CCP rides the Cluetrain
Get on board with the Cluetrain.
CCP Games rides the Cluetrain. Not perfectly, and sometimes they take a wrong step, but they’ve gotten onboard.
They talk to us, and not just with a flat corporate voice. We don’t get too much MBA-speak from them. I don’t want it, and I don’t think you do, either. They’ve got some cool people in there, and not all of them work in community management. If they locked away their devs and only worked through the community team, we’d lose a lot. Right now, we can bat around ideas, talk about problems, get insight on various decisions, and get confirmation that they love games, science fiction, net culture, and (of course) Internet spaceships as much as we do.
Some devs could use a little coaching, of course, as we’ve seen in recent months. Sometimes the Loving Mallet of Correction gets deployed a little strong, or they lock their designers and programmers up in their Viking mead halls and we don’t get to understand what happens. But more communication will always make the players happy.
I have great respect for Kaarback, but I could not possibly disagree more strongly with the suggestion that we should keep the devs from talking to us. In a communication vacuum, players get angry, developers misunderstand, and problems crop up. When we can short-circuit that process and get passionate people – players and devs – talking to each other, much better things happen.
Using Yahoo! Pipes, I keep a CCP Devs feed. Basically, I take the EVE Devs feed from EVE Search and filter out the moderators and whatnot. I don’t care about locked threads or edited flames, but I do care about seeing them engage on awesome player-created content, talk about championing feature requests, and sometimes even show us their warts.
Much love to the community folks, but they do something even better than just act like a mouthpiece. They keep us engaged, talk to us about community-specific stuff, and hopefully teach the other devs how to interact with us.
Let’s keep riding the Cluetrain.
UPDATE: Kaarbaak posted a well-thought-out rejoinder, to which I commented that we more or less agree. I want CCP to humanize themselves, solicit general ideas, and fix the CSM process. I don’t want them taking forum polls on whether a certain stat should have a 5% or 6% bonus (though dealing with dedicated playtesters on Sisi is another matter entirely).
Blog Banter 12: EVE Everywhere
Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!
I want EVE everywhere.
Mobile devices, netbooks, web sites, you name it. The API has gotten us started, of course, but only a start. Essentially, we should only require the client for undocking. Every other operation and activity can interact with the outside world. CCP should provide basic web clients, including a mobile version, but if they let us consume and manipulate the data via the API, we can see a vibrant ecosystem continue to grow and develop around it.
If I can do it without undocking, I want to do it remotely.
Hit “more” to see the details.
Big CCP announcement next Tuesday
We’ve known for a while that CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson will make an announcement at his GDC Europe 2009 keynote presentation in which he will reveal the next big project CCP will produce.
I believe that he will announce that their long-delayed “walking in stations” feature has grown to include a full-scale add-on including ground combat.
Of course, that sort of ambitious prediction doesn’t come out of the ether. We know at least the following:
- A recent trademark filing by CCP seems to hint at a new EVE-related game. And based on the logo, I’d say it focuses on individuals rather than ships.
- The Art of EVE book includes a section devoted to the concept art they have developed related to ground games.
- Rumors surfaced last year of some sort of EVE FPS.
- The oft-delayed WiS feature will not come in the winter expansion.
Thin stuff? Maybe. But I have every confidence that early next Tuesday morning, Hilmar will make me a very happy player. And I think he’ll do it with some awesomeness related to WiS and a ground game. However, I really hope that, rather than actual FPS mechanics, they focus in some way on RPG-style combat. This would fit the EVE player base and approach much better than bunny-hopping, rocket-jumping soldiers.
What do you think he’ll say?
