CCP Zulu
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Posted - 2010.07.19 06:29:00 -
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Wow, thanks for all the feedback, this is amazing. It's great to see all this passion in the community.
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There's no way that I can reply to every single question or post but I want to clear up a few misunderstandings I've seen tossed around.
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Team sizes and composition
First off regarding teams and team sizes. In the scrum, the development model we use at CCP, teams of developers work on defined work increments. A team should be 7 people give or take two. The team has to be able to deliver a fully functioning increment, meaning that the team composition needs to be complimentary. For example a team of only programmers is not a good way to go in most cases and a team of only designers isn't either. A perfect team for EVE feature work is composed of two to three programmers, two designers and two testers.
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Incarna
Most of the Incarna teams however (especially the seven that are on loan to EVE) are extremely specialized in either graphics programming or art creation. They could, in other words, not contribute a whole lot to anything else than those specific fields.
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Lag
Regarding the fight on lag I also have a couple of comments. We currently have everyone skilled and qualified to work on identifying and fixing lag assigned to identifying and fixing lag. However that task is not as straightforward as you'd hope. Assigning more people to it wouldn't speed up the profiling and exploratory work that's been ongoing as that is something that simply requires data gathering and observation over time and doing small iterative tweaks to code behaviour.
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There are about fifteen people working on just that right now. Adding more simply would not return any benefit. Those fifteen are not all 100% allocated to this task as this task couldn't take up all their time, rather they have flexibility to work on that rather than their other assignments when the time is right. Please note that there are more people working on lag related tasks, such as the fleet fight in a can project that are not counted as a part of those fifteen.
It is our experience from now over a decade of doing this that you can't schedule brilliance. So many times the right solution to a difficult problem doesn't come when you're working on it, but when you're working on something else. When that happens it is important that you have a quick and smooth path to work in your idea and publish it. It is this environment CCP is very aware of and very committed to providing. We have some of the most brilliant people in the industry working on this, we're confident that you'll start seeing improvements to the current lag issues soon.
CSM meeting minutes
What has been pointed out is absolutely right. CCP did get the CSM meeting minutes for review before they were published. However they weren't circulated with the meeting attendees, only with the internal CSM management team. The breakdown there is entirely ours, and I never suggested this was the CSM's fault (although fault in this sense is the wrong term as they were simply noting down their perspective which of course is their job) in any way.
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I'll continue monitoring this thread and will try to clear more things up but I won't be able to answer specific posts.
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CCP Zulu
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