Falerin
Legendary Loremaster
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Choosing to view something in contradiction of what it is because you have a negative opinion of that something is a logical fallacy. Opinions do not alter facts. Choosing to believe something knowingly in contradiction of actuality is to commit the cardinal sin of willful ignorance.
I must emphasize that while I do work for AE, that my responses herein are my own and they do not represent any official position by the company. I have neither the authority nor knowledge to speak for the company on these matters. I do however have some insights that I can offer.
That said, I think you have a fundamental misapprehension about how ArtixEntertainment functions.
Firstly, the largest proportion of our staff fit into one of two categories:
- Unpaid volunteers
- Independent contractors who are paid a small stipend that is a very small percentage of minimum wage for the work they do.
As a rule NO staff person is told that they "must work" on a specific game, as telling them that would simply make them leave.
By and large staff work where they wish to. We cannot assign staff that are working on a game they are interested in to work on a game that they are not.
Secondly, the vast majority of our staff fit into the category of creative staff. Only a very small proportion are coders at all. Most are designers, artists, storytellers, community staff or some combination thereof.
Several of our coders are covered in the above categories as well. Also several are multitasked.
Considering myself for instance, I am a coder, I however only rarely code, even for the game on which I work. My main job is creative not coding. I love OverSoul but I have never so much as looked at its code. The learning curve for me to help at all would be very steep. I would love to help out but I doubt AE would want me to and whats more I doubt the community would want me to.
Even were AE to be willing to let me meddle with it it is questionable that I could given my responsibilities elsewhere. I am a storyline lead for AQ classic, which involves numerous other responsibilities, I fit into one of the above categories of individuals.
Hence, I have a full time job outside of AE, two autistic children to raise, and countless other real life concerns.
Of the coders who are full time employees of AE. By their very nature most have to be concerned with the development of new properties and not maintainers of existing content.
Like it or not, even with a model of constantly evolving games, AE cannot simply stop making new games to focus on improving existing ones. It has been said before and it must be said again that no company that produces games can do this and continue to profit, and as a game company AE must be profit making to continue producing any content at all.
Now as to the questions that are unanswered. The simple fact is that there are not really simple answers to the questions being posed.
No AE as a whole has not given up on OverSoul but AE's focus is very much on producing profitable games.
Further, while it has a definite body of fans, OverSoul does not quite have the body of committed volunteers that AQ Classic has, for example.
It is very likely that if AE were to pull all funding from AQ Classic altogether the game would continue development solely on the power of its volunteer team. OS does not have that luxury.
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