EVE General Discussion

Well kids, we have had 4 of these already with the 5th one coming soon. A lot of people thought going to this new model would be stupid and lots thought it would be good. At Eve Vegas CCP said they are getting their feet under them and are actually enjoying the new model. I'm curious as to what the players think, and has your feeling changed?

I.e. if you hated the idea at fan fest do you like it now? or if you loved the idea do you now hate it?

My thoughts are I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I still hold that to be true. We had a few mixed items come, but in general I think this is very good for the health of the cluster.

I like it.

It allows CCP to be more agile, and more feature focused (as opposed to release date focused). Problems in mechanics don't have to sit around for months (or years) before they're addressed. My personal opiinion is that it's been a huge hit.

Of course, your opinion may vary if you live in an area where you pay for bandwidth consumption, and have to download the updated client every 6 weeks.

love it, its great.
more little things hitting the ui and being iterated upon much faster.
Edit: yeah doc reminded me there, moar tearz

To me it's clear cut: CCP has chosen a release cycle more in line with agile development. Not saying agile is better then any other form but in todays market, it is one of the better models to choose from. I vastly prefer this model over waterfall or big plan releases. But that's just me as a developer speaking... stability > jesus features.

+1 for agile

I prefer reverting back to the 2/yr model.

You had time to actually dive in and experience the expansion after having time to understand upcoming changes and feel it out and come to logical conclusions and slide into a new niche..

Now you don't have time to settle in before you are being blasted with another list of major changes and you don't know if this or that has already been released or if it is coming or whatnot.. There just isn't time to absorb or adapt.

It's like buying an iPhone. Why buy one now, in a few months it will be outdated... But then, that one will be outdated just a few months after that.

If you ask me it is being used as a tactic to prevent meaningful player response (Jita riots anyone?).

I like how the Soon™ has shrunk from six month to six week intervals.

The issue with doing a, for example, Kronos 1.0, Kronos 1.1, Kronos 1.2.. is that he stuff coming was not really attached to Kronos. Most of the time a code name followed by a version usually means that is the stuff being added that was designed for that code name. Like...

In Kronos the industry stuff was suppose to happen, but they pushed that back to Crius, so you could say Crius was Kronos 1.1. Hyperion was heavy wormholes, it would not make a lick of sens to link it with Kronos from a logical stand point. Hence the different names. Just think of the names as code names. Then you can call it whatever you want

Like the Exodus expansion was codenamed Shiva. And crap I get my expansions mixed up... either Cold War, or Revilations, or RMR was code named kali. I think they were all codenamed kali actually.

While its probably more convenient to break everything up into smaller patchspansions, I feel we lost something with the old twice-a-year format. Before we had major expansions that most people either looked forward to (or feared) with names like Quantum Rise, Exodus, Dominion, Inferno, Red Moon Rising, etc. These large expansions were accompanied by cool trailers, and hundred page long discussions. Now we have these smaller patches that roll through only carrying minor adjustments like a new module, new cloak graphic, indy tweaks, and so on. No real fanfare other than a small speculation thread that gets trolled straight to lockville. They've all been followed with daily patches/fixes for the first few days, so it's not like they have the advantage in that regard either.

Tl;Dr. Smaller patches are better for ADD crowd, while larger patches were better for those of us that had patience to wait for something good.

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I would still like to see a properly big Expansion (the one that gets the capital letter style) every so often, with the following release points adding additional content for that expansion as well as putting in extra content for the game itself.