EVE General Discussion

Since I am not a child, and I don't need to unwrap something every few days to feel like it's Christmas I'm perfectly happy with the rate of speed CCP has chosen for itself. Age also allows me to conclude CCP probably knows what it's capable of better than I do, and childish expectation isn't a wise thing to foist upon the adults in the room. It generally gets you stood in the corner.

PS How many pixels is enough, anyway?

I'm happy with it so far. I think every software company has a release rhythm that it settles into. I'm a backend software engineer at my company and we tried a few different timings. We did six months for a while; we did 6 weeks. We even tried weekly releases at one point. What we settled into as a good pace for us were 4 week cycles.

It's going to be different for every company. You have different vacation cycles, you have different planning cycles. It's almost impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all release cycle.

You have to find a balance between giving the teams enough time to get some bigger things done and little enough time to make a point of eliminating feature creep for a given release.

What I mean by that is that when you get all the project managers together and some of them want something big and stupid, it's easy for them to say, "well, you have 6 whole months!! Surely this is doable."

I don't know anything at all about CCP, but I see it all the time, just in a 4-week cycle. "Come on! You've got a month! Can't you just do this one tiny little thing??"

Well, no. Not without completely re-architecting large parts of our systems, and not without testing a bunch of stuff that we don't have tests for because you jerks never let us put the time into testing stuff, so no. That one simple thing you want is a no go.

From my end, with a 1-month release cycle, we get a ton of stuff done in terms of bigger picture projects. Yes, we do a lot of small stuff, and that makes people really happy. It makes me happy as a dev to be able to cross off a large number of things on my to-do list. It keeps morale high because we feel like we are getting a lot of **** done. But we also feel good because we are making progress on the bigger goals instead of letting them stagnate.

Shorter release cycles give devs more power to force other stakeholders to make real decisions about priorities. This is generally a good thing.

The things that I would imagine are the best byproduct of this change for CCP is that I bet there is a) more focus during planning meetings that leads to b) a heightened sense of purpose that leads to c) overall higher productivity and morale.

But that's just pinning my own experience on to CCP, and it may not be that way at all.

TL;DR:
I suspect it is a very good thing. I haven't been disappointed so far. We will probably find this to be really good in the coming years. But it's possible that it doesn't suit the team well. If that's the case, I hope they have the wisdom to experiment with other timings.

I forgot to add that because the cycles are so short now, they--by definition--need less feedback. If something goes seriously wrong, it's at most 6 or so weeks before it gets a rethink. Not 6 months. This is a good thing, and it allows CCP to take bigger and more dangerous risks. This is a good thing. I would rather have them trolling more and shaking things up more and making potentially bigger mistakes than not.

You can't live on appetizers alone. We need to get to the main course eventually.

I really want something interesting, deep, and new to engage with.

Yes. And parkour.

Because of reasons.

Confirmed. Selection of bowel related emotes coming in Oceanus

It seems that faster update cycles allow for less if any room for feedback changes before they go live. For example the next update is less than 2 weeks away and we still haven't even seen the details for some of the purposed changes. i.e. The Interceptor changes.

Which if that is what they want then so be it. Just don't give us the illusion that our feedback on purposed changes will make an impact upon a feature until after it is released.

The name for the next update is amusingly appropriate.
Named after a sunken ocean liner where the captain bailed leaving the passengers to fend for themselves......

Now that average players have dropped to 2008 levels, the Dev team is giving you fair warning....

I prefer the old ways of waiting months and month for new content... Made you all hyped up to release date.
Now it's just meh... Because the stuff released in the patches are only hotfixes, rarely anything exciting.

The hype around the old expansions was fun, the inevitable let down once they deployed wasn't.

Tyrannis was my first let down. I wonder if it'll ever reach the original vision for it.