@jill.ramsay
Thank you Jill again for your reply. I also do not think that I or any other customer has been deliberately mislead, and like you say, plans change, but I also think there are some communication breakdowns between various teams and departments within ADSK leading to uncertainly not only with customers but within ADSK ranks too.
I am not a conspiracy theorist although I, like many others speculate on these forums.
My comments are not based solely on just one post from a Mud/Maya developer last year, or one meeting with senior management last November, but on various conference calls and emails over the last 2 years with senior management, software engineers and directors, and various other technical staff that all lead me to strongly believe that Mudbox came very close last year to having its plug pulled.
I am glad that development is back on track and that Mudbox will continue in the ADSK portfolio, but I think it is general knowledge now that many of these long delays and buggy new releases are a direct cause of the downsizing and reshuffling that's been going on with not only with development teams but the whole ADSK infrastructure the last few years, mainly to cut costs, and this has lead directly to price increases that have lead to ADSK loosing a lot of seats and long term users of Autodesk products.
I know in my area, and my resellers area at the opposite side of the country, that many small studios cut the number of seats drastically last year due to the 32% maintenance subscription price hikes, and news of further hikes in the coming years, and some ADSK members I spoke to have stopped their subscription completely due to what seemed to be stagnant development in Mudbox, and unusable unstable new releases in Max, which I am sure now they will regret, but I was also very close to cancelling my maintenance subscription the last 2 years, but I had it in writing just before my subscription renewal late September that development is now underway again in Mud so decided to give it one last chance.
I know there have been a lot of hobbyists, freelancers and small studios that have been put off by the new Desktop subscription prices, and want maintenance subscription, perpetual licences and upgrade plans back, but senior management have made this very clear that that's never going to happen...
There's no confusion, just a misleading Knowledgebase article, that looked like a wet Lettice compared to the promises of further development and exciting new features that have been talked about but not implemented for 2 years now, and IMHO these bug and stability fixes released yesterday, should have been dealt with a few years back, delays because of the Mud / Maya fusion and an uncertainty of Muds future.
I know that ADSK has been hiring again lately, increasing its technical and development teams, which is good news, and there have been some great new additions to the support team, but this has all lead to larger hits on customer wallets, and when customers have to pay more, they expect more, which has gone the opposite direction of logic the last few years, paying more and getting unstable new releases or no development at all, so with these price increases, I, and I am sure most other customers will be expecting greater things for their money, as I for one currently no longer consider the prices of maintenance subscription for the new product we receive each year value for money, and that prices should be going down the last few years to reflect the products we receive which are either unstable or had no development at all.
Max 2017 getting hardly any use at all due to instability last year and a work around only one month before the new version of Max was released.
Development, especially stability fixes are coming at an extremely slow rate in various apps, that should be made priority. Look how fast stability fixes were implemented in Max 2016, all fixed within a few months of launch, and then look at the rate we are getting these fixes now! It reflects very badly on the development teams and upper management, and needs serious attention. I certainly wont be switching to desktop Sub and paying 3x more a year for the same products if I am already finding maintenance prices unpalatable for the slow development, and even some features being taken away that have been part of Max for many years like Iray and Mental ray. More money for less is not a great customer incentive. I know Mental ray / iray are available separately now for free in Max 2018 from Nvidia, but for how long?
Max 2016, after a few service packs was IMO one of the most stable and feature rich releases of Max to date, and I've been using Max since V4.2, and then it all seemed to go wrong with Max 2017, which IMHO is one of the buggiest and unstable releases in Max history, and some of those bugs have followed into max 2018.
I've never had any real issues with stability on my system with Mudbox, and cannot comment on new versions as Mudbox had no development in 2017/2018 until this summer, only announced to customers yesterday.
It does look like things are slowly getting back to normal within ADSK! But while Mudbox development stood still , Z-brush has had yet another great new update, and although its been commented that Mudbox cannot compete with Z-brush so ADSK will not try, I think Mudbox can be a strong contender even with recent delays, and if development picks up pace again with strong new ideas, Mudbox could find itself in a strong position again within a few years.
Cheers all for your input, and have a great rest of the week!
And sorry for the overly long ( as usual ) rant from me.
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