Well, historically CCP has had issues with documenting stuff. Many of the issues with old code come from the fact that nobody documented it, so new developers must do a forensic examination and retroengineer it to figure what's going on and how to work with it. That is compounded by how most of the old code was written as stackless Python, which is a very flexible coding tool but also haves an habit of hiding everything within black boxes.CCP develeped EVE with too little people in too litle time and too little budget, and so they had to cut the effort. Documenting software takes away time from coding, so they went for fully coding and no documenting.

Fast forward 13 years. Development processes have changed, have evolved, but some things never were learned. Now CCP is using Agile development, which is a fast way to code but requires extensive control and documentation. So we must suppose that now with Agile develpment stuff gets documented internally, yet that's just a guess. Some Glassdoor reviews point that CCP's development still is chaotic and mismanaged to the point that sometimes a team will destroy the ongoing work of another team. That is related with other CCP issues, lack of middle management and internal promotion (essential for agile development) and cliqueism (detrimental for everything skill related).

Enter customers/players. They don't need to know the code, just how to use it. That requires that someone CCP gathered all information of all teams working on code, plus backtraced every functioning system (undocumented) and its evolution (when and if and how was it updated) to establish a "image" of the status of the game in a given date. This, while the game keeps evolving at a frantic pace of change-of-the-month. It would be difficult since old undocumented code is old and undocumented, but would be the only way in which CCP could serve well the users of their software by providing an authoritative and updated source of information.

Regretfully, EVElopedia likely was "that guy's idea", which was implemented "back then" and once "that guy" quit, nobody ever looked onto it. Probably because it was -huh- undocumented.

Players also are disincentivized to document stuff; certain mechanics can be used for profit and advantage, and sharing them publicly would remove the advantage.The incentives for documenting "everything you know" are small and probably nobody wants to share but the bare basics... and now they'll be certain that CCP won't go out explaining stuff like "how to set up an Alliance" (just to mention a real case I was involved with).

We can bet that the shiny-new-idea being implemented (flight academy or whatever) will cover just some of the basics, will never go any further with really old stuff and will languish over time since, hey, players already are doing a better job than CCP could bother itself to do...

Well, historically CCP has had issues with documenting stuff. Many of the issues with old code come from the fact that nobody documented it, so new developers must do a forensic examination and retroengineer it to figure what's going on and how to work with it. That is compounded by how most of the old code was written as stackless Python, which is a very flexible coding tool but also haves an habit of hiding everything within black boxes.CCP develeped EVE with too little people in too litle time and too little budget, and so they had to cut the effort. Documenting software takes away time from coding, so they went for fully coding and no documenting.

Fast forward 13 years. Development processes have changed, have evolved, but some things never were learned. Now CCP is using Agile development, which is a fast way to code but requires extensive control and documentation. So we must suppose that now with Agile develpment stuff gets documented internally, yet that's just a guess. Some Glassdoor reviews point that CCP's development still is chaotic and mismanaged to the point that sometimes a team will destroy the ongoing work of another team. That is related with other CCP issues, lack of middle management and internal promotion (essential for agile development) and cliqueism (detrimental for everything skill related).

Enter customers/players. They don't need to know the code, just how to use it. That requires that someone CCP gathered all information of all teams working on code, plus backtraced every functioning system (undocumented) and its evolution (when and if and how was it updated) to establish a "image" of the status of the game in a given date. This, while the game keeps evolving at a frantic pace of change-of-the-month. It would be difficult since old undocumented code is old and undocumented, but would be the only way in which CCP could serve well the users of their software by providing an authoritative and updated source of information.

Regretfully, EVElopedia likely was "that guy's idea", which was implemented "back then" and once "that guy" quit, nobody ever looked onto it. Probably because it was -huh- undocumented.

Players also are disincentivized to document stuff; certain mechanics can be used for profit and advantage, and sharing them publicly would remove the advantage.The incentives for documenting "everything you know" are small and probably nobody wants to share but the bare basics... and now they'll be certain that CCP won't go out explaining stuff like "how to set up an Alliance" (just to mention a real case I was involved with).

We can bet that the shiny-new-idea being implemented (flight academy or whatever) will cover just some of the basics, will never go any further with really old stuff and will languish over time since, hey, players already are doing a better job than CCP could bother itself to do...