I can understand that no one really knows the answer to this, but I'm interested in what people think it will be. This will be helpful for people who are on the fence about upgrading their pledges.
So, how long do you expect pre-alpha will be going on before alpha happens? A month? Three months? Six months? Longer? How long do you think it'll take VR to get through their pre-alpha checklist and iterations?
grumble said:I can understand that no one really knows the answer to this, but I'm interested in what people think it will be. This will be helpful for people who are on the fence about upgrading their pledges.
So, how long do you expect pre-alpha will be going on before alpha happens? A month? Three months? Six months? Longer? How long do you think it'll take VR to get through their pre-alpha checklist and iterations?
And as others have stated, this isn't early access and pleding just for "Pre-alpha" in the sense of getting early kick at the game is the wrong approach. This is my view and I am not saying you or anyone else pledged just to get an early start. :)
If someone is on the fence then it means they are hopeful for the game and want to help make it happen. Pledge for that reason. :) All the rest are just bonuses.
I'm guessing 6-9 months for pre-alpha, followed by another 4-8 months for Alpha, then 6-12 months for Beta... Just guessing little over 2 years until release.
Granted I'm just pulling these from my bodily orifices and have no real information to base these on. So... not sure how much that helps.
~winter
I dont expect pre-alpha to be that long.... I'll guess 3 month's tops.
The way i understand it PA is just to make sure it's stable, and fix whats not. Optimistically it will be pretty stable and whats not will be easy to fix, then they move on to
Alpha, stable but incomplete. Im guessing this will be 6 to 8 months to get it complete, testing the features as they add them.
Then on into Beta for however long it takes
As long as we are taking wild guesses here:
Pre-alpha will take about 10 months. Each zone, class, race, etc. will be tested individually as they are created and filled out. Pre-alpha will be about making sure that each of the game components work.
Alpha willl take about 2-1/2 months and will start after all the components are in place. Alpha will be about testing the game as a whole, adjusting game balance, etc.
Beta will be 1 month. It will be about capacity testing and promoting the game for launch.
Launch will then occur on March 16, 2019. The 20th anniversary of the launch of EQ.
I have been in a few Alpha and Beta tests for different MMOs, the timeframe for most of them was play for a weekend, give back info on bugs and fill out a questionaire they would shut down for a week or 2 inbetween testings to work on bugs and patching. There would be about 4 or 5 testing periods for Beta. I don't remember how many it was for the Alphas.
Not fair to have Kilsin start a pot. Pot is legal in some areas and illegal in others - we should all have an equal chance.
I was going to say 3-3-6, like Durp said and his idea on the coincidence of a March 2019 release makes for a compelling story.
I would assume they are working toward full funding and if that happens, could accelerate the entire process. If and when that happens is key. And in order to consider March 2019 as a launch, I believe they have to get a bigger team.
Pre-Alpha- Dec 13th or 15th thru April 2018
*Full funding kicks in somewhere up until now
Alpha- May thru Sept 2018
Beta- Oct thru Feb 2019
Live March 2019
*This would be ideal scenario but my gut says toward 2020 for launch if they don't expand
If I had to guess, I would say PA will be mostly focused tests to get basic functionality like log in servers, zone tranferring and character data saves working correctly "in the real world". I don't think PA testers will be doing much casual gaming as the tests will be likely scheduled and pretty strict.
By the time they are ready to let folks roam about somewhat freely they will probably open up Alpha. I would be surprised if it took more than a few months to iron out the wrinkles in the core systems.
So if you don't think you can make it to scheduled tests with strict play guidelines, I wouldn't push too hard to get into PA if playing the game is your ultimate goal.
Pyye said:I would assume they are working toward full funding and if that happens, could accelerate the entire process. If and when that happens is key. And in order to consider March 2019 as a launch, I believe they have to get a bigger team.
I would not assume that more man power = faster progress, though it can.
You may or may not have heard of an essay by Fred Brooks (IBM Computer Scientist/Engineer) who was a pretty smart guy, called the Mythical Man Month.
He makes many observations about software engineering and productivity. See the full Text.
Some of these are:
"The Man-Month
The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable. Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communica- tion among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.
When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential con-
straints, the appHcation of more effort has no effect on the sched- ule (Fig. 2.2). The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. "
He also became known for Brooks Law, which states:
According to Brooks himself, the law is an "outrageous oversimplification",[1] but it captures the general rule. Brooks points to the main factors that explain why it works this way:
So, I wouldn't assume that full funding means quicker to launch or shorter alpha times, it simply means we get more quality and more time to accomplish the goals that will result in Pantheon being released before it has to turn a profit.
-Az
azaya said:Pyye said:I would assume they are working toward full funding and if that happens, could accelerate the entire process. If and when that happens is key. And in order to consider March 2019 as a launch, I believe they have to get a bigger team.
I would not assume that more man power = faster progress, though it can.
You may or may not have heard of an essay by Fred Brooks (IBM Computer Scientist/Engineer) who was a pretty smart guy, called the Mythical Man Month.
He makes many observations about software engineering and productivity. See the full Text.
Some of these are:
"The Man-Month
The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable. Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communica- tion among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.
When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential con-straints, the appHcation of more effort has no effect on the sched- ule (Fig. 2.2). The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. "
He also became known for Brooks Law, which states:According to Brooks himself, the law is an "outrageous oversimplification",[1] but it captures the general rule. Brooks points to the main factors that explain why it works this way:
- It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the "ramp up" time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of several engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even make negative contributions, for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion.
- Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases. Due to combinatorial explosion, the number of different communication channels increases rapidly with the number of people.[3] Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.
- Limited divisibility of tasks. Adding more people to a highly divisible task, such as cleaning rooms in a hotel, decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each other's way). Some tasks are less divisible; Brooks points out that while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month".
So, I wouldn't assume that full funding means quicker to launch or shorter alpha times, it simply means we get more quality and more time to accomplish the goals that will result in Pantheon being released before it has to turn a profit.
-Az
that's just, like, ur opinion man