EVE General Discussion

Yes, they are. And thus CCP needs to be cautious about using its marketing department or free-thinking / speaking developers to build up customer expectations solely based upon ideas that are unable to be delivered upon in-game.

What we are really talking about here is the concept of customer expectations management as well as the truths of CCP's business plans and resource allocations.

CCP has set themselves up with some client management challenges having seriously misallocated development time and resources with Incarna and, to an extent, Inferno. These were two development cycles assigned to stuffs that either customers didn't want or that actively killed subscriptions. These two periods of time could have been used to address the broken fundamentals of the game (corp roles, POS stuff, etc.) as well as the pie-in-the-sky ideas that improve upon existing game elements (ring mining, etc.).

Now, there is a continued backlog of necessary work on which CCP is playing catch-up all the while attempting to launch / integrate their gold-digging DUST project. How CCP Unifex manages to balance all of these competing interests will be telling.

Lastly, I am curious to see how CCP will improve upon managing customer expectations during their 10th anniversary Fanfest event w/o completely ******* themselves over with ideas that will never be delivered.

I have removed some trollish rumor mongering from this thread.

I imagine they will get better at managing player expectations when their customers stop taking statements like:

We'd love to be able to develop a Ring Mining mechanic eventually that works something like this... what do you think? We are considering devoting resources to prototyping it to see if it is a workable concept when there is time in the development schedule.

and instead hearing:

We PROMISE we are going to have Ring Mining as a fully functional mechanic in the next release or two. WE PROMISE!!!

Until this idiocy stops (which it likely never will) you will continue to hear people complain bitterly about broken promises and misguiding customer expectations.

To be fair, mining is such a bad joke that you totally could become an expert on it within 2 months.

Very true, but would anyone we could consider a mining expert resolutely assert that mining was perfect as is?

So yes, he could have been, but had difficulties seeing beyond the tip of his nose.

To be fair, most of those are people unable to tell the difference between CCP floating an idea, and CCP committing to an idea.

The first signs of CCP committing to a roadmap for ring-mining was at Fanfest 2012, with their plans to focus on harvesting and manufacturing after Inferno.

Now judging by the CSM Minutes, I think it's fair to say that they actually did look into the whole industry/POS/ring-mining thing but that it turned out to be too big a task, especially with their new focus on delivering expansions with multiple smaller updates to mechanics, focused around a specific theme.

We might very well see some initial updates to the industry framework this summer.

The reason I put the Winter 2013 expansion on the table is that, as far as I remember from the CSM Minutes, it's supposed to tackle 0.0 sovereignty. A big part of that could very well be bottom-up alliance income, like ring-mining. It's an obvious chance for an industry themed expansion, allowing CCP to make good on a little bit of everything. Ring-mining, modular POS, production/science interface, corp roles etc.

Its back to quicker and easier Jesus features.
Bring Eve back to life biannually since its perpetually dieing.

Goons and Co. weren't done mining all the Tech yet, so CCP told them they'd hold off until they were ready. *wink, nudge*

Or something like that, I don't know, nulsec is boring anyways.

Frankly ring mining is something that desperately needs to happen, at least if it's anything like the moongoo-replacing player-controlled scheme I understood it as.

Actually what would be fun is if Ring mining and moon goo were both existing.
So that you could have a garunteed source from the moons, but anyone could do ring mining (which is solely in low)