For the past year you’ve been banking on the working from home excuse for everything wrong with Gems of War. Whether it be bugs taking super long to fix. Troops and weapons coming out that clearly haven’t been tested thoroughly. Unprecedented slow response time from support when it comes to tickets submitted. Or even patches that are heavy in monetization and lack luster in any other way. Yet at the same time your company made the decision to start development on Puzzle Quest 3.
So if working from home is really that much of a tremendous set back. Why would you choose to start or reignite an old IP? And if the project was already started prior, wouldn’t it make more sense to cancel it or put it in an indefinite hold until Gems of War was back running right?
Unless… Of course… You believe the current status of the game “is running right”. If that’s the case, then your physical working location is clearly not the issue.
PQ3 has been in development since before we transitioned to working from home. We hired more people to help with the PQ3 workload, and it is largely a separate team.
In gamedev it isn’t easy to drop projects and pick them up again, and we had already hried staff for the explicit purpose of working on PQ3 prior to the global pandemic. It made more sense to continue working on both projects as we had already onboarded staff and made progress into the both the design and implementation of our new title.
On another note, we are working on our support backlog at this time. There have been some other extenuating circumstances that have made things what they are, and I have even been sighted helping out in support in any spare moment I have. (Anyone here had a ticket replied to be me? It’s like the good old days, except I’m slightly less helpful and patient than Kafka.) Our support team is also completely separate from our development team, so PQ3 being worked on has little to no bearing on our support processes. (I’d say the same for our community management, but I have been between two projects. That being said, I have spent the same amount of time on Gems of War as before, it’s just that my internal duties moved over to PQ3 duties.)
I promise this should ultimately wrap up any curiosity I have in regards to Cyrup. You mentioned prior to the PQ3 announcement that she was promoted to a producer role. Is it safe to assume she is now a part of the development team working on PQ3 or does one have nothing to do with the other?
Salty you can defend the team as much you want but can not deny the degradation of the quality. Major, very easy to spot bugs making their way into the game. It feels like the voice of the community is being ignored. Many reasonable feature requests faded into the void, without any being developed. On-the other side good for nothing features appeared like shrines and video ads on android.
It feels like the game is being sucked dry before it is discarded.