jrch5618 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:29 am
While you're at it, can you remove the icons from him and Major Rakal? That's annoyed me for a long time - it's never made sense, not since 1995, except as a feeble excuse to get some Romulans in the infancy of the game.
This is a useful opportunity for me to talk a little bit about the different "tracks" we in the Rules Committee have for changing the game.
If you aren't excited to read a lot about Internal CC Decision Processes, abandon this post! This is a post for people who get excited about interoffice memos!
Typos and cross-references are fixed immediately, without being reviewed by anyone, and are released monthly, so the time between a typo being reported and the time the typo is fixed is generally, at most, one month, but could be as little as 5 or 6 hours if you report it at the right time. I do these myself. (I also
created a lot of the typos, so fair's fair.)
Simple Glossary edits (clarifications, fixing obviously erroneous rulings like this one, functional but minor rule changes, etc.) are placed on the Rules Committee's monthly agenda for next month. If we're lucky, we come to a quick agreement, in which case we can get the fix out that month -- 5 or 6 weeks after it's reported. (We issue bluetexts rulings as band-aids if the game needs an answer faster than that.) Sometimes we don't, and an issue can drag on for a few months, or even get "tabled" if it's not important to deal with right now.
Clarifying errata happens at the rate of approximately 1 card per month. Changing cards is "expensive": it involves Rules signoff, Creative signoff, Director signoff, and Art has to put time into it (and Art's time is limited!). And there are lots of cards we want to clarify: about 75 in the "priority" queue, last I checked, with 4 in process. So if we decided to do some specific new clarifying errata today, we could have it out in 5-6 months.
Significant rule changes -- where we change something in the Glossary that people are going to actually notice, because it's going to change how the game is played -- are even harder. Those require Rules signoff and Director signoff at minimum, but
usually we need to consult with Design and/or Balance as well and get them on board. That's not even the hard part, though: the hard part is Playtesting, which grinds all our dreams to dust because it turns out our ideas are stupid and bad and need revision. (Playtesting has saved the community from bad rule changes many times!) There are two significant rule changes coming out with
Dogs of War. One of them has been in-process for 8 months. The other has been in-process for 21 months. (The first is unusually fast, the other is unusually slow, and it's because the second originated inside Project Babylon, an exploratory design team, and was bottled up there for a long time.) Their survival in testing was one of the biggest sighs of relief I ever sighed.
Functional errata -- where a card gains or loses functionality -- is not actually within the Rules Committee's ambit. Those decisions are made by the Balance Team, which is mostly occupied trying to address game balance issues. Their stuff has to go through Playtesting, Rules, Creative, and Art as well. I think it's the slowest of all, because, even when everyone agrees that a card is A Problem (Stefan deSeve is one; Quantum Incursions another), it is
exceedingly difficult to get a problem card to the top of the priority queue
and get both Balance and Playtesting to agree that a particular solution is a good idea that respects the original flavor of the card without making it OP or binder fodder.
Everyone
wants to fix Stefan deSeve, but it's in Balance's portfolio, and their decisions usually come down to something like, "Would you rather fix Stefan deSeve or get Holographic Camo off the ban list?" The functionally important stuff pretty much always wins. (Or at least it always did back when Balance was called Errata and had a very different staff.) And even when we all pretend for a moment that Stefan and Rakal are the most important issue in the game... you
still end up with surprising amounts of disagreement about what the correct fixes for them are.
If that all sounds like a bewildering committee structure with a
huge number of veto points... you're right! The 1E Department of 2021 is set up to move slowly and deliberatively. It takes a while for us to act, but, when we do something, we get it right the first time. (Or, at least, that's the goal.) The system blocks 99% of the terrible ideas while allowing most of the good ones to see the light of day, eventually... and (I think) that's a good balance to strike! The wheels of
First Edition grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine!
(My personal
guess is that Rakal and deSeve will eventually get fixed by getting included in a Virtual Promo series. If you want to do an "easy" fix on a card, but can't actually justify prioritizing it over everything else that needs fixing and testing, putting it on a virtual promo schedule is a great excuse to get everyone working on it. We
have to produce 6 VPs or whatever every 6 months, they
usually have a couple with clarifying errata these days, so why not include 1 or 2 cards everyone wants fixed anyway?)
TLDR: No, I'm very sorry, Rules actually can't change Stefan deSeve, and certainly not quickly enough to come out next month -- but everyone wants to fix him and, eventually, someone will!