EVE General Discussion

WoD development does not mean WiS progress. As they specified the engines now differed. Obviously the art differs, and even DUST development with avatar spaces in New Eden hasn't actually led to WiS progress.

"Differed," to the extent that they forked CARBON. It's still CARBON, and the changes they make can be adapted right back into the version of CARBON under EVE; or, if CCP does Incarna as a separate client, it can run on a different version of CARBON as well.

There's already been a fair amount of cross-pollination between the EVE and WoD teams. There's no reason to think that would suddenly end.

The way I see it, there was a plan to use dual/forked development for both EVE and WOD, however that all fell apart in the wake of the Nex/Greed is good riots.

CCP are still trying to fulfil the original plan though can only do so with one half of the fork/not both after promising the FIS only crowd that Avatar development would stop. Hence we see delays for WOD and no development at all (other than the bare minimum they can get away with) for Eve.

CCP Seagul's plan/vision for player made stargates is just filler designed to keep the eve playerbase happy whilst the WOD fork is underway, as is the ship re-balancing and player made star-gates.

Remember they had to abandon the Eve fork of the plan after considerable amounts of money/dev time and resources were spent on it. That type of decision cannot be taken lightly. Given that they've just lost the benefit of all of the afore mentioned dev time, money and resources what choice did they have but to abandon all Eve development until the original plan for Wod/Eve (now just a WOD plan) is completed? Remember they are contractually obliged to produce WOD.

Rebalancing and POS/SOV improvements could easily be handled in a single expansion with the resources available to CCP. 'm old enough to remember in this game when patches/expansions were world changing events that affected every aspect of life in New Eden. That isn't the case anymore.

Also if we can have wormholes in a single expansion why can't we have player made star-gates on the same timescale? I fail to see why there has to be a five year plan to get all of this done. Unless of course that WOD development is sucking away all of the resources in secret, not to mention dust and Valkyrie.

I can confidently predict that on successful delivery of WOD CCP will then turn it's attention back to avatars as they never ever give up on any long term visions or plans. That's why I say that avatar gameplay in eve is imevitable, we've just got to be patient.

Any idea what new clothing stuff they will bundle with EVE Source?

That's how they used to be. Ever since they almost blew up the game with Incarna CCP has been really good about sticking to their promise to focus on spaceship content. I have to admit that after the Summer of Rage I didn't believe that they would keep their word but I'm glad they did and that they give every indication of continuing to do so.

they don't want new players , and spreadsheet is so fun !!

Although I am pro-Avatar development, I can't help but correct this. We don't know anything about number of subs (we never have really), and CCP haven't released any official figures in a long time. Active player numbers however, seem to be doing fine.

http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

Don't get me wrong. That graph would look much better if CCP hadn't split their resources on so many terrible project ideas. We could have had expansions just like the ones we have had plus Avatar content development. C'est la vie.

I was not trying to imply that CCP should have 'no' other projects. That would be daft. But, CCP are currently running four projects and a mobile app (Eve, Dust, WoD, Valkyrie and the app). And CCP had openly voiced concerns that Dust wasn't pulling it's weight. Most big games companies (We're talking EA, Bioware, Blizzard etc) run only one (or occasionally two) unfinished projects at once and if one of their games flops they drop it and don't have to worry about maintenance costs.

CCP on the other hand are running 1 finished product that pulls it's weight (Eve), one project that might even be running at a loss but with no intention of dropping it (Dust) and three other projects. All of those projects rely on the income of one single game. There are literally no other successful games companies stupid enough to try this. If CCP hadn't have been greedy and added one project at a time, imagine how much more development resources they would have available for each game if they were only running two projects. Dust would have been twice the game it was, and Eve would be a completely different beast.

So I agree and disagree. Developing new stuff is the safe route, and a good idea but not to the extent that CCP have been trying to do it.

Edit: Also, as an aside, the Sony sponsorships happened before Incarnageddon. Dust and WoD both probably started development about Incursions time. So this was a problem that contributed to the summer of rage, rather than being a solution to it.

My suspicion with Dust is that they will do a marketing push once they have fixed some of the glaring issues with the Graeme, such as the complete lack of a new player experience, no PVE, planetary conquest being broken.

But CCP was already working on that before the summer rage. At least from 2009, and if I remember correctly they were already working on WoD. CCP started to divert reources from EVE to other external projects just after Apocrhypa, in their highest peak.

The summer rage itself was nothing special, just only a big arranged forum flame as happens periodically. Ant there was everything in it: people against the NEX store, people complaining cause monochle cost was too high, people upset for WiS not delivered as expected.

The only difference is that CCP used that as an excuse to disengage from any EVE serious develompents to focus on Dust (in the meantime they got the agreement with Sony) on and to lay-off part of their employees.

All things that was going to happens anyway.

So, was mostly an inside company operation. Hell, CCP also market it in their slide-shows