Gook started us off on a round of back in the day with his info talking about AF and it got me thinking of how things happened. Mistakes that were made and how things might have been different if other decisions had been made.
1) SFC2 being released before D2 was ready for prime time. The four - five months that the game was out where we couldn't D2 (which was one of the big things advertised) really hurt the game and community.
2) SFC-OP being released a month or so after D2 was finally brought on-line. Sure it might have given Taldren money to work with, but it really split the community and hurt on-line play. Specifically when it ran a different D2 than EAW.
3) Chat problems. Remember how hard it was to get the damn chat to keep working at first? Granted we ended up coming up with all sorts of different ways to communicate but if chat had worked right things would have been much smoother.
4) Missions. Minimal number of missions, and bugs in the important ones, like "Patrol". Sure we have Evil Dave with all of his missions but it took quite some time for the API to be released and if memory serves the documentation was extremely poor.
5) The apparent expectation that the community would step up and run servers to handle all of the on-line play. There were what, three official IPlay servers at first with max 32 players on-line in each? For a game that has sold hopefully thousands, that's not many slots to play. There were great people that stepped in and have ran great servers. But how many people tried to play in the first month or so that D2 was actually up and were unable to either get on-line with a good server, or find one they liked. What was quite strange was that even with the expectation of community servers, the documentation for the server kit was abysmal, abhorrent, totally lacking. What was really sad was that when admins asked questions, it seemed that even the Taldren people couldn't give a decent answer as to what a particular setting actually did. My hat is off to those who took the time to debug all of the settings.
6) Quality Control. From problems in the ship file to missions to on-line exploits. I know they ran the game and patches through betatesters, but as a player at that time, it just didn't seem to me that they tested the right things. I don't know what all they caught. But I remember they missed a lot.
7) The biggest biggest biggest mistake they made though was in the Flatfile Database. It should have been apparent from initial tests that the flatfile just wasn't going to work out. Database bloat, corruption, crashes. The flatfile failed on every turn. Then when the community attempted to figure out what was going on, we had to go in and dissect the flatfile ourselves. Figuring out what everything meant and coming up with our own tools to work around the problems.
Topic: Monday Morning Quarterbacking (Read 1077 times)