Evei Shard wrote:As for the Rubicon expansion, I'm still left wondering if CCP is at a point that they *can't* do anything more with Eve. That they've hit some hard limits on code or technology, and so on, and that they are now in a mode of treading water, just trying to keep the playerbase subscribing until they get WoD out (and perhaps foolishly assuming that it will save them financially).
On the other hand, I imagine that it's possible that the players of Eve are the problem for CCP. They may have some fantastic Sov solutions out there that would transform null-sec completely and make it a very competitive and exciting place to be, but they can't ever implement them because the changes would require a reset of nullsec. This would **** off their primary playerbase, so we're stuck.
Same with POS' stuff. They probably have some great fixes that would be easy to code, but it would require a complete reset.
In the interest of communication, maybe CCP should approach the community about such things, if they exist. Maybe they'll find out that null-sec is actually open to going that far if it means a much better solution (it's a stretch, but I'm feeling optimistic today).
It's just a law of symmetry.
How many times have we read people demanding EvE to forever stick to an early 2000 game play, where you MUST be super-social, super committed, join super corps, basically live EvE (this usually happens in pro null seccers vs everyone else)? Else you are meant to have a miserable life, don't deserve any kind of reward, should possibly die slowly eaten alive by scarabs.
But many know this is not early 2000 any more and the world has changed and with it the playerbase has changed as well. Many MMOs had to adapt to the new players RL induced necessities or died.
In the same fashion, the glorious pre-2000 developers days have gone.
Even CCP employees often blame a lot the elder CCP developers and their "spaghetti, inestricable code" and even design decisions. But then,
THOSE were the old school devs with loads and loads of vision.
Yes they coded in a furious and confused way yet
THEY brought EvE to life not the SCRUM era employees.
Those early devs would also imagine those "Jesus expansions" and then deliver them - usually with tons of mistakes, incidents a la boot.ini but in the end the stuff was delivered.
Over time natural turnover, promotion etc. made those early devs slowly disappear or lose contact with the playerbase needs. They slowly got replaced by "new gen" devs and designers.
Technically these are more orderly, more adherent to good practices, more... a lot of stuff. Yet there's somehow less "Insanity and genius" about them, the epic taste has gone. Sure, having 2 years of bugfixes is nice and all, but is this all what we can aim to now? It's little creativity at work here. Worse, they are losing contact with the ever running evolution in the rest of the gaming world.
The gaming world don't care for academic achievements like proving a console game could attach into an existing MMO, it cared to get Wormholes. It cared to get playable WiS not a proof of concept engine.
Anyway CCP should try and get back some of those scarce visionary designers.
Imagine what a guy like Chris Taylor or Chris Roberts could do to EvE. People that could single handedly affect the gaming industry just because they thought farter and higher.
EvE should routinely beat itself. EvE should not just have "emergent gameplay" but used to be and should return being "emergent developing".
Example: EvE started with a revolutionary concept - and underlying technology - to allow a one shard universe.
That was emergent developing.
Example of the new course: TiDi. It's a nice concept but it's a "defensive, defeated guy approach" to tackle the issue it tries to fix. Had it been the "real" CCP they'd have concoted something absolutely incredible and bold, like i.e. introducing multi-threaded clusters, sub-grid dynamic players entities management and so on. All of this possibly created in a small room full of smoke, furiously coding 18h a day "a la old times" and possibly with who knows how many issues. But in the end it'd give a new generation of lag-less gameplay.
But as I said above, it's not golden times any more. Players would not accept having a less than 99.95% servers functionality even with such a feature being delivered. And devs would not accept the "18h a day in a small room full of smoke" old way of delivering stuff.
Therefore we are in a post-golden times gaming era, where players are not the ones we could have back in the day, nor developers.