CCP in failing to fix whats broken NONE shocker...

[Mangala]

So latest CSM Minutes - from their visit to iceland - are out.

http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2010/CSM_CCP_Meetings_23-25_06_2010.pdf

These are the highlights to be honest - SHC is raging already, EVEO will no doubt eventually as will other places across the net:

"Lag will always be an issue however EVE, but EVE is now, from a technical standpoint, in a better state than it has ever been."

Uhm NOPE.  Lag was under control around/just prior to Dominion. Its awful now, and for anyone wanting to fight a large battle (that is unforseen so none of this tell us the day before nonsense), jumping into jita, use the mission hubs, life can get very laggy very quickly with as little as 250 on grid, hell lag is soo bad now that combined with the fact the NC blobs ganknights arent going north anymore;

CCP stated that once Incarna and Planetary Interaction/Dust 514 are fully implemented, focus will probably shift far more towards improvement of existing features.

Despite them saying that all of these have seperate teams working on them the buggy play, the fixes to obvious hacks, the lag issues, the fact that af's, rockets, minmatar at cap level, engine trails, FW, poses, pi's fucking clicks, and so on are not important. Player retention has obviously not been taught to ccp properly yet - theres only so much the playerbase will take.  Basically they just want to give us new stuff all the time and not fix whats fucked/needs revisiting.

So - lag is fine (unless you have to come shoot an outpost or a tcu with billions of hp and the prospect that the owner wants to defend it) and the game will have to stay broken for upwards of 2 years (took them from 2008 to this year to implement EVEGate - which was already being worked on in 2008...).

If I didnt actually already pay with isk, id be tempted to cancel but given I pay with isk canceling wont lose them MY money...  I still have faith in them, but they need waking up.

[Mangala]

Another gem from a morning re-read:

"The data does not seem to support that polished quality sells better than new features."

[Caradir]

Another gem from a morning re-read:

"The data does not seem to support that polished quality sells better than new features."

translated into my language : New shit no matter how broken gets us moar moneys. Mouthbreathers just want content not quality after all.

[Mangala]

CCp responded to the small pressure this was bringing - and is ever increasingly - with a devblog.

Best line of which is Zulu saying he just doesnt see what all the fuss is about as he got quite a different message to the csm re the future (he was helping deliver that message, go figure!):

iterative development and what's happening in 2011
reported by CCP Zulu | 2010.07.16 17:35:24 | Comments

Hey all, I'm CCP Zulu (formerly CCP Zulupark) and as of about a month ago I've assumed the role of EVE's Senior Producer. CCP t0rfifrans has moved on to become EVE's Creative Director. This means you'll be hearing a lot more from me in the future.

After reading the many discussions following the publishing of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) 5 meeting minutes, I wanted to write this dev blog to clarify some things that have been floating around, rumors and half-facts that seem to have taken on a life of their own.

 

First off, Incarna

(9 teams, approximately 70 developers)

Development of Incarna is something that CCP has committed to for multiple reasons, but the most prominent one is fairly simple.

To achieve our goal of EVE being a complete sci-fi experience we must have full body avatars. When we talk to people who like the concept of science fiction games but aren't attracted to EVE, it becomes obvious that there is a need gap that can best be filled by having a character to associate with rather than a spaceship, and I would venture there are many existing players who want this option as well.

As of August 17th, there will be about nine teams working on Incarna. Of those, seven are on loan from other projects - to which they will return once Incarna is launched - and the remainder are EVE development teams. The EVE teams can work on both Incarna and in-space features, but they are assigned to Incarna for now. Actually one of the teams is spending one and a half releases on Incarna, the other about three releases. So the resource cost from EVE is very contained while the size and impact of the feature will be massive.

 

Dust 514/EVE link

(1 team, approximately 7 developers)

We‘re also committed to producing and launching an MMOFPS hybrid. What we‘re doing is unheard of in the gaming industry, namely linking together a console FPS (MMOFPS) with a classic PC MMORPG. Let that sink in for a minute. CCP is the first company in the world to do something like this. First. Ever. The „resource cost" on the EVE side for that is a team continuing on development of the Planetary Interaction feature (the primary link between the two) for the next three releases, delivering immediate, meaningful value into EVE Online and making game development history while they‘re at it.

In-space features

(3 teams, approximately 22 developers)

Currently, the plan is to have three teams working on EVE (the space parts): a feature team, the mission design team and an art/effects team. The feature team has chosen to work on a PVE related iteration. In short, they‘ll be expanding and iterating on PVE in EVE, bringing together players for immersive and engaging group content. The art/effects team will be finishing up on left-over work all the way back from Apocrypha and on some level even Trinity, where we have not fully taken advantage of new features of Trinity 2.0. This will mean prettier effects that perform better, especially in fleet fights.

EVE Gate

(1 team, approximately 10 developers)

We have one team (at this point) assigned to EVE Gate development and iteration, and that won‘t change for the foreseeable future. Note that this team is a dedicated Web development team. I had planned on using them to fix fleet lag but was talked out of it.

The others!

(4 teams, approximately 15 developers)

I‘ve now accounted for 14 teams, but we release plan for 18 teams. So what are the rest doing? Well, we have a team dedicated to testing automation. Currently they are focusing on "fleet fight in a can," which is a borderline sentient AI-testing automation feature that allows us to instantly simulate interesting aspects of massive fleet fights, getting tighter feedback loops to the expert team that is working on improvements on that front (we are talking MIT Ph.D. here). There is a team dedicated to making tools and reporting mechanism for the customer service department. The core infrastructure team (patch delivery mechanisms, among other duties) is in there, and then there‘s a another team dedicated to performance monitoring and improvements.

On top of that we have some (space) cowboys running around injecting code into Tranquility live to debug fleet battles and fix exploits (these are the same people that do code reviews and architectural integrity checks for the EVE codebase). This is where the MIT Ph.D. come into play. This doesn‘t fall under the classification of a development team but contains computer scientists, QA people, operational staff and others. They are hard-at-work (often well-outside normal working hours) profiling and diagnosing all sorts of lag-related issues or trying to catch fringe cases that are impossible to reproduce on our test servers. This team will be greatly assisted by the "fleet fight in a can" sentient AI.

And that‘s that.

We have an aggressive hiring plan, as evident by our job listings. When those positions are filled we will be able to fully staff two additional EVE feature teams. Finding the right people with the right skills so that they can further enhance something which we have been working on for a decade already isn‘t easy, but we have increased the priority on global recruiting. If you or someone you know is interested in working for CCP, now is the time to submit those CVs.

So what about prioritization? Where‘s the iteration on feature "x"?

We have seen a number of players talking about us moving from new feature development into iteration in the year 2012, but until then we‘ll be pumping new features into the system. This is not an accurate description of how a 200-person development team works. In the 2011 winter expansion we‘ll certainly focus more than ever before on iterating and polishing up all the features that EVE has expanded to in the then eight years. What those specific systems are, I don‘t know as we haven‘t started the planning phase for that yet.

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.

Please, also keep in mind that our developers are constantly fixing bugs - small ones, big ones, important ones and obvious ones. But also bugs you‘ve never experienced, never seen and never heard of. The EVE code base is as big as the universe itself and we‘re constantly engaged in cleanup and backend work that the players will never notice unless something goes horribly wrong.

CSM you say?

Like many of you, I have read the meeting minutes from the CSM 5 meetings in Reykjavik last month. To be completely up-front about it, I have to say I‘m quite taken aback by the difference in the meeting minutes compared to my firsthand experience from attending the meetings.

For my part, I felt the discussions were very constructive and I had great dialogue with the council members.

Maybe I‘m completely delusional and it didn‘t go that way at all, but there‘s definitely something broken in the feedback loop we have with the CSM and I will be working closely with them to enhance our collaboration. When two parties have such vastly different perceptions of the same event, something is wrong and needs to be fixed. We have some suggestions in mind and we will be exploring them in the fall. I‘m confident that with the CSM‘s help we can take this to the next level.

Cheers,

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason

CCP Zulu

Senior Producer of EVE Online

I love CCP I really do. But the way things stand now, Sov is fucked, sov warfare is laggy as shit (and its not down to both sides bringing EVERYONE) due to obviously poor code (hell zpnight we got traffic controlled at so many gates and we only had 150 on grid at each gate... and jumping into a pos shoot got even more laggy/broken when there was 300 or so on grid).  Fighting sov warfare may be a bad thing for the next 18months (lol).

[peo]

The big thing is where they have dev time.
Eve is a spaceship game first... They are mostly trying to make it into "second life" (or whatever the name was) in spacestations... I seriously doubt there is enough demographics for that.

[Mangala]

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1354510

Comments thread for that blog.

Its actually damn good reading if you can get past the fanbois and 1 liner whiners.

[Kathras]

Hmm....that full body avatar thing is a slippery slope.  Once people have something to look at, they are going to want to make it look pretty...   

[Mangala]

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1360067

They ask people to vote for them in an award.

People say NOPE.

Some people say in 18months

[Caradir]

Unfortunately I wont be able to vote right now - would it be ok to put my ballot in say oooh...18 months or so?

definitely the best response in that thread

...but first a message from our sponsors.

The state of my (not) voting for CCP is the best it has ever been.

[Mangala]

My sig on EVEO has been locked
*refresh to see all images*

[yellow]Signature rotation removed for containing inappropriate signatures. Zymurgist[/yellow]

They added the yellow text the first time and I could add my rotation again, then they locked it and deleted the rotation, leaving this message in my settings:

(Your signature has been locked by the moderation team, please email mods@eve-online.com should you have any questions.)

[Caradir]

a case of "we dont like what you are saying. so its locked", im guessing.

[Kathras]

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1360067

They ask people to vote for them in an award.

People say NOPE.

Some people say in 18months

Their online line-up was fairly crappy.  It was hard to vote for anything. =/

[Mangala]

http://tech.uk.msn.com/gaming/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=154248947

UPDATE: CCP has now issued a statement on this story which you can find here.

Eve Online fans are venting their fury over alleged in-game lag - which, according to some, has left the game 'broken' and unplayable.

The latency is a direct result of a recent Tyrannis patch, and has resulted in outcry on the game's official forum.

One prominent forumite told CVG today that the game is "broken" and that large fleet flights had been made "impossible" because of the lag.

He added: "Loyal customers that have been playing the game for many years are being ignored by the games developers."

Others on the official Forum seem to agree, attacking game maker CCP for failing to fix the problem.

Sinfulangel wrote: '[Too] bad it makes CCP more money to market new features... [than] fix the core of what use to be a spaceship game.'

Grath Telkin added: 'Pretty amazing that this many people that really don't like each other can all agree on the same thing: You suck CCP.'

Zarks commented: 'The lag, OMG the lag........'

Fan anger has been exacerbated by CCP's request for them to vote in a European Game Awards.

'You guys either have really big balls or you're just plain pants-on-head', wrote Monkey Saturday.

CVG has contacted CCP for comment.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=257782

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Eve Online developer CCP has told CVG that fixing the lag on mass fleet battles in the game is its 'No.1 priority'.

We reported this morning that fans of the MMO were claiming latency had made the game unplayable following a patch update.

However, a CCP spokesperson told CVG this afternoon:

'CCP has invested significant time and resources throughout EVE's history on increasing the performance of fleet fights. We've always had a team of developers devoted to improving our technology and in recent years we made exponential headway through massive server upgrades and initiatives like "Stackless IO".

'Currently, unsurprisingly, this effort is our No.1 development priority and we have given the specialised team carte blanche in re-attaining 1,000+ player fleet battles that EVE is famous for.

'With the help of the EVE community on the test server, we believe we are close to some investigative breakthroughs and will continue to relay any progress via our developer blogs.'

[Mangala]

Eve Online developer CCP has told CVG that fixing the lag on mass fleet battles in the game is its 'No.1 priority'.

We reported this morning that fans of the MMO were claiming latency had made the game unplayable following a patch update.

However, a CCP spokesperson told CVG this afternoon:

'CCP has invested significant time and resources throughout EVE's history on increasing the performance of fleet fights. We've always had a team of developers devoted to improving our technology and in recent years we made exponential headway through massive server upgrades and initiatives like "Stackless IO".

'Currently, unsurprisingly, this effort is our No.1 development priority and we have given the specialised team carte blanche in re-attaining 1,000+ player fleet battles that EVE is famous for.

'With the help of the EVE community on the test server, we believe we are close to some investigative breakthroughs and will continue to relay any progress via our developer blogs.'

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=257782

[Mangala]

CCP has given a "specialised" EVE Online dev-squad "carte blanche" to tackle in-game lag issues that have the community up in arms.

"CCP has invested significant time and resources throughout EVE's history on increasing the performance of fleet fights. We've always had a team of developers devoted to improving our technology and in recent years we made exponential headway through massive server upgrades and initiatives like 'Stackless IO'," the developer told CVG.

"Currently, unsurprisingly, this effort is our number-one development priority and we have given the specialised team carte blanche in re-attaining 1000 player fleet battles that EVE is famous for.

The problems appear to stem from the recent Tyrannis update to the game.

Developer CCP appears to enraged the community further by asking for their vote for EVE Online: Tyrannis in the European Games Awards.

"You actually believe you deserve a reward for this bugfest?" asked one commenter. "Hahahahahahahahaha."