Pavonis Interactive Forums

Still, someone somewhere on Gatecrasher must have just lost 3 Rookies and another one bleeding out thanks to a triple pod activation.

As has been said many a time, it'll be ready when it's ready.

Steve-O wrote:

Cogo wrote: Is 1.5 close? Sorry to ask when you said no ETA, but we want!

I'm starting to think you're just trolling us now.

I am no troll!

Can we please get some info on the 1.5 release?

I imagine people would like to start new campaigns and I am curious if 1.5 is around the corner or it comes in something like 2 months.

I don't mind waiting but I try to avoid the situation where I spend a full day editing 1.4 files for common bugfixes , just so that 2 days later 1.5 is released with all the bugfixes included.

They haven't started asking for translations, and the patch is released who knows how many weeks after that, so plenty of time to get a campaign going, or at least fool around.

I don't see anything in the changelog that would require translation.

WanWhiteWolf wrote:Can we please get some info on the 1.5 release?

No, you can't. Pavonis doesn't comment on release dates, ever. Ever. Not even if you say "pretty please."

The reason is because if they DID comment on a release date, and then something delayed them (a new critical bug is found, the lead dev's cat died, whatever) then people would be all up in arms about "why isn't the patch out when you said it would be out?!" And that's just grief that no one needs.

The patch will be ready when it's ready. Calm down and keep playing 1.4, or go play some other game if you really can't stand the idea of needing to scrap a campaign to upgrade to the new patch (or, you know, just finishing your 1.4 campaign before upgrading if you're that attached to it.)

Until then, STOP KILLING MY ROOKIES! >:(

It's not only to dodge grief IMO. When the patch comes out is highly dependent on how testing goes. If testers find issues, then another round of working and testing is needed, which can take weeks. This is especially bad on balancing changes as fixing the issue is very non-trivial. So the potential end date varies a lot.

So potential end dates would probably sound like "two weeks if testers finish in time, don't find anything, nothing new comes up and nobody gets ill", each of these points not holding could radically change the date and corrections would come with the same set of restrictions. Which is hardly any better than saying 'we don't know'.

At least that's how I pierced it together.

Icarus wrote:It's not only to dodge grief IMO. When the patch comes out is highly dependent on how testing goes. If testers find issues, then another round of working and testing is needed, which can take weeks. This is especially bad on balancing changes as fixing the issue is very non-trivial. So the potential end date varies a lot.

So potential end dates would probably sound like "two weeks if testers finish in time, don't find anything, nothing new comes up and nobody gets ill", each of these points not holding could radically change the date and corrections would come with the same set of restrictions. Which is hardly any better than saying 'we don't know'.

This is pretty accurate.

In general, modern-day consumers want as much information as possible and producers want to release as little information as possible. The latter is because information released to the public is a liability: not just from consumer grief, but competitors using the information against you.

Now, in PI's case this is a mod so competition isn't an issue. Consumer grief still is. A producer can never trust unvetted consumers to not grief when given a short update because all it takes is one oddball to misunderstand or feel unreasonably entitled to generate a shitstorm. So what about long updates with enough disclaimers and catches to make sure any grief can be squarely blamed on the consumer misreading things? That takes a lot of time and effort - which most small teams don't have to spare.

Hence, the silence. There's less risk of grief from silence than from badly received short updates. It's uneconomical to do comprehensive situation reports that most consumers won't bother to read anyway.