What We're Dealing With Here...

…Is a Failure to Communicate.

You may have noticed that the Dev Blog Breakdown has been missing from these pages for the last couple of weeks, this is due to busyness with other things and the release of the CSM Summit minutes was foremost amongst these. Yesterday, however, we got a Dev Blog from the new Senior Producer at CCP, CCP Zulu. He was the guy interviewed by CrunchGear earlier in the week which prompted this post.

Read on for my take on this…

At first glance this Dev Blog looks like CCP trying to communicate better hopw their resources are being used over the next 18 months, the 18 months where we have been told that we will not be getting the polish and fixes to the core of EVE that was asked for by the players through the CSM. The threadnaught has been growing ever since, and its full of well reasoned and intelligent posts from the playerbase, and a noticable lack of trolling. Thats how seriously the players of EVE are taking it.

CCP Zulu himself is notably absent from the thread, with CCP Explorer taking up the slack and answering players concerns as best they can, its somehow not good enough though. Lets look a the Dev Blog first:

We find out first that CCP T0rfifrans has moved on from being Senior producer, where he was responsible for the best of EVE’s recent expansions; Apocrypha, and was behind alot of the initial ground work for previous unreleased iterations of Incarna (Ambulation and WiS). T-rfifrans has moved up to Creative Director becoming, I would assume, another exec responsible for the overall vision and direction that EVE is heading in. CCP Zulu (formerly Zulupark) has stepped in to his shoes and I would say he’s got pretty big shoes to fill.

He says in the first paragraph that we’ll be hearing alot more from him in the future, and then goes on to say that the purpose of this Dev Blog is it clarify a few things in the minutes which he says have generated “…rumours and half-facts that seem to have taken on a life of their own.” This is picked up on in the forums by various players and members of the CSM and refuted quite soundly. Though he never states explicitly what these rumour and half-facts are, communications error number 1, and it leads many to believe that even though he states that he has read the many discussions springing from the release of the minutes, he has not in fact done so.

I find it hard to believe as well really as I’ve been reading and writing about the minutes and the backlash being felt by CCP over them since they were released almost constantly and I’m not caught up yet. Zulu is no doubt a busy man and I doubt he has the time I have to pore over forum posts and blogs, unemployed as I am. This is communications error number 2; stating you have done something when it is obvious that you have neither had the time to do it, nor providing evidence that you have.

The blog then goes on to detail the various projects that are being worked on at CCP (those related to EVE at least, no mention is made of WoD but then why would there be?) and the numbers break down as follows:

Incanra
- 9 Teams, approx 70 developers
- 7 on loan from other projects
  Speculation is that they are from WoD as the engine is rumoured to be the same, I don’t think they’ll be from Dust as that licenses the Unreal engine and is being worked on in Shanghai and Newcastle.
Dust/EVE Link
- 1 Team, approx 7 developers
- This includes/is the iteration team promised for PI in the minutes, which is understandable as PI will be the link between the two titles.
In Space Features
- 3 teams, approx 22 developers
- The 3 teams are listed as a mission design team, a feature team and an art/effects team. The ‘unannounced feature’ from the winter expansion discussion at the summit is hinted at and it is stated the the features team is working on this, the art/effects team is apparently working on leveraging the ‘new’ (released November 2007, 2.5 years ago) Trinity 2.0 engine to improve the way textures and models are handled (see the recent Scorpion revamp). What is not made clear is whether the missions team is working on, are they collaborating with the features team on the new PvE content or are they doing something else related to missions.
EVE Gate
- 1 team of 10 web designers and developers
- This team is not realted to any in game issues and does not have the skills necessary to work on gameplay. Its a pure web design/development team.
The Others
- 4 Teams, approx 15 developers
- These are the ‘automation team’ working on the thin clients/bots which will be used to test and eventually resolve fleet fight lag. I like how Zulu describes it as “Fleet Fight in a Can”. There is also a team working on tools for the Customer Service department (GMs) and the metrics associated with that along with a core infrastructure team which deals with patch deployment mechanisms among other things. The last of these 4 teams is one dedicated to performance monitoring and improvements (more on that later)
- It should be noted that none of these teams look to be associated with actual game content and seem to be very much behind the scenes working on the actual software and hardware the keeps EVE ticking over.

So by my calculations that’s 114 developers working directly on EVE related stuff (discounting the EVE Gate team) if you discount the behind the scenes developers and computer scienctists, network/software engineers and others that seem to make up ‘The Others’ that leaves 99 developers working directly on in-game features 70% of these are working on Incarna.

Out of 500+ employees (this includes everyone, including those that sweep the floors and make the tea) about a quarter of those are working directly on EVE development (including EVE gate, the Cowboy team, and the behind the scenes boys). The mistaken perception in the treadnought that goes with this Dev Blog is that those who are working on Incarna are not working on EVE but are working on a different game. This is a misconception, Incarna will be part of EVE, its just not the part of EVE that the apparently overwhelming majority of EVE players want worked on.

And CCP are still hiring. They’re looking for more people to work on EVE (and other projects), more people equals more resources and more man-hours spent working on their flagship product.

The Dev Blog then talks a little about prioritization, or claims to at least. Zulu starts out with an attempt to address the concerns voiced by many that until 2012 there will be no bug-fixes or iteration , in favour of developing new features like Incarna and the as yet unannounced new PvE content. He claims that the winter 2011 expansion will “…focus more than ever before on iterating and polishing up all the features that EVE has expanded to in the then eight years.” This completely contradicts the statement in the ‘Commit to Excellence’ meeting minutes from the summit: “CCP stated that once Incarna and Planetary Interaction/Dust 514 are fully implemented, focus will
probably shift far more towards improvement of existing features. ”

So which is it? Is CCP going to focus on polishing and iteration of existing features or not? This is either an attempt at damage control by CCP or there has been a failure to communicate within CCP itself. As things stand this issue, which is the one that has drawn the most player ire from my perspective, needs to be clarified. The planned iteration need to be detailed and listed, and new features need to be announced and revealed well ahead of the winter expansion. The we can truly judge the truth of the situation for ourselves.This is communication error number 3.

The next paragraph is also contentious:

“That does not mean that we won‘t make any improvements until then! We haven‘t started planning the Spring 2011 or Winter 2011 expansions yet (not to that level of granularity) but we do realize the urgency of revisiting certain key game features. Rest assured, the CSM will play a large role in identifying those.”

As far as I can see, the CSM has already identified the more pressing issues that require attention from CCP, and unless CCP haven’t been listening up till now they already know which issues are in need of work.

Zulu then goes on the defensive, saying that CCP is always fixing bugs. This is all well an good, and most likely true, but the point being made by the CSM is not that there are bugs that need fixing from a technical standpoint. The point being made by the CSM and the rest of the playerbase is that there are fundamental flaws in the gameplay experience of the end user.

These may not necessarily be bugs, the code is working well and is defect free in alot of the cases put forward, but are aspects of game design that are not working as part of a playable game experience. There are technical issues; these are bugs, places where the code is not working as intended. And there are gameplay issues; places where the code is working fine but is not providing a gameplay experience where the term ‘excellence’ can be applied.

For example: Lag is a technical issue, there is something in the software and hardware that is not working as intended. This has gameplay implications sure, but at its heart it is a technical issue. Then there are rockets. this is a pure gameplay issue, the code for rockets is working fine, but as an element of gameplay, rockets simply do not work. Those are just two examples, I’m almost certain that there are many more bugs and that CCP is working to fix them almost constantly, but the bugs are not the issue. This is communication error number 4.

The last section of the Dev Blog is where the communications disconnect is brought out into the open for all to see, and to be fair to Zulu he seems to recognize this:

“When two parties have such vastly different perceptions of the same event, something is wrong and needs to be fixed.”

I do think that any ideas to improve communications between the CSM and CCP need to be explored as a matter of urgency however, and leaving it till the autumn may well be too late.

Onwards to the threadnaught.

I’m not going to dissect the threadnaught that this Dev Blog has produced in that much detail as it is huge (currently 27 pages and still growing) and I’ve not caught up with it in its entirety yet (I’m on page 18) but I will say this. It is probably the most reasonable Dev Blog thread I’ve seen. Players are responding to the blog rationally (for the most part) and with well thought out discussion. I can only hopw that CCP are reading it very closely and paying attention to the constructive criticism being put forwards by the players in it.

The thread contains some misconceptions on the player’s part, the difference between bugs and gameplay flaws for example, and a lot of guesswork about how easy some things will be to fix. ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ gets bandied about wuite a bit and the balance issues with rockets and other things gets a lot of attention whcih detracts from the most important point.

That point being the perceived disconnection between CCP and its customers and the lack of communication from CCP in the face of deeply felt player grievances and unhappiness. Zulu’s blog went some way to ameliorate this and the responses from Explorer and Soundwave in the thread itself were valuable and important addendums to that post. The post itself though did not go far enough, and made a few basic errors in communication which highlighted the problem quite starkly.

As many players have said in the thread, the blog itself was welcome. It gave us insight into how CCP’s resources are being allocated for the next few months but it did not go far enough with the details and did not address the specific issues brought forward by the CSM. More detail would be greatly appreciated, nothing sensetive mind, but more about the planning and execution of releases, more about the issues that are being dealt with. “We’re working on it.” simply won’t cut it anymore as that has been the line from CCP for a long time and the perception on the player’s part is that nothing has been happening.

What we as players need, and CCP need to do, in no particular order of priority as they’re all equally important IMO is provide the following:

More details about Incarna. At the moment it simply looks like Second Life in Space with the focus being on simply wandering around in stations and not really doing very much of consequence. What gameplay will be made available through this new facet of EVE. What tools will it give us as players access to that we previously didn’t have? Details are sparse and player cynicism is rampant, more information about what Incarna will be would go a long way to satisfying us. And no, simply saying “Its going to be awesome!” will not do.
More information about the backlog and details of what is being worked on from it right now and who is working on it. A regular Dev Blog from the leaders of each team or even one with a short section from the leaders of each team would do this job. Again less use of the word ‘awesome’ would be appreciated.
Revamped patch notes. Backlog items, CSM promoted issues and bugs should be clearly marked as such.
Any balance changes which require extensive playtesting and possibly tweaking should be published and let loose on SiSi. A new forum section should be provided for presentation of the player’s experiences of each of these issues a thread made for each one. This thread should be very strictly moderated (no “FIX LAAAAG” trolling or even very slightly off topic posts).

Sorry about the essay, but this is an important issue. CCP needs to re-evaluate how it communicates with its customers as a matter of urgency. They don’t necessarily need to change the plan, simply communicate to us better what the plan actually entails.

Update: Zulu responds on Page 30 of the threadnaught!

Update 2: Hellmar responds on Page 32 of the threadnaught!

M out

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