Dedicated team always thinking about improvements.
Very responsive to changing game environment.
Small Mod team Con’s
Lack of interface consistency between game and other mods
In House Dev Pro’s
More consistent design.
In house Dev Cons
Fire and forget development, once the initial requirements are released, you get what you get for a long time.
No dedicated team, development gets abandoned until things get so bad resources get assigned.
Telephone game disconnects between initial purpose and goals and the final results as the task gets passed through a large bureaucracy usually to developers that don’t understand the purpose and goals well enough to question if the design requirements they’re given actually meet those goals.
Mechanic helpers aside, I think this is what will be lost. We will be getting lessor and less flexible interfaces and they’ll be stuck in that state for a very long time. There were issues with original revamp that hung around until the end of dragon flight.
No. Large companies that had dedicate client teams and roaming specialist teams. Lots of PM’s, both internally and with clients and long chains of stakeholders with varying degrees of awareness of what’s really going on until the last minute where things can really go sideways.
Seen things fail in lots of different ways and my best guess is there will not be a long term team that owns this. Once this effort is done they’ll get assigned to something else.
I worked in complex systems all of my career and our “In House” software teams were never like this. The designers were constant looking at the next major iteration AND lowest cost corrections to critical issues found in the field (not fire & forget). We had leads that handled major sub-areas of the design like tactics, navigation & control, signal processing, communications, etc. (we had dedicated sub-teams working on specialized knowledge areas of the project). Our overall lead utilized an Agile Development approach so there was a stand-up meeting every morning that was not allowed to last for more than 10 minutes for each lead to say what their biggest expected roadblock was for that day (lead’s job to un-block the road), then a weekly 30-min meeting to discuss tracking of how well built software is meeting original purpose/goals (as well as cost & schedule tracking).
Perhaps your experience was different, as you say, but my in-house experience had none of the cons you describe (our biggest issue was working on a 20y old code-base, probably much like WoW’s challenge).
Even if you pay attention to the WoW Casts and various dev interviews with streamers, you clearly see that it’s evolved. Ion is like a leader of leaders. Those sub-leaders are all dedicated to a single purpose. There’s a UX team for WoW that includes Laura Sardinha & Toby Ragain and maybe three other people (i.e., it’s a small team).
