We have X amount of time available during a publish cycle per discipline (Design, Engineering, Art, QA). We decide we want to do features A, B, and C. All those features get scoped out for each discipline and you come up with a timeline to hit the target date of release. For some stuff - especially holiday stuff, you have hard release dates. When you run into issues that expand beyond the original scope of a specific discipline's original estimate you have to decide what to do - either expand the scope or move on and address it later. If you decide to expand the scope enough times it leads to what we call "feature creep" which can throw off the entire schedule and what often times leads to projects/features landing in "development hell." In the case of the Trophy, our art resources are heavily vested in doing new/revamped creatures for the pet revamp, so we start tweaking the schedule now and it throws off that project for the future. Do it enough times and like I said, development hell.Just curious... why keep adding content that is knowingly in need of fixing? Wouldn't it be better to get it working properly before pushing it out? We have SO much content that gets added and never gotten back around to...
This often begs the question, "Why don't you just release this thing or that and release whatever else later?" There's a lot of inter-dependency in the code base and doing that many forks gets messy pretty quickly, and as you can imagine after all these years its challenging enough to deal with it.