^ Exactly, hence any status bar would have to read:
50% (±49.9%)[/SIZE]
What would be the point of a progress bar this late in development? If the mod is going to be truly released before the end of 2009 then that is the only real progress bar you need.
Just sit and wait patiently for December 31st 12:59. =P
… you mean 11:59 pm … pacific time. 
AHAHAHAHA!! that would mean that I get the mod one day before all of you!!! (im in bc) but really, progress bars are bad. belive me, I was watching a mod with a progress bar, and the fourms were basicly used for OMG IS PROGESS BAR UPDATE? damaging to morale on all sides.
This has very little to do with the subject of this thread, but I feel inclined to point out something.
Originally Posted by cman2k
“It’s not that this information is secret, it’s that I purposely withold it. Any time information like this is given out, the public in general finds a way to use it against us. This is the same reason that game developers at large don’t give out this kind of information.”
The reason professional game developers don’t give out information on the games they are working on has nothing to do with this. It’s actually because their publishers require confidentiality in order to deprive their business rivals of an edge in the market (knowing about products before they hit the streets gives rivals the opportunity to pre-empt them with a similar product). In other words, nothing whatsoever to do with “the general public,” in fact the opposite. A secondary reason is that game developers are not involved with marketing - the game’s publisher has a team of marketing professionals who are paid to determine what and when to release information. And let me be clear, I realize the BM :s team is mainly comprised of professional game developers, they already know this.
Nice job trying to correct me.
The truth of the matter is not all companies are created equal. None of what you or I said is necessarily true for all companies. Some companies are bound very closely to their publisher with clauses as you have suggested. The company I work for certainly isn’t, and we do speak with our consumer base, a lot. And so do some others.
A lot of that nowadays has to come down to how big a company is, how proffesional they’ve gotten, and how much they care to interact with their community. From my experiences and the people I know in various studios, I like to think that a lot of the smarter game studios out there have got a littlel more leeway and a slightly longer leash than you are suggesting, and can make their own decisions on what they share with the community.
Again, this is all conjecture on both our behalves. Expressing your own views is cool. Just don’t go making it sound like I’m 100% wrong and you are 100% right, because that obviously isn’t true.
The company you work for is allowed to release “information like how many levels are finished, how many bugs need to be fixed” and the overall percent progress of the game independent of your publishers permission?*
Who announces your games titles/release dates to the general public? Your company or the publisher? If it was your company rather than your publishers PR dept., would your company still be in business if they released that information before the publisher gave the ok?
If the answers to either of these questions are “yes” (and you’re not self-publishing, lol) you will totally rock the foundation of my understanding of how this industry works, and I’ll be forced to admit that my experience working for a small developer is not as representative of “game developers at large” as I thought.
*edit: I do see your point here about this information being proprietary from both the publishers and the developers perspective because of (potential) damage control, so to some extent I’m just being difficult by arguing semantics - maybe I’m proving your point about the community using shit against you. But on the other hand, I’m going to maintain my position that corporate financial damage control and free mods are basically apples and oranges.
TBH I can’t go into details about all of this, because it is public information who I work for and who our publisher is.
Suffice to say, not every company/publisher relationship is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. For a while there we were our own publisher. Now we have an ‘official’ publisher, but we are owned by them so in many ways we are the same entity, and some of our higher ups ALSO do work for our publisher and have the power to make big decisions as an acting member of both entities. This isn’t even that uncommon nowadays, as publishers are buying many game studios and this kind of stuff tends to happen.
The lines begin to blur there quite a bit. We do have quite a bit of freedom for a company, way more than most for sure. But my point wasn’t that there are lots of company that have as much freedom as us, just that there are more companies now a days that do have some freedom and don’t have to put EVERYTHING they do past their publishers PR dept and get approval for every little thing. This is especially true for companies that have a little more weight in their step and have been smart enough to make good deals for themselves.
Like I said, nothing is true or not true for everyone. I think there are lots of companies that could get away with some of that stuff without publisher involvement, and even with publisher involvement not all publishers are the same and would probrably allow/disallow different amounts of things.
The bigger point here is that I believe that companies with experience in dealing with their community do end up finding a balance of what to share and what not to share with the public. There is certainly a point where the information you give out can cause more hysteria and drama than do good. People love to try and connect the dots, and when they don’t have all the dots that isn’t always a good thing.
…anyone else suddenly feeling a bit dotty?
I was writing a very long, detailed response to your post, then I thought to check on who this might be. Needless to say, if you’re working on MMOs then the developer-publisher-community relationship is way way way more complex (and open) than at your average 3rd-party studio - and while I still disagree with extrapolating this to “game developers at large,” I can definitely see where you’re coming from.
The mod will probarly finished in the late 2009’s.
Whew… what a relief, Thankyou so much for clearing that up for me! I was getting a little worried for a second there!
You’re welcome.
thats perfect.
Are some of you really that impatient? Seriously, they said 2009. Be happy with that, its as much as any other developer would say before the release date is finalized. Danielsangeo - that’s great haha!
Just use the percentage of :
( today - first_day_of_the_mod ) / (december 31st 2009 - first_day_of_the_mod)
That will shut them up
Good luck finding out the exact date the mod started on.
More or less 1 year shouldn’t change the percentage much 
…so, 100 - 100 * $daysLeftIn2009 / 1827 pretty much…