Why do versions take so long?

[Dab]

The main problem with the dev team is how rest of the community like to sit on their high horses and lecture about how they can do this and that within a week and get a new version ready within a couple of months, but never actually stepping up to do anything, or coming up with a random excuse to get out of doing anything actually useful when they're offered a chance to help. .

That would be the same typical response other dev members have given over the course of the years; and has never had any merit.

Many, many members of the community have stepped up and helped out only to be drove away by other devs, left after the lack of anything getting done, or jump ship because of the attitude your displaying. (Not saying DPC has nothing to do with adding to the delay for 4.87)

The reason for the long delays is because of the disorganization within the dev team and an insistence on releasing 'grand' updates instead of smaller, quicker, more adaptive updates.

Also doesn't help that a large number of veteran devs jumped ship and are playing other games and chatter about Star Citizen.

I think being the longest-running dev member (I was the 3rd member to join the dev team, after Angel) gives me the legitimacy to say that the above post is highly accurate.

I only mention this because it seems a common retort to say that only the devs really know how the dev team works.. Well I believe I have more experience than anyone else and saw the team from its inception through to its gradual decline a year ago.

I am only commenting on this topic (while I hover on the other thread about the storyline before I go away again), because I have been pretty frustrated by the unfair criticism of people giving very legitimate and accurate feedback on this topic, under the premise of "you don't know how it is." So, as one who does, and who no longer has skin in the game, I think I can be considered fairly objective about the situation.

The two largest reasons for new and veteran devs leaving the team were both mentioned in Daedric's post. Other devs, and the lack of progress. The dev team was very vile amongst its own members. People had a lot of biases, and those biases were, frankly, left free to do as they please, to the detriment of others trying to contribute. This created an atmosphere of distrust and dislike between the devs, who needed to work together. This, combined with the lack of progress, was a major problem. The cherry on top, at least in the last year I was here (starting 2 years ago), was in the leadership also being dismissive, sometimes insultingly so, to many member's proposals, especially those of new members. I don't know if it was driven by a belief that they "just knew better" than the new guys, or if it was a sort of territorial thing, but it caused a lot of angst.

The process of releasing grand updates, as Daedric mentioned, is also one of the main reasons for community population decline between releases. Things get stagnant. The admin team has attempted to make up for that with large events, such as the Rheinland gold shortage (for any of you who remember it). That has helped, but it can't replace the benefits of smaller incremental updates, especially in the areas of lore and gameplay.

EDIT: I would like to note that this is only my view of the dev team up until I left it. Many of the newer devs I have not had an experience of being a dev with, thus this does not reflect on them. However, it is accurate up to the summer of 2012.

EDIT2: Something I forgot to mention. When looking back at the old releases of Discovery, one notices that they were released in a much more rapid fashion. Every new release has taken more time than the last. Part of this is on each release having more content than before, which is itself a problem. Another reason is because of the decision making process used by the new team leadership. When Igiss led it, decisions were made by him promptly, and then work could begin. While this wasn't always a good thing, most of the time it was, and it led to much more activity amongst the devs and projects getting completed faster as people weren't sitting around wondering "if I start working on this project, will it get torpedo'd two months from now and make all my work worthless?"

This was an unfortunate reality among the team in its last few years. Even if you gained permission for a project or change, it was not guaranteed that permission was still going to be there by the time the project was actually submitted, or that the project would be included when the mod was finally released. No one wants to work on a project when they can't find out if it'll even be accepted or not. Projects that have prompt permission, and the dev's faith in that permission staying, have a better chance of success. When making a new system requires you to get permission from a storyline lead, a system lead, the commodity/trade team lead, and then finally the dev team lead.. The red tape isn't even worth it. A dev team isn't a bureaucracy, yet we've turned it into one. And the team leaders were not a group of people who delegated work either. They were primarily a "this is why you can't do that" person of the team. Many of the team leaders worked on their own projects, and only got involved when people came to them to ask permission to do a project. Only the infocard team worked as a proper team with delegation and cooperation.

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