Waltzkrieg
(?)Community Member
Smitten Businessman
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- Posted: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:51:36 +0000
I feel bad for saying it, but I'm skeptical. I think AtA responses from Lanzer are best taken with a grain of salt.
The site code generally works well, but staff seem like they just can't get it together to get the games and virtual spaces safe and working smoothly. And these are integral parts of the Gaia experience for many users. In the case of older features it may have something to do with old code being hard to decipher (and it can be). But the truth is that after zOMG, I have very little faith in the company's ability to maintain existing features that work reliably, let alone roll out new stuff. To me, the failure of zOMG to move from what was ostensibly a testing phase to a complete, working gaming experience was just more of the same, but with higher financial stakes. If the staff couldn't come through with a feature when so many resources were involved, I can't work up much in the way of expectations for future features where the stakes are smaller.
I don't think this has anything to do with the skills of the individual members of the coding team; rather, I suspect it's a problem of mismanagement, where huge projects are foisted on single team members, and getting the new hotness pushed out forever takes priority over creating a reliable set of site features that function and interact in sensible ways. And repeated staff purges really aren't helping. Skilled programmers can piece together the meaning of code written by other programmers, sure, but it's so much faster having the originator of a game or site feature on staff to maintain it. With each new round of staff shorn away from the site, we lose more and more people who are familiar with its internal workings, and it gets more and more difficult and time-intensive for those who remain to keep code written over a decade ago in working order.
This sounds a bit like doom and gloom. I don't mean for it to-- I mainly want to express my uncertainty. After these recent posts from admins about the "new" direction of the site, I feel like I have less of an idea than ever what to expect in the future.
The site code generally works well, but staff seem like they just can't get it together to get the games and virtual spaces safe and working smoothly. And these are integral parts of the Gaia experience for many users. In the case of older features it may have something to do with old code being hard to decipher (and it can be). But the truth is that after zOMG, I have very little faith in the company's ability to maintain existing features that work reliably, let alone roll out new stuff. To me, the failure of zOMG to move from what was ostensibly a testing phase to a complete, working gaming experience was just more of the same, but with higher financial stakes. If the staff couldn't come through with a feature when so many resources were involved, I can't work up much in the way of expectations for future features where the stakes are smaller.
I don't think this has anything to do with the skills of the individual members of the coding team; rather, I suspect it's a problem of mismanagement, where huge projects are foisted on single team members, and getting the new hotness pushed out forever takes priority over creating a reliable set of site features that function and interact in sensible ways. And repeated staff purges really aren't helping. Skilled programmers can piece together the meaning of code written by other programmers, sure, but it's so much faster having the originator of a game or site feature on staff to maintain it. With each new round of staff shorn away from the site, we lose more and more people who are familiar with its internal workings, and it gets more and more difficult and time-intensive for those who remain to keep code written over a decade ago in working order.
This sounds a bit like doom and gloom. I don't mean for it to-- I mainly want to express my uncertainty. After these recent posts from admins about the "new" direction of the site, I feel like I have less of an idea than ever what to expect in the future.
