The sheer volume of things that were overlooked with this feature are scary.
There was 3 months worth of
thought and development time that went in to this, as well as a "first draft" (bundles) and notes that came 2 days early.
At this point I am really struggling to understand what the development process of this game looks like.
Do you guys just toss a dart at a dartboard filled with ideas that some random people DMd you over the last 10 years and then start coding whatever the dart hits with no questions asked or thought put in to it?
It's no secret that you guys have very little interaction with the game itself. The way you play and the amount you play is minimal and creates a very clear gap of game knowledge and understanding of how things work. You guys admit this, we know this, it's common knowledge, you have families and lives, we get it. But you also made it clear that this feature took "a
lot of coding."
So when you know that a new feature is going to take an excessive amount of work, even if you only come to that conclusion once you are knee-deep in it, how can you allow yourselves to continually stick to this militant development principle of zero communication? I ask this honestly and seriously. You could have dropped this idea on us at any time in the last 3 months and explained stuff like, "ok, we want this to be really fluid and automatic, we are thinking that things will stack automatically and subinventories will be onmouseover now, and this is the size of stacks we are thinking about, and the items we are considering." And I bet you that at least SOME of the things that have been made an obnoxious chore, or some of the things that stacks basically broke would have come up in feedback.
I am honestly curious what you guys thought. Did you think this was going to be a clean pump-and-dump update? Everything was going to go smoothly? Because this 3 month development journey just became what is sure to be many additional weeks, if not months of tweaking until everything is less obnoxious and runs smoothly (if you don't just bandaid it all with a toggle or literally ignore it).
I just seems so obvious that so, so, so many development issues, development flops, crashes after updates and updates that lead to weeks worth of tweaks could all be avoided with more communication. There has to be a breaking point, right? Is the bar really set this low for you guys as developers? Are you are honestly happy with this sort of "drop what we have so far and let the server crash and the players complain for 20 pages" development strategy? Do you not think that more communication could help?
Something has got to give here. Updates like this raise so many questions, and it seems like you guys genuinely have less time and drive to develop and clearly less time to bugtest or even think about what bugs might occur with a new implementation. It seems clear that there are easy options available that would make the development process potentially smoother going forward. People want to help, people don't want updates that destroy the game.
You can move forward with personal growth and honesty and the community will support you in it.
You don't have to be small little principled gnomes forever.