? weird that you go futher into the fact that i said it was further in development as a Beta instead of Alpha game. You make my case even better lol. A game clearly in Alpha stage then, would have to have a lot more updates since the fact it is Alpha stage lmao
I just objected to one of your claims. The other claim you made then was correct though IMO, there are expectations by (many) players that the time between alphas in EA is shorter. Though there are no rules from Valve how EA is supposed to work, how long between alphas, how many alphas, ...
i bought this game when less then 6 months were between alphas. If they are suddenly going to take more than one year an update while saying their dev team expanded, then that's either laziness or there is something going on in the back we don't know
And here you are correct again, at least at the end: Yes, there is probably something going on in the back you might not know about. For example:
1) You probably don't know that at least the last three alphas took nearly a year. So what seems suddenly to you has been the norm for some time now
2) You probably didn't work as software developer, right? So here a few facts: The bigger a software project is the harder it gets adding features to it. Because inevitably there are a lot of cross dependancies all over the code base and adding one thing makes it neccesary to touch a lot of other places in the code. Changing old code makes it neccessary even for the writer of that code to first reread it to find out how it works in detail. Bug fixing gets more difficult for the same reasons.
3) Expanding the dev team is normal when a project increases in size. But it actually isn't a unproblematic fix, because any developer added needs someone to ease him into the code base so he is a liability at first. Then there are diminishing returns: Add one dev to a group and they spend 80% working and 20% coordinating among themselves. Add another dev and the group now spends 70% working and 30% coordinating (those are invented numbers, the principle is know in software development for decades). It is somewhat like the cores added to a CPU speed up the CPU less and less.
4) TFP added a lot of artists/designers to make more content like POIs or higher resolution graphics but good programmers seem to have been in shorter supply (according to TFP). Now designers can't help on the coding work or on the bug fixing, and bug fixing takes a long time now, each alpha now had ~2-3 months where we only heard about the number of critical bugs going down slowly.
Naturally TFP could have decreased the feature size of later alphas to make it appear as if each alpha took the same time as the previous one. But they apparently have a few habits that are not easy to break or a feature list with many big features not easily broken up. And releasing an alpha to the players is partly extra work that would interrupt the work on the big features. So they might not be so happy to change their routine.