EVE General Discussion

It's very simple. This is exactly what's going to happen to my 3 x 100+ mil SPs characters very soon. I am totally pissed with the way EVE is mismanaged.

1. Change management (incompetence)
2. Reset priorities (focus on EVE only, not other games)
3. Deliver real expansions instead of useless re-balances (this pisses me off the most)
4. Scrap the CSM, stop listening to biased EVE communities which do not represent me

Next we'll see Dust crash and maybe the whole EVE shut down too.

Do not post "give me your stuff". Reply with some intelligent thought. But I wonder if it is even possible given the IQ of some of the people here... plus propaganda.

OK:

Well CCP have done at least, you know, some game development. Have a look at the combined patch notes of the last 2 years. There are a metric ****-ton of development changes in that.

The issue is that almost all of those changes were of the "Now you can do what you always did, but better and / or without that annoying UI obstacle" type. Polish, if you like. And lord knows, EVE was in dire need of a program of polishing back in 2011. Only a very small fraction of the changelog details new things to do or different ways to do them. Probably the major exception was the ship rebalancing project, which is about the one unqualified game design success that EVE has had since 2009. That effectively added dozens of new ship to the "worth even undocking" list, and more importantly it added lots of them at the T1 frigate/destroyer/cruiser level so that low SP players got access to viable PvP ships.

So to a great extent, we're still playing the same EVE that we were playing the day Incarna went live. It's just that the hundreds of things that plain didn't ******* work that day now nearly all do.

As I said, you'd be horrified (not shocked, just horrified) at some of the developmental gaps that CCP still face even now: as of January they didn't have a tool for building PvE sites - that was totally a "Wait, you've been developing this game for over ten years and you're only just now building a tool that lets you make those instead of directly hand-coding them one by one?" moment. The debt was, in short, even bigger than we people thought.

So in their adorable Icelandic way, CCP are actually addressing the issues of the past. It's just there's still a lot of **** to shovel before they can start growing awesome new roses for us. An analogy would be to suppose that, post summer of rage, after slamming Crucible out the door to stop the bleeding, CCP decided to create EVE II. We'd expect such a project to take about 3 years or so, and not much development on EVE I meanwhile.

The major positive of all this is that CCP are proceeding in exactly the way that would make logical sense if they do indeed to maintain EVE for another decade. If they were planning a pump and dump scheme, then they'd just bang out some quick and dirty populist additions and screw the technical debt or the game design problems down the road. In short, they'd return to the old policy of 'awesome'.

But the sad fact is that after 3 years of this 'austerity', the players like you - and me, come to that - really really want a dose of "awesome", and soon.

And CCP know that. They really do. That was the subtext of this year's EVE keynote, and it's backed up by the conversations I've had with the devs. We (the CSM) sat down with CCP Seagull a year ago: she showed us the plan, talked us through it and told us that this plan was designed to use resources she actually had, not ones she hoped to get in the future. And in fact, CCP have done everything that was scheduled in for that plan and actually a few more things as well.

But when I saw that plan, even though I agreed that it was good, sensible and rational, my heart sank because I knew that it meant that the stuff that really needed fixing wouldn't be fixed for at least 18 months (now about 8-9 months?)

CCP are basically locked in to their current course right now: they can't realistically do anything except finish off the 'austerity' program, and this close to completing it, I don't even want them to. I'm reasonably confident that they'll continue to deliver on Seagulls development plan, I'm hearing from people who have no obvious reason to lie to me that the refactoring that has completed so far is already starting to pay dividends, and in fact CCP are literally doing everything I prayed they would back in 2011. (Remember back then? When we were literally begging CCP to fix the game before adding any new stuff in?) I am reasonably confident that sov is going to get reworked, power projection is going to get rebalanced, that the Industry changes will cause good and useful changes and a year from now a whole lot of things will be a whole lot better.

I just don't feel much urge to play EVE meanwhile.