What's your plan to make sure that we stay on task and still deliver every two quarters with staggered development for your teams? Do you still want to put in place certain things like checks and balances and getting it to QA?
TL;DRThey want to keep quarterly delivery but stop forcing every team onto it, using a longer cycle with the same gates, since ships and big locations are already released when ready.
Essentially the same process, just over a larger time frame, which just makes each of those individual gates a much more achievable set of goals.
You want to keep a quarterly delivery, but why do we need to force all the teams all the time to be trying to hit this quarterly delivery?
It compromises, especially on the dev side, when in your mind you've got the first week of a quarter, you're doing your planning, you know what you're going to do, you execute on it, then you prepare it for the patch and you go out to Evocati, PTU, and you're doing your feedback, and then you're expecting a date for it to be gone and you start again. When it goes past that, the other date doesn't tend to move, so you then have to pinch that time back somewhere. Do you take it out of planning? Taking out planning is usually a bad thing, because then it makes executing it worse.
The content teams already run to a different cadence. They're not delivering every quarter. If you're working on, on John's side, ships...
Yeah, they're out when we're happy with them. We always used to go towards: here's the quarter releases, we'll do things for the year, split up the ships between them, go in. But then it was a case of, well, this ship needs more time because we're not happy with X, Y, Z on it. Rather than just release a ship at a date, we'll release it when it's ready, like the Defender, the 890.
Same with a lot of the environment work. If you're doing a big landing location or planet, that's not something you usually can fit into a nice tight three-month quarterly period; it goes longer. But on the feature side, generally, yes, we had some features which went a bit longer. Mining was one of them. The original set of mining went through, and that took a couple of quarters in the background. But since that period, we've really been trying to just fit everything into a quarterly release. And the reason you do that is because, as a team, we're all trying to show as much new stuff and new features and work as we can to the community, and we're trying to just put all that in.