How does the development process work?

[Bhach]

Especially in the past few months, there have been some delays (with or without announcements) on PRO. Obviously these things happen, but there’s a lot of confusion and frustration over why and how things can be improved in the future. To avoid dropping uninformed statements, can someone fill us in on how the dev process works?

[Bhach]

Bump. There was another post with some points brought up, but neither it nor the responses give any information about how the development process works. If my request is too broad, maybe we could start with discussing answers to questions like "do developers have other responsibilities like moderation," "would having new trade and pvp mods help reduce development delays," "when was the last time programmer positions (broadly defined) were recruited," "how many people are involved in development," and "why does it seem that the development duties always fall on one person, based on communication in the discord".

[Bhach]

Since this seems to be getting no attention, I’ll share this paragraph from a former staff member in 2021. In the absence of other staff responses, I think it’s fair to assume that the same issues are plaguing the game today.
 

here’s a link if you would like to read the discussion yourself

 

 

“So, what exactly was going on? I will explain my experience and view, so this is subjective.

Every decision has to go through [Wally] if he does not like the idea, it will usually get denied. It is irrelevant whether the entire team proposes that it would benefit the game or not. In my case, that was CS stuff (basically everything you interact with, aka press spacebar), but it is not limited to that specifically. Some quality check is totally fine and needed, but you usually do not get through that easily. Most of the time, many pings and dm's were necessary to even get a response. Wally, I talked to you so often about that and it was an issue when I joined and when I left. You are massively overloaded and need to distribute some work/decision making to others not named [Cames] who is busy enough as well. Somebody has to be trustworthy enough at this point.”