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Campaign Theatre

T

talsharien

Well-known member
Any updates on this, last I heard it had been stated that it would be released before the holidays. It was not noted which holidays so was the intent that this would be xmas, or some other holiday?
 
We had hoped to have a beta out before Christmas, although we didn't commit to any specific day. Unfortunately we aren't quite going to be able to make that happen. Things are definitely coming together for a beta, but there are a few critical things that are not ready for beta yet. While some of us have a few days off here and there over the next 2 weeks, much of the team will be hard at work over the holidays to get these things worked out to launch a beta in the near future.

Any time we give a time window accompanied with "we hope", that's all it is, a hope, and our best guess. So with that said, given that we have missed the window that we'd hoped for, and given that we are now much farther along than when we made that initial projection, what is our new hope?

Speaking personally (not for Rob, or BJ, or LWD in general), my hope is that we can launch the beta sometime before the end of January. Based on what I currently think we have left to do, that should be achievable. We may be able to do it quite a bit sooner than that if we catch a break, but that will depend on how final testing goes. As a reminder, that's just a hope, and not a promise.
 
Personally I'm more disappointed by incorrect information (ie Campaign Theater launching back in June or whenever it was originally) than a lack of information.
 
Toblakai said:
They had this policy and they get just as much crap from people. No win situation.
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This exactly. Either way we upset about half of everyone, so we often err on the side of being transparent with our current estimates. But as this is software development, current estimates can often be wrong (sometimes very, very wrong).

talsharien said:
Perhaps in the future, you should avoid offering any kind of timeline rather than offering false hope.......
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FWIW you'll notice I was very careful to issue a lot of caveats in my updated timeline reply. We haven't always been very good about that, but that's something I'm personally trying to change.

Also, after revising the timeline, internally we have a new specific date we're trying to hit. We discussed making that date public, but decided against it for exactly the reason you stated. So we are listening to both camps here and trying to walk the line between them as best we can.
 
Fair enough Joe, what does make me happy is that you are prepared to come into the forums and actually discuss this with us which has been my major issue in the past. I am happy to wait for campaign theatre for it to be done right :)
 
I'm much happier with an estimation, along with the necessary caveats, to give an idea on how things are progressing.

It's also interesting to see the direction you guys are going, not just simply saying abc has some kind of a guessed ETA.

I'm happy with the increased communication.
 
Just chiming in as someone who understands that it's hard to provide deadlines and that things come up.
 
Duggan said:
Just chiming in as someone who understands that it's hard to provide deadlines and that things come up.
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Sure, that's a reasonable statement as an individual and for the most part is a fair statement as a company. Though I will say if it becomes a constant form of operation, then it is either poor management or poor projections.

In leading software dev orgs. I've been in ones that I had to build up from delivering majority projects under p75 confidence estimates and half of those failing the p50 projection to delivering > 90% in the p75 estimate with 25% in the p90 estimate (a cause for a great celebration!).

I applaud attempting transparency, but that's a double-edged sword - if you do attempt transparency it's always nice to give updated major shifts.

With that said, there are two questions
(a) Do they have an obligation to deliver?
(b) Do they have an obligation to give us dates and meet them?

In regards to (a) - I purchased waiting for this, I might try to subjectively say yes; but the reality is they have zero obligation to deliver anything beyond what we purchased. If the servers were constantly offline then I would say they failed (a) but since everything is running/working and they are fixing bugs they are meeting that fairly well.

In regards to (b) - Hah! No, they have zero obligation to do this. It's nice! It's customer obsessed! It's wholly illogical! I believe Neil Gaiman summed it up here with: journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html; I don't think that people here are asking out of entitlement though, just out of curiosity and excitement.

If I were mods I'd probably just threadlock it and say: We don't know, we're trying to get it done, it may be tomorrow, it may be next year - which is the honest answer (I mean, it's exactly what just happened) and at least that gives people less false hope and just sets proper expectations. <-- I think part of this was done earlier by Joe but in a 'we want to be transparent' with caveats way instead of direct.
 
Hey all!

I hope everyone has enjoyed the holiday season.

Campaign Theater is looking pretty positive for a January release. We'll let you know as soon as we have something more concrete. :)
 
Someone point me towards a place that describes campaign theatre, what it does and why I might want to learn more about it?
Sean
 
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