Skill Rework ETA?

[Duukar]

My BO needs an ST punt thats worth a damn.

Any projected ETA?

[Secrets]

That isn't going to be the purpose of the skill rewrite.

That is a systems rewrite - meaning that it will be easier for devs to make changes in the future, not make immediate balance changes with said patch.

[oaliaen]

So skill revamp Will not happen in 2023? Thats bad news

[Toshutkidup]

So skill revamp Will not happen in 2023? Thats bad news

I will say it for Secrets before Secrets can say it. Apply to join the team and maybe will go faster.

[Scottx125]

So skill revamp Will not happen in 2023? Thats bad news

I will say it for Secrets before Secrets can say it. Apply to join the team and maybe will go faster.

The concept of more developers/staff = faster products is flawed. As team sizes grow inefficiencies also grow. You also have a transition period where it's not expected for developers to realistically contribute much to a project until 2-6 months after they join, as they need to become familiar with the code base, brush up an areas they need to know aside from their core skill set. And essentially get up to speed with the project and development processes unique to that project as a whole. It also assumes he has the skills applicable to join the team.

And from what I've heard, the recruitment process isn't as open as it used to be. The devs are very protective over their code base and don't want it falling into the open domain like it did several years ago. If it was up to me the entire project would be open source. But whatever.

[Secrets]

So skill revamp Will not happen in 2023? Thats bad news

A skill revamp (in the sense that you're thinking of) has never been planned.

That would change way too much of the game in a way that would instantly make everyone uncomfortable playing the game.

When I was on the team, the others did a number of major revamps that weren't well-received (Torque's revamp to WL, SH/ SW, etc) and there's precedent on why large-scale class changes aren't beneficial to the game's short-term and long-term health.

The 'skill revamp' that is being teased isn't going to initially change anything with the skill values or balance.

I can't help if you're illiterate and interpret that as "there won't ever be skill revamps in 2023" because you work in extremes where everything is all or nothing - though, I can hardly fault you, as this is a mentality that the old dev team has fostered in the community with absolutes, and quite frankly it's because of RoR's historical communication issues even among the team.

The whole purpose of the skill code rewrite is so that it doesn't take literal months to implement a new skill change and have it reflected on both the client and server functioning as it is described in the game client. This skill rewrite will likely fix long-standing bugs, like how some buffs / vfx get stuck on and permanently reduce client performance, or Zealot/RP stances, etc...

Then, sometime in the future after that code goes live and is stabilized, then the development time doesn't have to spend months on new skills, or adjustments to existing skills - they can simply 'just tweak a value in a db' (obviously more involved than that) and have it reflected on the client and the server properly.

This is why, historically, revamps like the Squig Herder one have taken months and months of experimentation - the old buff / abilities system was done utterly incorrectly versus what the client expects. The fact that it works as well as it does is because of years and years of metaphorically fitting rectangles into triangle holes by force until they go through. The end result might be damaged and mangled, but it'll work for its purpose.

[Secrets]

So skill revamp Will not happen in 2023? Thats bad news

I will say it for Secrets before Secrets can say it. Apply to join the team and maybe will go faster.

The concept of more developers/staff = faster products is flawed. As team sizes grow inefficiencies also grow. You also have a transition period where it's not expected for developers to realistically contribute much to a project until 2-6 months after they join, as they need to become familiar with the code base, brush up an areas they need to know aside from their core skill set. And essentially get up to speed with the project and development processes unique to that project as a whole. It also assumes he has the skills applicable to join the team.

And from what I've heard, the recruitment process isn't as open as it used to be. The devs are very protective over their code base and don't want it falling into the open domain like it did several years ago. If it was up to me the entire project would be open source. But whatever.

Inefficiencies with this team are because there are two developers working on it total - dalen and MaxHayman.

If you spend 3 months learning the codebase and a developer has to take 8 hours of their volunteer time training you per week, that's effectively 96 hours they could recoup in the period of a few weeks to a month (I often spent somewhere like 20 hours a week on the project, higher when I was more active)

This may be true in bigger companies or companies where costs are problematic, but in hobby engineering, it simply isn't true that less engineers is somehow better and never training someone new is a bad idea. There's no 'job security' by denying others to work on the project, there's no competition about salaries, and technical debt and lack of people who know the product is a death sentence even in professional games industry engineering - at some of the companies where I work, if someone gets hit by a bus and can't provide me the info I need, it will take upwards of 6 months to a year to replace them versus just training 6 people (and if only 2 of them stay, that's 2 more engineers that I have now compared to before.) - and by proxy, technical debt is resolved.

You might be thinking, "Why not document everything?" - well, even in business engineering for video games, you may not have time to actually document everything.

Post-production games (of which RoR would qualify, even though it's a hobby) don't get the luxury of giant teams anyway, depending on the product of course. Obviously, a company like Blizzard with 300 employees may be able to afford paying someone to do documentation and planning that is technically savvy - and the sheer amount of people involved in said product may help avoid large swaths of technical debt.

But even then, with them returning to the office, they've slashed a large number of their workforce due to having people not wanting to go back to the office as they may see doing so as an inefficiency (or they live now in an area where doing so isn't beneficial)

[mryay]

Inefficiencies with this team are because there are two developers working on it total - dalen and MaxHayman.

If you spend 3 months learning the codebase and a developer has to take 8 hours of their volunteer time training you per week, that's effectively 96 hours they could recoup in the period of a few weeks to a month (I often spent somewhere like 20 hours a week on the project, higher when I was more active)

I am a CTO IRL and, quite frankly, hats off Secrets for your +20h/weeks on an unpaid project.
I lead a non-profit project in addition to my daily work (as CTO + lead dev), and it is rare to have people dedicated to "the cause". So all players should thank you, including all devs, past and currently active.

Now, I have to say, I am disappointed in the number of currently active devs given the nature and the proven potential of Return of Reckoning. It makes sense to me why this niche game isn't scaling to the next level, even if it has all ingredients for success.

A few questions, for you and the team:

1) Why not make this game open-source? Or limited-source + open contribution on some assets (events, RVR design, skill designs, quests design, skill redesign), if you are afraid of code proliferation.

2) Is legal arrangement between EA and Gameworkshop a hard showstopper? Or is the team voluntarily limiting itself?

3) Is there other reasons why you wouldn't tap into a larger pool of contributors (amongst the community first) team of dev engineers, data engineers, designer, 3D modelers, Game designers, sound designers, etc?

4) Is the advent of AI, with GPT4/ChatGPT, making (or would make) your life easier?

Of course, nothing is forcing you to answer. But the huge fan in me, a fan of the game and your achievements, would greatly appreciate if you could shed the light on my interrogations.

/salute
Swizz

[Secrets]

Inefficiencies with this team are because there are two developers working on it total - dalen and MaxHayman.

If you spend 3 months learning the codebase and a developer has to take 8 hours of their volunteer time training you per week, that's effectively 96 hours they could recoup in the period of a few weeks to a month (I often spent somewhere like 20 hours a week on the project, higher when I was more active)

I am a CTO IRL and, quite frankly, hats off Secrets for your +20h/weeks on an unpaid project.
I lead a non-profit project in addition to my daily work (as CTO + lead dev), and it is rare to have people dedicated to "the cause". So all players should thank you, including all devs, past and currently active.

Now, I have to say, I am disappointed in the number of currently active devs given the nature and the proven potential of Return of Reckoning. It makes sense to me why this niche game isn't scaling to the next level, even if it has all ingredients for success.

A few questions, for you and the team:

1) Why not make this game open-source? Or limited-source + open contribution on some assets (events, RVR design, skill designs, quests design, skill redesign), if you are afraid of code proliferation.

2) Is legal arrangement between EA and Gameworkshop a hard showstopper? Or is the team voluntarily limiting itself?

3) Is there other reasons why you wouldn't tap into a larger pool of contributors (amongst the community first) team of dev engineers, data engineers, designer, 3D modelers, Game designers, sound designers, etc?

4) Is the advent of AI, with GPT4/ChatGPT, making (or would make) your life easier?

Of course, nothing is forcing you to answer. But the huge fan in me, a fan of the game and your achievements, would greatly appreciate if you could shed the light on my interrogations.

/salute
Swizz

Hey, great questions! I'm also a lead dev who reports to the CEO directly now, leading a small team about the size of RoR's on a commercial post-production video game product, and I have a not-for-profit hobby game project on the side that is also a 100% 'clean room' (ie; no original game code) emulator.

1) The reason to not make this open source is, quite frankly, still control and specifically quality control (see answer 4 below) - and there's of course a political reason, too.

If you're spending 20 hours a week, you're generally going to be proud of your work. You're not going to want to share your time investment with others, only to have them take the time you've spent and make their own project with it.

When you're dealing with a team of about 20 volunteers including artists, management, GMs, engineers, and designers, consent to distribute is also a moral issue. It's not great to just share someone else's art project without their permission - and worse, someone else could profit off of your art project.

There was a project made by Russians recently that plans on opening a cash shop and profiting off of the game. If that were to open, it could potentially involve Games Workshop, Gamebryo or EA (depending on which one of the two wants to crack down on IP distribution problems involving a profitable venture)

2) EA and Games Workshop, from what I understand, haven't commented on RoR's existence, and they know the goal here isn't to profit, I'd assume - lawyer-types might report its existence, but its up to the parent company to ultimately pursue.

There's the added complication of distribution and who owns the IP, arguably, at this point - it may not be worth getting lawyers involved if RoR says, "Well, we're only emulating EA's property", and GW tries to take down on the basis that the property belongs to them. Or, EA sues, and they don't have an active contract with the rights holders and publicly pursuing a project takedown would require the consent of Games Workshop.

This is why projects like SWG Legends, whom have forked Star Wars Galaxies' entire source code illegally leaked to the emulator community by a former SOE dev, continue to operate, and why sites like Github haven't taken down SWG's source code from their site - it would be expensive if the legality was contested to prove damages, it would be a detriment to the companies' reputation for going after fans, and it wouldn't be an assured victory due to the IP being split between two companies.

3) They are already doing that with the art team, design team, etc run by Rubious and Ekalime. They are making new art assets that aren't normally included in the game and patching them into the game client via reverse engineering. They aren't also developers by trade - the RoR team, I Imagine, is about 40 people when you start including the extra art team (which operates outside the RoR discord in private) who are just Warhammer enthusiasts.

So there are some people on the database side that are new and in the loop - but they aren't software engineers. That role is hard to recruit for due to the lack of qualified individuals who are willing to put their free time on the line and actively reach out to the 2 developers involved and build a personal relationship with them.

Generally, I've seen people interested in helping, even professionally at my job - but in my job's case, they have to be paid employees or contractors (likely the latter first) and they'll generally not work on the role in question they want at first.

Those who would be qualified to help, much like in the business part of the games industry, without experience would start in the CSR / QA roles - they'd be picked with an opportunity to advance upwards, but may initially perform work that is below them. If they start showing interests in moving laterally, then you can start entertaining that.

But in my experience, even those folks burn out rather quickly, which is why it's incredibly hard to find people who fit the bills of:
- Trustworthy
- Reliable
- Skilled
- Dedicated
- Self-Motivated
- Willing to contribute without compensation

all in the same person. dalen, MaxHayman, Natherul, myself etc have all fit those bills historically, and the only times we've fallen off from that is when we've lost interest in the project - then one of the above attributes (or all) are not present.

It's hard to find motivation to work for free.

4) As an AI language model, I have no knowledge of other engineers. (jk)

However,

ChatGPT on a project made with mostly volunteers ends up introducing additional code quality issues that would have to be resolved. It's great to get a skeleton framework of something, but generally I've found ChatGPT to be utterly worthless for legacy tech. It can't write use cases that are specific to the legacy games industries' requirements of secure software. I'd be concerned or wary of anyone who uses ChatGPT as a primary way to code, as well.

Enhancing your existing performance is likely fine. But it's not a replacement for human interaction with IDEs yet, even if it writes fundamentally sound code or could pass exams, it's not going to pass an interview process with me - I don't want /just/ skilled engineers even professionally. They have to mesh well with the team and be able to explain their work. And the moment the AI language model messes up, I'll know.

Hope that helps answer your questions.

[mryay]

Hope that helps answer your questions.

Completely.

I sincerely thank you for your answer.
I appreciate the time taken for elaborating on the rationale.
It makes sense.

With respect to point 1), I won't teach you anything by saying there are ways of mitigating/enforcing code quality. But I reckon it requires more investment in coaching/code reviews.

So remains the political side. But there is no need to comment, this is internal business.

But in my experience, even those folks burn out rather quickly, which is why it's incredibly hard to find people who fit the bills of:
- Trustworthy
- Reliable
- Skilled
- Dedicated
- Self-Motivated
- Willing to contribute without compensation

This made me laugh. From "Trustworthy" to "Self-Motivated"-> this is already a great challenge for regular paid work. I am spending too much time on recruiting. And I feel and share your pain if you add the "unpaid work" component.


Now the elephant in the room is: would the RoR community have any weight in taking the discussion to Games Workshop and Gamebryo|EA to allow a form of funding for a non-profit organization?

I mean I would tip for paying the team from time to time. Contributors highly deserve it.

The team could ask for state/regional funding (AFAIK servers run in EU, aren't they?)

Even, maybe, think about a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) where they could raise community funding (using crypto utility tokens) with voting rights about the RoR next batch of skins, pocket items, armor, weapons, class rework, you name it.

/Salute
Swizz