Destination SkillQueue
Are We There Yet
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Posted - 2011.08.16 06:39:00 -
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I have some issues with your current plan.
The biggest issue I have is the total lack of deployment scheduling. Now I don't mean delivery dates or anything of that nature. What I mean is at what order and place should the changes be implemented. My fear is that you'll do the easy part of ruining altering and removing content and gameplay immediately, give promises of delivering the replacing systems soon and 3 years from that there will still be threadnaughts asking when is the promised content going to come. This is a major weakness in your feature delivery system and your plan needs to acknowladge this weakness.
What I suggest is that you bundle the features in groups that need to be ready for the new system to function properly and adopt a principle that the new or replacing systems have to be ready for deployment before you remove or change the existing systems in anticipation. If the new systems needs a cluster of core features to function properly then all of them should be ready before you make the change. Point being don't fudge up the game or remove content until you have the replacemement ready to deploy. And I mean ready to deploy, not "it's a priority" or "we will look at it soon", since you know you can't often keep such promises. It's understandable, but it's a bad thing and you can mitigate it's negative affects by taking it into account in your planning.
This sort of leads to the issue of your lack of vision for the entirety of EVE. It doesn't have to be as detailed, but you need some basic concepts made, so you know how they will fit in your grand vision for EVE. Everything is interconnected in EVE, so only having a plan for one part of it creates a high propability for failure or ruining the gameplay experience for other areas. Do it atleast to those areas that you are intentionally gimping, because you want to boost the 0.0 equivalent and couln't do it without taking things away from other players.
This leads to the last small issue of your plan to totally remove ice. Removing content from players entirely is a horrible thing in general. Have no mistaken ideas about that, you are removing content from players even if it stays in the game. The only content that exist for a gamer is the one he has access to where he plays. He may still have good reasons to stay in the area you removed content from, so for him you've just taken away content from him in your expansion. A more sensible and less painful way to achieve the same thing might have been to limit the supply of easy ice to something that can only meet a fraction of the demand. This way you leave the content for the players willing to compete over it without seriously affecting your plans for the ice market in general.
Anyway good luck in getting it all done. I have my doubts that you can do it all, but most of it seems good and certainly an improvement over what we have now.
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