Nerd rage

Not mine. But the EGA stuff that's been hitting the news wires. There are all sorts of reactions going around. Both from inside and outside the EVE community. From the shock of people who don't play EVE at the virulence of the reaction to the (few) who are quitting EVE over it (can I haz your stuffz???).

I realize that a bunch of you are up in arms over the development plan and what's been going on. From a certain point of view it's justified. And it must be said that CCP to a certain degree has made their own bed over this one. However comparisons to SWG's NGE debacle are probably premature. There are a bunch of reasons for this.

1) This is not about ripping things away from players.

SWG's mistake was removing working content and mechanics without substituting equivalent content/mechanics. CCP has avoided this sweeping type of mistake. Their big problem is they have this vision of where the game should be and they have a whole bunch of content that are approaching completion and they are over focussed on that atm. If CCP suddenly removed a whole ship class or 5 - like say HACs - then that might cause something like the SWG's NGE.

2) There (still) is nothing else like EVE out there.

One of the other reasons that this has a good chance of blowing over is that EVE has no competition in it's domain. There are no other PvP/Sandbox/Economic/MMOs out there that even try to do anything remotely like EVE. On the fantasy side you've got Darkfall (not really familiar with it, but from what I've heard) and that's it... Heck it's production and economics game play is complex enough that spreadsheets are not optional to game play for those of us who get into it (how many pages is your main production spreadsheet up to? Mine is at 21 sheets). Welcome to the hardcore. There are no fluffy pink kitties here.

3) We are the hardcore, we hold CCP to a higher standard.

The reality is that we DO hold CCP to a higher standard than other developers. Sometimes they can be hard of hearing, and need to be reminded of it. The reason is that for all it's flaws we can see just how great EVE could be. When it's working well and "a plan comes together", there's absolutely nothing else out there like it. Nothing. This provides CCP with both an advantage and a dis-advantage. On one hand they won't be loosing too many players over this. I mean where would we go? Most other MMOs are bland and tasteless compared to EVE. It is like a technicolor show in the days of black and white. On the other hand you'll get incidents like the threadnaught on that voting page when we feel that CCP is making serious mistakes.

4) Part of the problem is historical.

Right up to Apocrypha there was constant improvement in the lag situation, while good working new content was brought to the table. Everyone agrees that Apocrypha was probably the greatest EVE expansion to date. The wheels came off the cart after that. Lag started to get worse. Even more problematic it got asymmetrical (i.e. attackers got worse lag than the defenders on any grid). It's been getting progressively worse in the two main expansions after Apocrypha. All of this just after CCP was boasting about "Excellence". That right there is the reason for most of the nerd rage. Don't go boasting about excellence when the situation is getting worse. Welcome to getting hoisted on your own petard.

5) The real rock and a hard place

The problem is that the features that CCP is working on and have promised to deliver are things they've been working on for the last 3/4 years. It's been going on so long that it's starting to resemble vaporware (I'm Canadian, as you can see by my unfailing politeness there). So regardless of the nerd rage going on, they ARE going to have to deliver some form of full body avatar soon. Their plan showed that. The problem is they still over allocated resources to the detriment of exiting code. There comes a point where you seriously need to work on your basic infrastructure. Because if it's shaky it does not matter how many new features you put out there, people are going to notice the cracks in the pavement.

Having a vocal player base is a disadvantage in that you occasionally get the rose glasses ripped off your face. The advantage is that you get those rose glasses ripped of your face. At least CCP now knows it needs to re-focus a bit. And although they can be a bit hard of hearing, at least they are not deaf (like the SWG developers were during the NGE thing).

Now I'm not CCP. However I would advise them to seriously consider forming a permanent "balancing" team (or two) who's job is to make sure that fixes and adjustments go out every update (not just every expansion). The backlog of stuff to address is big enough to justify permanent teams (side note: the teams are permanent - the personnel in them do not have to be). Also just because you plan to revise an entire area of the game does not mean that interim fixes on that area should not be done. With your development cycle on revising stuff running multi-year backlogs, it's worthwhile to get smaller fixes out there until the big ones can be done properly.

Another problem is with the Agile method they've been using. It's very good for making sure things are getting delivered. The problem is the "unfinished" feel it leaves behind if there is no follow up after the initial delivery. This is not necessarily a call to abandon Agile. It is a call to make sure there is follow up.