at Fanfest CCP announced that the update cycle will no longer consist of Qudrants. Instead, there will be the so-called “Arc”. What, when, how or by what something new will come remains a mystery.
At Fanfest it was announced that we are already in the first “Arc”. If I had understood the hint correctly, the event sites of Concord and the smugglers belonged to the arc. These are now gone, so there should be something more or new.
Have you noticed anything new that could be part of the arc and the “biggest” content update?
CCP tried twice a year updates. These worked well and grew the game, but then CCP got lazy and complacent and decided they couldn’t keep up that blistering pace of innovation anymore.
Then they went years with no real updates, then they went to ‘slow’ updates, then they decided they would try, smaller, monthly style updates (really just patches). Then they figured on quadrants but couldn’t keep that up either.
So moving to “mystery updates, you have to find the clues and figure out when we’ve done one” is pretty much just CCP giving themselves no update schedule at all, while also telling you there’s a price increase 'cause the awesomeness is about to get real.
I prefer the “it’s done when it’s done” approach. If you assign a set amount of time for your updates then that limits what kinds of updates you can do. Small updates get lost&forgotten because they don’t fully fit the set time so that would be “wasteful”, big updates won’t fit in the time slot and either are not done or they’re done in a crappy and rushed way. You also get the “we’re supposed to have a big update but we don’t know what so we’ll just do whatever”.
It’s like demanding a game to be released even though it’s not ready yet, because any content better than no content (and 5 year olds have no patience) and then you get to cry about how it sucked.
The current approach from CCP is to give content to Ahsteroti in his spare time so that he can do some lore research and solve the puzzle. If he succeed, we get new ships, if he doesn’t, well, we either not get the ships, or they will be delayed.
To be honest, I have the same concerns. Probably they just want to develop things in a relaxed way and when it’s ready, they’ll bring it into the game bit by bit. At least that’s the impression I have at the moment, as there’s nothing new to be found anywhere and only half-baked formulations like “could be anything” at Fanfest.
However, I had hoped that you could prove me wrong
