Why wasn't something like that [merging and splitting] in the first release then? If you knew you were going to flood the inventory system with all these new materials of varying qualities, why wasn't merge and split in the first release?

But we have to release at some point, don't we? How long do we want to wait to release for all the features that we have planned? If we waited on every little feature that we want to be part of the system, it would take us so much longer to get anything out into players' hands, and it would just slow down the iteration overall. Back to six months waiting for the next patch.

It's hard because if we waited for everything, we'd never release anything. There's a reason why some games go six months between major releases or even longer. They go completely quiet. We are putting new stuff out almost every two weeks at this point. Now, it's because we get feedback on the stuff we have. We need that feedback on the stuff we have. We need that testing on the stuff that we have, because we might learn something about the stuff we have that directly affects the stuff that we're waiting for. And better to know that while we're still working on this than finish this and go, "Oh, I wish I had known this earlier. If only I had put what we had out earlier, that information could have informed this." There's a whole lot of reasons why we operate a live environment in the middle of our game development. It's beneficial in a lot of ways, and it's annoying. It is annoying to have to put out a feature that you know needs merging and splitting, and it's just not ready.

I'll never be happy with any feature we put out. It'll never be complete. It'll be as good as I can get in the time and resources that I have. That's me being a perfectionist. That's nothing against the game.