Seriously,pull yourself together Anet.

Originally Posted by Linsey (former lead Live Team)

The Anniversary Update – lessons learned

Back in January we talked a bit about our hopes for the year. Now, eight months later, I want to let you know how it's going so far. The Anniversary Update was a huge success, but it was clear to us that we had bitten off more than we could chew. Once the update went Live, we stepped back a bit to regroup, assess our process, and seek another designer. This took some time away from development, but it was important, and we learned a lot from the experience.

Here’s the biggest takeaway: we just don't have the manpower to produce maintenance builds, skill balance updates, festival builds, and large content updates all at the same time.

That was a pretty big revelation for us. It meant some big changes were needed. We started working on streamlining our update process with the hope that extra work now meant less work later. We began working on automating the base functionality of holiday festivals, weekend events, the monthly tonic changeover, and the monthly tournament map rotation. All of these things have previously been done manually every time and required rigorous testing to make sure no numbers were off and no files were missing. You’d be surprised at how much work each festival needs every time it runs even when we aren't adding new content to it. Automating these systems will free up time for other projects, reduce the number of maintenance builds, remove the need to do a build to start holiday festivals, and simplify the upkeep of GW for its caretakers. It's an exciting project for us because of the effect it will have on our day-to-day work.

......

A New Approach

I know this is a lot of information to take in, and it comes in a package that is sort of unusual in the game industry. At the beginning of the year, we spoke about wanting to be more open about what we’re working on and set this as a high priority in the months that followed. We had a lot of plans for how to accomplish this, but as they say, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”

We’ve decided to try a slightly different approach, starting with this post. As you can see, we are relaxing our stance on talking about projects that are in progress and projects that are just getting going. We’ve launched Facebook and Twitter pages to give you quick updates on what we are up to. Taking a less formal approach like this will work easier with our fast-paced schedule and will hopefully increase the flow of information to you.

This degree of transparency is unusual for large game companies, being more common to smaller studios and indie projects. We’ll be sharing information and offering insights into the development process that the public normally doesn’t have access to for AAA games. This kind of stuff goes on behind the scenes anyway; we’re just pulling the curtain back to show you the process. To make this new approach successful, our community needs to meet us halfway. We all have to be on the same side here.

So, in return for this openness, we expect you, our community, to be understanding when projects that we have discussed may be canceled or changed, or a project or build is delayed. We want you to have ambitious expectations for us, but to understand that there are always limitations. Everyone has to deal with finite resources, competing priorities, and unexpected complications, and we’re no different. By embracing this reality, we can work together to bridge the gap between development and community for the betterment of the game.

I’m looking forward to chatting about my work openly, but as always please keep in mind that there will be lulls in activity from time to time.