Ninetails o'Cat
League of Super Evil
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Posted - 2010.07.21 22:58:00 -
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I don't think there's much I can add to a discussion about an issue this contentious without repeating pointlessly what other people have said far more eloquently than me.
I think the important thing for CCP to do now, not just to calm everyone down and stop what all the evidence points to being a slow but steady haemorrhaging of the core player base, but to prove their own dedication to excellence and show that as a company they still have the same aims as they did when they set out to make EVE, is for them to say how all this feedback is affecting their process.
Is it adjusting the priorities of the teams, but leaving the distribution intact? This would include such things as pushing the rocket balance to the top of the pile of stuff that needs to be done, or recommending that someone have a look in factional warfare bugs. This is the very least that CCP could do to soothe the current state of affairs, and really wouldn't take them much effort or time.
Is it affecting how you're distributing the teams of devs? I am aware that this is very unlikely, but if CCP were a company that truly listened to their player's concerns, you would expect at least one team being siphoned off of some other project to just patch up the glaring holes in CCPs current only income source and (if what they say is true) core project, regardless of how (un)successful the other products are. I know that Scrum is all about keeping to the established timetable, but when faced with something approaching total disagreement from your customers, you would expect some reaction.
The third and, the more I think about it, most likely option is that CCP just ignores all our concerns and does nothing, despite us trying as hard as we can to convey how CCP appears to be approaching corporate suicide; doing the exact opposite of what your customers want is never a good idea. Whilst Dust and Incarna may get you more customers, it is just as likely to fail and leave you with just EVE as a successful game.
I know that my individual concerns are pretty unimportant to CCP at any level, but I think that when you have community members saying how they've let their subscriptions drop, including many that have in the past defended your actions and have proven their devotion to your game again and again, you might want to start paying attention because for every well known person's or someone else's publicly announced departure, there are five, ten or twenty people who just go in silence.
Also, have you considered how if your game just doesn't work, no matter what new features you have people are not going to stick with the game. You may join for the shiny, but it is the nitty-gritty, the bones, the actual substance of the game that make you stay. And whilst EVE has some of the most complex, in-depth and enthralling gameplay I've yet encountered, when everything you do has bugs and 'features' that make them broken, it ruins all of that.
I really, really, really hope that Dust and Incarna go well, and they are done to the high level of completion that CCP used to work to, but the more you look at it, the more they just seem hollow and empty baubles to amuse a consumer base that CCP doesn't have, and probably won't draw away from other options successfully.
EVE is a brilliant game, unmatched in vision and complexity by anything out there at the moment. But it will die a slow death if you don't solve all it's many issues, and the longer you go without attempting to solve them, the more the stench of death will fill the game, and that, more than anything else will drive away new players.
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