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.

Congratulations to the newest members of the Council for Stellar Management. I personally voted for TeaDaze, but Song Li and Alekseyev Karrde had excellent platforms and presence and I really wanted to see them get elected. Glad to see that that happened.

Separately, I find it interesting that they received 629 votes for “abstain,” aka “none of the above”. And they received far fewer overall votes in the whole process. Anyone who got less votes than this option should really think about what that means, and the fact that that result got a statistically significant portion of the vote totals really says something.

I suspect some of this might have to do with Larkonis, but even more, CCP needs to do a better job both of listening to the CSM and publicizing where they’ve done that. The skill queue went in nearly a year ago. What about since that time? Specifics, please, with a human voice, not some corporate statement. “CCP remains committed to valuing player feedback through our innovative and industry-leading CSM process…” That sort of thing makes me puke.

However, that belongs to the future. For now, congrats to everyone who won, and please remember to continue to listen to your constituency and represent us fairly and honorably. o7

Image credit Eduardo!