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I think they've got this covered, at least in concept. There will be bumps and details to iron out as they occur of course. The most important part of managing (and thus meeting) customer expectations is communication, which was specifically mentioned in the dev blog. It's an ambitious change, but I think they are fully aware of the implications and prepared to deal with them.

The tooltips were first A/B tested on SiSi, then A/B tested on TQ (starting 1 April), then tested on SiSi and now fully deployed to all on TQ (13 May). Different features will be tested in different ways for different periods of time.

you seem to think that just 'cuz they're going to do a release set every 6 weeks that this means they can't or won't test?

the whole idea is you can use the shorter intervals to 'change the kind of work you do'

so you spend the first lot of cycles creating the content in house, this is all the back end concept design, prototyping, implementation and case testing.

then when you've got the content to a point where it's good enough to use, you put it through into the 'release this stuff onto singularity' - ideally i'd like to see this as quality assurance goes and checks the design doc components and based on complexity determines an appropriate number of cycles required on SiSi needed to gather appropriate feedback and test data from players.

(while this is happening the development team is free to be building/designing something else as another team is responsible for overseeing this stage)


then when that's done with - assuming that nothing hugely nasty was found that needs to be fixed or redesigned - the content will go into the 'release this onto tranquility at the end of the next cycle' box

the whole idea is to make releases more optional, so there's much less lost if you miss a deadline or need to stop to fix something, it's not 'you MUST release content every 6 weeks' it's instead 'every six weeks we will release content that's ready to go, and if it's not ready yet by all means keep developing it until the next cycle's done, or the one after or the one after'

and that's ideally what a useful implementation of this system will help mitigate, the changes to workload distribution means devs can better focus on one specific task at a time and when that one tasks done do something completely different, depending on availability of human resources, jumping between several tasks over the course of a dozen cycles would also be advisable.

yes it's gonna depend very largely on how intelligent the managers are but that's what they're paid for - if they aren't good enough to use this system yet then they best be startin' to learn :)


personally, i've been waiting nearly 5 years to see CCP get around to adopting this system - well in fairness not just CCP but most companies that develop MMO genres, simply because it's the only system I've encountered that can react quickly enough to the multitude of unforeseen changes that crop up when messing with systems of ever growing complexity - if something does break or someone does make a wrong step it means the difference between weeks and months in fixing it.

as for the testing on SiSi - yes previously the system used for managing feedback by reputation and in practice has been poor, hopefully the change to this system will afford the breathing room to correct for that, spend 6 weeks building it, 6 weeks checking it and re-thinking/testing alternatives/parsing feedback to make sure, then go from there.

(admittedly you also cannot parse feedback you do not have, CCP would do well to post patch/release/test notes to SiSi on the tranqulity launcher/news feed so people interested in looking at something new can go and take a look with minimal effort, a rethink of the use of systems available to players for providing said feedback also wouldn't go amiss - adaptive systems are only as good as the management of information inputs and outputs they have available to feed them)

the trap with the previous system was there was no time within the deadlines to consider any error that wasn't a functional error, "if it compiled, runs and displays properly it's good and i have to move on to the next part or the whole system will be put off for 6 months, there's no time to spot a flaw and suggest an alternative once the design's in we gotta go with what we've got."

- because of this we've been subjected to countless poor content deliveries, Scanning formations, Marauder Bastion Module, and Ghost sites to name some recent ones: all of those releases work, but they aren't/weren't well considered and weren't altered adequately ultimately causing them to subtract more value from the game than they added - all because the game development methodology wasn't versatile enough to double check itself relative to the players on time.

This change in release schedules will be seen as a mistake. Check back next year and see if it isn't so.

Observations:

- Perhaps because of the launcher, each major release in the current model, is actually 5,7, or 10 patches, that come out in a flurry.

- We already have "point" releases in between major releases (suffering from the same flurry of patches around each.) (In fact I would not be posting now if Eve wasn't patching yet again.... which "release" is today's patch for?)

- The stability of the game is something many players rely on (as someone posted earlier). Having 6 weeks between these new releases increases the chance the sandbox will be broken more often. Saying you might get down to 5-week or even 4-week releases ...well...that begins showing some lack of touch with reality. 10-week or 12-week releases seem much more viable, provided you ramp up testing and start taking player feedback into account.

- Small example: The changes in reprocessing would take a perfect refiner 200 to 250 days (depending on current remap) to train the skills required to get back to the new perfect refine. We were given 60 days notice (so thank god that is slipping....)


tl;dr: Skeptical this will work, skeptical player tester feedback gets listened to, go for quarterly releases.

Audaces fortuna iuvat. CCP have great, unique world. Great developers (look at graph team works) but always lacks something. Final step. Some bold move. A leaders as you wrote. I don't see any charisma at fanfest. Bunch of peoples that i would gladly drink a beer or two. Again no offence to anybody.
Our aproach as players have different perspective from someone emploied in CCP. I saw that when watching panels from last fanfest. There was a guy who told about some improvement in EvE performance as general (this was best what i've heard from all fanfest material)- audience reaction, meh. Rise and Fozzie - "Do you wanna see some spaceships!!!" - wild scences at audience, panem et circenses. Players are happy they get new BS, but where do they fly them? In those boring L4? Where in this is "performance guy"? This should be prio.

I have been playing for over 5 years now. Trust me. This new system will be better. It allows CCP to be more flexible and agile in their development and deployment. Having a single deadline once every 6 months is like having everyone show up to defend one station timer. It looks great on paper. But in practice its a huge PITA.

In the past deployments were huge multi GB patches with many changes that all had to work together. They frequently did not, generating rage and angst amungst players and devs alike. I don't think for even a second that devs aren't passionate about Eve. Hell, I spent 4 hours last night trying to figure out why I couldn't get a single conditional formatting option to work in a google spreadsheet because God-damn it, It's my project and I want it to work!

And about your reprocessing gripes, HTFU. You now have to train perfect skills to get perfect performance just like everyone else. Deal with it. I already trained those skills on my indy alt because, holy crap, I actually wanted perfect refine in nulsec 40% outposts. Guess you shouldn't have taken those skills for granted.

Dev feedback is so much better now that it has been in the past. CCP deserves recognition for their efforts. :applause:

Is this to try to force us back into using the launcher?

So many releases and patches that we need to use it before we try to log in for the first time after DT to make sure the patch for the day gets installed?

I don't see what the whole issue is to be honest. With the old system, if something was finished it had to wait until at least a mid-point update (assuming an expansion had just been released) to be released under most circumstances. Now under the new system it could be released in as little as 6 weeks.

Under the old system if something was still under development and missed the deadline it would have to wait for a good while. Unless CCP did a special update (in rare cases it has) it would mean there was a minimum 3 month wait until the mid-point update, before that content would get released.

Plus I have found that the launcher, now that it is finally starting to work good, makes this process a lot easier. Granted I stated back in the days of Trinity when updates were a whole different animal lol

I personally like the idea of this being the standard for releasing new things. Maybe this way some of the smaller things that the players want will make it into the game more often and with less frustration. Also this way things wont be as dramatic in creating fotm ships and fits.

As for a suggestion of a small thing to add, it would be nice to have a skirmish and info mind link.