Will the WOTC Gametable return or is it dead forever?

[renau1g]

If you're meeting these people all the time that dislike 4e, why are you having trouble finding people who want to play soemthing other then 4e?

Those people must really suck.

They're waiting for 5e

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

See I think part of the issue is we don't know why the delay happened in the first place.

I mean could it have been as simple as everything WAS set to go, on course, ready for roll out day 1... and then Suddenly someone realized that there was some code somewhere that did something bad? Like accidently made getting access to easy, or gave out people's credit card numbers to anyone? Or just a bug that crashed the whole thing?

(I remember the compendium was actually up the night before 4e's release then it dissapeared for a while...)

Then once they tracked down the bug they realized it was something that needed a HUGE rewrite to fix?

Doesn't sound very plausible. Somthing like accidentally giving credit card numbers away or giving too much information would not be so hard to fix. My reasoning here is that while these parts are important, they are very contained usually. They will usually be some small component, and rewriting that one isn't that hard.

They said that the GameTable had a lot of stability issues. That might be something that went wrong on the fundamental level, something you might find in every part of the code and might be an issue of bad coding practices. Maybe the 3D Engine that was supposed to be "ready" actually sucked and needed a rewrite? That would be a component big enough to rewrite to take quite some time.

The project I am working on was originally said to take 200 man-days. Well, that was either a blatant lie of the agency that made this estimation in an effort to get the job, or it was a gross underestimation of the complexity. I am still working on that app, 2 years later. It is probably in a "ready state" since a year, and now only receives enhancements. But the team did start out with 4 developers and 3 designers, to slowly cut back to 1 developer (me).

I suppose there might be some intentional or unintentional miscalculations going on. I have no idea how well either side (the development team or WotC) understood the goals and the complexities. And there still seems to be a habit in the software industry for people to say "We want X, we need in Y, for Z money.", which is like telling an engineer "We need you to create a car with 300 PS, 2 litres of gas on 100 km, and for a sale price of 15,000 € (X), for 1,000,000 € (Z) development cost, in 2 years (Y)" It doesn't work like that, at least one of the X, Y Z variables free.

 

[Sammael]

It is not possible to write a piece of software which will be completely bug free. The only thing to do is decide on what are "acceptable" bugs and how many such "acceptable" (identified) bugs will you allow before release. In general, if you narrow your bug list down to 10%, and none of the bugs are show-stoppers, you are good to go. Of course, depending on the application's severity and mission-critical status, the percentage will sometimes be lower, but there will always be bugs. At some point during software development, you have to stop the development/bug-hunting cycle and roll the product out of your door. The more complex the system, the more likely it is that fixing identified bugs will cause new unidentified bugs.

Anyways, I work for a small software company. We pride ourselves on the fact that every single one of the projects we worked on was completed and rolled out without any major identified bugs. Of course, they were often late (because EVERYONE in the software industry gives unreasonable time estimates to customers) - but never more than a month or two (and the cause of delay was often external). However, this is not the case for most software projects. In fact, I once attended a conference where it was stated that a staggering FIFTY PERCENT of software projects end up canceled.

Nevertheless, WotC's past performance with software projects is cringe-worthy. Unless I hear that they signed up an external software comnpany with excellent references to do the job, I shall remain skeptical about any and all software products they announce. After all, from the software development point of view, the DDI was a miserable failure - it was late, most of its marketed features are still not there eight months after release, and its two main attractions are a glorified database which would take my team about a month to develop (tops) and a character builder interface which uses that database - very nice, but also hardly a work of software art.

 

[The Ghost]

See I think part of the issue is we don't know why the delay happened in the first place.

True. We don't know. That is why we leave ourselves room to maneuver by not being specific about when a product will be ready until we are absolutely certain of that date. Had WotC done that initially we would not be have these debates. Or, at the very least, they would not be as frequent.

I say this as someone who is a business owner. Commercial real estate development to be specific. I have built a number of buildings, I know that contractors often cannot complete a project within the quoted time frame. There are way too many problems that can arise. So I protect myself when dealing with future tenants by using phrases like "coming soon" or "late summer/early fall 2009", etc. It allows me the flexibility to get it done right without the pressures of people complaining about the delays. I can defend "late summer/early fall" in September easier than I can defend "a June release" in September.

Had WotC originally said "We will be releasing 4e in June 2008 and then coming soon we will have Dungeon/Dragon/Compendium/Character Builder/Game Table/etc." many (most?) of us would be more understandable about the delays. I stand by my position that it was a mistake by management and marketing at WotC.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I use to have a boss that would give us deadlines and goals that were total BS, and then report to his boss that is what we said...Now I am not in IT, I am in sales and Customer Service....


so here is how it looked... Gary would tell me By next tuesday I need my 4 teams to avrage 1,000 upsells each...then I would tell him "are you crazy our best agents don't avrage 100 upsells aday"... it is less then 5 days and each team is 5 agents... if my best agent does 75 avg upsells aday and my worst do like 40-50...it will never happen...

then Gary would go to his boss "Rob said his teams will avrage 1000 upsells"

I can onlt imagin how that translates to "We need all of it by relase day"

 

[malraux]

True. We don't know. That is why we leave ourselves room to maneuver by not being specific about when a product will be ready until we are absolutely certain of that date. Had WotC done that initially we would not be have these debates. Or, at the very least, they would not be as frequent.

I say this as someone who is a business owner. Commercial real estate development to be specific. I have built a number of buildings, I know that contractors often cannot complete a project within the quoted time frame. There are way too many problems that can arise. So I protect myself when dealing with future tenants by using phrases like "coming soon" or "late summer/early fall 2009", etc. It allows me the flexibility to get it done right without the pressures of people complaining about the delays. I can defend "late summer/early fall" in September easier than I can defend "a June release" in September.

Had WotC originally said "We will be releasing 4e in June 2008 and then coming soon we will have Dungeon/Dragon/Compendium/Character Builder/Game Table/etc." many (most?) of us would be more understandable about the delays. I stand by my position that it was a mistake by management and marketing at WotC.

And that's probably what WotC did internally. They padded their development schedule to have all the software out the door for launch. But because they didn't have much experience with software padding, they greatly missed the deadline.

 

[Scribble]

Had WotC originally said "We will be releasing 4e in June 2008 and then coming soon we will have Dungeon/Dragon/Compendium/Character Builder/Game Table/etc." many (most?) of us would be more understandable about the delays. I stand by my position that it was a mistake by management and marketing at WotC.

Well sure, in the end, yeah it was a mistake on WoTC's part. No two ways about it. They promoted something, and it didn't happen.

I was just saying we don't know whether that mistake was: "Well it's not gonna happen, but promo it anyway." or "Everything's ready to- oh crap did anyone notice this???"

Either way, I'm just confused by the anger. Dissapointment sure- They promo'd something that looked cool, then didn't have it ready. But why anger?

When I think about the GT I think "Hrmm that sounded neat, sucks it's not up and running. Sucks for WoTC they could have had more of my money."

I just can't fathom why I would ever be angry at them for not having a product to sell me.

Don't get me wrong. People can respond to any situation in any way they feel appropriate. (no matter how innapropriate it seems to me.) I'm honestly just confused.

 

[darjr]

Certainly. It is pretty much a known fact. And that is what makes it troubling that WotC management and marketing went ahead with the advertising of the features as being available at the release of 4e. They could have saved themselves a lot of these headaches by initialy labeling these products as "coming soon" or "in the near future" or even not advertise them at all until they were ready to beta test them. Instead, they used these tools to help sell people on 4e. For some of us, that is the reason we bought in. It would be like Sony selling me an HDTV only I would have to wait seven months to get the HD part. Sure, I could still watch TV over that time but I didn't get what I paid for.

I'm not disputing that they messed up big time. I'm in the camp that they way overpromised and way underdelivered. I think, in general, the officers of WotC and the staff would agree.

I do wonder how much the tragedy and the downword spiral of the man in charge of all this digital stuff impacted how far wrong the company got it.

 

[darjr]

I'm not going to carry on this argument any longer. You and I obviously have very different ideas when it comes to this. We are just going to have to accept that our standards are very different (well, I'll accept it, whether you do is up to you).


However, there is one thing I very much want to clear up.

I don't know where you got an idea that I'm justanobody, but I suggest you actually check my profile. I don't alt troll. I don't obfuscate, lie or hide. I have but one profile on here and this is it. You have made a significant mistake with regards to this. If you want confirmation on that, please contact me through my profile and we can discuss this further.

I'd rather not. Your and justanobodies posts do seem eerily familiar. I'll take your word that your not justanobody.

I easily found that quote by looking at your profile (give it a try) and clicking a link to a post that MustrumRudcully gave you experience for. It wasn't exactly dificult to find, but it was fortuitous for me. Interesting how things like that can come back to haunt people though.

Condescending and rude post by El Mahdi? Check.

As a point of fact, I'm not haunted by that thread, I consider it a badge of honor.

Good day to you. I hope you continue to enjoy the thread, but you'll do so without me.

OK.

 

[The Ghost]

I just can't fathom why I would ever be angry at them for not having a product to sell me.

Because they sold 4e as having this feature. People made purchases based (partly) on that. People have a right to be angry when that feature is not available.

I do not see anger as necessarily being a negative. Often times it can help focus on where you are weak and thus where you can improve on for the future. WotC clearly made some mistakes over the past year and a half. They know that. And this process will, hopefully, help them not make this mistake again in the future.

Edit:

Also, it is not anger that we should fear. Anger implies that we still care about it.