Assembly Hall

You know, if me or chribbra, or Tippia were your CSM we'd be talking and arguing about change all the time! why do you not elect forum warriors, and then surprised when they don't post?

burn the csm with fire

Try reading again.

This has nothing to do with the invetory system...as far as what I was getting at.

If anything you just proved my point.

Mostly we are not raging (in public) because it doesn't help. Those days are past now because CCP isn't dropping the ball on things the day after they put them in the game. That's why Soundwave pushed his update blog out - to prove that they aren't going to just walk away from this.

As for the calls to 'revert' back to the old system, that's not going to happen. It can only evolve forward from here. If you think that the changes to the inventory system involve a "couple of lines in the client" then you have no idea of the complete and utter mess that is the 10 year old server code implemented by dozens of previous employees, many of whom no longer work at CCP.

Speaking for myself, I'm not disagreeing with anyone that the inventory system was released far too early and needs to work better. The "unified inventory" has removed a boatload of previous inventory functionality and replaced it with a laggy click fest which is downright painful to use. I almost stabbed my monitor last night trying to find a couple mods to re-fit a ship before a fight.

Right now I'm not raging, but I am annoyed, as my gameplay has been unecessarily made much harder and, for now, I am biting my tongue and giving CCP the opportunity to demonstrate that they will get this crap fixed quickly. Just because the CSM is not writing a ton of ~words~ about it constantly doesn't mean we don't understand what is going on or isn't going on. We have spent quite a lot of time this past couple weeks talking to the specific devs doing the Unified Inventory stuff, linking threads / posts and trying to help prioritize what needs fixing / iteration first.

Several of the CSM members have blogs & twitter accounts and have been on several podcasts and EVE radio. We have published the schedule for the first summit next week well in advance and have asked for feedback on the schedule in Jita Park as well. Here is the thread specifically about the U.I. team. I'm PRETTY SURE that the Unified Inventory changes will be front and center in that session and after hours as well.

Feel free to continue bashing the CSM; we're going to keep fighting for you anyway.

Yay a step in the right direction

Thank you for the encouraging words Seleene.

I think the point that the technically savvy amongst us are trying to make is that in a client-server system such as eve there is a strong distinction between data (what's in the hangar) and presentation (how it's displayed).

We are trying to make the point that regardless of the reasons of the underlying DATA changes, the PRESENTATION should not have changed, and it can indeed be reverted IN ISOLATION.

No, it's not "a couple of lines" but neither does it require re-work on the server (I am making the assumption here that CCP are using industry standard best-practice here - something along the lines of the controller-model-view paradigm).

The current presentation is a thin veneer over the underlying data structures - that much is obvious to anyone who writes these things for a living (me included). Players do not need this - they need an immersive, contextual and convenient interface. The fact is that for most of us, the old visual interface was far superior. I think all we are asking for is that the new one is made to look and feel like the old one, and we can start adding improvements from there.

Does this make sense?

I fully appreciate that and, in hindsight, you're not wrong. I can only really explain my own feelings on this which is that because we're talking to CCP pretty much every day, we see that they aren't ignoring what's going on. The people directly responsible for this mess are, understandably, pretty stressed out. They should have paid more attention to the SiSi feedback before release but, at this point, they can't wave a magic wand and change things no matter how ~easy~ some self-appointed expert thinks it is.

Perhaps it's due to being a bit jaded after nearly 10 years and almost 'expecting' something to go wrong with ever major release that allows some of us to just shake our heads and hope for the best. The difference today compared to last year though is that CCP isn't just dropping a broken feature on us and walking away - they ARE going to fix this and (hopefully) the finished, final product will be something we all might come to appreciate.

Have no doubt though that the CSM doesn't have special game clients which are somehow different than everyone else's - some of us are pretty mad too, we're just spending our time trying to be constructive with the devs and help them filter through all of the communities righteous ang-... ummm... quality feedback.

There's a great reason for this - its entirely inefficient to have every single one of us reply to every single mail we get. We save time that we can be using to work with the developers by having a single person take the lead usually on each mail.

We could spend all our time raging on the forums, posting every day, and having every single CSM member reply to every single individual mail, but that would also mean we'd accomplish very little actual work.

Remember we see a lot of what CCP is working on for subsequent releases, whether or not we can speak to them publicly, and so naturally our level of rage at CCP will be lower than the publics, because just like with the inventory we were aware of not only the community's concerns, we were aware that CCP was already working on a set of fixes for the common complaints.

I know how frustrating this can be for some players, (remember it was only a month ago I was on the other side of the looking glass), but one of the realities of working on the CSM is that communication we share with CCP happens over skype and in private forums. Out priority simply has to be taking the time to write extensive notes and suggestions in those channels, where they will be most effective.

One last thing I've learned since taking office - players should know that developers don't respond well to raging jerks that call them names and accuse them of not doing anything, that kind of behavior is a quick ticket to having your posts ignored. That reaction is expected of every single change to the game, so you'll have to bring something more to the table if you want to make a difference. They respond much better to calm, constructive, respectful criticism, and frankly so will the CSM.

Once again Seleene, thank you for taking the time to respond.



Well, I would argue that the middle ground is to move the presentation layer to where we were, and then introduce small incremental improvements from there.

Please argue strongly for this on our behalf.

It is not about the bitching. It is about the fact that the thing remains in tranq. If they can't fix it in few days as the newest dev blog indicates, it should be taken down asap for further development.

Think it this way.

Your new car breaks down and needs few weeks of repairs. Will you be happy if they come to repair it to your yard every day so you can still use your broken car to do nothing - or will you be happy if you get replacement for the time it takes to get your own car back?

This is not rocket science.