EVE General Discussion

There's so many reasons why phased roll-outs are better than one big release that I'm not even going to bother listing them all. Also, the negative reaction had less to do with what was delivered and how long it took, and more to do with things aside from that (NeX store) and a certain leaked internal letter. I'm glad we can finally walk around - the discussion about that aspect of EVE was tiresome after so many years. Now we can all move forward and focus on what matters: spaceships.

You forget that for 3 (or was it 5?) years the players here were demanding WiS be implemented en masse. A lot of people wanted this to happen and were looking forward to it for a very long time. They even demanded it be delivered ASAP regardless of whether or not it is finished, which I believe is part of the reason why we now have what is essentially an unoptimized, unfinished WiS beta.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, waiting another year to see the CQ wouldn't have hurt - however the pressure felt to get this out there must have been enough to do what they did with Incarna. The current trend of "FiS is better, forget WiS" is not as clear cut and resounding as you make it seem. A quick glance at a recent poll topic shows mixed feelings, with the loudest protests coming from nullsec PvPers, FW pilots, pirates and highsec griefers. These type of players (unfortunately) are a minority in EVE - with the vast majority being of the carebear variety. In fact, I've seen almost the same number of posts with people asking for more variety of clothing and to hurry up the 3 remaining CQ's + establishments as I have whining about FiS being broken.

I believe that if WiS was shelved "until it's done" like you suggest, that we would be seeing the whining coming from people who had been asking for this feature for years. Not necessarily a healthier state, depending on what you value as worthwhile content. I do tend to agree with you though, as I value FiS simply because it is the core of EVE - Apocrypha was when I first subbed to this game.

You can't please everyone all of the time, and winter is coming.

The vocal minority are the ones who are the alliance or corporation leaders. They are the developers of EFT or Evekill. They are the ones who run eve uni, write the forum posts, create blogs or host third party forums. They are the ones who run on CSM, the ones who the media pick up on and wax lyrical about. They are the ones who not only try to get their friends to play but try to get GF's, wives and offspring to play eve.

The vocal minority are the most evangelical. Provide with the koolaid at your peril.



I agree with the sentiment and I always felt that the marketing line was too simplistic, however there was a massive focus on expectations management back then with questions such as "should we only have one expansion a year, or more regular minor expansions when and as content is ready."

There is no way you are getting a full blown expansion twice a year. I want it, you want it, and CCP wants to deliver it. But there ain't no frickin way.

Arena net tried it, they failed miserably. And managed to whore 5 million copies of their game, which when all said and done was about a million subs.

I would rather have CCP release stuff and patch it endlessly, as along as it doesn't require a lot of server downtime, which ATM its not.

I think phased expansions are a good thing. But the phased expansion in the winter of 2010 had the phases following each other in weeks, not months or years. I expected that the phased expansion of Incarna this last summer would be:

Phase 1) One CQ, single player
Phase 2) 2 to 4 weeks later: all the other CQs, still single player
Phase 3) 2 to 4 weeks later: common areas, multi-player, establishments with games
Next major expansion: contraband and a tie-in to FiS stuff with players shooting each other over contraband.

And here we are 3 months later with no second phase.

I personally despise the roll out concept. Hey heres something new thats only half complete, just wait 6-8 months for the rest of it to be released.. Neat. From a marketing standpoint I actually think its worse off then releasing it all in one go. Nothing is worse then promoting something thats incomplete and having new players see this. However I know from a programming standpoint it can be a good thing since its less crap to shift through when something goes wrong.

I do believe that the Incarna roll out was done horribly wrong. NeX shouldn't have been released until AFTER(or at all) the multiplayer aspect was implemented, and that CQ shouldn't have been released until all 4 where complete. Thats just me though.