CCP Hellmar
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Posted - 2010.07.19 14:57:00 -
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Wonderful EVE community,
I realize there are many good points raised in this thread which I could comment on but I wanted to help a bit by putting some clarifications and perspective out there quickly.
Feedback like we see here is indeed read by everyone that has anything to do with high level priorities at CCP and it does affect prioritization, it always has. Nowadays it takes longer for us to react, as the code base of EVE has grown and we have a larger team of specialists that work on it.
In prior times we had a smaller team of generalists to work on EVE and thus it was easier to both react quickly and for individuals to speak to a broader set of fields. The problems we are tackling now require more specialized knowledge, as they are deeper and more complex. Our solution to address the downsides of that is "enterprise scrum" which allows gelled teams of specialists to have the agility and domain breath as a generalist have.
We are still in the process of gelling our scrum teams and while that is occurring then people are timid when it comes to replying directly to the EVE community. It doesn't help that the EVE community is full of "tough customers" which I personally have always loved and appropriated, nothing worse than apathy which is certainly not our issue, but as new people come to the forefront then they need time to adjust to the ardent feedback that you tend to give.
I have often noticed people come out and speak to their responsibilities, feel the "hammer coming down" and pull back and be less willing to comment. It takes a lot of "old timers relating to their experiences" for people to open up again.
Regarding LAG
One poster cautioned CCP Zulu about having "same people who introduced the problem" working on addressing the current lag we are experiencing with large fleet fights.
Many of the fundamentals that need to be improved now were laid down by a handful of people a decade ago during my term as CTO 2000 û 2005 (I am currently CEO of CCP as of 2004).
Now we have a team of technologists, software architects, engineers, operation specialists working on the problem. These good people possess knowledge and ability way beyond what I ever had during those initial years of EVE development. It is not to say that the core technology of EVE Online is bad in anyway; however, the world and CCP have learned so much since that we have a much better chance of doing this right a decade later.
So we are indeed getting a very fresh perspective on the problem. It however takes time to catch up to all that has been done prior. Addressing the scalability challenges of a single shard MMO is probably one of the more complicated areas of parallel architecture design. There are some aspects (e.g. session coherency, lock congestion, module stickies) which I hope the team will be able to release in the coming months but these kind of fundamental changes need to be extensively tested before we enable them on Tranquility.
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