Jita Park Speakers Corner

We realize people are anxious to hear more but DUST is not quite in the phase of open collaborative development that EVE is in right now which is not something EVE players are used to / comfortable with (yet unheard of for normal console development). It is what it is.

The lack of discussion however does not equate to a lack of progress, and we'll be sharing some details with the CSM in anticipation of the EVE player base "caring". For now though you'll just have to wait like everyone else.

I think his point is that, in the wake of almost zero details about Dust's one major unique aspect, people aren't really anxious anymore. That's bad on a normal day - in a timeframe that has seen the release of both COD Blops 2 and Planetside 2 (the latter of which is also F2P), it's even worse.

The other posts in this thread are proof of that - hell, you've even got a CSM member literally saying "Right now I don't care because I haven't been given a reason to care". When someone from a group of people that volunteered a year of their time to help your company is saying things like that about one of your products - I mean, that's gotta be a bad sign, no?

What Mr Helicon said, I say too.

Candidly, it would be better to have an engaging, meaningful link that supports progressive goals in both games that needs ~iteration~ after launch than it would to have a trivial, meaningless link that works. All the players who are too impatient to let you take a couple of tries to get it right are long gone anyway.

If Dust doen't connect with EVE in an exciting and innovative way, then it will dry up and blow away like autumn leaves. It's more important that the link is worthwhile than that it works perfectly out of the gate.

And the sooner you bring the CSM in on this, the better chance you have to make that link engaging.

The nightmare scenario for Dust is this:

• DUST released, the Eve/Dust link is faction warfare only. CCP promises deeper more meaningful links in future.
• PS3 players play it casually for a while because its the latest FPS available.
• The next Space Battlefield Call of Honour FPS franchise sequel is released.
• Everyone jumps ship because the Eve link USP hasn't been deep enough to get the playerbase hooked.
• A far more meaningful Eve link is released.
• Nobody in the PS3 playerbase cares: they've moved on to the next Space Battlefield Call Of Honour franchise sequel, the only people left playing Dust are Eve subscribers who also own a PS3.

You need to be damn sure that link is enough to get its hooks into the PS3 playerbase straight away. Eve players have been patient waiting for iteration on needed features because we have the years of player-generated content and there's little in the way of truly open sandbox MMO competition. Dust doesn't have that, and the FPS market is much more competitive - unless you can hammer into the PS3 players from long before release that this isn't just another generic future FPS and deliver as such from day 1, they'll never treat it as anything beyond another FPS to occupy them for a couple of months, and they won't wait 6 months or a year for an expansion which provides what has been promised.

More importantly for your business model, they'll never become the type of dedicated long term fan who puts their hand in their pocket and gets their credit card out for the weapon and vehicle varients that will be available through the microtransaction market.

can those courier missions where you pick up the marines be turned into missions where you pick up dust bunnies and shuffle them around planets?

I agree with most what the other posters have said in this thread but I think for the sake of constructive discussion it is also necessary to appreciate the difficulty of CCP's position:

* The link between DUST and EVE has to be designed in such a way that it can again be severed without killing either game. This requirement has been mentioned consistently for as long as CCP has been talking about EVE and DUST being linked.

* DUST players must not feel like 2nd class citizens if they are expected to stay around.
The whole "mercenary" concept is nice but if ground control turns out to matter all large alliances will use their organizational capabilities and their "old money" to roll their own DUST squads, they won't want to rely on mercenary contracts (and can do so as many of their members play FPS side-games in addition to EVE anyways).
Getting 0.0 alliances involved early, allowing free transfers of value between DUST and EVE and releasing a PC version of the game would probably limit DUST's audience to a subset of the EVE playerbase as "independent" console-gamer outfits would not be able to compete (who wants to play a newly released pvp game where your opponents get 10 years worth of headstart?).

* It would be naive to assume that CCP will get a "meaningful" DUST link right on first try. The link would have to be tested extensively and testing against SiSi would probably not yield any useful results. For DUST to launch with a meaningful link CCP would have to link the DUST beta to TQ.
This is a hard decision to make as it means that the testing of ideas that might in practice not work out at all and many of which will be scrapped or completely reworked over the course of development will leave "meaningful" traces in the persistent world of TQ.
How would you react if your alliance lost space because CCP decided to try something really crazy on one DUST beta weekend?
It's also unclear how the progression from beta to release would be handled in such a case (wipe DUST to a clean slate at the end of beta but deal with the persistence of its effects on TQ?).
Letting DUST launch with very shallow link and expanding the depth of the link between both games as experiences are made and lessons learned seems to be the safer and far less controversial route.

* In today's market an open beta is the same as a release. Even the professional gaming media is starting to produce reviews and give ratings to games that are still in beta and the internet stopped making the distinction between beta and release years ago (just think of the SC2 beta, the WoT beta, the Dota2 beta, ... chances are the beta gets more exposure than the actual release version). There is no "open beta" grace period.


Maybe at this point it really is more important to protect EVE and give DUST a slow start (hoping for mediocre success 1-2 years down the road as gamers begin to acknowledge the constant evolution and improvement of DUST) rather than gamble for an unlikely but grand success and risk a spectacular failure (that might adversely affect EVE).
Given their experience with the slow but steady growth of EVE over many years this point of view does probably come to CCP quite naturally (and I am certain that it can be wrapped into nice adjectives such as "long-term", "sustainable", "strategic", ...).


Of course I still think CCP should have released DUST along with a meaningful link to EVE (instead of FW weaksauce) at least 2 months ago. But I doubt that this view contributes anything useful to the discussion of CCP's options

i dunno, just repeat the question i asked about DUST in last year's version of this thread and didn't get answered.

i'd retype it but like most eve players i dont really care about this anymore

I'm actually still putting together a little tease on some thoughts that me and a few others have been collaborating over the closed beta-period and after the last CSM Notes I'm hoping we can but some more meat onto the ideas once things settle down in open-beta as we felt their was a ton of surprisingly accurate assumptions and parallel sentiments from the summary of the Summit this Dec. I think we've actually some pretty good ideas for a layer of connectivity and appeal for Capsuleers and Bunnies alike and I'll be sure to link them up once we have them.