not the fact of it.  likewise, yes, *all* business strategies fail in the long term.  as do governments, dynasties, etc.  which is why it's important to concentrate on the "term" and not the "fail".

What problems do you see that the devs should fix that you can't?  

You think there is to much gold and res in the game.  Buy all the res up and send them to the HOC. 

"House of Cards" is not correct, it implies a level of organization and structure that software development can not meet.  Agreeably, any given piece of code is many times more stable than any single card.  Also agreeably, stacks of code are generally many times more stable than stacks of cards.  But some stacks of code fall down over and over and over and are darn well impossible to correct.  Like stacking cards in a wind tunnel.  That's the strength and weakness of software in a nutshell.  So many young developers seem to think that a completed function will always "just work".  They don't realize how many pieces of code that have been around for decades still don't work as they are supposed to because no one ever tested them extensively or got priority (from management) to fix them when told they were broken.  These legacy issues create mountains of cascading "work arounds" and bugs and then if "corrected" create mountains of fixes to the fixes.  Of course, all that is hidden behind a massive complex of coders, 60 hour workweeks and "patches".  Management addresses this by seeking the lower and lower cost "mythical man month" coder (as you move up the pyramid) and the whole thing stumbles on in mediocrity as advancing hardware hides the inefficiencies.  That, in a nutshell, is 90% of the software industry today.

Not reviewing and classifying every "identified" flaw in a system is a mistake.  Likely a little mistake, potentially a big mistake, but there is no system to differentiate.  Yes, professional quality control would reduce the number of flaws the developers need address (that should be a job at Illy) but they "can't afford that".  Sure, spelling errors are trivial, unless they are in a DB and some dev starts matching things based on spelling.  How do you classify petitions as "important" or not unless you review them and identify the cause (or at least identify the likely underlying functions).  Maybe you have 500 petitions, all looking obscure and different but all floating over some very common code that you're depending on for your new "big thing".  What exact methodology let's you determine if a petition is "important" or not?  How exactly (that word is the rub) do you know that you can ignore 90% of the petitions unless you look at 100% of the petitions?  If your quality control system sucks that bad, then you need a new quality control system.  If the petition system isn't part of quality control, then what is it?  If you can ignore 90% of the petitions but you don't have a system to identify that 90% then you should probably ignore 100% of the petitions and eliminate or re-tool the petition system.

Personally, not fixing a simple spelling mistake is just lazy.

1. The significance of a problem is judged by the customer, not by the business. A business that dismisses customer problems as frivolous or unimportant will eventually have no customers.

2. Most businesses do a very poor job of planning the development and launch of new products or services. In my 30-year career our unofficial motto was "there's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over". You can get away with providing an inadequate product or service only if you're the only one who has it and customers are willing to overlook the problems because they really want the benefits.

3. Not caring about minor problems will be viewed as not caring about major ones either (the "broken windows" principle).

Llyr wrote: In my 30-year career our unofficial motto was "there's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over".

again, i'm certain that the suspension of time and resource constraints would result in much more solid software.  (actually, i am not, because much software suffers from a failure to identify correctly its purpose at the outset, or to build with change in mind, but the *management* impact on quality would disappear with the elimination of time and resources as considerations.)  this is a bit like saying that getting uphill would be easier without gravity, though, so i don't see it as a very fertile topic.  if one is preparing appetizers for said party and they aren't quite up to one's usual standard, i would argue that quality is best served by delivering them in time rather than better the next day.  i wonder how the workers in any of the companies in which you served would have reacted if management had decided to put off a product release for month with the announcement:  "we understand your priorities.  we won't be able to pay you for August, but the product will be something of which you can be proud."

Llyr wrote: You can get away with providing an inadequate product or service only if you're the only one who has it and customers are willing to overlook the problems because they really want the benefits.

i've no idea in what sense you're using "inadequate".  if you mean that the product or service does not satisfy *all* of a customer's needs, inclusively, then all products and services are inadequate--else you would need only one.  if you mean inadequate in the sense that it does not deliver benefits that outweigh the disadvantages (including time to learn, to implement, etc.), then it is not applicable here, since customers would not continue to purchase or use it (and we wouldn't be "getting away with providing" it.)  if you mean "inadequate" in the sense that customers' expectations are not met, that is as easily a problem with marketing as it is with quality.  products can only be inadequate *to* some standard, and their inadequacy is usually considered proven or disproven by the market.  in the case of illyriad, the player base is deteriorating, which might indicate inadequacy, but i think it has little to do with petitions going unanswered.

Llyr wrote: Not caring about minor problems will be viewed as not caring about major ones either (the "broken windows" principle).

if this is the theory to which you refer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory), it would seem to be applicable only to the builders' attitudes about the product, as customers cannot break more windows.

Edited to add: Not that I've ever had to close a petition I shouldn't have opened because I was an idiot.  Not me.  Ever.  It was my "friend."