- Achronos
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- Bungie.net Overlord
Tom Achronos
Bungie.net Overlord
twitter: http://twitter.com/Achronos
"I have no words that would do justice to the atrocities you commit to the English language, as well as your continued assaults on the concepts of basic literacy and logical reasoning."
Posted by: Toji
No first off I would like to say that this is in no way meant to be offensive to the Moderators or Staff of Bungie.net, I merely want to have some type of insight on you views and mind set regarding some of the issues in this fine community.
No problem, that's what this forum is for. On to the answers ... I'll just number them rather than quote them to save space:
1. There is not a specific number of mods that we target. The problem is that we have to implictly trust each of them, and that trust is hard to come by. We always are looking, but again, trust much be earned.
2. Excluding the specialized News, Gallery, and Voting booth, since they're special, I think a few of them are very good, and others need work. Septagon and the Flood, and to a lesser degree The Library and The Maw are probably good examples of forums doing exactly what we want. The 3 Halo 2 forums are troublesome since they see so much traffic, flaming, and other general subject confusion. But they are all better than The Underground, because each Halo 2 has its good moments, but the Underground is mostly just people who seem to post without thinking.
3. By design. Eventually, we announce our next project, I'd imagine the mix might change, depending on that project's needs. But for now, we're happy with the public forum breakdown. If anything, The Underground should probably be better focused.
4. When we are scheduling feature updates (major or minor), we usually collect the ideas (from here, from our ideas, and other places), rank as to priority (how much we want them, how useful they are), as well as how difficult one is to implement. For example, Search is a hard problem that takes a lot of work to do. But it also has a high priority to get done, second only to performance and stability work. This is in contrast to something that would be hard and time consuming, yet provide minimal return - an example here would be localizing time zones according to your user profile's settings. After we build that list, we build the schedule, and we use the list to cut things appropriately.
5. It was a good first effort. The goal was to create something innovative and cool, yet not impact the game negatively. I think we did that - the gameviewer especially is very innovative for a console game, but you don't need it to get the Halo 2 experience. Adding stats has also forced us to become much more disciplined about maintaining large (gigantic) databases - we've learned a lot, and that's always good. That being said - we had to build bungie.net's infrastructure first, which limited development time for Halo 2 stats. I wish we could have done more, but I always wish that after a software project - there is always more you want to do.
6. I generally think we're pretty good about that, considering that we let you say a lot of things in our forums that a lot of companies wouldn't let slide. The only area where I think we need improvement is that the 7th Column group system is not as flexible as it one was, and needs some serious work to spruce it up.
7. I'd say that most people don't understand that the bungie.net development team consists of me. I am the only person that works full time on bungie.net, and while other people help for testing and during major updates (like the stat system), I'm it most of the time. So, I have to focus my priorities. First on the list, performance and stability. We've gotten much better in the last few months. As I close out on that, we'll move toward a bunch of very ambitious community features to try and stem the tide. We'll we have a fairly effective banning tool, we need to give the community better tools to positively encourage quality contributions to the community.
8. We are currently in a feature freeze for performance and stability work, after that, I imagine getting search online will be something to do, as it is mostly done, aside from lots of testing and other miscellaneous loose end. After that, it is too early to tell. We have lots and lots of plans, and I think you'll like the result. So, I guess the answer is - major updates not around the corner, but hopefully sooner rather than later.