Ecliptic Rift

Man, I was a dumbass in university.

Years ago, I enrolled as a freshman in a computer science program. By the end of the first semester, I had a part time job as a programmer (what I spent my whole childhood assuming I would do for a living). I thought CS itself would just bore me, so I switched to mathematics. That itself didn’t elevate me to “dumbass” status. But then I found that attending class bored me. I’d rather work at a job I enjoyed then do the tedious stuff. I enjoyed studying and working through problems, but not actually getting myself into class. I ended up dropping out just shy of graduating, then having to go back years later once I already had a full-time job and a family to finish. My own decisions made my goals harder to achieve, a lesson I never forgot.

That sort of theme has echoed through my life. Why do the boring, tedious stuff when I can find something new and interesting and challenging? And once I feel like I’ve figured it out, broken the code, gotten the hang of it, or whatever, even if I haven’t fully mastered the task at hand, I move on. When I feel threatened, I withdraw and cut off communication (frequently exacerbating my problems). To be clear, I consider these personal flaws that I continue to work on correcting. I like to think I’ve made significant progress, but I’ll probably always have to manage them.

So I totally get CCP. I really do. They build cool stuff. If you read this blog regularly, you almost certainly agree, or EVE Online wouldn’t matter to you. But once they’ve built it, tuning and improving just doesn’t interest them institutionally. Obviously, that won’t hold true for every individual employee, but that’s their overall direction. They want to build Incarna and DUST 514 rather than rework factional warfare and finish storyline overhauls and go back to the drawing board on corporation management and lowsec. This has some problematic elements (they don’t actually finish cool stuff) and some benefits (many of us have anxiously awaited Incarna for years, and DUST 514 has a lot of folks interested).

Yeah, CCP suffers from an attention deficit. It’s not that they think that new shinies will easily distract players from existing problems. No, they have gotten distracted by new shinies. They realize their situation, at least partially. Ask any of them if they think they really have a stellar, excellent UI, or if they feel like “fleet lag” is fixed, etc. But they’ve made a choice to focus their resources on new development rather than maintenance and continual improvement.

They also have some communication problems, obviously. That’s not new; any veteran player can recount lots of past issues where they clearly didn’t manage their messaging as well as they should. T20, ghost training, Larkonis, and lots of other events point that up. The recent problems with the CSM point this up, and they struggle as an organization with the sort of transparency, accountability, and excellence we (and they) expect.

I don’t advocate throwing a fit. I don’t plan to leave the game, though for unrelated personal reasons I have significantly reduced my active accounts (maybe that’s my ADD-like shifting focus cropping up again). When your friend has a problem, you don’t walk away from the friendship if it means something to you. EVE still means something to me. I stuck with SWG through the NGE, so this little tiff doesn’t even really compare on any significant level.

But we need to help them work through it. We need to support the CSM process, because if you think Mynxee and TeaDaze and the rest will just let this drop, you haven’t really paid attention. And if you think Hilmar and Oveur and T0rfi really don’t care, then we have a fundamental difference of interpretation.

NB: Props to @DuncanFeldane for the title of the post. I’ve had the topic bubbling in my head for a while and this crystallized it for me.

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?

Cross-posted to Chrome Bits