At times, when Three Rings announce new content that is coming to Spiral Knights, that same batch of content quickly goes to Test in days. For example, in some cases, like this, their recent announcement about the Dash & Bash moves was made days ago, and now, it's on Test. I thought the wait was gonna be a bit long for some new content additions, but for Three Rings, the moment they announce some new content near to completion, it goes into Test in less than a week or so. They then post the sessions about said new content and the time periods of said testing sessions, and when the last day of the session is done, they take almost a few days to intergrate the new content to the live game. They should release the new content right after the day of the last testing session was over. Anyone's got their opinions about this?
I'm noticing a pattern here about new content announcements & test server openings, recently...
Alright, so what's so special about this?
Well like, before, Nick would say things like "We're going to buff the iron slug"
But now, I have forced him to wisen up! For he has crushed the hopes and dreams of spiral hipster with his lies!
I believe that OOO stopped announcing things that are uncertain before they're more or less ready because of people like the one who posted above me. We remember too much. We know too much. If they don't see something they've announced through, they get a ton of crap from the community.
@Fehzor
At least he didn't remov-
Wait, I've gotten a new message from the Spiral Knights System, give me a second ^^
/suicide
(Nah, I don't think they're that evil :P)
It's kind of interesting that over time, test server updates have come to the live server more and more quickly. (And not just from announcement --> test.) This would be good, but in some cases, like spectator mode, features arrive on the live server without any real player feedback at all. The UI update went live after a couple days on the test server, but few major changes were made before posting it up, even though there were some notable issues that players did flag ahead of time. (Getting cursed in Lockdown is still a death sentence at this point.)
While new updates are always great, it makes me wonder if they really want our feedback on some of this content, or if these are more like sneak peeks to try out the content, with the possibility for feedback being taken on the side?
Of course, the flip side to all this is that regardless of feedback, making changes and programming content is not easy, and at some point you have to simply say "No more changes, we take it live now and adjust down the road".
Forget what Nick said; Buffs are too mainstream.
I am getting the thought that content development times may start to accelerate quickly. I'm hoping it is true, since we want more content in less the time.
@Bernston
True. Maybe they were having internal engine problems?
Or maybe they're working on something secret and are taking a break from it?
If they had internal engine problems, they would post about it and then the servers would be temporarily shut down posthaste. And if they were working on something secret, and were taking a break from it or not, they would have at least left a teaser about it.
No, because when they give us teasers, that means that the players will bug the developers for the rest of eternity over content which hasn't even had a release date announced.
Yeah actually OOO's is just getting it to the tweaking stage before they announce it, otherwise they would have a lot of angry players when they cancel updates.