I always find it really interesting when MMO devs stop being polite and start getting real. Like, say, in this thread over at the SWG forums. Especially in light of Sanya’s most recent – really excellent – post.

The loss of beast loyalty is NOT new, it just became apparent in GU5 due to a bug. A bug that we have now fixed. To get an understanding on how this wasn’t originally communicated to Beast Masters we have to do a little internal history lesson. Four score and seven something something…

Blixtev and company started working on an ambitious chapter that we called Beast Mastery. During this time we had X amount of designers, programmers, and artists to start our brainstorms/documentation phases.

During the weeks that followed designers, programmers, and artists started to leave the project. Where they went is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the fact that other designers, programmers, and artists had pick up the torch where the others left off. As well as finish their own tasks. For some of those tasks we inherited, we were under the impression that the system/item was done, and just needed bug fixes/polishes. I will freely admit that I was the 3rd designer to touch loyalty/happiness pre chapter 6 launch. When I got this assigned to me, it was assigned as a “fix the bugs that come in, the system is done”. So that’s what I did.

I had internal docs that said the design was to lose loyalty, I didn’t get any bugs on them not losing loyalty, and during my play tests I didn’t find any bugs on this. We went live with this feature enabled. Yes we dropped the ball and it should have been in some sort of update/post to give you more information on it. Since it was me who inherited it last, you can blame me, I am a big boy I can take it. I wont make excuses, all I can say is I was focuses on getting all my tasks done, and fixing what bugs came in for loyalty so I didn’t ever tell Beast Masters how the system works from A to Z.

Lets fast forward to GU5. Hanse had a tough task of working BM update, it is a tough task don’t doubt that for a second. There are a lot of intricate details in this system that are all intermingled, and one wrong move will have wide ramifications. Hanse discovered that the expertise “Beast Empathy” never really functioned. So he took a stab at making beast loyalty happiness function with this expertise. Loyalty/Happiness is called in several places and he had to touch all those places. Unfortunately in the course of making your happiness/loyatly function more efficiently (and with expertise that works) we introduced a bug that dramatically increased loyalty loss. Hanse has since fixed this bug, and we have patched it out …