Best Answer Phil, 20 April 2014 - 09:08 PM
I've heard this argument many times, so let me explain my reasoning a bit:
Firstly, developing this stuff takes time. We're not talking days or weeks here, but months or years, depending on how much free time I can invest. I've started this project in September 2012, not just yesterday. So if you say we should have been "a little bit more patient", what you mean is more like "a few years more patient". What factors strongly into this is motivation. I am much more motivated to work on a server that is used a lot than one that is just a project on my hard disk. Motivation also decreases over time. In fact, it's quite possible that if I had held it back until it's perfect, I would have simply given up at some point and moved onto another project. Ergo, no server at all. This leads to two things: a public server makes me more motivated, so work on it more often. Doing more work means it takes less time, which in turn means my motivation and focus decrease less.
Another issue is that the BFME community itself is shrinking a bit every day. If I had waited another 3 years until I released, maybe the community would have been mostly dead already. I'd rather release an imperfect product to a wide audience than a perfect product to a handful of players. That means the whole work would have been for nothing.
The other big point is testing. You'll notice that this server is officially still in "public beta". We know it's not perfect and we don't consider it done. We have so many ideas what can be done with this project and we haven't even reached feature parity with the EA server. I plan to continue this project for many years if circumstances allow it. However, it is impossible to write a perfect program on the first try, so there will be bugs. Some of them are really hard to discover if you don't have real-world usage. Many of the things I've fixed recently I didn't even know were a problem until people playing on the server reported it. So by releasing it earlier, it gets improved a lot sooner and faster than if it was kept secret.
Another nice side effect is that by releasing early, we have found a couple very skilled and motivated helpers (ICT, Echo, etc.) that shoulder part of the burden and contribute to an even faster and better product. If you keep stuff secret, you're isolating yourself from outside help.
You'll have to trust me when I say I've thought long and hard about when to make this project public. And I'm 100% convinced that I've made the right decision. Of course you can disagree, but be aware that you're basing your conclusion on incomplete information.
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