Taken For A Ride in New Eden
Frankly I am at a loss of what to post. I like to try to be upbeat while also delivering criticism but only if necessary. With the release of the latest CSM minutes I'm finding it hard to be upbeat and even harder to restrain from launching into a full on emo rage.
We've been misled for the last couple of years regarding resourcing being diverted to projects other than Eve and in the next 18 months we can't expect anything being really fixed because there are NO resources being applied to the current Eve client (read FW and other fixes et al) as we know it, instead they are diverted toward DUST514 and Incarna.
This may not bother you. In fact, it seems that the decision makers at CCP think this is the case. They are working on the premise that they are providing excellence which flies in the face of the evidence in this thread where an unprecedented and since unmatched level of support has been reached with not one Dev comment.
Various forum posts on the Eve-Online forums, over at Scrapheap Challenge and elsewhere have been discussing direct action. This ranges from station sit ins, Jita invasions, global thermonuclear war (awesome), mass quittings (please don't lol) and other such shenanigans. I myself have suggested a Day Of Darkness where all fansites and blogs wink out of existence for one day or simply display a message of support for the CSM. I still think that is a good idea...or maybe have a logo added to their site banners!
However as Mandrill has pointed out in his blog here there is more value to be achieved by getting behind the CSM and showing them your support. If CCP are listening to them (which is debateable) as they are the player elected reps, pressure may still be able to be brought to bear.
Where do you do this? You keep an eye on these forums:
Jita Park Speakers Corner
Assembly Hall
Or the Twitter hashtags #eveonline #tweetfleet
If nothing happens as a result of that then more direct, coordinated, legal, non-EULA breaking form of action remains a possibility.
Exciting times! The CSM have applied pressure to CCP. CCP have pushed back. Now it's time for both to reevaluate their positions and meet again.
Strap in, it might get a little bumpy.
EDIT: Another Great Summary
ANOTHER EDIT - QUITE IMPORTANT! This adds a little more perspective and as my regulars will know I always try to be fair. Perhaps it also highlights how truly awful the CCP Comms are or maybe how spin can be used for damage control. I'll just present the post, you decide!
YET ANOTHER EDIT: Take part in a United Blogosphere here:
http://keithneilson.co.uk/united-eve-blogosphere/
You must also realise that the published CSM minutes that have essentially sparked this all off went through a rigorous review process by CCP themselves. It's not as if the minutes should be a surprise to anyone.
CCP Chronotis in a post hidden away in the Test Feedback Forum:
However to digress on that CSM quote a little since I have been on the 'CCP council' as part of the team representing eve game design since the CSM was conceived at every summit besides the last one. Perhaps I can attempt to clarify and make things clearer with a 'view from the trenches' of eve development as we seem to be misquoted here or we just dropped the ball at conveying the correct message there (which is possible, mistakes happen!)...'I heard no fixes or improvements for 18 months rabble rabble 11one11one111!'
It is more correct view to say our 'major' project slots are all provisionally filled for at least the next three expansions (You should all hopefully be aware of Incarna for example which is our biggest ever feature in development. These naturally have big budgets and lots of advance planning and development which spans many releases) and that there is less room for the major CSM project requests such as role system overhauls to an ACL format/addition of security clearance levels ideas for eg (stuff we have talked about in the previous fanfest roundtables and with the CSM) which is a complex and major project with high technical risk alongside those.
However related to that area of game mechanics, we did very recently internally create the diplomat role (allows you to manage a corporations standings) following on from the recent standings management overhaul in Tyrannis which added many usability improvements to starbase/station management and the difficulty surrounding standings management as a sneak peak of smaller sets of improvements making their way down the development pipeline if not the complete corp role system overhaul in its entirety.
As mentioned in the minutes, a helluva lot of time is going into lag investigation and it is important to us that we try to alleviate this where we can. Every time we run a mass test, QA and software are trialling new fixes or deploying specific logging tools to investigate why modules get stuck deactivating for an example of one symptoms under investigation.
We have always spent ~20-30% of our development time on bugs and hardening. As history should show there is always a typically a slew of improvements and fixes alongside each major expansion which matter to many players if not necessarily yourself personally always.
That cadence has not changed at all and even got better given that we carried on working on Planetary Interaction as a major feature (stuff that spans multiple sprints and teams) for a second concurrent release and that is unprecedented in our history to iterate so soon after a first release on a major feature with almost the same level of development resources.
Remember to compare this with the minutes and use your own intellect to judge.
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| CSM_CCP_Meetings_23-25_06_2010.pdf | 466.59 KB |
