EVE General Discussion

How does the 18 months cycle fit in?

Btw I'd rather go for monthly iterations and getting all the small things and smoother transitions than getting another dull door or crappy inventory.

Sigh.

Go and read the Developer's on posts on the matter, especially CCP FoxFour's post on why they decided to leave some npc turrets and stations under the old AI when the plan was to change ALL npc AI in pve content.

I take it you've never done many of the high end null sec DED plexes like Blood Raider Naval Shipyard or others with the citadel EM torp that does 160k damage and have 20 neuting battleships + scram frigs ect ect. Those old plexes (which sahre the exact same NPC ships as high sec missions) were designed for the dumb AI, where as wormholes and incursions were designed for the "smart" AI, which is why you do't see 50 sleeper battleships (for example) in even an escalated wormhole site.

For MOST missions and plexes, the AI change would either be unnoticeable (especially for non-drone users) or at best a minor annoyance, but we (the people who gave feedback) pointed CCP at missions and plexes that would be totally broken with this change. In addition we've alerted them to various other potential consequences to the change (like perhaps being able to tank faction police with drones, when we did something similar to faction police years ago when I was in faction warfare, CCP emergency patched it THAT WEEK lol).

And yet they are still aiming to make the change. I'ts not the change that is bad, it's how they are going about. I'm a pve player, I want better pve, tacking on new npc behavior to old content isn't the best way forward, many of us think a better way forward is a more comprehensive re-working of pve content TO INCLUDE smarter NPCs.

Basically, we're in the Age of the Quick Fix.

Crucible was an emergency expansion, where CCP were distracted by internal events and the post-Incarna fallout and had to rush out an expansion in 2 months so looked around for as much low-hanging fruit as they could to knock out quick-fixes. It worked so well that the template has stuck. But CCP are running out of quick-fixes, and we're still faced with the old critical issues that cannot be tackled so simply.

No quick-fix is going to resolve the unfinished and broken mess that is Dominion-era sov warfare, or fix the entire industrial process, or revamp lowsec as a place where players actually want to go and set up home. And we're seeing the strains as CCP opts for quick-fixes over proper expansion, such as the mining barges which should have been rolled into a complete reworking of mining and rebalanced alongside the introduction of a completely new mining spectrum (comets, rings, moon interaction, composite asteroids, etc), rather than stat tweaks being rushed out solo in a way which obsoleted two of the three hulls overnight.

There's talk from what we've heard so far that the POS revamp will be a deep and fundamental overhaul when it sees the light of day, and I'd like to think that will signify that CCP will move back towards the 'take the time and do it right' approach, as well as picking out the quick-fixes that are still available and are suitable to be quick-fixed. We shall see.