What i wrote is pretty much 1x1 as far as managing a project goes. Its the simple facts that you have to take into account when you decide about resource allocation.
It has nothing to do with poorly designed code, as the same principles could be applied to about any job you name, that can have multiple people working on the same thing.
Not only does your post contradict my own experience, but it also fails to meet plain old common sense.
Not really, what expereince DO you have? If I wrote a game that is one solid block of code 400,000 thousand lines long, yes it would be stupid to assign multiple people to problems. Yes it is stupid to put multiple people on the same task ussualy unless they're having difficulty. What you fail to realize in a generalization attempt to justify GPG for being slow is there is LOTS of bugs that need fixing, all of which SHOULD BE interdependant from eachother. There's no reason a new developer cannot be told, go here, fix this. Although what ussualy happens in this game is, when they fix this, this unrelated thing over here for some reason no longer works.
You can spout off all you want about diminishing returns about developer allocation, but to take it to such an extreme as you have is absurd for the OOP world we live in today.
Have to agree with you, there really doesn't seem to be much going on. Some commentry:
A large number of the problems are present in lua files, eg TB fire autoattack anim state, sedna's priests numbers being wrong, gauntlets burning mana instead of draining and having hidden attackspeed buffs etc. that should be fixable in an afternoon, irrespective of management/OOP/anything else.
Replays were in Supcom from day 1, DG is on the same engine and their absence is frustrating to be kind.
Content I would guess is done by different people, artists would have as little dependency on the codebase as possible, so again why we haven't seen any hints of new maps/DGs/items is inexplicable from most viewpoints.
Mod support, like replays, is in Supcom and is already workable in DG. Sorian's mod manager has already done much of the required work, the content tools need to be made available before people like TheScottishAlien can start making new stuff though. I don't care about centralised lists and automatic downloading too much, if people can't make anything what's the point of the giant backend being discussed for distribution? We need a reliable GR2 exporter. We need a .scmap editor that works with DG. UI mods don't need this kind of infrastructure.
Clan support is probably a fairly major task, I'm not holding my breath for it.
I really like almost all of GPG's games, but their post-release work has never blown me away.
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