Feldercarb wrote:Bagehi wrote:Feldercarb wrote:Bob Bedala wrote:I've just realised something.
On large scale software projects, you have engineers dedicated to feature releases & sections of the codebase. But those features are specced by product owners who are experts in their fields, in this case game designers.
Do CCP really have engineers in effect doing game design with seemingly little feedback from game designers?
The latter are the people who should be in communication with the playerbase, not engineers -- unless it's digging into the details of a bug. Seems weird-as, to me, but explains a heck of a lot.
I have to agree here. Its like this team has to find something to do to keep a job instead of being assigned something to do by a game designer. Does CCP have game designers anymore? I am really beginning to wonder. I can testify first hand at the frustration of CCP breaking content. I am constantly getting more reasons to leave rather than more reasons to come back. I have been back approx 2 months with the notion that CCP finally listened to their players and were making the changes players have been asking for. To stop working on useless things and address the things players have been pointing out and to not waver from that goal. This is a waver from that goal.
I had relearned all the stuff I had missed, I had finally settled into a role and learned all the new changes and and mods and started making a plan and a goal and working toward that goal. Now I am faced with a nerf that challenges my entire goal and makes me consider just leaving. I chose rattler pilot, wrong time to come back I guess. The new ancillary mod made rattler viable again, now this nerf sucks all the fun out of game play again. Suck me in with great new changes and a listening ear to player concerns, and then chase them away again with needless changes and failure to deliver on the promises used to lure players back.
Soundwave is a game designer and he's been championing making PVE more like PVP. So, this looks like a step in the direction of what a game designer, the lead game designer, has stated as a goal for the game.
...and where were these stated goals in the release notes for Inferno? Where did it say we are going to release new mining changes, mods, fixes, and
DRONE AI? This is deviating from the set goals posted in this release and creating new bugs and unforeseen consequences in HighSec PVE, null sec ganking, DED sites, Eve economy, and a direct impact on player count, and eve itself. Where are any of these changes helpful? I don't see a game designers hands on this at all, and much has been left unconsidered in the impact this seemingly small change is really producing. This idea should be completely scrapped and is taking way too much dev time away from serious issues. Concord is attacking players? I mean come on this is pathetic. Creating bugs out of thin air for no reason. I don't see Soundwave's signature on this either.
These changes are not for Inferno, they are for our winter expansion which has not been named publicly. Where did we say we are going from new mining changes, mods, fixes, and drones? Here right now.
Everything we do has the chance to create bugs, even fixing bugs has a chance to create bugs.
Where are these changes helpful? With changing up our PvE gameplay and moving it in a direction where we can continue to improve our PvE gameplay. The current AI that all the NPC use is not something we can really change. If we want to improve our PvE experience the first step is switching it to this newer AI so that we can make changes.
Not sure why you think no game designers touched this. I am a content designer, this is what we do. While our title is content designer we are game designers that just focus on content instead of gameplay features.
I am sorry you consider the CONCORD issue being pathetic, but we actually already had a fix ready before you saw this dev blog. It just happened to miss the deployment to Duality. This is exactly why we need to do this though. As I said before we can start making more changes to our PvE content we need to have the AI upgraded and deal with these problems. This must happen first. Along with the future better it leaves us with less code to maintain as we no longer need to maintain the old AI code. All of this is a good thing.
Again, everything we do has a chance to generate bugs. This all does have a reason and I hope this post helps bring some of that out. :)
Also, Soundwave most certainly did sign off on this as he does for all the design stuff.