Agreed on all counts. My guess is that the data they're currently gathering will influence the next Roadmap regarding development priorities. Soooo I guess this is actually a good thing despite our frustrations.
Yes and no, keep in mind a lot of that data is coming from premades vs new players. The optimal data comes from premades vs premades, and while some guilds did defend their territories during the fighting(Lash did, AVON did, some of the Blood Angel guilds like SL, I know there were some WP and MYST warparties as well.) a lot of them were, well, playing Orks for the 5k RTC. As much as I have my own opinions on the Kannon and Ace Dakka i'm almost certain that these premades, a lot of which you couldn't even see due to the lack of tags, exacerbated how threatening they tools actually were. I would be extremely hesitant to use any data from this campaign for any balancing.
http://forum.eternalcrusade.com/threads/just-a-heads-up.65560/#post-1468399 This post gets me every time I think of the pending LSM campaign... Can you imagine what would happen if the other 3 factions banded together just to wreck it? The productions levels of the salt mines on Cadia would be off the charts.
Well, considering the only way to get premades to fight each other is to friggin' schedule a battle, they don't have any other way of GETTING that data. Besides, there's still another 3 to go.
Well there is one solid way, and it's a way that might of led to a lot of dead air as they prepped for it. But if we had all the theme'd campaigns *at once* instead of split into sections it would of resulted in a massive press by all the factions simultaneously. That would of provided insanely good data, promoted the game financially, and gave every faction a reason to give their all. That, imo, would of been a much better way to do it.
It also would have likely overloaded the servers, cutting out all data collection. If the servers were larger in number and more stable, I'd absolutely agree with you. But right now, I feel like it wouldn't have worked as well as we would like.
Damned if you or damned if you don't, that said i'd rather the servers were disabled for a day for something like that. The Ork campaign has been a nice way to build up the Ork playerbase but I can't help but feel a large part of the potential for theme'd campaigns had been squandered. Which I feel branches into the larger problems with EC, the game hasn't taken enough risks and is falling behind as a result. What got the initial investments in the game were the risks it seemed to be willing to take, which have fallen to the wayside. I think that, if our playerbase can handle two months of dead air for engine updates, then we can probably hold on a day for what I feel would of been a massive boost to the game, a significant financial boost, and probably something that would help smooth out the game mechanically.
Quite true, however I can understand why the devs are reluctant to take more risks currently. Consider that they spent the majority of their initial funding on development of the original open-world idea, which in the end tanked horribly on them. They have now had to re-create the game into something solid in a very short period of time (game development-wise anyways) with only part of the money they had. The Humble Bundle sale and the Steam sale helped them get some of that money back, but that huge initial issue seems to have colored their vision on what the game could be. They're going slow now because of that, especially with a much-reduced development team. Developer PTSD, lol.
