Hi everyone! I was working this weekend getting ready for Gen Con, but I was heads down and didn’t take a look at the forums until today.
@everyone, as Rob said, the functionality for Syinscape integration was already built in from before, so getting it ready for them to use took a few hours for both testing and verification. This will be the same mechanism we’ll use for integration with other third part apps going forward.
Let me first be clear that our priorities have
not changed. The vast majority of our time is spent on the Content Market and the web version, plus various pieces that are needed to meet those objectives. As users have seen in product updates over the past months, we’ve also been opportunistically adding various small refinements when time allows, just as we said we would do at the beginning of the year. This initial integration step for third-party apps is simply one of those quick-and-easy enhancements. It does not reflect a change in the team’s priorities.
Like Rob, I was disappointed to see the rush to judgement. In the future, please
ask if something is not clear. I think that between my posts and Rob’s, we’ve demonstrated our willingness to provide clarity if users are ever confused or unsure about something. If you don’t want to post your question on the forums, you can always send me a PM asking for clarification. If it’s something where I think many people might be similarly concerned or unclear, I can post on the forums. I don’t think that will happen often, but I’m happy to offer my availability up to the community.
As for frustrations about “soon”, man do I get that. I was just on a podcast talking about Realm Works, and I
really wanted to give my “best-guess” estimate for the web version and the Content Market based on what I’ve heard recently from the development team.
As many of you know, I’m married to Joe (the lead developer on the web version), so I know first-hand how progress is going, as it’s a part of our evening “how was your day, dear?” conversations. However, those conversations have also made me more aware of something else: (1) we’re building this from the ground up, (2) it’s huge and complex, and (3) it’s breaking new ground that other programs haven’t touched before. Because of this, there are many unknowns that we don’t run into with our other products, like Hero Lab or Army Builder.
Following the Kickstarter, we provided a lot of information about development progress, and our best-guess estimates. Unfortunately, that led to two issues. 1) Users would critique development decisions based on incomplete information or draw incorrect assumptions based on the information we provided. This required
a lot of development resources to respond to and correct the false assumptions and misconceptions. 2) The “best-guess” estimates were interpreted as promised release dates and when we “missed” them (for the reasons I mentioned above), it led to a lot of (understandable) frustration among our users.
That experience forced us to change our approach. Instead of providing estimates and extensive information on development progress as in the past, we’ve instead focused on showing visible progress as we hit milestones – for example, the sneak peek of Realm works on the web a few months back and now the imminent preview at Gen Con. Unfortunately, it seems some people want it both ways, and that merely creates a double-bind that can’t be resolved. Since providing details didn’t work well and, more importantly, ended up consuming a fair amount of critical developer resources, we’re not doing that for the time being. I hope that clarifies things a little on why we’re not sharing estimates right now.
What I can do is provide some basic, qualitative information. While there hasn’t been much visible movement to show on the Content Market, significant progress is being made. The best analogy, and one we’ve used many times before, is an iceberg, where only a small portion can actually be seen above the water. The Content Market is a huge iceberg, and a lot has (and continues to) go on beneath the surface. Virtually all the pieces that consumers will ultimately see are built upon the foundation beneath, so there’s nothing of substance to show off right now. Once we focus more heavily “above the water” in the months ahead, we’ll be able to show off visible progress.
All that being said, there may be ways we can improve how we share our progress without the drawbacks we experienced before. I’ll be mulling everyone’s feedback over while I’m at Gen Con (including the PMs I’ve received over the past few days). Please understand that I won’t be able to respond to posts/PMs much this week because of the Con, but I’m reading them.
