Smedleys last post on twitter.

Get your head out of the clouds. No person in the private sector in North America earning more than minimum wage can ever step away for "2-3 months" and still have a job when they get back.

Didn't you hear? Being a software developer in America comes with a benefits package that include a two week long champagne and hooker binge after every production launch, followed by a six week vacation in the Himalayas listening to the wind and merging your consciousness with the all-mind.

I do love how many people White Knight the idiocy that is letting most of your staff go on vacation for 2-3 weeks right after a major production launch of a product require constant ongoing development work though.

Edit - seriously ho.oker is censored? Good god, it's like they installed a language filter designed for five year olds.

Actually the worst thing you can do in game development is go on vacation after launch lol ...

Agreed. I understand the holidays and such, everyone gets time off around this time of year. I also understand them working hard to release the game and getting some vacation but to leave a game completely hanging? That's just bad business and this is a business. The happier they keep their customer the more money they will make.

Staggered vacations after a recently launched game would of made more sense especially after a major update. I know they have lost customers from the bugs the last update gave (One of my best buds refuses to play now). They may get them back they may not but why risk it to begin with? This a new game it needs to be watched closely.

But what do I know... Maybe the game industry is just really laid back?

They usually get a vacation after the game is launched because it works. Meaning the majority of bugs, major bugs are gone. With PS2 i swear there are more bugs now than in the last couple of weeks of beta. I am starting to think they hired Microsoft developers.

Damn. Wish I got 2-3 months off for every 6 months I worked. I'm in the wrong industry.

You also get to play video games at work.

wow, i wish i got 2 weeks off A YEAR.

i get one week every 2 years lmao im a manager of food service. pretty lame, and this isn't really the course of action i want to see in my game developer, especially only 1-2 months after LAUNCH. very alarming indeed.

CyclesMcHurtz, one of the developers, posted less than 45 minutes ago: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?members/cyclesmchurtz.7909/.

Well do you put in 3-4 months of 100+ hour weeks? Game devs do, especially in crunch time.

Also they have multiple teams. There are the guys working on content for the future, basic maintenance, and a lot of other things. They also section up the vacations so that the whole office doesn't just empty out so they can address problems if need be.

They said their goal in 2012 was to get it stable as they could, and they did just that. They did that so they could have a few months of relatively no updates. They have one major engine revision coming in January (Smedly was talking about it) which has actually been in development since beta but they decided to not try to push it for launch. I'm sure there are a lot of little fixes that didn't take much time coming in a patch this month too. It's not full blown development right now though, most of their guys are given a lot of time off.

They may not get 2-3 months, but they get several weeks, especially the top guys like Higby and Smedly.

Devs are probably not posting because they're working.

Umm... teachers? I trust that everyone here has met at least one in their lifetime.

Ya, I know a couple. They get jobs in the summer to help make ends meet.

I sure hope you have. Because your reading comprehension leaves much to be desired. I expicitly said

No person in the private sector in North America earning more than minimum wage

Guys,

Smed has a pretty long history as a destroyer of games. I've seen it several times with SOE games that I was subscribbing too. He shows up, makes lots of fancy posts, acts really excited about the game, pretends to be just a regular gamer with a cool job, he follows it up with vague promises about the future, tells you about his personal life.........and then vanishes from the community.

........while he massages the community with his left hand, his right is busy gutting the game - watering it down, making it arcade friendly and attempting to chase the WoW band-wagon. He grubs on money. He has come into our game, pi$$ed the carpet and now he won't be back. He might sneak an inteview a month from now, but he won't be talking to us anytime soon.

I've seen this demon operate. Trust me.

There are private schools, you know...

This seems overly-cynical. Ya the game has a few things wrong with it, but "gutted" is a laughable way to try to describe it.

I guess our definition of stable is a little different. I'm crashing once every 30mins-1hr in this game every night since the first update. Before the update I could say the game was stable... but afterwards... no, not at all.

At this point, that sounds far more like your problem as we've had over 100 people in my outfit's TS for 2-3 hours straight and none of them experience crashes on that level. They happen, but very rarely.