jason1982 wrote:Yes i know its in Alpha but that excuse only goes so far.
It goes a lot further than you think.
jason1982 wrote:was it preventable sure but its a mistake.
So was Y2K, and it cost, at the time, several billion dollars in hardware and software upgrades to fix. When great CEOs make statements like "Nobody needs more than 640k RAM*" less than 10 years before everyone is running software wanting 4MB of RAM... The industry is still that shortsighted in some regards.
The question is "what's reasonable reimbursement?" I burned up q100 wood and q200 metal to build my knarr. I know that isn't much to some people here, but for me, at this moment, it was a big investment. Do you think I'm going to be happy with a q20 in return? I'd rather just smash it and rebuild. At least I can use my old one until I can regrow my trees.
One could argue that a better database system could be used to track materials spent, so that proper refunds in materials could be made. Is that affordable on the budget that this game has? Good databases require a significant amount of computing power, especially one that has to perform in real time on a game. It's not as expensive as it was 10 years ago, but you can run all the game data for this game on a single desktop PC. The database operations would either require a high end server system or a small network of dedicated nodes. (Note that I am making a lot of assumptions about data throughput on this based on what financial database data processing looks like.)
*Bill Gates, c. 1982 shortly after the release of the IBM PC
Opinions expressed in this statement are the authors alone and in no way reflect on the game development values of the actual developers.