EVE General Discussion

Ship spinning, supercap nerf, AF buff, hybrid balancing, pod killmails, engine trails, generic patcher, etc etc. CCP is delivering a whole ton of things that players have asked for. However, on top of all that, they are also moving forward with WiS (with all the new stations), new ships, and of development of other features and Dust 514. All is well, right? Well...

Some people are (rightfully) questioning why all of these small awesome things that CCP is doing have been ignored for so long -- years, in some cases -- just to all be done all of a sudden when CCP got in trouble. It's suspicious, isn't it? "Don't CCP play their own game?" to quote many people.

That is probably not what happened. Being a software developer myself, I have been on projects where everything was going so super-well that everyone felt like they were on a roll. New features were being developed left and right, and the future looked bright! However, as inevitably happens in very fast development of software, there are bugs, loopholes, and other minor annoyances pile up.

That is where the problems begin. We developers consider our time to be extremely valuable, and when given the choice of developing an exciting new feature or fixing a boring bug with a possibly tedious solution, we will almost always pick the former. This leads to a product feeling incomplete and half-assed, most likely with a userbase disillusioned with the developers. I suspect this is likely the same chain of events leading to other famously crappy-at-first products, like Windows Vista.

In Eve's case, this bubble popped with Incarna. Riots, mass quittings, and other things ensued. Since player satisfaction wasn't going to be fixed by adding more new features, they were practically forced to look at the "little things" that piled up over years, and they are now getting fixed.

The bigger problem remains, though. While I'm sure we all understand CCP's enthusiasm for always making the Eve universe bigger and better (this includes Dust 514, by the way), rushing out new feature after new feature without looking back only leads to eventual catastrophic explosion of player dissatisfaction.

Team BFF was one of the best things that happened to EVE in a long, long time. However, as it were, it was too little, too late. While it had its merits, it did not address a ton of very long-standing problems. Be that because of lacking manpower, expertise (BFF is supposed to address all little things wrong in EVE -- that's a lot of variety in programming expertise needed!), or direction, I can't tell.

What I can tell is that we need more of it. Just like this Winter expansion will address a million little things, there need to be hotfixes for nuisances in gameplay constantly -- bug fixes, rebalances, whatever. As evidenced by the plans for this upcoming expansion, you can do it, CCP. So keep doing it. For the whole future of EVE, not just in times of crisis.

And players, don't go too hard on the devs. While "greed is good" may have been the motto for EVE's finance department (it's sort of their job), the only thing the devs (and maybe even Hilmar) did wrong is loving to see EVE grow too much.

tl;dr: CCP: More BFF stuff now and forever more in EVE, for great justice and a happy playerbase. Players: CCP screwed up, and are scrambling to fix things. Curb the rage, give them some time to act on their :words: and try to see it from their perspective sometime.

I don't care what mode they're in: I like it

Maybe they have learned their lesson. I hope so, because if they just do this for one expansion (this winter), and then start being retards again, they will experience the exact same issues.

Me too, but I don't think they can afford to at this point, and I think they FINALLY know it. Two years too late, millions of dollars in wasted resources, so much wasted time, so many lost customers, but I hope, I pray, that they finally realize their mistakes.

Why are you even playing? I have never seen anyone so negative about everything. It's strangely disturbing.

There are people who actually have a reason for long faces today and I bet even they are still trying to smile.... A little bit.

Lighten up and smile. Go on. Smile. Go on......There.... That's better....

See, you feel better already

Meh... it's the same with Dell.

Dell think their stuff is awesome. From Servers, and switches down to phones and cables. All of it is ace.

Meanwhile, many customers think Dell is crap, usually when it's not working.

People have different points of view. Most of the time, they are all correct in their view.

The OP has some valid points. The main one is let's see what CCP does with the winter expansion?


My only question is why does everyone always list the tl;dr: at the bottom of the post? You end up reading the entire post anyway before seeing it.

Another dev gets drunk and kicks the plug out of the wall?

Rouge and Apostle, I'm not saying I'm not cynical, or that cynicism is a bad thing. I'm just saying that pessimism in this case, at least from my perspective as a software engineer, is unnecessary. Also, blame is getting put in all the wrong places and for the wrong reasons.

Hmm... Is playing for almost 2 years enough to give me bittervet status? Maybe I need to stop the optimism.



You are absolutely right. I actually saw a thread with the tl;dr at the top earlier today, and it made me incredibly happy. I'll keep that in mind whenever I write any more tl;drs.

Damage control? IDK. PR campaign, absolutely. But, one must wonder how much longer Eve, or even CCP, is going to be around with Hilmar pulling a BP, 20% of CCP's workforce being cut and a project being shelved.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff that happens when a company is not so much trying to convince it's customers that the end is not nigh, but its investors/owners. Name one other company that fired 20% of its staff for customer satisfaction?

Personally, I think WiS has been a huge technical failure for CCP. They've hit some kind of technology wall with WiS development and have put WoD on the back burner. Considering the processing power required for one avatar in a small room, I've no idea how they're going to scale it up to hundreds of avatars in expansive & dynamic environments. It's plausible that the team developing WiS, being the same guys developing WoD, ran themselves into a deadend, pitched to CCP what they could do and ended up wasting lots of development time and expenses only to reach a conclusion that they couldn't do it. That kind of oversight is the kind of stuff that get you canned.......

I think CCP is in dire straights and we'll be lucky if Eve is here this time next year.