Nobody commenting the Hillmar's letter (
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2672) yet, or did I just missed the thread?
Anyway to me this sounds like the best news for Eve for a long while! The message sounds like he has gotten the message. At least I pretty much agree agree on his statements on Captain’s Quarters, Virtual Goods and Incarna.
Some of the most promising quates:
Quote:ow we need time to add the content that will bring more meaning to the gameplay—again, without disrupting the space combat simulator that many of you are, or at least were, very much in love with—and without delaying crucial improvements that this core experience desperately needs.
Quote:"We’ve been trying to expand the EVE universe in several directions at once, and I need to do a better job of pursuing that vision without diluting or marginalizing the things that are great—or could be great—about the game right now. Nullsec space needs to be fixed. Factional warfare needs to be fixed. The game needs new ships. We need to do a better job of nurturing our new players and making EVE the intriguing, boundless universe it has the potential to be."
Quote:We all know that much quoted phrase, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do,” that will make the difference here. From now on, CCP will focus on doing what we say and saying what we do. That is the path to restoring trust and moving forward.
I hope he is sincere!
I a firm beliver of “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do,” so lets see
NN
Dunno.
I have been incredibly annoyed the last months by a whole bunch of people exaggerating the problems beyond proportion, thereby making it difficult for me to talk about them at all, and in general dragging me into their camp with a rather annoying "with me or against me" attitude.
From my perspective, what happened in the last months was that a bunch of whiners who have been around as whiners since I started playing (EVE has been dying since then and they have quite a gazillion accounts since then) got some traction and dragged a whole lot of people with them, exaggerating and misplacing problems, derailing any sensible discussion, etc., and CCP has no other option now than to try and "fix" problems that don't even exist. (NB: If you think I just said that there are no problems, read again.)
Part of the problem is that the CSM is getting less and less useful. There have been a few big issues they were good at fixing, but the things they can deal with now are less colorful. Which means they need to make mountains out of molehills to justify their own existence. A nice catalyzing effect.
Having said all of the above (and I am incredibly annoyed that every fucking thread about EVE in the last months had a good chance of getting derailed into a stupid CCP bashing exercise), I am very happy to see that they noticed a few problems. E.g. trying to sell a pure infrastructure upgrade like Incarna as a big expansion does not work (it works for people like me who know what they mean with the whole Carbon stuff, but the general EVE player couldn't car less about it), so I hope their marketing group gets that fixed in the future.
I'm somewhat worried about the amount of topics they announced as working on. I suspect they're allocating one scrum team per topic, which is nice, but I also do hope that they will not push out these features no matter what just to placate people.
I want EVE to be a good game, and that requires time and thought.
Personally, I was surprised to see that letter. I don't follow e-o forums, so I have missed a lot of the recent whines. From what I play EVE, I like the game as well as I always have, and I see new people staring to play and old timers quit and some of them come back all the time (as much as I always have). I've seen some updates lately I liked and some I was meh about. Situation normal? Apparently not.
And like I said elsewhere, if they fix the DT in FW, I'll forgive them screwing up some of the other stuff.
(2011-10-06 18:40)Arkady Sadik Wrote: [ -> ]I have been incredibly annoyed the last months by a whole bunch of people exaggerating the problems beyond proportion, ....
(2011-10-06 18:40)Arkady Sadik Wrote: [ -> ]From my perspective, what happened in the last months was that a bunch of whiners who have been around as whiners since I started playing (EVE has been dying since then and they have quite a gazillion accounts since then) got some traction and dragged a whole lot of people with them, exaggerating and misplacing problems, derailing any sensible discussion, etc., and CCP has no other option now than to try and "fix" problems that don't even exist. (NB: If you think I just said that there are no problems, read again.)
I share Arkady's view. The CCP bashing has gone out of any portions to the side of fanatims preventing any sensible dialogue.
On the other hand maybe something like that was needed to get CCP to realize that they were trying to do too many things ending up launching half baked/half tested features (and leaving some of them unfixed). So the situation half a year ago was that the CCP was preventing the sensible dialogue.
Lets hope that now if CCP start being sensible as promised, the angry mob cools down and start being sensible too. If that happens then this drama has been worth it.
However if the mob now thinks that have upper hand and continues in trying to control CCP, then this might actually turn even worst.
NN, who hopes to see the interior of The Shackled Amarr somewhere in not too distant future.
It's a good letter. I might consider resubbing more seriously if they keep on the track that Hilmar's set in the letter. I'd still have to find the drive to play, but there might be less reasons to stay away / more reasons to jump in other than simply "omgshiny".
Hilmar Wrote:The game needs new ships.
No it doesn't. The existing ships need to be balanced. "New ships" is the same kind of wish as "new lands" (or worse, the ill-defined cry for "new content") is in other games: shallow and short-sighted.
I don't care about any of it. The only thing that's an issue for me personally (immersion-breakingly high NEX clothing prices), he didn't really address. All the other stuff, new content, play-balancing, fixing things - I don't care. Others do of course, and if the letter makes them happy or at least less cynical then that's a good thing, but I think EVE is basically 100% fine already for what I want to do with it. All that post makes clear to me is that most other people play the game for vastly different reasons to what I do, but then, that's always been clear to me right from the start.
Quote:E.g. trying to sell a pure infrastructure upgrade like Incarna as a big expansion does not work
This. And you can tell they tried to avoid this, by rolling out one CQ and a few NEX items early, but that actually just compounded the mistake, which they've obviously now realized. I wonder if this might have been a negative side effect of their use of Scrum -- if they let Scrum's directive of "ready for release at the end of each sprint" convince them to release these tiny pieces which may have been ready technically, but made no sense from a sales and marketing standpoint and were not a priority for the end users.
I've got some hopes as to what his letter might lead to... but we'll see. I wasn't expecting it, that's for sure.
Maybe they'll make more use of sisi to release the completed sprints to... a sprint/sisi/tweak+polish/sprint model or something (no i don't know scrum!
)... kills the "big bang" releases for marketing purposes but it might avoid having them fall flat.
I really hope more dev resource will be "left" working on FiS iteration and balancing than they have. They're still going to branch out into "new" features and tech, they have to to keep the game alive, but the lack of support of old "broken" (or just out dated) features is a real bugbear for me. Maybe we'll see a pickup on this with the new back end tech like the Carbon stuff as it replaces the poorly coded (but sufficient at the time) core code sections.
I do expect winter's release to have a whinestorm around it because xyz wasn't done... I don't see them turning arround loads and loads of things in the time left, but it might be a good start. We're even seeing this whinestorm at the moment after only a few days with eveo covered in "but what about xyz". Winter might be a kneejerk response to drop everything onto FiS to appease the whiners, but a balance between keeping FiS improvement rolling along along side new features and tech would be nice to see in the future.