The big picture when fixing bugs:

As already noted, there is basically 1 team working on the bugs for all the games. This is a massive project that took years to put together.

How hard is it to fix bugs?

Let's look at a small program I wrote of this type for a single player:

In 8 hours I was able to write a little over 2,000 lines of code.

In the next 8 hours (next day) I was able to correct all the syntax errors I had made, reducing the number of errors from the compiler from about 200 to about 40.

In the next 16 hours (2 more days) I was able to fix the logic errors to bring the compiling errors down to about 8.

At this point I had spent 3 times longer fixing bugs than it took to originally write the program, and it still wouldn't compile.

It took about another day to track down the causes for the last 8 errors and get the game running. 

This meant a week to get the game to Alpha testing, and it was only 2,000 lines of code.

One of these MMOs is on the order of 100 to 1,000 times more complex, having hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and they are not all written by the same person. It is always about an order of magnitude harder to troubleshoot someone else's work, because you don't know what they were thinking when they wrote "this" piece of code. Frankly: far too few programmers (in my experience) do even half enough documenting within their code to make it intelligible to maintain.

Hi BADLAG247!

I understand that the main purpose of this post is to make some things clearer for our players. But I'm afraid, it may confuse them. So I suppose it would be wise to mention in your post that all the information in it is just your point of view but not an official data.  

Soldier's Inc got a bit of a break though

Actually, we have no breaks for each of our projects. Currently, we're working on bug-fixing but in the future, we'll add several significant changes as we already have such plans.

This is one of the reasons the company will say things like "We are not going to reverse the change we just made." Because quite simply: they can't.  

I'm afraid you got this wrong. Actually, some of our games have tangible distinctions. And sometimes we can reverse the change we just made as we did a few weeks ago on Sparta: War of Empires.

I understand and agree with many of your statements. However, knowledge of our players is often not enough to imagine a "true big picture of the game". Please, trust only official sources.

Thanks for understanding.

Sergey Kryvorotchenko said:

-snip -

Soldier's Inc got a bit of a break though

Actually, we have no breaks for each of our projects. Currently, we're working on bug-fixing but in the future, we'll add several significant changes as we already have such plans.

-snip-

You are saying that none of the code from 1 game has propagated into any of the other games, and that all the coding for each of the clones was done from scratch, by individuals not involved in the other products?

While I agree that there are some significant differences between some of the games, others are so similar that it is hard to tell them apart except for the skin and text. 

For example: Soldiers Inc is essentially Stormfall Age of War, and if you understand the wraiths in Stormfall, you'll understand how the Mercenaries work in Soldiers without having to read the Field Manual on them.

While Vikings is a significantly different product in some respects, it is still a TW style game, and may share the same core engine. (This is speculation on my part, but could also be made from scratch.)

Finally, while it is possible to take 8 teams and make 8 similar games without any collaboration between teams: this would be criminal on the part of the company if it has stockholders. Traded companies have a financial responsibility to not waste money, so not leveraging code and other resources produced for 1 product to make it faster  and cheaper to produce the next would reduce profits, and be grounds for terminating the leadership of the company, and maybe even suing them.

While I don't know all the ins and outs of this company in particular, there is a fair amount of information available to anyone who wishes to look.

My main points though were: 

1) The company providing the games is not simply "greedy" as many have suggested in numerous posts.

2) Players are getting a lot of "bang for the buck" from this company because it has the ability to leverage similar games.

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with the company, and do not have access to their facilities, so I am not an "insider" in the company.

You are saying that none of the code from 1 game has propagated into any of the other games, and that all the coding for each of the clones was done from scratch, by individuals not involved in the other products?

I didn't say that, actually. Of course, our games have many similar parts of the code. It allows us to affect all our games at the same time. But each of our games is a separate and independent project. So we can add new features to each of them without any influence on other projects. 

Anyway, I hope your post will help other players to take a better view of game development.

Thank you.