Regarding the watcher last night and another decision
so due to a security vulnerability that happened due to refactoring in September, someone was able to access the admin area without being an admin. This is fixed now and the only access that the watcher could've potentially had was access to some statistics and ability to create updates, notifications and send bulk-email, which he luckily didn't. So thanks for that.
Regarding to a lot of bugs, incomplete features, raw design and a lot of 'testing' with live players - the game did get released too early, but I think we had good reasons to do that.
The reasons were that we needed to:
1) See the general interest in the game. If we stayed and had been calling it beta, the interest might have been lower.
2) We could not have tested google ads benefits while the system is labeled under 'testing' and not as an official release. We needed to know how much ads actually would bring in.
3) We needed to test the store to see if people were willing to subscribe and pay. If it had been in a beta status we wouldn't know this either.
We need to know all this to show any potential investors that the game would be worth investing into and we'd know ourselves that we are not wasting time on developing the game. I have always been thinking about the long term goals and what the game could be in the future, but due to limited resources and the budget coming from ourselves which essentially means we have to choose to impress quicker and have less quality control. Usually these types of games would assume that we have quality assurance and testers working for us, but we have to be on it ourselves. My long term goal has always been to make a management game happen, but this type of project can't happen as a simple side project so I can't currently see a better way of doing it. If we chose to spend more time on testing/quality we would have a lot less new features and more people could potentially lose interest. I completely understand how this can frustrate a lot of the players.
All in all we are currently considering putting back the 'beta' label for the game as we have gauged the general interest enough for us and we'd be looking to continue to develop the game without false expectations. If we do put the 'beta' label back on then the game will still proceed and we won't be resetting anything, but just move on by being adaptive. By the way this decision is something that we have been thinking for a while now and it's not a decision we are making due to last night. We will also be removing the ads when we do that as it's against the google policy to use ads while in testing.
Good luck and have fun!