I believe the wording used in that newsletter is what makes it a promise. Not rules-lawyering over whether a roadmap constitutes a binding promise or not. But it’s okay, I don’t need to convince you (you seem to have chosen a view and will stick to it come hell or high water). Fair enough. I normally don’t even feel the need to brood on what could have been. But when I see people claiming it’s the community’s own fault for believing things like mounts and sorcery were promised features once upon a time, I feel somewhat offended.
Indeed. And nothing wrong with that, agreeing to disagree is sometimes a lost art (particularly online).
So far only mounts have been officially cancelled. The Purge is in the game only different from what was initially planned. Sorcery is introduced bit by bit. There’s Alchemy and Necromancy. I don’t doubt the dev team is working on making it works with corruption as initially intended, but it seems to be difficult to achieve.
A big revamp of each Capital and Thrall"s spawning was released a month ago. Like for Sorcery that could mean they proceed step by step. Each new features added to the game add bugs too. It’s better to keep bugs manageable to add these features bit by bit. There’s the risk for each feature added to break the game balance, too. Proceeding step by step let time, first to see if it works as intended, and second to adjust game balance if needed.
Then perhaps some features promised were too ambitious for a small company like Funcom to achieve.
My guess is, they underestimated the CPU cycle costs.
A lot of thrall and other problems belong to the lack of CPU cycles.
You can observe this with increasing server population.
Low population server (depending on server hardware) (eg. <20 people) thralls respond as they should, like single player solo.
With increasing pop, issues start to appear everywhere: NPCs stop getting AI-Brains, Thralls only teleport and doing “nothing”, long loading of structures and recipes, purge waves not working, building things getting slower (the amout of e.g. fundaments you can put down in a given timeframe).
A possiple solution would be splitting one world to multiple servers, but this would be a major effort not only on the techincal software and hardware side, but their bussines model too. We can expect that this will not happen.
My guess is they are trying hard to save CPU cycles wherever possible they can, fixing bugs and optimising code.
Currently there is not much breathing room for costly new features, but we will have to see.
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