Console Console 1.3 - An Update on Timing

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Surely they have done most of the bugs by now. Do I have to lower my standards and expect a delay everytime?
To be fair, it's either having a delayed update or an update with bugs. Neither are very good standard-wise. ;)

Apart from that, it's impossible to gauge how far they are with QA from an outside perspective. It's like trying to gauge in a restaurant how far the chefs are with your food. And similarly, if it comes out too early, it's undercooked.
 
Apart from that, it's impossible to gauge how far they are with QA from an outside perspective. It's like trying to gauge in a restaurant how far the chefs are with your food. And similarly, if it comes out too early, it's undercooked.[/QUOTE]

I like my steak raw...
 
I've bought your game for PS4 cause you promised release PC-equivalent before August, 16. WTF? Will I play before 2018? Are you sure?

Same. Specifically bought my 3rd copy (xbox 360, mobile, and now ps4) so i could enjoy the new content. That was back when the release was announced for q2. Had my first vacation in years this month. Only reason i bought the new copy was because i had this vacation planned 6 months in advance. Now my vacations over, and i've wasted $20 on a game i most likely won't get to play. I work 11 hour days 6 days a week. I just dont have time to spend on gaming anymore. If I'm lucky, i might get to actually play over Christmas. If you give a timeline, you needs to stick to it, or you ruin your companies credibility, and alianate your customers. This is a bad business practice.
 
Same. Specifically bought my 3rd copy (xbox 360, mobile, and now ps4) so i could enjoy the new content. That was back when the release was announced for q2. Had my first vacation in years this month. Only reason i bought the new copy was because i had this vacation planned 6 months in advance. Now my vacations over, and i've wasted $20 on a game i most likely won't get to play. I work 11 hour days 6 days a week. I just dont have time to spend on gaming anymore. If I'm lucky, i might get to actually play over Christmas. If you give a timeline, you needs to stick to it, or you ruin your companies credibility, and alianate your customers. This is a bad business practice.

This is why companies never give timelines, or when they do, never a specific timeline...
 
Same. Specifically bought my 3rd copy (xbox 360, mobile, and now ps4) so i could enjoy the new content. That was back when the release was announced for q2. Had my first vacation in years this month. Only reason i bought the new copy was because i had this vacation planned 6 months in advance. Now my vacations over, and i've wasted $20 on a game i most likely won't get to play. I work 11 hour days 6 days a week. I just dont have time to spend on gaming anymore. If I'm lucky, i might get to actually play over Christmas. If you give a timeline, you needs to stick to it, or you ruin your companies credibility, and alianate your customers. This is a bad business practice.
Just to clarify, 16th of September was never indicated by any official sources as a release date.

Either way, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. If they release it on time instead of delaying it, the quality will suffer and it will damage the company as well. If they do delay it to maintain the quality standard, people will complain about the delay instead. The only way to get it right is to predict (I would say estimate, but frankly it's more a prediction than that) the release date correctly, which, apart from being extremely difficult, suffers from a similar problem:
  1. If your prediction is too early, you either have to delay the product or release a low quality product.
  2. Predict it too late, people will initially complain about how long it takes, and if you do release early, people will accuse you of 'rushing' the product, leading to among other things cognitive bias when people find the quality lacking ("I found a bug! See, they did rush it!" or "I don't like this mechanic. It's probably because they rushed it and didn't test it properly!").
  3. Predict it right on time, people will assume all your future predictions (which, like I said, are extremely difficult and rely partly (an arguably large one at that) on luck) are correct as well, meaning your margin of error for future predictions gets lower.
  4. Don't make any predictions at all, you get hounded for a release date, and people complain when their personally estimates development durations (and if ones made by the developers themselves are inaccurate, just imagine how big a chance those of people with no inside information have) are exceeded.
So you see, even doing it right has negative consequences. There may not even be a way of doing it right, it's merely choosing the lesser of many evils.
 
September 16th may not have been a confirmed date, but in the article Update on Console & Mobile 1.3 Update Progress Q2 was announced as the release peroid. They made the same claim in the article
The Path Ahead: Major News Updates for Console & Mobile
Now you can try to justify it however you like, but these articles show confirmed timing. If people purchase you product and you fail to deliver within the timeline you set, then there is no excuse for the product to not be available. If you were prepping for a wedding, and schedule with a caterer to provide food at the reception, and pay upfront, you would expect the food to be there for the reception, not 3-5 months later.
 
I would just say that the cooking of food is a far more straight-forward process than game development. That is like comparing baking cupcakes to building an airplane.

@Kazzymodus is on to something here.

No one likes this delay - or any delay - but the game wasn't ready then and it isn't quite ready yet or we would have said so. Between the two evils of being late or cutting corners on quality, we are going to choose being late every time. That is how we do things. When that mantra hasn't been followed in the past, the results are predictable.

Not trying to say it doesn't suck, this wait, but more explaining the logic behind it.
 
I would just say that the cooking of food is a far more straight-forward process than game development. That is like comparing baking cupcakes to building an airplane.

@Kazzymodus is on to something here.

No one likes this delay - or any delay - but the game wasn't ready then and it isn't quite ready yet or we would have said so. Between the two evils of being late or cutting corners on quality, we are going to choose being late every time. That is how we do things. When that mantra hasn't been followed in the past, the results are predictable.

Not trying to say it doesn't suck, this wait, but more explaining the logic behind it.
I understand delays and I would rather have a working game than a broken one. My biggest issue would be the lack of updates to us users. I don't need an exact release date but I would like at least monthly (pref bi-weekly) updates on how the efforts are going. Are you still on track? Are you stuck on something? What crazy glitch did you fix? We get updates so far and few in-between it feels like you just vanish at times. So just little updates on the progress you are making would go a long way.
 
My family and I are super excited for this update! Glad it's still continuing forward. The way I look at it, we bought a finished game, and all these updates and extras are free icing on the cake. I was brought up when the original N.E.S. was coming out, so this kinda thing is awesome. Thanks for all your hard work!
 
Now you can try to justify it however you like, but these articles show confirmed timing. If people purchase you product and you fail to deliver within the timeline you set, then there is no excuse for the product to not be available. If you were prepping for a wedding, and schedule with a caterer to provide food at the reception, and pay upfront, you would expect the food to be there for the reception, not 3-5 months later.
I disagree with you on a major point here. The purchase of a product doesn't entitle you to a promise of updated features. They don't owe you anything more than you've already paid for. While many games are supported beyond an initial purchase, they don't have an obligation to. Buy your games for the product they are now, not the promise of what they will become. You chose to take your vacation to play the game. The timing does happen to suck, but that lost opportunity is not the game maker's fault.

I understand delays and I would rather have a working game than a broken one. My biggest issue would be the lack of updates to us users. I don't need an exact release date but I would like at least monthly (pref bi-weekly) updates on how the efforts are going. Are you still on track? Are you stuck on something? What crazy glitch did you fix? We get updates so far and few in-between it feels like you just vanish at times. So just little updates on the progress you are making would go a long way.
See that's just not reasonable. Pipeworks and 505 games aren't tiny little indie devs, they are large teams of people. Nobody actually knows the entire picture of how things are going. Gathering the information you're requesting in the timeframes you're asking for would actually take time away from actually making the update. They have a community manager who does deliver as much information as they can every week on Twitch. That's really as good as you should expect.
 
I disagree with you on a major point here. The purchase of a product doesn't entitle you to a promise of updated features. They don't owe you anything more than you've already paid for. While many games are supported beyond an initial purchase, they don't have an obligation to. Buy your games for the product they are now, not the promise of what they will become. You chose to take your vacation to play the game. The timing does happen to suck, but that lost opportunity is not the game maker's fault.


See that's just not reasonable. Pipeworks and 505 games aren't tiny little indie devs, they are large teams of people. Nobody actually knows the entire picture of how things are going. Gathering the information you're requesting in the timeframes you're asking for would actually take time away from actually making the update. They have a community manager who does deliver as much information as they can every week on Twitch. That's really as good as you should expect.
You say this but if updates to how they are going take time then why do they bother making videos on YouTube about stuff we already know. If they didn't people would complain but if it made the update come out faster then it would be better just not to do it
 
You say this but if updates to how they are going take time then why do they bother making videos on YouTube about stuff we already know. If they didn't people would complain but if it made the update come out faster then it would be better just not to do it
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't issue. The internet and social media demand that companies talk to them like they're all close friends.
 
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't issue. The internet and social media demand that companies talk to them like they're all close friends.
Yh, I guess that's the sad truth. Personally I'd rather they made every priority being on the update than to let some time slip on videos. I can easily watch some 1.3 videos if I want to
 
I'm very excited to see what this update holds! Hopefully, it can come out sometime before my birthday. Anyways keep at it with the great work :happy::dryadhappy::merchanthappy::nursehappy:~:happy:`:happy::joy:
 
They say that they put quality in their updates but I remember the time when the hard mode dungeon could not be unlocked because Plantera would not spawn. and it was like that for a long time before it was fixed. This same issue will probably happen again and the MASSIVE delay would be for nothing.
 
I'm actually quite surprised that the wiki said that. The Terraria Wiki has NEVER failed me once.
The problem with speculative release dates is that they are self-perpetuating. Someone, somewhere, comes up with the notion that, say, the release date is the 16th of August. Some other people pick that up, and eventually one of them, believing it to be true, posts it on the Wiki. The result of which is that more people see it, until it eventually gets taken down for not having a source. However, soon somebody else will have indirectly 'learnt' through the Wiki (e.g. from someone else on Reddit who read it on the Wiki) that the game will release on the 16th, and puts it up again, starting the cycle all over. Paradoxically, people will update the Wiki with information that originated from the Wiki itself.

This of course doesn't limit itself to Wikis, of course, but all forms of social media, as well as word of mouth. The only real way to dispel such false information is to pass the release date said information propagates, and that's hardly a solution.
 
They say that they put quality in their updates but I remember the time when the hard mode dungeon could not be unlocked because Plantera would not spawn. and it was like that for a long time before it was fixed. This same issue will probably happen again and the MASSIVE delay would be for nothing.
it's a totally different team this time
 
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