What is done when a component becomes too complex or cumbersome to be useful in the game. Would it be dialed back or scrapped and start anew?---Hey fellas thanks for taking time to answer questions. What are some of the carrot and stick methods you utilize to get a task done on time? How do you balance positive feedback with critical critiques? What are hard lines you draw for yourself and the teams you produce?asked by The Tick & Delaron

So, on the first one if a component becomes too complex or cumbersome...this actually ties back to that Skype conversation I had with Steven Humphreys regarding entity token system. One of the things we talked about is anytime a designer uses the flow graph system or using flow graph as a designer, it pings the network and the more times you use flow graph to ping the network, that's going to cause more and more bandwidth problems.So, one of the things we want to do it is look at is using flow graph the most effective way of doing this design feature on the ship. So, from that it becomes a conversation between the designers, would they rather just hard code it, would they rather flow graph or entity tokens through flow graph. So, these are things that are planned out in advance but there is some research and development that goes into it, we do some concepts, some proof of concepts for prototyping to see which one works better.

Yeah, to speak to the next question about in terms of carrot and stick methods...I personally don't believe in carrot and stick because if you see the old adage of carrot and stick, it generally means whatever it is you're pushing for with this carrot is going to get tired at some point, right, cause they're never achieving that goal. It's more about making something attainable, more about working alongside their leads, it's more about constant and consistent daily motivation. It's not about sticking something out there and going, 'All right, let's go get it, if you don't get it you're going to get hit'.That's not going to get anything done and we work in a very creative environment, we're making video games, we're making experiences, we're making entertainment...we're not building a cog, we're not building a car, we're not building something that's been proven, we're making stuff up as we go along. It needs more, I think, finesse than carrot and stick, I think that's using very old production processes....

Yeah.

Production facilities and it just doesn't work in this environment.

Yeah. I think that's largely true of a lot of game studios where production ruling with an iron fist is an antiquated model and largely doesn't work out because so many people have valuable voices to add to the content of the development of the game. It's a much more collaborative effort, there's no single moment where production is, 'this is what we need to have, this is what you're going to be working on and absolutely nothing else'. So, we have a lot of sit down discussions that we've mentioned before with our international colleagues. We also do daily stand ups with the development team to see where they are in every task, what roadblocks they have, where they're at, do we need to do anything for them to help them get their job done.

To use the carrot and stick method generally means the person who's doing it, you have to force them to do something they hate.

Yes and we don't want to use coercion.

And here everyone is excited to work on this. The passion drives all of us to work hard everyday, every second we're at our desk and if you get distracted, that happens but that generally doesn't need some forceful motivation.

No, no. Usually get distracted by something else cool in the game.

That's right. Look what this does, isn't it cool. Then balancing positive feedback with critical critiques and hard lines, how to balance them...you want them both. You don't want everything to be negative and constantly down even though in this environment we're trying to make things better so we're always looking at things partially with a negative eye. So we need to motivate... what's good about it, what's successful, how did that go well. Let's say that last release, we all want to pick it apart and say how horrible it was, we agree with what you're saying, we read the forums and Reddit...yeah, this was horrible and that's stupid and this sucked but we have to go but we succeeded here, here and here and everybody loved it. Awesome, let's keep building on top of that while fixing the bad things. It's easier for us, we're all in that critical mind set to make things better.

There are sometimes where we have to put a hard line down and say, 'no, cannot include this into this build'. I know you love it and it's something that you really, really want to see fleshed out but we just don't have the resources or the time. If we can get it out for the next patch awesome but we would like to see some more testing, some more tweaking, some more balance on it and definitely some more input on whether it's from our QA team or the big man CR himself.

That's right, absolutely.