Is this plan going to work?

I think so. But what it needs, right, and I think Chris's letter kind of sets the commitment. That's what we needed, right? Going from the previous way of making the game to this new way, a company of our size takes time to shift gears and change direction. And so even though you're like, okay guys, this is our focus now, reorder priorities, assignments, it takes a while before it actually takes form, right? And you need the people in the teams to really grasp what we're after, right? In terms of increased playability, what it means for them in the day-to-day, right? And I think that we have the commitment from the leadership to change this and we have the means to do it. So in order to support this effort, it's not just we're talking about priorities and orders. That's one part of the puzzle. But the other part of the puzzle is to make sure these teams are properly supported to do this. It's in paying the tech debt that's been plaguing the project for a long time, that we've been kind of dealing with, putting in the corner, tackling some of it, but then letting it build up. And I think that we need to attack that head on. And to support our teams, it's about helping them improve the output, through better process, better pre-submission checks, better validation, building the tools that will allow them to have confidence that when they put in a fix, that it's fixed, or that when we say a bug is fixed, that it is fixed, which, let's just say it, has been an issue, right?

Many have been the times where I've seen everybody from you to Chris to Jens in the chat, they read a report on Reddit or they see something on Twitch and YouTube and they find the Jira and the Jira says it's fixed. And it's like, I thought this said it was fixed. And that happens for a lot of reasons. We've talked a lot about how there are multiple causes for the same outcome. And yeah, that cause of that outcome was fixed, but now we've just exposed a second, different cause for the same outcome. It's frustrating.

The proof will ultimately be in the action, in the month after month, patch after patch. There won't be a patch every single month. Like I said, we're currently looking at about nine or 10 on the schedule. We actually have a meeting tomorrow where we're going to kind of hammer that down and have a better idea. Certain things affect the patch cadence. But more patches this year than any year prior, but with less of the feature work, far less of the feature work, and more of the content and the bug fixes, the content that doesn't require new features. Somebody in the chat was just saying, do less events. It's not the events that are the problem. It's the events that are built on new features. Events built on existing feature work can still be fine. That's part of what we're looking at.

Ultimately, it's just the product. That's the thing that counts. What's the output? Does the output get better? Are we still dealing with the same problems that we've seen before? Did we actually solve any of those issues? Or are we still going to look at interrupted missions or any of these bugs that are plaguing us? And I think that that's the key, right? And that's how we should be measured. It's in, does this new method work? Is the product improving, right? And its quality.