Saturday, 3 November
Today is final content lock, postponed from last week due to the fires in San Diego. Today at 9pm, to be exact. Currently it's about 7:45pm, and I just got back from the office; there were still plenty of people there when I left, too. Lunch was ordered for us, and dinner too, and various people brought in goodies from muffins to beer to cinnamon buns to keep everybody going. Content lock means that after tonight, we are not supposed to add any new files or change any text that is visible to players. So we do have a few more days to fix bugs that don't involve that -- for example, tweaking the stats on armor, which is one thing still on my list. I went through my remaining bug list several times and I think I've fixed everything that involved new files and text changes, although sometimes you don't know until you start fixing something. I hope I got all the text changes done anyway, as the translating team are going to be busy getting all the text properly translated for the international servers between now and release date.
Thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of many others, my bug list is miraculously down to only 20 items at the moment. Syzygy in particular has gone above and beyond the call of duty helping out, especially considering he's not even in the same department! MissDoomCookie helpfully came up with some text for the faction reward letters for the Gorowyn tradeskill faction when neither Cronyn nor I had the time or inspiration to think of anything intelligible for them to say. Jindrack was a huge help untangling some complicated hail handlers today too. Hail handlers still give me headaches on a regular basis.
I was very grateful when Jindrack said he'd finished up his bugs and would be happy to help with the three hail handler bugs that were sitting on my list. The folks like him who write quests on a regular basis are much better than I am at spotting problems with hail handlers than I am. Even if they don't seem to appreciate slugs feigning death; Jindrack still hasn't said a word and the slug has been moved aside onto his filing cabinet. It may need to find a new home, poor rejected thing! I'm sure it will amuse someone somewhere. (Lyndro, Gallenite, Silverfrost, and MissDoomCookies have all acquired slugs of their own since I last wrote.)
One thing I've noticed very much in the past month is how helpful everybody on the team is. We all have different deadlines, but people are always offering to help out where they can, and I certainly owe thanks to many more people than I listed above for lending a hand here and there, not to mention to all of the QA team for being so thorough and catching so many bugs that I missed.
Where I was working before as an IT manager, I was really the only IT staff for a long time, and when I did get a contractor to help out, I never felt I could ask a contractor to work extra hours when they were being paid only on a 9 to 5 basis. The rest of the company was basically sales and marketing, and couldn't have helped out for the most part even if they'd wanted to, which probably wouldn't have occurred to them since it was my job to support them. So I've never been a part of a team this size who are all willing and eager to pull together and help out whoever needs a hand to accomplish a common goal, without worrying about whose job description is what and which department does which thing. It's a pretty good feeling! Except of course for the part where I feel like I'm the one who's needed the most help. But by the next expansion I hope I'll be more on top of the game and in a better position to lend a hand rather than need it. I guess I did do a few things for people here and there -- recipes for Srukin and Kander, collection quest reward furniture, stuff like that -- but it's mostly just been doing things for tradeskillers! Anyway it's pretty amazing how everybody's so willing to help out everybody else, even between different departments and different areas, it's all just a bunch of people pulling together to make the game great, which is the one thing we all want most of all. It's pretty cool, man, as they say here in California. I could get used to this!
