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EVElopedia shutting down on February 29th.

First post First post
Author
Annemariela Antonela
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#21 - 2016-02-26 18:30:53 UTC
This is the end.

We are doomed.

“Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.”

― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

Estella Osoka
Cranky Bitches Who PMS
#22 - 2016-02-26 18:31:54 UTC
So, when a player puts in a support ticket about a game mechanic not working as it should, GMs are going to reference what precisely? A non-official Wiki that is fan supported, fan created, fan edited? And they expect that to be correct?
Jagd Wilde
Pandemic Horde Inc.
Pandemic Horde
#23 - 2016-02-26 19:49:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Jagd Wilde
Doomed

Guess i started too late.

EvE R died. Roll

Every alt I own has a red safety, this has brought my friends much laughter.

Mara Pahrdi
The Order of Anoyia
#24 - 2016-02-26 20:13:08 UTC
CCP always sucked at internet communication. In almost every regard. Who still remembers that player stories web project?

Remove standings and insurance.

Indahmawar Fazmarai
#25 - 2016-02-27 07:28:38 UTC  |  Edited by: Indahmawar Fazmarai
Droidster wrote:
The EVElopedia has not seen too much input and editing from players as far as I can see. I tried adding some content to a page and it worked, so it is definitely a functional wiki. There is a restriction that the person must be logged on and have an EVE account in order to edit it. You cannot edit it anonymously.

The information on sites (DED/unrated) is much better than that on the uniwiki so it is too bad it is going away.

It is strange that the company thinks the site is a burden to maintain. I would think a wiki would be kind of an auto-pilot kind of thing.


Well, historically CCP has had issues with documenting stuff. Many of the issues with old code come from the fact that nobody documented it, so new developers must do a forensic examination and retroengineer it to figure what's going on and how to work with it. That is compounded by how most of the old code was written as stackless Python, which is a very flexible coding tool but also haves an habit of hiding everything within black boxes.CCP develeped EVE with too little people in too litle time and too little budget, and so they had to cut the effort. Documenting software takes away time from coding, so they went for fully coding and no documenting.

Fast forward 13 years. Development processes have changed, have evolved, but some things never were learned. Now CCP is using Agile development, which is a fast way to code but requires extensive control and documentation. So we must suppose that now with Agile develpment stuff gets documented internally, yet that's just a guess. Some Glassdoor reviews point that CCP's development still is chaotic and mismanaged to the point that sometimes a team will destroy the ongoing work of another team. That is related with other CCP issues, lack of middle management and internal promotion (essential for agile development) and cliqueism (detrimental for everything skill related).

Enter customers/players. They don't need to know the code, just how to use it. That requires that someone CCP gathered all information of all teams working on code, plus backtraced every functioning system (undocumented) and its evolution (when and if and how was it updated) to establish a "image" of the status of the game in a given date. This, while the game keeps evolving at a frantic pace of change-of-the-month. It would be difficult since old undocumented code is old and undocumented, but would be the only way in which CCP could serve well the users of their software by providing an authoritative and updated source of information.

Regretfully, EVElopedia likely was "that guy's idea", which was implemented "back then" and once "that guy" quit, nobody ever looked onto it. Probably because it was -huh- undocumented.

Players also are disincentivized to document stuff; certain mechanics can be used for profit and advantage, and sharing them publicly would remove the advantage.The incentives for documenting "everything you know" are small and probably nobody wants to share but the bare basics... and now they'll be certain that CCP won't go out explaining stuff like "how to set up an Alliance" (just to mention a real case I was involved with).

We can bet that the shiny-new-idea being implemented (flight academy or whatever) will cover just some of the basics, will never go any further with really old stuff and will languish over time since, hey, players already are doing a better job than CCP could bother itself to do...
Teckos Pech
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#26 - 2016-02-27 07:41:56 UTC
Well, while it was nice to have the wiki in my early days in the game I got most information from other sources. One paper I found a player had collected a bunch of data on stacking penalties then fitted some models and derived the equation that CCP used for stacking penalties. Rather impressive bit of work.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--Friedrich August von Hayek

8 Golden Rules for EVE Online

Tyberius Franklin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#27 - 2016-02-27 07:52:01 UTC
To be honest it's a resource I've actively avoided using for certain purposes due to often being incomplete and out of date. I remember when the tier 3 BCs were released and not being able to find any info on them for months. Then later the ship rebalances started kicking into gear. EVElopedia started having the same update issue on a much wider scale.

As a repository of info that didn't change very often if ever it does tend to have info which is useful and not present even in other wikis, but the lack of it going forward will likely see that info populated in other resources.

Sad to see it go for what it did have and for the lack of an official resource this creates, but not all that sad since the official resource was often not the best for many uses. Would prefer some more dedication to it, but I suppose this keeps the lack of updates from becoming misinformation from an official resource from another route.

Not sure I like the idea of flight academy videos being a replacement for easily searchable text resources on mechanics either...
Tavin Aikisen
Phoenix Naval Operations
Phoenix Naval Systems
#28 - 2016-02-27 08:52:09 UTC
Because f*** the lore and context, right?

"Remember this. Trust your eyes, you will kill each other. Trust your veins, you can all go home."

-Cold Wind

Wanda Fayne
#29 - 2016-02-27 09:22:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Wanda Fayne
Boo.

If anyone can port the records and upload for posterity...
I'll toss in a plex for them.
Ugh

Edit.
I just downloaded it

"your comments just confirms this whole idea is totally pathetic" -Lan Wang-

  • - "hub humping station gamey neutral logi warspam wankery" -Ralph King-Griffin-
Arkarli
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#30 - 2016-02-27 11:26:56 UTC
Yeah...

I'm not thrilled about this. EVE is a complex game and when I started playing EVElopedia was really useful. I think CCP should be updating their wiki not shutting it down.

Its just lucky the EVE community has produced a huge amount of publicly available information about the game themselves.

The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.

ISD Buldath
#31 - 2016-02-28 19:40:14 UTC
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Caleb Seremshur
Commando Guri
Guristas Pirates
#32 - 2016-02-28 23:34:18 UTC
Droidster wrote:
The EVElopedia has not seen too much input and editing from players as far as I can see. I tried adding some content to a page and it worked, so it is definitely a functional wiki. There is a restriction that the person must be logged on and have an EVE account in order to edit it. You cannot edit it anonymously.

The information on sites (DED/unrated) is much better than that on the uniwiki so it is too bad it is going away.

It is strange that the company thinks the site is a burden to maintain. I would think a wiki would be kind of an auto-pilot kind of thing.


There are still geocities sites out there - true relics of the 90s - haunting traps catching the unwary and reminding them of the dark days when every chancer loaded their sites with gifs and embedded music clips.

I don't think it's a matter of cost. Evelopedia is being closed probably just because it was an outdated competitor to other sites and it was making newbies confused about using other sites or the zombified official one.
Talvorian Dex
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#33 - 2016-02-29 03:30:36 UTC
Well, the portion I used most often were the cosmic signature ratting guides. I've copied over the data from Evelopedia and am in the process of standardizing the formatting of them (including listing escalations on the same page as the original unrated sites that produce them) and posting them on my blog, in a separate page for easy reference.

You can find it at http://targetcaller.blogspot.com/p/cosmic-signature-ratting-guide.html, where it will be long-term.

Writer of Target Caller, an Eve Online PvP blog, at http://targetcaller.blogspot.com

Oraac Ensor
#34 - 2016-02-29 05:26:27 UTC
Ned Thomas wrote:
Eh, big deal. The player run wikis are better resources anyway.

EVElopedia is, or rather was, a player-run wiki.
Ibutho Inkosi
Doomheim
#35 - 2016-02-29 06:14:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Ibutho Inkosi
Look at it this way. (scratch that). Look at it that way!

As long as the tale of the hunt is told by the hunter, and not the lion, it will favor the hunter.

Oraac Ensor
#36 - 2016-02-29 06:19:45 UTC  |  Edited by: Oraac Ensor
nvm
Nick Bete
Highsec Haulers Inc.
#37 - 2016-02-29 17:01:44 UTC
Tavin Aikisen wrote:
Because f*** the lore and context, right?

This. I kind of doubt that Eve Uni or Brave give a tinkers damn about the lore and backstory. Their purpose is to teach newbs how to do stuff and possibly not get killed.

Also, why the hell should I have to turn to third party sites in order to find out information that should be OFFICIAL, CCP AUTHORED and DEFINITIVE? Oh well, it's not like CCP likes using its own official communication channels that much anyway. Now off to follow Reddit, Twitter, Tweetfleet, etc. so I can find out what's happening in Eve...
Roll
Forum Toon
Doomheim
#38 - 2016-02-29 21:02:54 UTC
any chance to get the data of the wiki so we can migrate it to mirror?
Faryl Hanaya
Faire des Tas
#39 - 2016-02-29 21:16:15 UTC
Came back to Eve on the 25th. Did not notice this information about the shutdown. Spent 5h updating my personnal character RP sheet on Evelopedia during the last TQ down.
And of course, the dump was done on the 25th so I can't find it back there...

Well, my bad I guess.

But can we at least know if those "In character" RP pages will be transfered in this so call new plateform as well ?

I was hopping to leave a mark in the lore with that. Would be most disappointed if it were to just..disappear.
Zifrian
The Frog Pond
Ribbit.
#40 - 2016-02-29 21:26:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Zifrian
sero Hita wrote:
Mag's wrote:
Are you really surprised? Look at the whole forum debacle. Couldn't be bothered to port the history that came with the old forum, because :EFFORT:. That may also be lost at some point.

This is just more of the same. Soulless.

Well they do mention the alternatives:
CCp Falcon wrote:
With the introduction of the new Help Center and the ever developing Flight Academy project from our Customer Support Team, as well as the amazing (and far more up to date) player run wikis out there such as the EVE University Wiki and the Brave Newbies wiki, plus the availability of more up to date static data from the EVE Universe via CREST, we feel that the EVElopedia's life cycle has run its course, and it is now time to move on from hosting it.


It is not like you will be left with nothing. They said in the second last o7 show that they will expand on the Flight academy. I personally never used EVElopedia as I did not like the format and found it often outdated, for example finding the hull boni information. I instead used EVE uni, which is more up to date.

For an example compare :
EVElopedia
UniWikia

I know which one I find more informative. So I don't see the problem tbh?

In a way you are left with nothing. CCP has been relying more and more on players to provide the information to play its game. Furthermore, look at third party support and it's also relying on players to write its documentation and provide solutions to things like not having a consistent Database format saying "third party devs are a resourceful bunch!"

As someone who is part of this community, that is a poor model of service. Why? Because we get burned out doing stuff for a game we pay for, get little recognition for, and have to deal with a CCP changing its decisions constantly - then we stop developing/updating/and contributing. What does that leave the player base? Not nothing but pretty close.

For this change, look at the justification - brave newbies wiki. Brave was the hot ticket last year but they have waned recently. What happens when they decide to close up shop? What about Eve uni? For third party support, what happens when someone like Steve decides to quit playing?

I'm not saying that CCP shouldn't use players to support their game, but they really need to provide some consistency and reliable support to how they use it. Having one central wiki should be kept and supported for this reason. Without consistency you get a complete hodgepodge of resources, which are never complete or localized.

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