Y'all say you want more transparent comms, so get ready for the new strat where we talk about the shit that sucks as well as the good stuff.

To use a film metaphor, right now we're in Act 2, which is the part where Luke and his friends get caught in a dumpster and nearly get crushed to death

I think the bare-all approach will pay off in Act 3

Suspinded

A (hopefully) objective TL;DR

* A small number of the plugins and apps were removed from the client to help load times (10-20%)

* Boot times were improving until 10.3. It is suspected server strain from increased use due to.... you know... is partially to blame. Server capacity is being scaled up, which should help.

* Affinity, a tool to help reduce plugins loaded on startup, was discovered in this client review to be broken since 2018.

* Fixing Affinity is not going to address these issues, and will need to be replaced in the client.

* Client fix plans are being changed to implement something other than Affinity, which will slow down the road map.

Solid summary

Eslayeris

I think that if you guys succeed in fixing the client while communicating the process behind it you can get some trust points back with the community but the reality is that this specific subject is one of the most controversial ones ingrained here and people don't have much hope left. I still think that this is the correct approach but you guys shouldn't hope for positive reactions until problems start to get fixed. Keep the good work little cactus octopus man.

100% agreed, I think it'd be nuts to expect an overwhelmingly positive reaction to any update that's fully honest about challenges without meaningful improvements to show.

Many (most?) people care much more about product changes than transparency about problems.

But the idea is that—since we are confident we're going to be able to make those meaningful improvements given enough time—anybody who goes on this journey with us is going to have a deeper understanding at the end of it.

The payoff will be at the end.

neenshah

SOME SETBACKS

Affinity was broken. At some point during 2018, Affinity was inadvertently broken. Since Affinity isn't working properly, the client is defaulting to loading every single plugin during bootstrap and postgame loads.

In the bigger picture this discovery isn't a setback but rather a huge success, considering the whole point of this campaign is to fix issues. Especially when it's a tool that's been literally broken for 2 years.

Yep. It's simultaneously humbling and a validation of our approach (dig deep to discover root causes)