EVE General Discussion

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/10/reexamining-ccp-development-cycle.html

Players want it all. They want their iterations and fixes, but with every expansion they want something big and meaningful as well.

The problem is that CCP's development cycle for each expansion is quite short. And being quite short, they don't have the time to really give depth of features.

Player expectations (which are always high), simply don't mesh well with the short development windows that CCP gives itself.

The development time for a summer expansion is approximately five months. January to May. Tack on another month for fixes and iterations once the expansion is released. Then there are two months of summer holidays, when CCP development slows to a crawl. The winter expansion cycle is much shorter, starting around the end of August. A three month development window, with another month of fixes and iterations once the expansion is released. This is the CCP development year.

What seems to happen, especially with the big features, is that CCP announces a really exciting upcoming idea at their fanfests and player meets. Then come release day, that idea always seems to be a pale shadow of the original pronouncements and "promises." The short development cycles should likely be blamed. There's never enough time to deliver everything, and some of the features of these bold and grand ideas have to be left on the cutting room floor.

Take Inferno's faction warfare, as an example. This probably should have been re-developed from scratch, given a complete rethink. But due to the short window of development, existing features were simply massaged and iterated upon. What resulted was a system that focused on PvE and loyalty points, rather than a system that focused on PvP. The five month summer expansion development window precluded anything but the massaging of existing features, rather than the development of all-new features.

I would suggest a single expansion cycle per year. Each expansion will focus on either a broad theme (i.e., industry or war) or a single big exciting (jesus) feature (i.e., POS revamp or ring mining.) This allows CCP to really give a theme or single concept the development time it deserves and to really pack on the features, deliver to expectations.

As well, throughout the year, various smaller iterations, fixes, and rebalances can be released. Every team will not be working on the main expansion full-time, and when they're not doing so, they can work on some of the low-hanging fruit. The little things. These are released to the players as they are completed.

What we end up with, is a fully-fleshed out concept/theme, once per year. As well, throughout the year, a random collection of little things released in a relatively constant stream.

It would seem to me, with the upcoming POS revamp, that a change in development cycle would be advantageous. The POS revamp, as envisioned at fanfest and player meets, is a massive project. A rethink of what currently exists. Modular structure-cities in space. It will require a lengthy development window. It will require work from most of the CCP development teams (though not all of them simultaneously.) So, while CCP still get the time to develop POSes in the correct way, working to deliver the expectation (rather than the pale shadow), there is still development time throughout the year to tackle little things, release them as they are finished. Players are thus not waiting a full 12 months for one big feature, plus a collection of smaller features. Rather, they wait 12 months for the big feature, and are delivered smaller features throughout the year.

Even with the change in development cycle, CCP doesn't lose out on the marketing potential that expansions bring. The expansion concept remains, CCP is just given time to deliver a yearly expansion of greater depth and scope.

Some will complain, that we're being short-shrifted an expansion per year. That's not really looking at the larger picture. Given the short development cycles to begin with (especially winter), we're being short-shrifted on the larger features in a two-expansion per cycle to begin with. I think, in the long run, CCP will be able to deliver better content if they switch to a one-expansion per year cycle.

You should spread out your posts more, to ensure each gets the attention it deserves.

Are you actually posting here for content?

Or soliciting blog traffic?


If the former, dump the link.

If the latter, dump the content.

I, of course, like blog traffic.

For those that don't want to click through, the whole article is posted. For those that want to make my little graph grow, the link is there for their charity.

I'm not sure why this bothers you so much.

One of the better comments I've read:

Small 'r' risk is the new CCP mantra.

All you need to know.

No more Incarna scale disasters.

Plenty of scope for stuffing up, but less chance of '20%' impact.

I don't think there are many more jobs left at CCP they can get people to do for free.

(Do you work?)

Been saying this for years. \

So the development cycle, to you, is just the actual coding work? The design, discussion, theorizing, whiteboarding, brainstorming, etc, falls outside that scope?

If so, then I reject your thesis. 5 months is plenty of time to simply put design into code and test it for a couple decent features given the programming resources CCP has. If not, then Crimewatch is a prime example that you're wrong about features having to be contained all in one development cycle.

Also, well done making "iterate" sound like a bad thing. Can't please everyone... some want big new features and say forget iterating on old... some want existing features iterated on to improve them and say to hell with "Jesus features".

Whoever made that article clearly doesn't understand how dev cycles work. CCP doesn't just think up some new feature, slap it out in 3 months and call it a day. They might focus a little more on one feature once it is getting close to being finished in order to get it into an expansion but a lot of the projects have been worked on for a year or more before they were released. A single expansion from summer to winter is not a "dev cycle". Maybe an "expansion cycle" but not a dev cycle. Dev cycles are typically determined by the amount of time it takes them to complete a task. It doesn't necessarily have to coincide with an expansion. The features coming in this expansion, for all we know, could have been being worked on several years ago.

Posting in a Peotic Stanziel spam thread.