**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
RELICS: Under Development
WISH CRYSTALS: Scrapped
GALACTUS RAIDS: Postponed
MASTERIES 2.0: Soon™️
Just so we have a kind of idea of what is still on the board and what isn’t.
I propose an extra thing to "under development, scrapped, postponed, soon" to have a distiction in the postponed group. Postponed gives the interpretation that it will be implemented, while it could be that X feature "needs more discussion about viability of implementation" or "possibility of working in current game economy" or something like that.
English isn't my native language so I hope I'm expressing myself well enough and someone else can clarify my thoughts. But this is nitpicking and already going very concrete and detailed, i like to conclude with: yesyesyes please I like this idea.
I see roadmaps all the time in the technology space. In terms of how of much them get delivered when they estimate they would get delivered, Kabam's development roadmap is pretty average. If you're looking for promises to bet the farm on, roadmaps are not for you. If you want an idea of where a company is trying to go in the future, where their immediate focus is, and how that might evolve over time, recognizing that roadmaps are virtually always flexible documents that will change over time (internally, you won't necessarily see that happening in real time), then roadmap offer a lot of insight and guidence.
If you want delivery promises, that's what announced features are. They announce them when they are basically certain they will arrive. And you'll probably find out about them a couple days in advance, usually. But if you want insight into the minds of the developers, that's where roadmaps are useful. They show you what the devs are thinking today, and give you an idea of how ambitious they are and in what directions. The roadmap told me a lot about where the devs were concentrating their focus, and by extension what they priorities were. Whether we get a wish crystal or not is not all that important. Knowing what they were thinking in terms of champion acquisition and their long term ideas about what is appropriate targeting was extremely informative. If you were willing to accept the roadmap for what it was.
Players always complain they want more transparency and insight into what's going on. But the simple fact is most people are not prepared to use that information in a reasonable manner. Knowing what the devs are thinking today is not a promise for what will happen tomorrow. The devs themselves cannot predict how the future will unfold. Which is why I've always said how we treat the information we're given determines how much we deserve to get. The devs live in a world with uncertainties. They can't predict with 100% certainty *who* will be there in a year, much less *what* they will definitely be working on. So what they are thinking today is interesting guidance for the future, but not a prediction of the future.
If players want insight, insight is messy and uncertain. And every player that demands promises is saying the players who want insight is not allowed to have it.
Also, the last one doesn't contradict what I said, rather it is an example of the worst case scenario I explicitly mention: "Granted Kabam have done a lot of good stuff but I would rather they under promise and over deliver, road maps tend to be the opposite."
Intel uses roadmaps. Microsoft uses roadmaps. Google, Citrix, Checkpoint, RSA, Cisco, VMware, Western Digital, pretty much every technology vendor I've worked with or heard of has roadmaps. None of them use the term to mean an explicit set of directions intended to specify exactly what they are going to do and when.
They are called roadmaps in reference to actual maps of roads that drivers use to get where they are going. They don't dictate precisely what a driver must do, because a driver might encounter unforeseen road conditions, unexpected detours, or even decide to change their destination based on what they encounter. They are strategic plans subject to change.
What you're talking about are called "turn by turn directions." Those are supposed to dictate precisely what you are supposed to do. Nobody publishes those when it comes to their business.
Let's try this: Hey Google: is a product roadmap a guarantee
Is that an anomaly?
Is this the *only* view of roadmaps? Of course not: there are other opinions, but even they at least acknowledge what the prevailing opinion is.
And I should point out that article was written by someone who's explicit position is representing a company who sells the notion of using dynamic roadmaps as the primary means of customer facing software development management. In other words, this is a disciple of the religion "roadmaps are promises."
We’ve had strikers in the game and actually they’ve been pretty fun. Battle grounds has been on the whole a success (just got sort out bugs and cheaters). The QOL of life changes from @Kabam Zero have been great. So it’s not as is if we don’t see things are being done. But there’s a lot in the roadmaps that we value that haven’t been done that would be great if implemented. Not only that but what else is coming? What is in the horizon to look forward to that might be at the expanse of something suggested in the past?
We all know we’ve gone through both a pandemic and a broken input system that has likely shifted resources on a lot of things. But we often have beg, claw and scratch for updates on these things. And it’s not until we hit a critical mass of the community with our pitch forks out demanding some kind of an update that we get anything. Ignoring previous roadmaps in the hope we’d forget or stop bringing up what was in them causes undue resentment. I’d much rather (this might just be me) have communication come out that says we were planning on doing X but have found resources to deliver to much, so no longer doing X but doing Y, Z and A instead. These are being planned for delivery in 3/6/12/24months. I think @Kabam Jax style has really been a breath of fresh air to the community. I think stopping road maps isn’t the answer, but they probably should start with a “we said this, we did this, we didn’t do this and here’s why. Now here’s what we intend to do…”
Taking former Dev Diaries as an example. A lot of things which have been missing the mark, like New AQ AW format, Mastery 2.0, Wish Crystal, Practice Room, etc. It may be because of different reasons from Kabam perspective to delay or withdraw it against the planned roadmap. However, there is little or no communication to the community about the reason behind. Therefore we saw a lot of roadmaps in Dev Diary since 2019 yet we never see how Kabam review their process and their feedback to the community expectation. Whenever you said you will do something within 6 months 12 months and / or 24 months, concerned players would like to know why it didn’t happen after that period.
Besides, I’m always uncomfortable to see why your team delete some posts asking about the progress. I don’t understand your team criteria but I just saw a lot of normal posts “tracking” the progress by different players being deleted. Which gives me a pretty worse impression as your team used to say something when shut down a post, whether reasonable or not, but removing posts is like cancelling the voice.
I mean, your communication did improve the transparency and change the confrontation attitude for some of your team did. Nonetheless, communication should not be limited to acknowledgement and we do hope to understand why those items being listed in roadmap were not implemented and whether your Dev team would drop it out or revising the schedule. The former interview of game designer Kabam Broccoli impress a lot of players because of his straight and frank talk on a lot of topics, yet it only happens when he leaves. I think many players want to hear that voice from the game team, in which you can be the bridge of that channel.
SO CUTE ☺️
TL;DR
I think this above quote from Jax is a really good bar for setting expectations. Not promises, but concepts. May happen, may not.
However, I don't think the last roadmap I read was positioned that way. I loves me a good roadmap discussion...or a backlog grooming, bug burndown, velocity planning, or heated post-mortem. But Kabam shot themselves in the foot in their presentation of that previous roadmap.
I don't think it was clear to the majority of the community that this was a roadmap of ideas to explore. It felt more like a roadmap of things that would be delivered, and it even came with rough timelines of when the community could expect to see these things. The way the roadmap was delivered to the community doesn't match the intent described above. It was a pretty big miss in fact. And then the radio silence on meaningful followup left the community to guess for themselves what was going on.
Rather than use that as an excuse for hesitation, or blame the community for misinterpreting the intent of the roadmap, make a better roadmap. Make it clear that these things are concepts. Give regular updates and treat the roadmap as the organic thing that it is to the community. Put a TL;DR version up front–a simple table with concept name, stage of development, summary notes. The stages of development could be: Idea, Proof of Concept underway, Pulled Killswitch, Beta, etc. Don't give dates for things until they've progressed beyond concept.
There are still "Coming Soon" placeholders from years back... Adding more and putting them there wouldn't even be 2.0.
Now making them easier and cheaper to switch between, and making some of them more relevant (scouting, half the class ones, etc.)... that would also be welcome.
Since "betas in prod" are now a thing... Try 3 new masteries over on the right... make them free / zero mastery points, and let people try them for a couple weeks, and if they work well, make them permanently unlockable / put a typical mastery cost on them.
There are always going to be people complaining whether you do a roadmap or not. I don't appreciate someone else telling me what information I can "handle" knowing/not knowing. Transparency is all most people ask for and every mature player can hope for. Ignore the others, they are always going to have a gripe.
@Kabam Jax has been a tremendous step in the right direction, but there is no reason we can't get a quarterly roadmap outlining the things that are being worked on, plans for the near term and long term, things that they'd have like to implement by now but have been difficult to get done, and what items have been scrapped. This was promised a long time ago when they realized how poor their communication was. It lasted about a year, but now we're back to the old ways -- and have been for some time.
The idea that this info can't be shared because parts of the playerbase will feel "let down" when some of the items don't happen is a copout. Those people, and the entire rest of the community, are even more letdown when they don't have any info thrown their way.
1) Just mention what is really sure to be implemented
2) Put several levels of priority in front of the topics
If they have never made this roadmap public but someone leak that out, then I can take it as internal. Otherwise it is already a roadmap communicate to the community. Twist the original purpose of such roadmap won’t help defence anything.
Let's try this again. The whole "Dear Jax this is what a road map is" thing that you mentioned is not something the vast majority of businesses actually do, except for internal roadmaps. Internal roadmaps are the ones that go through the lifecycle you mention. And because they are internal, outsiders rarely see them.
Externally published roadmaps, which are the ones that Kabam actually released publicly, do not follow the same script you mentioned, because that places too heavy a burden on the publication of that roadmap.
I'm not sure what Google search or Wikipedia article you're quoting from when you assert what a roadmap is, but whatever source it was it did not contain enough detail to clarify the nuances between internal roadmaps designed to be a component of internal strategic planning, and public roadmaps that are primarily intended to communicate a point-in-time projection of current plans and priorities without exposing or entangling restricted operational information.
If anything, I would suggest to under promise and over deliver so that our expectations can be blown away if you do great things.
The problem isn’t missed goals. I actually love hearing about aspirational ideas for the game even if they don’t happen, because it gives insight into what the devs are thinking about. The problem the community has had with the previous road maps is 1) not understanding that these are aspirational documents subject to change rather than concrete, already completed projects; and 2) failure on Kabam’s side to communicate when a road map project has been scrapped or delayed or for whatever reason not happened within their previously discussed timeline.
I get it if the technology for Wish crystals doesn’t work in the game. I understand if Masteries 2.0 has been put on the back burner due to other more pressing issues. The world’s been on fire for a few years now, plus MCOC has had all of these input issues to deal with on top of it. It happens. And I think the community would (mostly) be understanding if Kabam had come out and said “Mastery reworks are tabled for now while we adjust to XYZ new thing that has gone horribly wrong.” It’s just that last part that’s missing.