Philip Becerra · Producer

Yeah, we actually have a weekly, bi-weekly meeting that is just venting, right? It pretty much is that. It's not supposed to be just a place to vent. It's a place where you can share your frustrations, and we play the game every week. We have playtests internally that every team does. And after it, it's like, okay, there's a lot that we need to fix here. It's an opportunity for us to get a reality check, and we try to play as much on live as well. I try to do it all the time, to get the pulse on the current situation in the game, and then have that feed into the decision-making process that we do with directors and leads, right? Everyone is acutely aware of the issues that players have right now. We share those frustrations 100%. I'm seeing the posts, I'm seeing videos of people talking about what they like and don't like, and it matches almost 99% with what I'm hearing internally in meetings with regular developers. So I feel like we are very aware, but there's a challenge in just addressing what is currently the biggest problem at face value. It's often a little bit more complicated than it appears to be, especially when it's deep-rooted in some of our tech stack. It just requires a bit more brain power than just one developer going off and doing a bunch of bug fixes.

Jake Ross · Lead Producer

We do have a process for tracking all the player feedback, essentially. And so we do have an acute awareness, as Philip said, of what the issues are. It always just comes down to priorities, right? And I mentioned earlier how we have an expectation during our planning that we allot time for unknown unknowns. We also have an expectation that teams account for time to address what we call quality of life issues and bug fixing. And so along with the feature development commitments we would need to develop a specific feature, we ask teams to account for unknown unknowns. We ask teams to account for tech debt. We ask teams to account for quality of life and bug fixing. And so it's just a matter of what percentage of the team's time is spent on each of those allocations. And often new feature development dominates the team's schedule, but there are times where we pull those levers around and we say, okay, we're going to need to spend more time on quality of life this quarter, or more time on bug fixing, or more time on tech debt. But that's just the challenge of having both a live product and an alpha development game at the same time. So these are always just different levers that we have to pull.