Death and Taxes...

[Qui-larek]

We know Vlada, nothing wrong with a little /burstrun every once in a while

[Praxi34]

Thanks for letting us know ORU. I live in the UK and run a Beauty and Aesthetics business and the tax and VAT issues are awfully arcane. Hitting the VAT threshold in the UK is a full time job in itself paying it back!!!!

I will make sure I donate a bit more this month to help cover some of the costs.

[Mobyus1]

Video is recorded, edited, and rendering. Will be available later tonight.

->Open Spoiler<-

...yes, I know it says "ChannelUpdate_July18" ... but it's not.

[Praxi34]

Video is recorded, edited, and rendering. Will be available later tonight.

->Open Spoiler<-

...yes, I know it says "ChannelUpdate_July18" ... but it's not.

Awesome good work Mobyus1

[Mobyus1]

Alright, it's posted. Spread the word. And thanks to everyone who's already donated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypM7h2GHDts

[Walking carpet]

Alright, it's posted. Spread the word. And thanks to everyone who's already donated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypM7h2GHDts

Ohh Yeah tanx bro

Vlada stop playing with the taxes heheh

[Misk Brebran]

Alright, it's posted. Spread the word. And thanks to everyone who's already donated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypM7h2GHDts

Good vid as always, thx Mob!

[Vlada]

Ohh Yeah tanx bro

Vlada stop playing with the taxes heheh

This is a serious thread so ill refrain from explaining what I'm playing with most of the time.

[dust906]

if i was to voice my first thought after reading this.

It would be that i think the entire dev community should come out and just do a QA live one night.
we don't hear from you guys enough in my opinion and if you want us to pull together, it would just be nice to see that from the devs, even when not in a bad spot.

just looking for more communication with the base.

[Mobyus1]

if i was to voice my first thought after reading this.

It would be that i think the entire dev community should come out and just do a QA live one night.
we don't hear from you guys enough in my opinion and if you want us to pull together, it would just be nice to see that from the devs, even when not in a bad spot.

just looking for more communication with the base.

I would be down to host such a thing... like a livestream with staff on Discord or something. I think it'd be too difficult to get everyone together at the same time though.

[nee2earth]

It would be that i think the entire dev community should come out and just do a Q&A session live one night.
we don't hear from you guys enough in my opinion .

I actually used to irritate the devs about that very thing quite a lot back when i was on-staff, even trying to organize something with less pressure (like a Newsletter) to augment the Year-End-Updates.

But in retrospect, i came to realize not only how impractical it was but also how unnecessary.

Reason being: Most, if not all, of the entire current Dev Team is readily available for questions 24/7 in IRC & Discord, as well as on these forums.

----

like a livestream with staff

. I think it'd be too difficult to get everyone together at the same time though.

Bingo ^ , therein lies the main hurdle. RL time management.

We all have to remember that these are not paid SOE employees required by corporate to do 'Stratics live chats' periodically for PR. These are noble volunteers, working in their spare time. And 99% of that spare time is typically spent coding & testing.

Letting them work in peace seems to indeed be the best method for consistant progress.

[Surrena]

It was nee who reported you to magyar tax gestapo.

Also anyone notice that vladas post went from 32k to 52k in matter of days? He must be god at posting!

[Vlada]

I actually used to irritate the devs about that very thing quite a lot back when i was on-staff.

I think both you and they will have to agree that you irritated them about many other things as well.

Also anyone notice that vladas post went from 32k to 52k in matter of days? He must be god at posting!

I think i know what it is, posts that shouldn't count towards post count are showing up now because i was messing with some settings, ill see if i can fix it today.

EDIT: Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know.

[Kurgol]

Don't feel bad, you guys do an amazing job for volunteers. I have donated as much as I can afford, I'm sure you guys will be back in the black soon =)

[lordkator]

if i was to voice my first thought after reading this.

It would be that i think the entire dev community should come out and just do a QA live one night.
we don't hear from you guys enough in my opinion and if you want us to pull together, it would just be nice to see that from the devs, even when not in a bad spot.

just looking for more communication with the base.

I'm generally supportive of open communication between staff and community.

We have a number of challenges on the Q&A front:

1. Trolls
2. We're all volunteers and on five different timezones world-wide.
3. All of us have day jobs so scheduling is tough (yes some work on the weekends)
4. Currently there is very little to discuss, we're very clear on our goal and it's set in stone.
5. Managing Q&A is stressful, and in this context most Q's will be off topic because of our clear milestone.
6. People who's Q's don't get addressed feel like we're not listening or being defensive.
7. We often make a lot of technical decisions but we make very few if any design decisions because we're trying to emulate a point in time, not fix it (yet).
8. Given 1 hour to code vs 1 hour of Q&A which would you really rather our devs spend time on?
9. See #1

One of my concerns is that the people on the forums are not the bulk of people in the game.
Lots of people in the game, login, play, have fun, logout, live their lives, come back again later.
Only a small percent actually make it the forums. And we also have a lot of people in the forums who never play the game.
This imbalance makes communication here biased in a way that is not easy to correct for.

All this said as you may have noticed I've been trying to carve out more time for the community. All of us on staff know its important, however it is incredibly time consuming and challenging.

Perhaps we could start with the community voting on a couple questions (NOT IN THIS THREAD) and we can try to have a thoughtful answer to the top couple of questions on a weekly basis.



(P.S. If you try to get Q&A questions started on this tread I'll ask the mods to delete your post)