EVE General Discussion

I for one am excited by the upcoming changes.... and encourage them!!!!

Most of the changes have been discussed for quite a long time (ship changes, FW changes, etc). And many of them have been testable on the Test Servers for quite a while.... So what exactly is your problem??

well the FW change will be good, the tech moon changes who knows ( high value moons are/were sources of conflict).
can't wait for dust.

Er.....the problem is essentially CCP has a long, unfortunate track record of implementing broken concepts or code.

Let's use FW, since the hammer fell on that concept yesterday .
The desperately needed changes were not due to flawed coding, but a hugely flawed concept.

Take your pick of the following reasons that concept was implemented. Some may be true, others not, but at least one of them has to be true since CCP just erased big chunks of how they envisioned the new improved FW concept 6 months ago:

1. CCP did not think through the concept enough and did not recognize that the players would game the system perverting it from the way CCP envisioned it.

2. CCP ignored the players on the forums who recognized the problems with the concept before it went live.

3. CCP did not allow the players and devs enough time to thoroughly test the concept to avoid the exploitation that CCP just stopped.

And that was just one system. Now CCP is changing 3 new systems, overhauling FW AGAIN, and introducing Dust.
That is way way too many moving parts to ensure that there will not be "unintended consequences"....drastic ones.

I am not saying that the general thrust behind these changes is not a step forward (OK, I think the AI change is idiocy).
What I AM saying is there is no way CCP can get all these things right at the same time, especially given CCP's track record.

It would be far better to slow down the process, dump all these changes onto one server, and take months to analyze precisely how all these changes interact with the existing game.

Brute force and ignorance, as my dad always said.

Do your worst CCP, its very entertaining.

Note that in the case of Incursions, many of the changes were reverted due to the heavy-handedness of those changes.

In the case of Tech moons, there is an entire style of gameplay based on the income afforded by just those moons. Drastic changes to moon goo or Tech moons in particular will have a major impact on null sec.

In the case of Faction Warfare, even blind Freddy could see that the main form of income (complex spinning) did not encourage PvP, did not enrich the FW community, all the while distorting the economy by pushing module prices down and PLEX prices up.



In the case of Incursions, CCP changed the mechanics, found that the modifications broke the community, then changed some stuff back.

In the case of Tech moons, CCP is still trying to figure out how to "fix" the perceived problem without breaking the nullsec community.



In the case of Apocrypha CCP was introducing not just a modified scanning mechanic but entirely new NPC AI, an entirely new mechanic for travelling to new star systems, and an entirely new system of building space ships (reverse engineering, hulls with subsystems). That warranted an extreme amount of public testing.

In the case of the FW changes that were made earlier this week there was a system that was clearly broken where the brokenness could be simply solved using existing game mechanics, i.e.: adjust the dungeon completion trigger so that it required two conditions to be met: button timer completed, and all NPCs destroyed. The damage that plex spinning was doing to EVE Online was far greater than any amount of breakage introduced as a result of the tweaks to FW complexes.

If you are going to have difficulties with missions due to the new AI being introduced in December, you might want to consider taking friends with you on your mission-running sprees.

As long as my BOOT.INI file is intact after the patch, I'm a happy paying customer

Carry on with the fixes and updates and balancing.

Blackbird? Have you seen the Moa? I mean really seen that thing?

I love the Osprey and Blackbird. The Moa has its own curious styling, which some people might interpret as ugly, but at least it is not symmetrical and boring.

Symmetrical is boring. No two ways about it.

That's because we're the testers.

And when we work out how to industrialize, CCP make the changes.

It's cheaper and better in the long run for 400,000 to find the faults than for 10 or 20.

It's the most natural and cyclical process in software development - always has been.

Confirming I am still placing a massive bounty on Dinsdale Pirannha for his terribad posting when December comes around and encourage others to join me. Feel free to post how many millions you will also place on him.