Issues, Workarounds & Localization

First, Thanks for the expansion. It's been a long time coming that you starting thinking about the game that is keeping your company alive.

Now that you've done that I'm hoping in the next little while you are going to focus primarily on fixing the MANY glitches within that game. Old ones and new ones alike. If your question is, "which ones would you like to fix?" perhaps you should ask that of the community because there are too many for me to even get into.

At this point I've become tired of all the bugs, I've got 2 months left on my subs on all of my accounts, and if CCP hasn't stepped up like THEY PROMISED, I'll be closing everything down, giving everything away and closing up shop permanetly. I've given over 6 years to this game on multiple accounts.

as a long term subscriber I was patient with the BPO scandal, all the way to the Nexus marketplace that's absolutely useless. You promised us walking in station YEARS ago. It's still not there. Dust 514. My god, in my eyes it's still vaporware, And now this solemn promise to focus on EVE once again to make things right.

Well I'm still not seeing it made right.

You've got 2 months CCP. Make the most of it.

P.S. What one person is willing to put into writing, you can be sure there are hundreds, if not thousands thinking it. You've already seen what can happen when you let the community down, if you fail now it's going to be expensive.

I hold a similar opinion.

It seems to me like this game is running at a world-class popularity level which should, if done right, bring in big $$$, which should translate to manpower and getting things done well and done quickly. It's not though, it's getting new content and repairs/fixes at the rate of some low-budget starter project run out of a persons basement.

Is some entity taking too big a piece of the pie and milking the profit out of this game as much as possible with putting the least amount back in? or is it really just that expensive to run the game and despite it's massive popularity, they just dont have enough money to throw at their problems? If the latter, what is it thats running up the bill so much?
If the bill's being run up, then what do they need to cut-off or think of a new solution to? If these things were public, you could get a public opinion on what people would be ok with giving up in exchange for something else. Too much of this game seems to be a bunch of wild guesses at what players want, coming from a board room somewhere far seperated from the end-users.

Correct me if Im wrong, but the number of problems in this game seems to be growing, not shrinking. They have a balance to maintain between spending their time fixing stuff and keeping people happy and adding new content to make people happy... but really, they should be ontop of both, if not ahead of the game with these add-ons completed a year or more in advance to give them plenty of testing time and avoid a hateful rain of bug reports and dissatisfied customers who feel they should be paying for a finished and polished product, not a disfunctional one with a long waiting list of problems.

I too hold a bit of resentment that they wasted who knows howmuch manpower and money trying to do the whole Nexx thing and station walking environment and not fix the core problems in their game. Doing so would probably net them more profit in players who keep playing than people wanting frivolous items and sight-seeing. I get it though, its a good cash grab, make something that can only be purchased via a plex.. people will most likely not buy plex's to get this stuff but the isk-wealthy will pay isk for plex's to get these novelties and others will in turn get the isk they bought those plex's to trade for. It turns trading isk for plex into straight up money in their hand rather than just selling subscriptions in advance which doesnt get them any extra money really, it just kinda advances the pay out... as far as I understand. So ya it was an idea to make money but a wasteful one that they really should have explained better to the community. Also, I wonder, with this advance in pay that is plex sales, did CCP see what they were doing or did they not and spend all this big burst of revenue only to realise that they'd have low periods upcoming in the future and desperately pump out this nexx idea to cover an upcoming defecit? Im assuming their business people would be smart enough to foresee this but you never know.

Maybe they're spreading themselves too thin? Giving a bit to the art team to improve the backgrounds and ship textures, a bit to the dev team to make new content, a bit to the bug-hunting team, a bit to the support team and probably alot more "teams". Im thinking, graphics can wait and if they are so hard to do, outsource it to someone who can do it better, faster and cheaper. Artsy backgrounds and ship features are a very short-lived thrill whereas ever-lasting bugs are an escalating issue.

I feel like alot of things get put on the back burner that are more important than the things they are dealing with. They add new content when their last add-on is still harboring a boat-load of issues. They "fixed" magnetar holes by breaking the hell out of them and leaving it like that to date. Im looking through these threads and seeing a minor graphical issue that affects people with three screens (a minority to be sure) addressed personally by a GM over issues that EVERYONE experiences. Thats just ridiculous. They paid someoen to make a bunch of fancy backgrounds that, I dont really think the vast majority of players bother to even notice, or if they did, would appreciate the improvement for a very short-lived moment. Same goes for ship textures, looks cool, gets boring fast. It appears to me as if CCP is fussing over a new centre-piece while the house burns down around them.


The OP is right in saying that where people write things alot more have kept silent about it. The vast majority of people I know in this game are dissatisfied with the rate of innovation and repair CCP puts forward. Many dont feel like they would heard and dont bother to write anything.

Short reply misses completely for 0 damage.



Would you have me imagine up numbers for sometihng there is no recorded data for? 60-95% of the people I know are dissatisfied with the amount of bugs... or I could just say the vast majority. There is no equivocal or intentionally ambiguous arguement here in order to mislead. Simply my representation. CCP would have their own statistics Im sure.

Having graduated from university in computer sciences and software engineering. a handful of years ago, then proceeded to run my own operations over sea's ranking alexa top 300.. Im fairly aware of all ins and outs of software development and large scale deployment. I am still very disappointed with CCP's overall operation. Im no mogul the size of CCP, but it isnt that hard to envision, given the large bodies I worked under for the years leading up to my own venture.

CCP is failing hard. Its not that hard to bug hunt or to outsource it, in my experience. Realistically, you shouldnt be in a situation where you have more bugs than your entire employee base could fix. The worse the programming is though, the worse and more numerous the problems are... maybe they just need to sit down and re-write some things with more diligence rather than chasing phantom bug reports obscured through a pile of compounding errors. When making a large project like this its like a hundred hands piecing together a mosaic and I dont get the impression from their end product that they're doing it with the right amount of co-ordination and symbiosis.
They need better planning and execution, basically. I'll concede that Im not an avid game developer and my experience stops at game mods and tweaks in that field, but pretty much every other game developer who's games I've played have not made a habit of creating more problems than they fix. At least, none that have lasted.

I dont expect them to get it done in two months like the OP. This game is quite massive and respectable in its design. It would be nice to see a public statement about an increased investment/effort in smoothing out the majority of the known issues and maybe a revised plan on expansion releases to allow for more thorough testing. Treating your paying customer base like your guinea pig to find issues and having maybe a few hundred people on your test server to weed out only the more blatent problems, is not a good system in my opinion. I dont like being left with unresolved problems for half a year of paying to play.

Am I wrong when I say that no other big time MMO has this many issues? In my experience, I've never paid to play something so consistently broken and behind on fixes. I love the game, its just such a love/hate relationship because its like trying to appreciate the Mona Lisa through broken glass.

They could use to prioritize the bugs they are fixing first with a ranking system ordered by the number of people affected and a set limit on how long they will back-shelf certain known issues that affect even a sub-group of players, like for example, Magnetar wormholes. Alot of people like to use wormholes, not magnetars though, they've been broken for the better part of a year. Maybe they could put up a poll on their website to get a better idea of which problems people want fixed first. I could see alot more people clicking through a quick poll either in-game or on eveonline.com where they can see their contribution and know its being taken into consideration as opposed to writing up something on the forum with no dev/gm reply or acknowledgement. As far as I know, this entire thread is for naught because I've received zero official acknowledgement or reply.

Their current priorities boggle me. Looking at the patch notes every time as I do, I see visual glitches being fixed first and foremost. Some hinder your playing, most are just minor nuisances. It appears to me as if they spend more time trying to make their game look pretty on the outside, for whatever reason, and less time fixing issues with the mechanics of the game unless its something completely game-breaking. I'd like to see more emphasis on game mechanics being fixed, even if its only 10-20% of the player base that are presently affected, if its something like wormholes that anyone could potentially run into, it should still be fixed. Whats to say people arent just avoiding that part of the game because of the issues?