Aside from my clearly click-baity subject line, and a penchant for some snarkyness, let me try and make a case why 2.4 should never have been released. Yeah, yeah several new dinos most people will rarely ever use is at least a short time welcome chase and addition, but what is the cost of focusing on that content?
Over a month ago now there was both a brilliant letter to Ludia by @Piere87 and an actual published response from Ludia. We were wrong, that’s not who we aspire to be, we’ll do better, etc, etc, …
So let’s say 2.4 was ready to go in late December, fully play tested, but held to provide some post holiday new Dino excitement to lead into a new year. Surely what was already in production could make it through the holidays incident free. As long as you only wanted to dart one of the two uniques, and you know not the brand new exclusive new one, nope, but we can fix that with a special event. A month later 2.4 lands as developed, well thuds is more apt with multiple premature releases. Hmmm…so much for the ready to go and thoroughly tested argument.
So maybe there was still work to do. Was the community expecting a release in mid-January? I guess so with the recent release schedule, we must have new content after all. But actually, that’s not really what the community was buzzing with. I’ve run grypo on my team for a few months now and never faced a grypo-grypo death match in Library, maybe others have them every day and twice on the weekends before a cup of tea, but it does seem a little less frequent than the ubiquitous sarcorixis demigod during epic hybrid tournament weekends or nitro Thors bullying lower level teams just for kicks, oh and thanks for adding the helpful taunting emotes to make those bully matches extra enjoyable. I’m sure the leads were patting themselves on the back while saying, yeah that chat in raids to help the players communicate won’t be nearly as appreciated. But what’s the worst that could happen if the arena were left as is to a future release, it’s not like anyone would really stop battling in the arena or even playing the game at all, right @Poezzzie? I’m not in Shores, but getting stomped on by the top few players would be about as much fun as me facing multiple level 30 heavily boosted teams in Library or lower arenas.
For the past couple weeks, I and many others have had to constantly restart the app to get raid invites. Surely with the newly professed focus on quality that would be prioritized to fix in the next release given the impact on, well ya know the playability of the game. The past few hours seem to show surprisingly no improvement. And while I loved the treasure chase two weekends ago, last weekend they sure seemed hard to come by despite walking the same route around my house each day, must have just been good luck the prior week and bad luck last week, not anything to do with a problematic premature code release.
This is getting long-winded, so back to the topic. Given all the playability issues in the game and the newfound commitment to quality why oh why did 2.4 have to be released this week? Maybe a few insiders knew, but most of the player base probably wouldn’t care what day it came out on if it showed a dedication to fixing the growing list of poorly implemented or missing features many of your most dedicated players have posted about on this forum. Maybe from a monetization standpoint adding a few new critters and store incubators is a better use of your dev time, but it sure doesn’t make your player base very happy. Either commit to quality, or commit to indifference, but please don’t promise quality then de-prioritize it in literally your next release.
