[rob]

Sorry for resurrecting bits of your post, Tim, but you raised some valid points, and Josh’s post kinda ties in, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and provide some answers. I really didn’t want to discuss some of this stuff, but Josh isn’t really giving me any choice in the matter, so it’s time for me to just suck it up. Here goes…

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

In the last year+ LW has gone to CIA level of secrecy with what it is doing.

About two years ago, I started getting sick with great frequency. As has always been my custom, I shrugged it off and kept working my usual hours anyways (often 90+ hours each week). The ailments continued to get more serious, and I just continued to work through them. After a few months of that, I found myself in the hospital with some very serious issues. I spent a few weeks effectively doing a guest star appearance on the TV show “House”, with multiple doctors trying to figure out what was wrong and making all sorts of wrong guesses along the way. They finally figured out WHAT was wrong, but to this day they still don’t have a clue HOW I got it.

Without going into further details, I believe I essentially broke myself. I’ve spent the past 20 months on huge doses of brutal meds that have taken a massive toll on my body. I've been a shell of my former self, and that's had a profound impact on everything we've been trying to do as a company. But I’m still alive and kicking, so that’s better than the alternative, right?

One unfortunate aspect of the meds is that I can barely sleep. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in 20 months, and sleep deprivation on this level puts a serious crimp in one’s ability to have clarity for in-depth coding. It also makes a person pretty irritable. Another aspect of the meds is that it puts users on edge all the time. I’m sharing all this, because it’s pertinent in multiple ways.

Needless to say, my ability to get stuff done was seriously compromised. The doctors provided misleading information in some key ways, so I mistakenly thought that the situation would improve “any month now”. In conjunction with this, there were ongoing problems with obtaining a viable implementation of the API we needed from Paizo to get the Realm Works Content Market completed and launched. So we operated for a while from a place of hoping that things would get better shortly, and we outwardly remained hopeful and positive in our communications. After that wore on for a bit, we realized that the positive thinking we were projecting was starting to be viewed as misinformation by users – and understandably so.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team focused their energies on getting HLOnline into place. We experienced some setbacks along that path, which resulted in everything taking longer than intended, but it DID all come together. The problem was that our credibility was basically shot. Between HLO delays, the mistaken belief that I’d be getting better quickly, and continuing to not have what we needed to complete the RW Content Market, few believed us anymore, so the simplest solution was to “go quiet” and just release things when they were in place. This is what I’m assuming you mean when you refer to a “CIA level of secrecy”. It wasn’t intended to be secrecy. We simply stopped talking about anything until it was actually released, lest mere comments about upcoming products and features would be misconstrued as more empty promises. As part of this shift, our notices when things DID get released were typically centered on brief announcements on social media.

I’ve finally crossed an important milestone, so I’m slowly getting off the nastiest meds and beginning to feel a little bit better, and that means I should be able to contribute significantly more than I have for the past 20 months. We successfully got the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Playtest out the door at GenCon. And we theoretically now have enough pieces available of Paizo’s API that we can rework some things on our end and hopefully get the Realm Works Content Market launched. <fingers crossed> So things are looking up. That said, we weren’t planning to discuss that stuff publicly until this thread made things difficult for me to NOT disclose it.

When I saw many of the comments being made in various threads about HLOnline, it frustrated me to see some of the misconceptions that existed. I figured we needed to provide at least a modicum of clarity on what we’re doing at this point. Fortunately, the fact that I’m feeling a tiny bit better allowed me to write the original post. I just hope I don’t say anything that belies my inherent irritability as this thread progresses.

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

Where are the developer blogs or posts talking about the features LW is adding? Paizo has posts introducing new employees and even interns. This would help with the new employees that LW hired to show again that they are not going away but changing. But all the forums had been told was that people like Colen and Ion had left. I recently learned a guy named Gabriel works for LW. Who is he? What does he do? Shrug no clue...

I’d love to write about some of the things we’re putting into place, but it simply hasn’t been feasible. I was asked to turn in my forum posting privileges once the sleep deprivation and edginess from the meds started to bleed through into my forum posts. That was a long while back. This is my first time back on the forums since then, and there’s a lot of trepidation about it, since the sleep deprivation and edginess still persist.

Everyone here is working long hours to get everything into place, so taking out the time for developer blogs would delay getting critical functionality into place. Besides, most of the folks here are classic software developers that aren’t ideally suited to writing blogs. The CS team also has a full dance card already, so allocating time from them to write blogs would similarly incur delays on the things they’re dealing with. I’m NOT disagreeing with you that the blogs would probably be helpful in some ways, but we’ve been operating from the perspective that any such blogs would be taken by most with a huge grain of salt, so we figured it was more productive to focus on getting code into place and support tickets answered. We can revisit that thinking and re-assess.

Since you specifically asked about staff, here’s the quick rundown. Over the past year, we’ve lost two developers and one CS person. Within that same span, we’ve hired four new developers and two people for the CS team. So we’re absolutely growing. As for names on the developer side, Josh and Gabe have joined the UI team working on the HLO front end. Dave has taken over the HL Engine – not to be confused with David on the Server stuff. And Ryan is a jack-of-all-trades who’s wearing multiple hats right now. On the CS side, Rone and Ryan (another one) are now working with BJ.

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

What about all these "taking servers down" posts about? Why do they not contain at least a tidbit of information about WHY it is happening. What features are being added in all these "servers maintenance posts"? IMHO this would at least let people see progress or changes if we knew "something" was being changed or added.

Immediately after each of these instances where we take the servers down, you should be seeing release notes posted that highlight the key things introduced within the new release. The outage last Saturday was an exception to this, since that was just a nasty problem that we fixed. There’s usually a sticky thread with these details that remains until the next release is deployed. For example, there’s a thread entitled “Gen Con Update” present right now. If we haven’t done that in some cases, that’s a problem that we’ll need to rectify, so please let us know when that occurred so we can figure out what’s gone wrong in the process and get it corrected.

Hope this helps!