First thanks for taking the time to chat to us all.
May I suggest that, as we as players are unable to estimate the effort involved in any one 'fix', or the impact it may have, we could take an approach of prioritising fixes in batches leading up to CASP.
It is also difficult for us to estimate the effort involved in transferring fixes from alpha to beta to main.
It seems to be(?) problematic to do smaller more frequent iterative fixes, say one a month if necessary, for example fast track tutorial and high priority bug fixes, which may have a high impact on new folders (and the rest of us in trying to help out in chat) and we tend to have updates which are a very big mixed bag, often with associated complex issues which do not emerge immediately.
So a suggested priority order to set us up for CASP would be:
1 scoring/rebuild problems insofar as possible.
2 - tutorial, housekeeping, and language issues fast track any remaining which can be dealt with in a sprint so newcomers and people without English as a first language can play.
1 and 2 could be swapped depending on the degree of difficultly of 1
3 - Cookbook, tools (reset defaults) and other display issues that can be fixed in a Cookbook, tools and game display sprint, some of these may be in the fix mix already but these issues really do have a big impact on folders.
4 - Lua and other script issues - not new requests, just clearing any bug backlog so we have happy coders and reliable scripts.
I would think that those items, just doing fixes, and any overwhelmingly supported enhancements that can fit in the appropriate batch, will take us up to April-May, ie three or four sprints plus time to load and test through beta and main.
The advantage in doing the code fixes last is that the coders will be able to confidently work with the preceeding fixes and prepare detailed requirements for any remaining issues.
Anything not fitting into these groups would not get tackled before CASP unless there is a separate resource available to atttend to it, in particular doing anything which is not directly beneficial at the CASP foldface.
Cheers spmm
