Earlier this week, MMORPG.com's own Paragus revealed a community-based Darkfall developer Q&A on his blog, Paragus Rants. In it, Aventurine devs answered some 57 questions about the game and its upcoming (and delayed) expansion. As with many things Darkfall, flames erupted on the official forums with fans claiming the development team was being evasive in their answers and may have avoided some topics completely. Tasos Flambouras, in a post nearly as long as the Q&A has weighed in on the controversy.
Before taking on some of the more specific content issues, Flambouras had this to say about how Aventurine goes about revealing information:
The problem we faced with the questions asked is that they were mostly about topics we cannot discuss yet and that's why it took us a while to deliver it. Rather than to not respond or to avoid answering most of them, we decided out of respect for the community to address every single question as best as we could. Some people mention that Syncaine's recent posts about his visit to Aventurine are more informative than the community QA. A part of it was because through the interaction with us he was able to ask the right questions.
Before I go into the content within the Q&A, I have to explain that when we say that we're looking into something, or considering, or have plans for, it doesn't mean that we're being evasive or diplomatic in our answers. If that was our intention, we simply wouldn't answer. It means that we're trying to give you actual insight or confirmation on what we can't go into detail about. These statements are supported by a sequence of events that has taken place at Aventurine involving a number of Darkfall developers doing real work, a lot of planning and meetings taking place, infrastructure being designed and implemented, testing, documentation, community feedback taken into consideration, player feedback, support tickets, bug reports etc. depending on what we're talking about. There's a professional pipeline in place. Even when we say there are no plans for something, like an alliance bank for example, the process has still run its course and we've decided against it.
When we post something about upcoming features publicly, anything, it gets multiple authorizations before it goes out and there's nothing informal about it. The specific QA replies were collaboration between Claus Grovdal, and Kjetil Helland and myself.
