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[Ulphus]

I don't always agree with Ulphus, but when I do, he's spot-on!

Tautalogically, really. 

And wait, what have we disagreed about?

Also, Incarna is almost meaningless to me until we have social spaces.

Yep, completely agree. I could see them potentially allowing "guests" into staterooms as a "one or two people in a space" test, rather than go straight for the crowded station (assuming anyone actually leaves their quarters) but TBH, I don't really expect it.

[Bataav]

Yep, completely agree. I could see them potentially allowing "guests" into staterooms as a "one or two people in a space" test, rather than go straight for the crowded station (assuming anyone actually leaves their quarters) but TBH, I don't really expect it.

A nice (and possibly obvioius) option for the small groups of capsuleers together is the corporation office - if you're docked at the HQ of your corporation you have the option of joining others in a basic meeting room style environment.

But you're right. We are probably going to experience a mass rush from solitary confinement to the crowds of a busy station in one step.

[Ellis Croix]

From CCPs point of view, I suspect they'd rather get out something than push it back, since this is essentially a giant beta-test of their walking in stations stuff. The sooner it gets into testing, the sooner they can get to work on fixing the bugs. There will be bugs, and they will be found and some of them even fixed.

I would actually correct this by saying that it is not a beta test for Walking in Stations; it's a beta test for Mercenary Quarters that will be part of DUST 514.

From the DUST 514 devblog here:

You turn on your PS3, and launch DUST 514. You choose the character you created before, and log onto our servers. You are standing in your Mercenary Quarters. This is your private space and where you spend downtime between battles. From here you can access chat channels, the marketplace, fitting, the starmap, leaderboards, and much more. An icon is flashing. You have new mail in your inbox; a call to arms.

Sound familiar?

On the flip side, let's look at this from the viewpoint of a corporate structure.  Social areas and immersion are of little concern when balanced with reduced R&D costs for future projects.  Despite what some people may believe, CCP is a for profit company.  With the amount of expansion that they've made in the past two or three years, they need to justify their development time.  This is where (at least from an "business degree" perspective) microtransactions and dropping features that cannot feasibly be completed in the launch window they have allotted begins to make sense.  Putting the development focus on the DUST 514/EVE connection can be seen as a positive.

In the long run, this coincides with the expectations of most players.  Minor fixes get to be added to the development cycle.  The focus is on future features and making existing "high priority" features more attractive.  This also means that there is less need to cater to the social players, and more to the "power gamers".

Of course, you don't need the Scrum/Agile model to do this.  Cryptic Studios is one who uses the structure quite effectively (they're developing Neverwinter with "tech" that they first built for Star Trek Online).  They don't do Scrum (to my knowledge), but they do microtransactions.

They also do it all with a really small development team though.

There's a hidden reason for it all; microtransactions are very, very attractive for a certain set of investors.  Think of where the development studio for DUST 514 is.  Think of where the largest economy in the world will be within the next few years.

 

The big picture?  CCP is going for... yes, they've already said it... global domination.  They're making the chess moves, and they've flat out given the broad strokes of their plans.

Now, from an RP perspective...

Yeah, I'll get back to you in a year.  I'd rather wait out the storm and see how things turn out on the other side.    I'm quite interested in playing DUST 514.

If you really want my perspective... I don't see why there couldn't be a "generic" quarters for capsuleers.  Add some themed furniture, alternate floor layouts... I tell ya, CCP is missing the boat here. 

P.S.: Sorry for completely off-topic, but I just felt that it was needed for perspective. 

[Alain Colcer]

mhh i have to say a few things here from the technical perspective that could be interpreted as taking the side of CCP on this matter, but trust me its quite the opposite:

1) In order to go ahead with Incarna, CCP had to refactor a number of things in their engine, specifically most of the framework for the UI (Carbon technology) this work brought many issues but has potential to open many options in the future, we are experiencing that now with incursion 1.6.1 (sadly not with the best results). This is probably most of what frustrates people lately, cause its an invisble feature or maybe it is visible but not in any spectacular way.

2) Deploying the basic tools to render, animate and move a full "human" character is a big thing, specially if the visual look of said character is completely defined by a complex number of variables pre-selected by the Player. I've visited SISI several times these last few days and the animation looks incredible natural, even for fatty chars, women or men.....i don't remember seeing such "natural flow" of the body on other games......

3) It's one thing to have a single character being represented in a fairly consitent way, its quite different to portray 50 in single location and make them interact at the same quality level. Most importantly any optimization process needs to start with some basic metrics once its gone live (measurement after deployment), so baby steps are a good path to take here. Not dissapointed they haven't gone beyond the personal room area, but a bit sad they didn't at least created 4 distinct locations according to racial station type.....

In the end from a technological point of view, they are taking reasonable choices, however  from the marketing, goals and customer expectations perspective they are falling short. There should be at least some new feature that are exclusive to CQ's for the player to enjoy and i can't seem to find any (unless of course you count the new wardrobe options using Aurum)

To me, this is just a "foundations" release to future expansions, it's free and i don't plan to change my attire just yet so no big issue.....the potential issue however is whats gonna happen from June to December .....not sure why.....but i get this eerie feeling it won't be anything good.

[Ciarente]

Cia wonders if this skirt makes her bum look fat

Finally a use for the default 'slightly worried' Intaki female expression!

[Andreus Ixiris]

They are pushing it back. The same way they pushed back Incursion. Go ahead and swap the nameplate, release the rest of the content when it's done. That's their development model now. *shrug*

It's bullshit.

[Morwen Lagann]

Here are some pictures I've taken from the last couple weeks. (Posted as links to save bandwidth for people, also because of large resolution.)

From inside the CQ:
CCP did a pretty good job with the mirror in the CQ - note that instead of taking the cheap way out and just rendering another instance of Morwen, they actually render a mirror image of her (note that her tattoo is rendered on the correct side of her face). Apparently we can also shop for the latest line of, uh, toys, from the Crystal Boulevard, right from our couch. Unfortunately, we're kinda stuck in our CQs - it seems that CONCORD doesn't think the air in the station concourse is quite up to snuff.

The Hangar Balcony:
The first thing that really becomes noticeable is that we finally have a proper sense of scale for our larger ships. The turret models' bases look a little funny on the Bhaal/Deemer/Geddon hulls, though, both due to their size and the shape of the hull around where the hardpoints are. Needs more dramatic pose though. The rotating hologram on the console is a cute touch (much like the one in the CQ itself), and the undock sign is easy to spot, while not overly distracting.

The Noble Exchange:
Honestly, some of the stuff is decent - I like this particular combination of jacket, pants and heels for example. The blue one-piece suit-dress is nice, but I'd personally prefer a version with a longer skirt and a less... obtrusive collar. The skirts seem okay, though there's very little in the way of matching tops to go with them at the moment that actually look decent, with the sole exception of the "military" blouses - which utterly reek of "hey look, you've got tits, let's make them look two cup sizes larger than they actually are" which makes me facedesk hard.

I don't have any male characters, and :effort: to make a test one, so I haven't looked at the male stuff yet.

[Senn Typhos]

Cia wonders if this skirt makes her bum look fat

Finally a use for the default 'slightly worried' Intaki female expression!

In the good way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADpKVgSItX0

[Andreus Ixiris]

The air contamination message made me chuckle.