Quantity vs. Quality

[acetken]

I think the poll question speaks for itself. I don't like waiting so damn long between versions. I'd be very happy if I got 1 new thing and some bugfixes each release isntead of a whole shift in the gameplay dynamic. It'd make it easier to balance, and would help the comunity stay awake... I mean... Active...

[Curunir]

I think the way the DEVs are doing it is just fine. As long as they put out smaller patches every now and then, and only when desperately needed. I enjoy a huge patch that changes a lot.

[Slappy]

Patching early and often would have some advantages:

More balance tweaks can be tried and tested. If a certain tweak doesn't work out, then it's fixed in next week's patch. No big deal.

Bugfixes come out much sooner. You fix a bug, it goes in next week's patch. None of this "several weeks dealing with small bugs" thing.


And some disadvantages:
Since TUT doesn't seem to have an autoupdater thing, players have to go and manually download the patches. Having lots of patches would make it really annoying to re-install TUT or install it fresh, for newbies.

Another disadvantage is that the devs have to spend more time on code/patch management - putting together a patch every week and testing the package would take time that could be spent on further development.

And finally, players will have to live with new bugs that crop up, at least until the next patch or 2 when they're fixed.

---
I'd say the first disadvantage is a pretty big one. We want TUT to be newbie-friendly, and they already have to download 3 patches. Unless a huge "latest everything" patch was also put together every week (taking yet more dev time), they'd also have to download several smaller patches, more as time goes on.

That said, I'd prefer the small patches often route if the patch creation process could be streamlined. This is a beta anyway, and it's not unheard of for betas to be updated very often. Hell, most MMORPGS aren't beta and they patch every week or so.

[Machine]

Little and often.

But doing that would probably be harder work for the devs.

[Omega]

I'd prefer no patch at all, this means that Thievery has been completed.

On a different note, I think it is stupid to put out so much patches, people might get confused what to download and what not to.

[Yenzarill]

Keep the number of patches to a minimum, so there is a clear line distinguishing version, to avoid confusion.

[act smiley]

Large and infrequent but with in-between versions when there's some major issues introduced in a patch that need to be dealt with fairly quickly (as in maybe 3 or 4 weeks).
Roll on 1.35 then

[Mr.K.]

Frequent small patches are a pain in the arse for developers and very prone to be buggy. For new players, they mean a lot of downloads and annoyance if they want to keep up for a while to see if they like the game. They present incompatibility issues in different servers.

Unless there's something that needs urgent addressing (lightgem bug *might* be such a thing), a patch every now and then (1-2 months min, although 6 months for a patch is a bit long if it's just because of gameplay issues. Dev's have been including new models, maps, textures and reworked a lot of the code, so it's understandable that 1.3 took so long).

My 0.02€

[Stakhanov]

I'd say release major patches a little more often , like every 4-5 months.

[The_Dan]

Smaller patches preferably, my poor dialup-connection doesn't like 40mb downloads

[Machine]

Smaller patches preferably, my poor dialup-connection doesn't like 40mb downloads

*hugs Dan*

It's ok man! we;re in this together! we can make it!

[acetken]

Jesus Machine, you think being from the future and all that you'd have a faster connection...

What AOL version are they up to when you're from?

[Curunir]

Jesus Machine, you think being from the future and all that you'd have a faster connection...

What AOL version are they up to when you're from?

Eleventy-billion.0