Strap in, it's a long post...
Obviously communication has been lacking on the systems front lately and I hope to offer the community a little insight. I'll lead with the main question and expound from there.
TLDR
Scheduling is tight and we don't have enough people.
Why so few AAs this time?
For the better part of 3 years I have been working as both a systems designer and and programmer, with the last 1.5 years of my time being split at approximately 70% code hours 30% design hours. The opportunity to gain experience working on larger code initiatives in addition to the smaller bugfixing I was previously doing to keep the game running was something that made a lot of sense. Not to mention the financial incentive to move onto the engineering track from the design track.
Going back to last year, in the 2-3 months leading up to the previous expansion I clocked in approximately 754 hours, coming into the office most weekends and putting in very long weekdays. Far less awful than the war stories many of my colleagues in the industry have suffered through, but we get to make games, which theoretically is something we want to be doing.
By the time the last expansion launched my communication with the community was obviously lacking but I was relatively happy with the systems work I was able to implement, or at last as happy as any developer can be. The team and I share the sort of driving passion that tends to carry us through the rough work days. So for all the anonymous negativity that gets projected at the team and company, we still derive fulfillment from what we do. We get to work on EverQuest, that's a big deal, it's something important and meaningful to us.
Unfortunately for our team EverQuest does not exist in a vacuum here. So when it came time for bonuses, which traditionally account for 15-20% of my annual pay, despite year over year strong performance from a passionate and consistently engaged community, I took a 7% pay cut from the previous year. Granted I remained employed, while a lot of incredibly talented and equally hard working people, through no fault of their own, did not.
That financial stress would have been fine if not for my banal human desire for family. So while working myself ragged so that I could be proud of my work I put an unfair burden on my fiance because I was never at home to help care for the puppy we adopted; or more importantly, be a partner to her.
So when I took stock of the important things in life I realized that sacrificing everything outside of work for the sake of pride and polish simply isn't sustainable, which hurt me a lot. I am someone who takes considerable pride in my work. I wear that Norrathian Martyr badge proudly. I was 12 years old when I started playing and have dedicated nearly all of my life to EverQuest since, first as a player and now as a developer. So to see the sum total of that dedication result in yet another year that I struggle to provide for the ones I love, it did some considerable damage to my motivation to give more than can be expected to keep the ship afloat.
After that revelation, I've striven to be a better human being. Foremost by being home on time to walk our dog in the evening so that my incredibly patient and understanding fiance doesn't have to ask at 11pm whether I'll be home for dinner or not. It wasn't feasible to go beyond the hours scheduled for AA development given the enormity of the engineering workload the team has slogged through this year.
So I more than fully understand the community's disappointment with the scope of AA development and while my post count has decreased substantially from earlier years I do honestly read just about everything posted here on the forums. My ever-expanding to-do list (in bullet point format) is 21 pages long.
Class AAs?
With the time that was available I made the decision that the more important part of AAs to get finished were passive ability upgrades. These take considerably less time than the activated abilities both because they're shared between more classes and because there is less spell implementation, which takes considerable time given the lack of tools to expedite the process.
Within the 30% of my work-year that comprises design work I also had to complete the implementation of achievements and their rewards, serve as a knowledge-base for all the strange arcana that defines how any-and-everything gets implemented, and I'm currently scrambling to ensure the design work for the faction window that the engineering team and I are putting the final touches on now will get done in time for launch.
More later?
I don't expect that to fit into the current schedule. The design team is already working on about 3 major initiatives for next year and the programming team on several more than that; much of which is mandatory behind-the-scenes efforts to fix services like the login servers, character data, stability issues, etc.
I want to be able to say that the EverQuest team is aware of community sentiment. We want to be able to do more for you but I feel there's a misconception on the size and scope of things. I would strongly encourage everyone to peruse the current credits and understand that the scope of things that get put into a release are done by people with the titles "Artist", "Designer", "Programmer".
This is not in any way meant to belittle the efforts of all the other shared services people that contribute to the game, but with 4.5 artists, 5.3 4.3 designers, and 5.7 4.7 programmers, there is only so much that is humanly possible. Not to mention the fact that the EverQuest team has been continually begging management for 2 additional content designers for multiple years to no avail.
So?
So that's the behind the curtains view of why AAs look like they are. I certainly wish I could paint a better picture but I feel like I owe you, the community that has given me so much, some sort of explanation. Please see TLDR version if you skipped this essay.
