Listen, I know the new supports are a dumpster fire. But…
As a developer (not for D3/Demiurge, but in another market), I can 99.99% guarantee that these decisions did not come from the developers directly. They came from Management, Sales/Marketing, and/or other bean counters at the company. While the Devs get “tinykittied on” a lot around here, it’s rarely actually their fault. They get their projects and generally, assuming D3/Demiurge is like just about every other software house out there, have little to no input on WHAT is done, only HOW it is done.
The way it works is usually a dev gets a ticket. That ticket has a description, estimated hours, some other tracking info, and acceptance criteria. A sample ticket might be:
Create a new character for Dazzler. Attached are the sprites created by the graphics department for her cover, headshot, battle stance, icon, animations, etc...
Estimated hours: 20
Sprint: 18-may
Priority: High
Acceptance criteria:
- 4 star
- tier 2 health
- match damage order: yellow, blue, red, green, purple, black
- critical multiplier: 2.5x
- yellow power: laser light: damage base per power level: X, damage base per level: Y
- blue power: Light show: stun target 1 turn per power level, at power level 5, stun target's teamate's for 2 as well
- red: passive power: distraction: opponent matches in a X random colors (Determined at the start of the match) gain 1 less AP per match. Where X is the power level of the power. At power level 5, opponents gain 1 less on any match.
The Dev who gets assigned the ticket has to code all of those criteria into the game. (S)He didn’t decide “hey! Lets make this character” or “This should be the powers” or “Let’s make a totally useless PvE item and only reward the most powerful versions to the top PvP players.” They don’t get to say “well, even though this is my ticket, I’m going to fix Gambit instead.” Well… they don’t get to say that and keep their job.
To pull the curtain back further, someone else made those tickets, usually not the Devs. Someone else yet then went through all the tickets and assigned them a timeline (known as a “Roadmap”). Managers (usually upper management) says “We want this feature out by this date” and the middle managment/supervisors of the Dev/graphics/database/documentation/etc teams have to figure out how to take those tickets and fit them into the sprints to make those release schedules. Most of the time, sprints are over-stuffed and have more man-hours of tickets in them than there are available to work. This is what causes “the crunch” (seriously, google, “game development ‘the crunch’”, then feel bad after reading the horror stories).
I’d go on, because there is so much more, but this post is long enough. I didn’t even get to fully flesh out the QA->re-Dev cycle, feature creep, priority creep, or to even explain sprints and “the crunch”.
tl;dr:
Stop tinykittying on the devs. Blaming them is like blaming the Privates and Corporals in the Army for the decisions that the Generals and Lieutenants make.
