EVE General Discussion

Stuff

Thank you, CCP Guard, for your straight honesty.

You knew you'd probably be "burned at the stake" (yes, CCP Soundwave, I'm looking at you!), and still had the guts to undock knowing that the station was heavily bubbled and camped with angry hostiles.

It's said that optimists see the glass half full, the pessimists see it half empty, and the engineers know the glass is twice the size it needs to be.

So, rather than 2/3 failure (or 1/3 success), I'd rather think the task completion was beyond your control.

In this day and age, CCP has not (only) a problem of success/failure ratio. We came to expect glorious failures from you guys - from boot.ini's to melting GPUs. The wondering on next patch isn't "it will break something?" anymore, but rather "I will be able to play decently again how many weeks after the next coding disaster?". In a wicked way, it's even amusing.

And yet, CCP has not entirely understood that the technical prowess (rather, its absence!) or promise to Deliver Excellence (buzzword detector is going off-scale!) are not their main concern. Their main concern SHOULD be the loss of trust and the abysmal job on communicating with your playerbase.

CCP Guard faced the forum squarely in the eyes, and came out admitting failure to deliver: the fate of that answers thread is a sad one, and I mourn the answers I won't get to my (many! maybe too many!) questions. Yet, the appreciation of his desire to communicate and not childishly hide behind a finger is what is largely appreciated by most posters.

There is a lesson in this thread. I dearly hope it's learned.

/shakes head, crawls away.

(Edit had to)

Well that's great, that's just ****in' great, man. Now what the **** are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty **** now man...

Friends,

You all remember the „Devs answer everything thread“ (I know for a fact that some of you do at least) that we started this spring, with the intention of – as the title subtly hints at - answering every question therein.

As a brand new Community Developer, I started this project with the full intention of pushing it through no matter what. Then summer came with the final Incarna sprints, the Incarna launch, and all that followed. The summer period was extremely hard in terms of securing any „extra“ time from developers to spend on answering questions from the thread, and it‘s not going to get any easier. Answering this amount of questions publicly takes a lot longer than many would expect because often you get second thoughts about details that you then want to research, or you want to polish the wording so it´s clear and understandable for what you intend it to convey.

Long story short, I grossly understimated the time it would take to finish answering all these questions, and overestimated the man hours I would be able to secure. And I learned a few valuable lessons along the way. One of them being never to use the word „promise“ unless you KNOW the result.

It is time to step up and admit defeat and apologize - we will not be moving this thread over from the old forums. Statistically speaking the project was two thirds of a failure. We answered 347 questions out of the roughly 1100 we received, despite repeated attempts at securing manpower. I can only hope that the questions we did answer made all of this at least somewhat worth it for some of you.

We‘ll go back to the drawing board and figure out different ways to do similar things in the future. To those that took part, waited, and never got what they came for, I humbly offer my most sincere apologies.

-CCP Guard

The same way you win Global Thermonuclear War.