2012-05-31, 08:14 AM
Locked Wrote:Well I didn't mention anything about publisher vs developer relationship so I have really no idea where that came from. If there's anything I don't understand is why it's forbidding for them to do their own work under that situation. Could they not fix the bugs themselves? Are they not intelligent enough? Do they lack the manpower? I just don't understand why they have this system in place that is just so inefficient. The source provided states that the process itself takes 6-7 months to process. While I don't know how Nexon handles or manages its time how does this apply to the bugfixes announced in this patch? They are most very recent, some from the patch beforehand. Do they plan these out beforehand just to give themselves a pat on the back?
You answered your first question with your second question.
What prevents them from doing it is they're not the developer. You're asking why the guy at the counter at McDonald's isn't going back there and making your food for you so it gets done faster. It's not his job. He's there to hand you the food someone else makes. If they pineapple up the order, he's not going to go back and do it for you, he's going to pass that info back to the "cooks" and they're going to fix it and he'll pass the new version to you.
Nexon America does have a rudimentary development team, which is really more of an implementation team. They mention the server engineers and whatnot in the dev blogs as partnering. They're the ones who take what Korea gives them and install it. Just because you can screw a light bulb into a socket though does not make you an electric engineer capable of building a better light bulb, or even capable of understanding why the bulb isn't working the way the person you got it from said it should.
Nexon confuses the issue themselves by using the word "developer" too loosely. It can mean both the actual programming people and can refer to the entire creative design staff that come up with the ideas and those two are pretty different. Take Eurydice here ; http://www.southperry.net/showthread.php?t=41629 "Next week Ill be travelling to Korea to talk with the other MapleStory developers about future plans." That can have two very different meanings. Is E going to discuss technical aspects with other programmers? or is E going to discuss overarching thematic design with the creative team to figure out how to incorporate Nexon America's exclusive content into the presently evolving paradigms and themes? That simple statement and the questions it raises right there casts doubt on exactly what E has meant all this time by claiming to be a "developer". What they describe the developer as doing here http://www.southperry.net/showthread.php?t=39014 ", the developer is delivering all of the new files and a list of changes to the server engineer and the producer" sounds closer to actual programming, but is ambiguous as to whether or not they're referring to a person who's actually physically present or one who is online FTPing stuff across to them. Even the "Once the maintenance is over and the game is stable, the developers and server engineer go home to sleep." doesn't really clear that up.
As to the overarching question of why. Why are they so ambiguous? Why does their paradigm seem so stupid? You'd have to ask them, but you have to consider that MapleStory is a franchise. It's not several independent companies running their own game willy-nilly. Everything that gets merged into the game has to be potentially be merged into all copies in all locales or they run the risk of forking too far to be compatible with each other. Centralizing development ensures that everything that gets added in has better chances of of remaining interoperable than it would if you set 10 developers down in different rooms and let them go on a different copy of the source for three years then tried to put what each of them came up with independently back into a single coherent game. Even in Korea they're broken out into separate teams for separate locales, but because they're physically present with each other they can better interact and try to avoid stepping all over each other. It does not always work as we've seen numerous times, but it has a lot more chance of success where the teams are together than if they were scattered.
It's not having what you want - It's wanting what you've got.