Innovation and Idiots

"The man who invented the wheel was an idiot. The man who invented the other three, he was a genius". - Sid Ceasar

To expand off Ceasar's line of thought - creativity is only as good as its application. Since application is a function of cost and opportunity we've caught ourselves saying "okay, we want to integrate 1,897 features and1,852 of those are nice to haves but 45 we'll have for launch" and so the story (and run on sentence) begins of how working at the Titan Strike concept for so long has forcefully taught me that some creative ideas just do not make the pipeline(yet). They are either not worth it fiscally (finances) or functionally (users), of course the designer in me pulls and tugs at executing every module/component for our online community but at the end of the day it is about prioritizing based on a bedouin cost/reward system.

I hate to tear out the emotions from the creative process by numbing it down to unemotional calculations - but at times it's the only thing that snaps us out of drawing-board-mode (that we love) to reality. Every minute detail, from the navigation bucket messages that display as it expands and contracts to the user sign up process has received a vast amount of TLC-WBAA (Tender love and care with Bad Ass Attitude).

Anyway ... to really pound the concept out would be to use a family-planning comparison to our pipeline selection process, it's like having 20 kids - it would be a great amount of fun but at the end of the day can you feed them?

"Hi, this is Nobu, can I help you?"
"Yes, I'd like to make a reservation for 22"
"Ooo ... corporate party Sir?"
"No, this is my everyday life and it really sucks."

With much the same angst, we've selected our offspring (our pipeline features for beta) with a surgical guess at what gamers (us) need to form a tribe - and this is Titan Strike.