Destination SkillQueue wrote:Thanks for the quick fixes and continuing to talk to us about this. It still needs a lot of work, but you're moving in the right direction and if you manage to keep up this pace of upgrades, I'm sure you'll get there sooner rather than later.
For those responsible for this mess:
Don't take the abuse you get too hard. People with perfect hindsight excluded, miscalculations happen to everyone. Instead of arguing who is to blame and bickering about what should have happened, the more important part is how you deal with the aftermath once you notice you're knee deep in crap. As a company you've reacted very well this time. Instead of pretending everything is fine, showing continuing contempt towards the playerbase and retreating to your shell, you've continued to engage in a dialogue, acknowladged the need to address the issues in a rapid manner and have gone on to do exactly that. Once the issues are fixed, the tempers will quickly cool down.
Keep up the good work.
I disagree. The devs should take the feedback as a kick in the nuts, collectively recoil in horror, and pray every night for the next few months that they aren't going to be told to not show up anymore. Why? Because if they don't, they'll never learn. It's not even a matter of hindsight. A disaster like this occurs because of a large succession of failures. They need sufficient motivation to figure out where **** went wrong, and what they can do to prevent it from going wrong in the future. Saying "Good recovery" doesn't provide that motivation.
There needs to be an entire report written up. What were the warning signs? Why were the signs ignored? Why was production rushed to such a point that an obviously broken system went live? Why is there some sort of honest belief that negative criticism is invalid because the players are too stupid to tell the difference between "Different" and "Total Garbage"? (Hint: When you point out actual flaws, odds are REALLY good it's not because it's 'different'. That's a freebie). Who did their job right? Who didn't do their job right?
Seriously. When you add in a feature that generates SEVERAL comment threads over 50 pages long of people complaining about how much your 'feature' sucks, it's time to act like you're the FAA investigating an airliner crash. CCP is too small and going in too many directions at once to afford every other patch being "incarna 2.0" because you rushed half-completed ill-conceived features from test to live. There comes a point when even the majority of apathetic players start cringing at "improvements" and start leaving for something else. If someone else released internet spaceships, incarna 3.0 will sink Eve.
We yell at you because we don't want ALL of you fired (only the really incompetent person that green-lighted moving unified inventory to live). We want you to learn from your mistakes. Learn that ignoring feedback because you think you know better isn't a way to make a consumer product. There's a difference making a product no one knew they wanted (think iPod) or making a product that everyone already told you they don't want. I know, I know. It's a subtle difference. Like the difference between a lighter and a nuclear explosion. Products that consumers didn't know they wanted meet with great success when introduced to a test group (Think: Test server). Where as your Unified Inventory was met with pretty much outright hostility. Or how about that last week or so of comments before Inferno went live where people were BEGGING you to not move the Unified Inventory to live? Seriously. HOW do you miss **** like that? That goes beyond incompetence, and into willful ignorance or possibly a direct attack against CCP. I'd look at whoever pushed it through with a great deal of suspicion. If I was in charge, I would fire them for malicious activity and probably hire someone to investigate their activities at the company for the last year or so to see if they were willfully stupid or outright malicious.
*edit*
Not too bad. Very few words got censored. I'm getting better :D