Your contention seems to be that they do not have these plans and thus the game and company is doomed. My contention is that hey, maybe they do, but they don't share specific details publicly. Should they? That is another debate - on one hand like you said the community can provide input. On the other hand, they are under no obligation to do so and it can ultimately backfire and/or limit CCP's flexibility in the future.

Don't worry, we promise DUST isn't P2W.

Hold on, we have to release 16 different AUR packages before we can fix that bug.

From my experience its more like this.

The city they started in isn't finished, the road between the two cities isn't finished, the location of the second city isn't honestly known, and the second city itself is more of a myth than an actual physical thing.


And they can't seem to figure out which one of these problems needs fixing first.

yeah seems like they do more work on aur gear and aur sales than the game itself

In this thread: We now prove our personal business acumen with crystal ball insights into CCP's internal processes based on the company's public statements department and personal experience with the end product.

Also, WRT derailing the conversation... 1) My thread 2) Not your thread 3) Ya'll derailed the thread, and snarky comments are more than welcome.

To be clear, since we are on the monthly (or roughly monthly anyways) release schedule we don't sit back 6 months in advance and plan what will be in each and every release.

I can't speak for every team on the project but at least for us here on True Grit we have a plan for the order in which we want to do things and we have an estimate as to how long each will take. So if someone in the company asks when feature X will be out we can say "about release Y." However in reality we work on features and then release them when they are done.

So when you ask what the purpose of the 1.6 release is, being honest, the purpose is to be a release that can carry the things that are done out. When we finish features we move them from our teams branch to the main DUST branch and they just go out with the next release.

TL;DR: 1.6, and all our monthly releases, serve the purpose of allow the devs to release whatever features/fixes/updates/etc. that are ready at that time.

That depends, who are you sharing these plans with? If they are shared with customers who can point out flaws well in advance and might even be part of that process of completely overhauling long-term plans then it is probably in a company's best interest to share their plans.

Honestly, if CCP worked with the exact same process they are using now, but just told all of us exactly what they are doing they would receive far less hate, and be forgiven when something takes longer than initially expected. My worry, and point is that CCP themselves don't know exactly where they plan to be in the long-term and therefore are unable to tell us.