Why implement a broken solution?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Larili
Still begs the questions why did they switch to unity when they did with such a broken version of game? ( There is no way on earth that this level of bugs and issues came as a `surprise'.)....
I wonder if you have ever worked for a boss or management that is unreasonable?
Consider if you will -
- TSO is a free to play game
- It pays it's way ONLY when players buy gems
- When Adobe announced the end of life of Flash 3.5 years ago, Ubisoft/BlueByte seemed to give their focus to replacing TSO with the next generation called Settlers Alliance instead of commencing a migration when all the resources and talent to do so was available.
- Ubisoft/BlueByte were caught with their pants down when it seems Settlers Alliance failed dramatically in the first user testing and ultimately went belly up. They then had to draw up a last moment plan for what to do with TSO.
- The marketing spin presented to us late last year was how much Ubisoft/BlueByte was investing in us by giving us not just one, but two solutions to continue playing! (a.k.a. "We left the migration way too late, so we need an interim bridging means to limp along while the migration progresses).
- All of the bright sparks who did the Flash migrations for everyone else had long since moved on to the latest technologies and were not interested in base-rate contracts working in ancient technologies (not a selling point on any CV!), so Ubisoft/BlueByte had only the dregs and cheap, "still wet behind the ears" coders to work with. (This is rather evident in what we see in the poorly considered functionality of the ported game. It would seem that even the project management and in-house testing had NO idea of the playability criteria for the game).
- The client solution needed licensing and who knows how much money paid to Samsung, etc for the enabler to to play a Flash game via the client. It would seem that 3 months was agreed as we were supposed to be on Unity by Easter. This would have been a tough fight to have with upper management, and whoever was managing the migration project was probably backed into a corner and forced to agree to an absurd timeframe to "control costs".
- Easter came and went and more licensing and money was required to be directed to Samsung to keep Flash going for another few months. This would have required a screaming match at board level about the poor return of the money spent so far. Whoever was running the migration probably had to sign in blood that they would get the game playable with just the one more extension of licensing to Samsung.
- As the end of the further extension to the client licencing approached the question from senior management was probably as simple as, "Is it coded sufficiently so that it is playable?".... The operative word there being "playable", but neither management, nor the poor sods doing the coding could actually quantify what exactly "playable" meant.
- The coders who have obviously never played the game were probably quite proud of all the code they had written and how close things looked (not played) to the original game. They would surely answer, "Yes, it's playable!"
- The team in charge of managing the migration had already signed in blood that no more extensions of licensing for the Flash client would be required/allowed. They could only respond, "Yes, it's playable!" (With their fingers crossed behind their backs!)
- Senior management would then have directed, "Well put it in and make it start paying for all this expense then!"
- So in it went and within days we had a 100% bonus gem sale!
