I rechecked my notes on the innumerable “Agile Development” classes I attended - as any good corporate citizen is now required, even if you’re not a developer - and what’s one of the first things I see scribbled again and again?
“Minimum Viable Product”
“80/20 rule”
That’s not to disparage the hard work that has been put into this creation. Let’s face it, to revitalize the Simmer market meant disrupting the current model.
That meant what could they do beyond another locally installed and managed sim that didn’t end up as Call of Duty bloatware? How could they find a way to integrate Petabytes of data in the real world, and make it available on an end-node? Honestly, 1st generation attempt to Stream real-time mapping and POIs injected into the scenery while flying? That was not a homer, but it was a two-base run. Kudos to their chutzpah - they pulled off something that others are now going to have to look at to be in the game going forward.
That being said - back to my original point - Agile. This is an MVP. The sooner people acknowledge that and come to terms with it, we can all “move on” and give as much useful feedback as possible on how to make this better.
MVP. 80/20. A product that was not polished, but gave the baseline features and functionality SOMEONE thought was good enough to pull the trigger on and publish.
I get it - a lot of stuff was identified in Alpha, but not fixed. Why? No idea, I wasn’t invited to it, I applied. But by Alpha tester feedback since launch, there’s a lot of stuff that’s still churning that they picked up on.
Public crisis. WFH. Shared resources. Factors that intensify a non-optimal way of working and collaborating to move this product forward.
Not making excuses - I’m pointing out things that people may instinctively know but not have consciously formulated or come to terms in their own mind.
Everyone’s a critic, until they aren’t. That means the day they didn’t criticize is the day their horse crossed the finish line. There is a priority list somewhere. We as end users don’t have access to it, but we have some sense of level of effort Asobo is saying it will take to address. Follow the timeline of the Garmin fixes; now there’s somewhat of a stake in the ground. What’s the wildcard? Well, ask Jorg how the Community Mod Collaboration is going - because it would be immensely foolhardy not to factor in all the work Working Title has done on fspackages. Yet, it’s not a simple solution as integrating their collaboration. Or is it?
Keep asking questions folks, but understand you were sold an MVP, and you bought an MVP. People who are used to Waterfall (like me) find this approach to product delivery immensely disruptive and frustrating, but that’s the way it is now. Get on the train or be run over.
