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Summer 2014 Expansion, [Service Pack 1]
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Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#1 - 2013-10-31 12:48:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Sarah Stallman
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion, no new content be added beyond what is convenient to do so and you instead task the various dev teams to pick a bit of Black-Box code and beat the crap out of it with various sized hammers until it makes sense and they can rebuild it in a more sane and documented fashion. To spend those months identifying module dependencies and isolating things wherever it makes sense to do so.

My reasoning is it feels like whenever a fundamental change is proposed that would dramatically improve the game the response is along the lines of "We'd love to, but that's a giant mess of spaghetti code and we're afraid to touch it". I've heard this applied to everything from the cloaking mechanics to corp role management to player owned starbases. Changing the node system to allow for dynamically moving systems without dropping players would be nice, too.

In short, after a decade of feature creep I think it's time to step back to look at the big picture and clean house.
Debora Tsung
Perkone
Caldari State
#2 - 2013-10-31 12:52:52 UTC
Lol, I can almost see the "CCP is so lazy" posts. Lol

Stupidity should be a bannable offense.

Fighting back is more fun than not.

Sticky: AFK Cloaking Thread It's not pretty, but it's there.
Maximus Aerelius
PROPHET OF ENIGMA
#3 - 2013-10-31 12:54:06 UTC  |  Edited by: Maximus Aerelius
Lock requested for the following reasons:

"This is more of a rant aimed at CCP than an F&I that we can comment on. Please lock fore it gets all heated :)"

@OP:

What the Devs devote their time to is for CCP to decide and they can be persuaded but not by ranty type threads but by putting forward Features and Ideas that they may pick up on.

Don't you think that they are already unraveling the "spaghetti code" and have been for some time?

IB4TL

[b]Fast Character Switching "XP Stylee" Undocking - More Routes Out of Station[/b] Here's my tear jar > |_| < Fill 'er up!
Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#4 - 2013-10-31 13:01:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Sarah Stallman
Sorry, this wasn't intended as a rant. I'm not upset, particularly. Apparently I failed to set the tone of my post correctly.

I'm just concerned that so much focus is being put on making things bigger and better that the foundations those features are to be built upon is getting less attention than they should. It isn't that I think CCP is being lazy or unskilled, it's that this stuff is hard even when not on a six month release schedule and we as a player base should encourage them to focus not just on the things that are shiny, but the things that are completely out of view.

I am aware that they are doing a large number of this type of revision constantly, and in fact most of the non-major updates are exactly this type of work. I am merely suggesting that it be taken to another level.

However, without a large show of support from us, the players, they will never be able to justify taking the risk. That is the only reason this thread exists. Without player feedback, this can't happen. Seems like a perfect fit for the F&I forums.
Kaerakh
Obscure Joke Implied
#5 - 2013-10-31 14:44:49 UTC
It's somewhat implied in Rubicon that they're taking steps to abandon old code specifically for example POS code. They went out of their way(in the twitch stream) to mention that these new structures in Rubicon have none of the old POS code. Their current plan is probably just slower and more subtle than what you're saying.

Schrodinger's Hot Dropper

The Fate of Forum Alts

Guaranteed Success
Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#6 - 2013-10-31 14:52:19 UTC  |  Edited by: Sarah Stallman
I would not be at all surprised. As I said, I'm well aware that these kind of changes are indeed happening already but after ten years an expansion dedicated to cleaning up and optimizing the overall experience at a software level would seem reasonable, at least to me. A form of spring cleaning, if you will.

My concern is that by doing all of this optimization in the background won't allow them to really dig in to architecture level changes as the scope of such things is simply beyond what they can dedicate the time to right now.
Bischopt
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#7 - 2013-10-31 14:58:00 UTC
I wouldn't mind this at all.

Overall improvements to the game would be very welcome over new content.

Rubicon is a good example of this: My most anticipated new thing is the warp speed changes instead of the new content.
Alvatore DiMarco
Capricious Endeavours Ltd
#8 - 2013-10-31 15:29:25 UTC
They're definitely working on the legacy code, communications from various Devs (Fozzie comes to mind) indicate that there's a team busy with that exact task. It is, however, apparently... difficult and slow. It doesn't help that (as I understand) most or all of the people who wrote the legacy code no longer work for CCP.

CCP wants to bring links on-grid without melting the servers into slag, give us POSes that don't suck and eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) lag in large fleet battles. All these things require some manner of rewriting, refactoring, untangling or outright replacing miles of legacy code.
Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#9 - 2013-10-31 15:55:01 UTC
Exactly. What I propose is they take six months, their entire staff and an full expansion to dedicate to doing exactly that. To build themselves a framework from which they can continue to do their magic.
Alvatore DiMarco
Capricious Endeavours Ltd
#10 - 2013-10-31 15:59:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Alvatore DiMarco
Even if they did something like that, for everyone who rejoices about bugfixes and old legacy code being replaced, there would be at least an equal number of people crying all over the forums, themselves and each other about how there's no new features, no new ships and say that it's just more evidence that CCP isn't working on EVE anymore.

As for myself, as much as I would love to see the old code dealt with as quickly as possible, I'd also like to see some of the newer things ( read: hacking game, PI ) and a few older things too ( I'm looking at you, COSMOS ) iterated on and/or completed just as much.
Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#11 - 2013-10-31 16:15:31 UTC  |  Edited by: Sarah Stallman
I don't mean there would be no new features, just that the focus on the expansion would be squarely on internal improvements. If they can lick the problem of kicking players when they change nodes, for example, they could automate a system to balance server loads, lowering the usage of time dilation. I imagine that would be a major improvement to sov warfare, but is one of those architecture level changes I referred to.
Karash Amerius
The Seven Shadows
Scotch And Tea.
#12 - 2013-10-31 16:21:38 UTC
POS mechanics should be seriously worked over (modular, and more capabilities as discussed before). It would fit with the progression from Rubicon as well.

Karash Amerius Operative, Sutoka
Sarah Stallman
Pen2 Logistics
#13 - 2013-10-31 16:24:59 UTC
Karash Amerius wrote:
POS mechanics should be seriously worked over (modular, and more capabilities as discussed before). It would fit with the progression from Rubicon as well.


Everyone agrees they need work, but the code that runs them is nightmarish. There's been more than one dev blog about it.
ALI Virgo
Dreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
#14 - 2013-10-31 21:55:29 UTC
Sarah Stallman wrote:
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion, no new content be added beyond what is convenient to do so and you instead task the various dev teams to pick a bit of Black-Box code and beat the crap out of it with various sized hammers until it makes sense and they can rebuild it in a more sane and documented fashion. To spend those months identifying module dependencies and isolating things wherever it makes sense to do so.

My reasoning is it feels like whenever a fundamental change is proposed that would dramatically improve the game the response is along the lines of "We'd love to, but that's a giant mess of spaghetti code and we're afraid to touch it". I've heard this applied to everything from the cloaking mechanics to corp role management to player owned starbases. Changing the node system to allow for dynamically moving systems without dropping players would be nice, too.

In short, after a decade of feature creep I think it's time to step back to look at the big picture and clean house.

good idea..i wish people would be more tolerant
Meyr
Di-Tron Heavy Industries
OnlyFleets.
#15 - 2013-11-01 00:13:01 UTC
I'm definitely in favor of something like this. A patch/update that had some minor tweaking of ship stats (you don't get off that easy, Fozzy!), but really devoted effort so improving the back-end code without having to worry about some new 'feature' or 'implementation' would go a long way towards making progress in the future a more linear process. Continue the ship balance, maybe tweak a few more features, such as the Mining Barges, or adapt the mineral content of lower-tier battleships, or whatever - the point of this patch would be to improve existing content, not necessarily provide NEW content. Different missions (no new coding needed, maybe revise a few of the less popular ones), alter agent dispersion, maybe tweak mineral dispersion, or another round of weapon/tank adjustments. Spend the majority of the update on the CCP side of the house, and make future patches easier. We're willing to wait for a patch cycle.
Caldari 5
D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F. S.A.S
Affirmative.
#16 - 2013-11-01 01:26:56 UTC
Meyr wrote:
I'm definitely in favor of something like this. A patch/update that had some minor tweaking of ship stats (you don't get off that easy, Fozzy!), but really devoted effort so improving the back-end code without having to worry about some new 'feature' or 'implementation' would go a long way towards making progress in the future a more linear process. Continue the ship balance, maybe tweak a few more features, such as the Mining Barges, or adapt the mineral content of lower-tier battleships, or whatever - the point of this patch would be to improve existing content, not necessarily provide NEW content. Different missions (no new coding needed, maybe revise a few of the less popular ones), alter agent dispersion, maybe tweak mineral dispersion, or another round of weapon/tank adjustments. Spend the majority of the update on the CCP side of the house, and make future patches easier. We're willing to wait for a patch cycle.

I think this would be more the type of patch/expansion that would work, Major reworking in the old code, whilst the less coding orientated people in the company iterate on all the other parts that they normally work on, like the Art Guys working on High Res Texture Pack optional download thing and V3/4ing more ships and other structures and the like. The balancing guys balancing ships and modules, Heck even have the Live events guys run some more RP stuff too.
Arthur Aihaken
CODE.d
#17 - 2013-11-01 02:39:02 UTC
Sarah Stallman wrote:
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion...

There's no Summer expansion. The next expansion will be Winter 2014, with 4 quarterly updates between now and then. What these will all comprise is anyone's guess.

I am currently away, traveling through time and will be returning last week.
Alvatore DiMarco
Capricious Endeavours Ltd
#18 - 2013-11-01 04:53:10 UTC
Arthur Aihaken wrote:
Sarah Stallman wrote:
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion...

There's no Summer expansion. The next expansion will be Winter 2014, with 4 quarterly updates between now and then. What these will all comprise is anyone's guess.


I had forgotten about that.. what a strange decision.
Karma Codolle
Chimera Research and Development
#19 - 2013-11-01 05:10:25 UTC
Pretty sure CCP is just as frustrated with it as the rest of us and is probably working on ways to fix it right now. but they can't risk boring the player base with a bunch of behind the scenes stuff and nothing new for them to play with.
Oberine Noriepa
#20 - 2013-11-01 06:49:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Oberine Noriepa
Arthur Aihaken wrote:
Sarah Stallman wrote:
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion...

There's no Summer expansion. The next expansion will be Winter 2014, with 4 quarterly updates between now and then. What these will all comprise is anyone's guess.

Where did you get this information? It's not that I don't believe you, I would just like to know specifically where this was said, as that's a rather interesting and huge bit of information that I missed.

Alvatore DiMarco wrote:
Arthur Aihaken wrote:
Sarah Stallman wrote:
I would like to propose that for the Summer 2014 expansion...

There's no Summer expansion. The next expansion will be Winter 2014, with 4 quarterly updates between now and then. What these will all comprise is anyone's guess.


I had forgotten about that.. what a strange decision.

It's not so strange when you consider the longterm goal for where CCP Seagull wants to take the game. Allocating more development time to this release (and possibly future releases) will, perhaps, grant the full realization of the expansion's theme as opposed to the haphazard development process behind previous releases. EVE now has a direction through which it may legitimately expand in terms of substantial content. By this, I mean that we may get an expansion that will impact EVE as much as Apocrypha did.

We will just have to wait and see if they deliver. Given CCP's reflections on prior mishaps in addition to what's on the horizon as far as competition is concerned, I'm they are in a position where failure is not an option.

∃
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