Player Features and Ideas Discussion

By setting up a crowd-sourced funding campaign on Kickstarter or a star-citizens style independent crowd-sourced funding to fund a specific new dev team to work on the old legacy code areas of Eve Online. This is to go alongside what dev teams are doing currently, not change any current dev teams work.

But why?
Whenever CCP look into what new or refreshed features can make it into a new expansion they have to take into account how many roadblocks they will come across based on the areas of the game that have remained fairly unchanged for anything up to 10 years. These areas of the game have been coded by a developer that has since left CCP and never documented what all the lines of code affect or do. It takes time to look though it, poke it pull it and see whats affected.

This work doesnt produce any kind of substancial results quickly that can be seen by players but it helps untangle the mess that means more critical areas of the game can be re-coded and any roadblocks in mechanics and feature development can be cleared, allowing more interesting and feature rich 'quality of life' changes for us the players.

Smoke and Mirrors
These roadblocks arent regularly reported, and sometimes features in initial development seem to stall and stop without any real explaination as to why. Typically its considered the feature cannot be completed or that it 'cant be done', where its more accurately the case that its hit roadblocks because it ties in critically to a block of the game that devs have been told cant touch cause they dont know what the results will be (may affect other areas of the game very negatively).

Features / Incentives of Supporting
Players can be given priority voting on what areas of the games old legacy code gets looked into first, depending on the level of support you can be given more votes to use and distribute as you see fit. Other ideas on incentives can be posted in this thread of course! what do you guys want?

Structured Goals
This is an area that can only be estimated, goals should be based on whole chunks of legacy code. Categorising them on level of complexity (linked to estimated dev time needed to recode) and initially should be structured on smaller sections gradually getting to the larger areas that require more dev time and therefore more money.

Why support via PLEX may not work
As much as im sure people would love to pay via PLEX (myself included) i think the fact the assets real world value is already tied into CCPs day to day financial flow means that it doesnt have enough separation to allow the funding enough freedom to grow.

How will this affect us as players?
Many features turned away from explansions and current issues with the game currently come from these areas. How many are really only something CCP knows, but it is a very real problem. Breaking down these barriers will mean so many features that many people have been calling for that have no actual issues in game balance could be implemented.

It also means that dev time on features could we be reduced meaning not only better new features sooner but features with more scope scale and functionality. This means our in game quality of life is better and more productive.


Thanks for reading!
feedback very much welcome, especially from CCP!

Id agree. Looking at Planetside 2 for example. A large part of the community wanted SOE to stop all of their content work and focus purely on optimizing performance and improve general game performance, their not far away from releasing it and PS2 will be looking alot stronger now and in the future because of it. Id be in favor of the same as the end result will yield in the ability to do a hell of alot more things with EvE than they currently can do.