With work on Scrobbles swiftly moving ahead, I find myself thinking about the inevitable and yet seemingly unreachable release date.
"Users are going to want this, so I should add it now.."
How many times have I now said that to myself? "Users are going to want to customize their pages", "Users are going to want to submit custom data", "Users are going to want to embed content in their pages", "Users will need snippets to be configurable so they don't need to write a new one for each 'key' or 'value'"... Each time I do this, it's for a good reason - I don't want to fail as a service, and therefore I need to be the best service around.
As mentioned previously, my main competitor (in the World of Warcraft arena anyway) is probably WWS (WoW Web Stats) - who have a mature, but nowhere near as flexible system as the one I have written. The keyword there however, is "mature". I took a look earlier and the wealth of information available from it is astounding. I can of course do better, and I do aim to write snippets which emulate the statistics that it throws out.
However, I then need to think about the groups of people who will be involved in these events, and think that perhaps they will want to combine their data and compare each other during raids, I need to possibly write a system that allows snippets to link to further in depth data based on a keyword in that snippet, I need to to write a system that allows users to create 'views' of their data between a user-defined period of time, with inputs coming through the existing snippet data. It needs to be really easy to create these views, possibly from templates so that data about a raid can be retrieved within a set period of time.
What about those casual users who are wanting statistics not about raids, but about their day to day activities? There is still a wealth of data that I am still not collecting, and I'm going to have to create a character of each class and profession in order to find out about them. It is absolutely terrifying how much stuff that I might "miss out" in the initial release of the software.
And there is the clincher, if I get it wrong, there is the chance that a future version of the WoW stuff might make previous data invalid. I can't be having that, so it has to be perfect, or at least - forward compatible to begin with - do I need a system for this??
What about those users for whom stats don't mean too much, I need to write that 'third party' website, WoWScrolls.com, so they can see the potential of throwing all their data at Scrobbles. (Public services are *awesome*). How do I achieve that? My colleagues at work have suggested that I use something like AIML to generate the blog posts and I can see their point, but it still leaves me with the daunting task of actually populating the database with "witty" phrases about each location, each task, each type of character and etc - nevermind creating the actual profiles from the data available at the WoW Armory.
My head is full of ideas, and getting that final feature list is not easy - because the moment I allow people to use Scrobbles they're going to start having even more ideas than I can deal with, and being the sole developer it's going to be very hard to keep up with the demand for features - nevermind technical support, complaints and all the normal day to day problems that come with running a website.
There is also that niggling issue, that releasing a service like this feels a bit like throwing down your cards at the end of a poker round, there is always the risk that your opponents might have a full house - and then what do you do?
Where do I call it quits? I could do with Scrobbles being out before the summer holidays so I could just prioritise my list of ideas and just work on them as much as possible before then, throwing it out in whatever form it has at that time. (Limiting the total users so I have time to assess server load and start thinking about monetizing the operation so I can spend more time on it - World of Warcraft is not the be all and end all of this system after all!).
I start to understand why games and software in general can often take such a long time to get out the door, there is always that one little thing that you just know the software will not be complete without. At some point, the users need to start leading the development strategy, and if their ideas conflict with mine - what on earth do I do then?
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