I probably should have been clearer on the limited availability of the shop. Yep, it’s designed that way — probably not the best way of doing it, but it’s done now.

BTW Syncaine, did you get your account yet?

And while it would be nice if the website loaded faster, the limited time the shop is up is because it sells out that quickly, not because of some technical issue.

I appreciate what you are saying. I’ve worked at small software shops too, and what you say does happen. Corners get cut, communication both within the team and externally don’t seem important, and things, often important, don’t get done. Product features get cut, but unnecessary gold plating gets added. It all gets rationalized away at the time, but comes back to bite the backside later.

The thing is, that it’s probably more important for a small operation to get all these things right the first time than it is for a big company. A company like EA or NCSoft can wear a bad launch, or some of the other issues, longer than a small company can. (Selling a million boxes at launch helps a lot.) Sure, people cut the little guy some slack for a while, but that only lasts so long.

The Mythical Man Month Mantra (like my alliteration?) talks about how adding manpower to a late project only makes it later. That does depend on where you add the manpower. If Tasos was so busy with other tasks, and Aventurine employed a full-time community manager to handle that side of things, it would have given Tasos more time for his other tasks and improved efficiency. Same goes with getting a web guy in (assuming they didn’t in the first place) to handle the web and business systems. On the other hand adding programmers to the game engine late in the game would have reduced efficiency.

I’m not sure that releasing something, anything, just because of a promised date is that great of an idea these days either. I think the gaming public has had enough of games being released in a poor unfinished state.

Their a small company, and they never planned to generate this much buzz. They had a really hard time making their deadlines. So hard they didn’t had time to do a proper beta, or really test their billing system. Or fix some nasty bugs before release. Or even communicate properly, or to manage the building of their new website. But they said februari so februari it is.
They had lots of plans, and they really wanted to do all this, but they just didn’t make it. I’ve done projects just like this and it’s all so familiar.

Their game is not really finished yet, and they know it. They have 1 game server-cluster and don’t have the manpower to open the next one. And you can’t just hire people and be done twice as fast (read The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks), training people cost much time. And I guess their PR person (Tasos) has many other functions, most of which are aparently more important than writing clear updates.

But to their credit, they did release _something_, just one day late, and technically it runs pretty smooth now, even though the game itself needs work. Yeah, I won the reload lottery and am playing since the first public night, and I’m pretty happy I’m not working at Adventurine.