Peter VonThal
Raygun Technologies
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Posted - 2008.10.15 01:09:00 -
[4]
 Originally by: CCP t0rfifrans
The bug that became a feature
On Monday, we released news that we are disabling äGhost Trainingô, the ability to train characters on inactive accounts. This resulted in strong reactions from the community as many people were routinely making use of it. We explained the matter in more detail and pointed out that this had been a bug in the original game code. Those of us who were involved in the process of making the decision and communicating it to the community did not realize this bug had been so accepted as a feature that it was listed as such in our own documentation on our own website.
How can we not know whatæs in our own documentation? Well, to be frank, it was a case of insufficient communication on our part between various teams û a regrettable mistake and hard lesson to learn at the expense of the trust youæve placed in us. Thereæs no way to spin it and we wonæt add insult to injury by trying to do so. It was a mistake on our part and for that we sincerely and humbly apologize.
Many would hope that in light of this we will decide not to cancel ghost training and keep it active as an option but weære cannot to do that. EVE is already one-of-a-kind in allowing players to progress their characters through offline skill training. We stand by our policy that if you want your character to progress in EVE, you should pay the subscription fee. The fact that so many people have been able to do so for several years was our own oversight. We know this change, and our misstep in telling you about it, has created some discontent and we hope that over time we can prove our committment to make EVE better than ever for you will be evident as you enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Torfi
Torfi, thank you for at least giving another official CCP post. Considering you are old-school CCP, if you're going to continue to say this was a bug, I'm more willing to believe you than some others and I will accept the decision. However, maybe think twice about how changes like this will be announced in the future. The announcement should have come from a senior CCP staff member (like yourself) with the "real reason dev blog" being the first thing we hear about it, not a short, bad news item and wrangler saying "a dev blog is coming soon " to explain why this is happening, like it's a side effect of a nice new feature. 48 hours is too short for notice about account changes like this. You could have told us in a devblog that you've found troubling trend in ghost training and you have decided to fix this "bug" on Tuesday Oct 28th's (or whatever, even next week) downtime and that this is a final decision. ...I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
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