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[Verone]

And yes, I dont know how DUST is meant to be sustainable. EVE you can update, but how do you stop DUST from becoming outdated and outrun?

DLC and Digitial Distribution solve that problem completely. Updates and additional content are easily supplied.

Until the console generation leaps foward again, which I wager we'll start hearing about in a year or two, then what? Another game on the shelves entirely? Dust 514 Two?

I really want to be excited for this shit, I really do. I'd love to get some of my friends into New Eden one way or another and Dust 514 could be the perfect vehicle for that. Just seems like there a lot of hurdles it will have to cross in order to keep up with the console FPS market let alone the life expectancy of EVE Online itself.

And I only wish I were a bitter vet, I haven't been around that long yet.

9 times out of 10 consoles are backwards compatible. Even more so when there's no physical media and everything is digitally distributed onto a built in hard disk.

It wouldn't surprise me if CCP have noticed this with Sony, and their comparability reliability from PS3>PS2>PS1.

Sure, consoles move on, but I know probably over a hundred people who still drop some of their favourite PS1 games from the mid 90s into their PS3 to play them.

All CCP have to do is create a winner. Even if they don't, they're more than likely happy in the knowledge that the vast majority of Eve players own consoles and most 0.0 alliances will be setting up a DUST wing to deal with any Sov related stuff they need to.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

You know what else was "kind of new thing"? Credit Default Swaps.

Wow. Really? Seriously?

The vast majority of economists are trained in Reaganomics. In university. Not to get too political here, but suffice to say the same vast majority was hailing the strength of the world economy as late as autumn of 2007.

The games industry is a microcosm of such boom/bust/ignorance, but just as experimental. When you talk about CCP you are talking about every single other MMO developer out there. You say that CCP has little understanding of how their mechanics will play out when released. In reality you're talking about anyone in the industry. Game Design isn't even a widely respected Bachelor's degree yet. The games industry is in a state as or more experimental than the film industry in the very early 20th century.

A revenue metric is what every games company uses these days. Money is money. If anyone following the industry thought even as early a few years ago that MMOs would stay on one payment model, they were seriously missing the mark.

And since you have mixed up your terminology, let me fill you in on the lingo:

Technical Director directs the technical innovation aspects of software. They are software architects who decide how the code will be constructed and then refactored. If the codebase is already strong, as it is in the case of CCP using UDK for DUST514, having a technical director on board is entirely unnecessary. I suspect they are looking for someone to direct the structure of the DLCs.

A graphic designer has nothing to do with 3D modelling, except perhaps with primitives that need to be included. They are not responsible for modelling the visually accurate meshes included in a game, and typically work in functions of marketing.

[Bacchanalian]

You're entirely missing the point: CCP is a business. They don't care what one customer thinks. They might care about what a percentage of customers thinks, but certainly not one.

Actually, they care about neither.  They care about potential future customers--current ones are already paying them.  See also; CCP refusing to provide any sort of coverage whatsoever of the 5 man prequals for AT9 because they felt no stream was better than a stream that wasn't 1080p with in-studio reacharounds and GM interviews.

If they cared about what paying subscribers wanted, you'd have seen them allowing a stripped down stream of the matches with or without commentary so we could at least watch what was happening. 

Slightly off topic, but not entirely.  I do think CCP is a business--they just assume that their current customer base is pretty secure and spend a lot more time caring about new potential customers than those of us with 1, 2, 4 paid accounts.

EDIT:  Unfucking my quotes.

EDIT2:  Posted that before hearing that CCP allowed a ship into the tournament today with tech 2 rigs.  And I won't even get into the server crashing mid-match.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

I think your quotes are messed up there, Bacc. 

[Crucifire]

9 times out of 10 consoles are backwards compatible. Even more so when there's no physical media and everything is digitally distributed onto a built in hard disk.

It wouldn't surprise me if CCP have noticed this with Sony, and their comparability reliability from PS3>PS2>PS1.

Sure, consoles move on, but I know probably over a hundred people who still drop some of their favourite PS1 games from the mid 90s into their PS3 to play them.

All CCP have to do is create a winner. Even if they don't, they're more than likely happy in the knowledge that the vast majority of Eve players own consoles and most 0.0 alliances will be setting up a DUST wing to deal with any Sov related stuff they need to.

I suppose so. A pure digital distribution approach would certainly add a lot of room for the content to adapt and grow, especially when it comes to crossing the generation gap. Here's hoping they take that route.

And you're right about backwards compatibility to an extent; if I had a PS3 (I won't) I would have popped my copy of Xenogears in there and done a playthrough a long time ago. But backwards compatibility for online play? For the most part my online console experience has been limited to titles like Monster Hunter where whole new installations (being a fully priced retail product) is the norm, with the older versions immediately becoming outdated. From what I can tell current console FPS games do pretty similarly.

[Hurs Sokira]

I do think CCP is a business--they just assume that their current customer base is pretty secure and spend a lot more time caring about new potential customers than those of us with 1, 2, 4 paid accounts.

And that's exactly the problem. They gradually alienate old customers (or forcing them to downsize from 4 to 2 to 1 account), while not creating lasting relationships with new ones.

Sure, CQ will create lots of new customers curious to see what's it about. Same with Dust. But there is not enough meat on the new features to make them stick around. You can only create so many Incarna monocles or so many Dust guns until it becomes boring.

What matters is experiences due to player interactions. Very few games have it. Just dumping several bored teenagers into close quarters with SciFi guns not gonna cut it, not with CoD and Battlefield 3 coming out.

Look at CCP's track record. Factional Warfare was intended to attract new players. How did that work out? You talking about DLC for Dust, constant updates and all other exciting stuff.

How many updates has Factional Warfare received since it launched?

[Hurs Sokira]

What CCP should have done is create PC-based RTS game for planetside component, a TotalWar/C&C clone set in EVE universe. Combine PI resource strategic gameplay with unit-level real-time combat. Infinite replayability, clans, etc. Use DLC/microtransactions if you want to, but keep it out of EVE economy. Make Captain Quarters a common interface between the two. A pod pilot can dock in and have a quick 30 min battle vs AI or human opponent while waiting for the fleet op. That would have been groundbreaking.

Instead we have a shitty HALO clone and Monocles Online.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

Why is cordoning off the EVE economy from the Dust economy a good idea? Sure it means more balancing work to hook them into each other, but it makes for less interesting gameplay and player interaction.

Last I heard, CCP has metrics on average customer subscriber time and it was about 8 months. This is old information, but I don't believe it has changed much in the past couple years. I think they're well aware it needs to be longer.

[Hurs Sokira]

Why is cordoning off the EVE economy from the Dust economy a good idea?

Because exposing typical DUST player to market manipulation that routinely happens in EVE is such a great idea, CCP may just go for it! And just imagine all that ISK from botting and RMT pouring into DUST. What can possibly go wrong?!?

Last I heard, CCP has metrics on average customer subscriber time and it was about 8 months.

Was that before or after buddy system exploit? 

I think they're well aware it needs to be longer.

And everyone knows the best way to retain existing customers is not to fix existing issues, but redirect resources to other projects, while blatantly nickel and diming current playerbase for worthless cosmetic stuff...

[Aria Jenneth]

Seriously, let me get this straight... CCP are good people working with bad code? Where is that bad code appears from? CCP writes excellent, well-documented, reliable code, but this code then falls under influence of bad people and falls with the wrong crowd and goes bad?

Oh, now this is a good story.

As I understand it, the CCP of yesteryear, way back before 2003, was basically a garage band, lacking the experience and support of some other (Blizzard) developers. They had a lot of ideas, but their technical know-how was a little lacking. Much vision, enough computer-savvy to get the job done.

Done, but not done gracefully. And like it or not, that sometimes-awkward bit o' coding has formed the foundation on which everything we've seen in the game since has been built. A full stable of high-grade programmers is not a complete fix for a game whose very core was cobbled together by guys who only kinda-sorta knew what they were doing.

You can see the evidence of this in various places. The combination of an unreliable installer with a nifty "repair" utility that would be wholly unnecessary if the damned installer could be persuaded to do the job right the first time-- that's a good example. Intractable problem, ameliorative workaround.

You get hints of this from time to time in dev blogs and other, related places (I seem to recall Need for Speed dev blogs mentioning it in particular). The overall upshot is that the base coding on which all things in Eve depend is a lump of (functional!) arcane chaos, rendering the entire client a castle built, to a greater or lesser degree, on sand.

Maybe someday it'll be worth CCP's while to go and rebuild Eve's heart, but, unless they want to just redevelop EVERYTHING from the ground up, that's likely to be comparable to open-heart surgery: complicated, dicey, and undertaken only as a last resort.

What about LOLsecure forums? Or boot.ini fiasco? Was this "bad code" planted by original devs? Or was this the result of gross incompetence of current "good" people?

I'm an enormous fan of politics-- international, national, local, whatever. Best comedy in the universe. One of the easiest observations in the universe is that it's remarkably easy for intelligent, well-intentioned, well-informed people to make boneheaded mistakes.

The odd fiasco isn't CCP. It's people. CCP just has a good rate of having its fiascos end up 1) visible and 2) entertaining.

Yes, I know it probably wasn't all that much fun if you got your boot.ini overwritten, but then it's also probably not all that much fun to get your country invaded for reasons that turn out to be bogus. In either case, I'm sitting far enough away to be amused.

I'm less the sort to wear rose-colored glasses, Hurs, and closer to the grinning misanthrope. I expect people (in general) to screw up, and I'm rarely disappointed.

... Though I'm actually quite fond of people, so I'm not really misanthropic as such. I just find people fascinating to watch. Better than birds, any day.

I am writing this angry stuff because I still believe that original concept EVE can be saved from the scourge of the current (mis)management.

What reason, precisely, do you have for thinking that this isn't the original concept of Eve?

CCP, as far as I've ever heard, undertook Eve with the idea in mind of making one sci-fi setting to rule them all. That means more than an economic simulator with a spaceship game tacked on (as Eve has sometimes been described). It means that some incarnation of DUST, Ambulation/WIS/TitleOfTheDay, and PI were all coming at some point basically from the day CCP figured out that it was going to be operating in the black. We may even be able to literally expect some version of "sims in space." A day in the life of a random Caldari citizen struggling to scale the corporate ladder would be an interesting thing to see simulated.

Say what you like, CCP has vision. Their execution is a little suspect at times, but really whose isn't? Blizzard?

Maybe. Or maybe they're just better at concealing the occasional mess.

And as for you-- you think you can do better? You think you can put together a team that can do better? I invite you to try. Make something better than Eve, "Eve as it should have been," and I might just come play it.

Don't worry: I won't hold your foibles against you, very much, either.

[Kyoko Sakoda]

Because exposing typical DUST player to market manipulation that routinely happens in EVE is such a great idea, CCP may just go for it! And just imagine all that ISK from botting and RMT pouring into DUST. What can possibly go wrong?!?

Gold farming happens in most all MMOs of any success, and some developers don't even care and let it run wild. CCP certainly tries to do something about it, but the Internet is hard to control, you see. It does not mean something new for the sake of experimentation -- and furthering the still budding field of game design -- should not be tried. Cordoning off EVE's economy would be cordoning off an interesting feature of the game. Plus, last I heard the essential DUST gameplay items were mostly going to be microtransaction based (the way a customer pays instead of monthly), so there can't be market griefing of an essential weapons package, for example. What could potentially go wrong is the market for PI materials based on DUST combat.

Was that before or after buddy system exploit? 

Was not based on trial numbers at all.

And everyone knows the best way to retain existing customers is not to fix existing issues, but redirect resources to other projects, while blatantly nickel and diming current playerbase for worthless cosmetic stuff...

If you read up on what CCP had to say at Fanfest (you likely wouldn't and would be content to stay inside your own rhetorical shell) they have 138 people working on EVE, not including GMs and support staff such as Marketing and Community. There are teams working on small fixes and reiteration, but you would likely not care about that either. "Where's the meat, where's the change?," you say?

Well, you're going to have to suck it up and go watch the videos on YouTube, because I've run out of patience for forum whoring. EVE Keynote and CCP Presents on YouTube. Easy to follow.

[GoGo Yubari]

Maybe someday it'll be worth CCP's while to go and rebuild Eve's heart, but, unless they want to just redevelop EVERYTHING from the ground up, that's likely to be comparable to open-heart surgery: complicated, dicey, and undertaken only as a last resort.

But isn't that exactly what all this Carbon business is about? I'm pretty sure it is.

The discussions in this thread are getting a bit too convoluted with paranoia and vitriol to really get further into. Also, boot.ini to Iraq war and RMT to latest financial market crashes... oh kay. I think there's lots of interesting things to critically talk about, but the topics are getting wildly mixed up to create rhetorical weapons to swing with, so yeah.. I guess time will tell.

Incarna? My disappointment with what's happening with it has been discussed elsewhere, but we haven't seen much of it yet, so who knows? If that applies to Incarna which is just around the corner, it is exponentially the case with Dust.

But at the core I guess I'm a bitter vet too, so I as well dearly wish CCP would put their effort into iterating Eve and building on the core systems. Realistically, after Incarna, I'm pretty damn sure that's what they're going to do as well. I'd be very surprised to be proven wrong in that.

[Aria Jenneth]

Maybe someday it'll be worth CCP's while to go and rebuild Eve's heart, but, unless they want to just redevelop EVERYTHING from the ground up, that's likely to be comparable to open-heart surgery: complicated, dicey, and undertaken only as a last resort.

But isn't that exactly what all this Carbon business is about? I'm pretty sure it is.

Hm. Now that you mention it, I think that's true, though I don't think they're exactly finished with the process. They apparently haven't gotten enough of it replaced to get a nice, reliable installer set up.

Care to guess what my main problem with Eve has been?

[Casiella]

[mod]As a reminder to everyone: discussion of opinions regarding CCP, DUST, etc., are more than welcome here. However, please phrase things in a courteous, civil, respectful manner. You might think that the PS3 or microtransactions are the worst things since Greedo shooting first, but if you can't discuss them in a way that comports with the guidelines for this site, don't do it here. Further problems in this thread will lead to more definitive moderator action.[/mod]

[Seriphyn]

For the record...taken from EVE General Discussion....

Modern Warfare 2 sold 170k on PC, 5 million on PS3 and 9 million on 360.