Your argument analogous to saying the Big Mac is a specialized[1] product within the McDonald’s menu because it’s got 2 patties. Just because something is specialized within EVE doesn’t mean it’s specialized within the player’s options.
Mission running, ie: PvE task completion for rewards from NPC actors available to everyone, is literally the most common type of content in MMOs. It is the most common type of content in space RPGs. If the EVE player just wants to run missions, they can do that in Rebel Galaxy, ST:O, or scores of other games. What’s more, they can do it better than the currently-available crop of PvE missions CCP offers. That, not the rest of ‘the EVE Online spectrum’, is what CCP has to compete with when evaluating how they work on their PvE content.
That is not a specialized product. Ignoring literally the rest of the industry in order to insist that the absolutely most mainstream part of EVE is a niche within a niche… which of us is twisting reality?
Well, first off, that’s not what I said. I said the best case is that they’ll quickly be just as optimized, farmed and ignored as the ‘good’ current ones are. But you never work based on ‘best case’, you work based on ‘likely case’ and even ‘worst case’ scenarios.
The worst case is that in the process of adding new missions, someone makes an error in a table and breaks things horribly in poorly-documented code that nobody’s really been able to completely unravel for 10 years, so they can’t easily fix it. I personally believe that in the wake of the Z9PP-H error five years ago, CCP’s learned to put in better safety measures, and that one of them includes backing up their data. So I’m not too worried about ‘worst case’, but it’s still part of the cost/benefit analysis.
The likely case is that people will react as people normally do. Most people are resistant to change. They don’t like new things unless those new things conform to very particular preferences. As a result, you’ll have a number of people who like the new missions. You’ll have a number of people who are completely ambivalent to the new missions. And you’ll have people who dislike the new missions.
As we’ve discussed, happy people, people who are getting what they seek, tend to simply enjoy what they’re getting. They don’t go out of their way to give props or speak up in support of things. So the response CCP will see will be the people who dislike the new missions complaining that CCP has made more missions that suck, more missions they prefer to skip, and are wasting their time.
Where that’s dangerous is in the majority of people who’ll be ambivalent. They won’t have formed any strong opinions about the new missions. But if they’re hooked into the larger community, they’ll be hearing that the new missions suck. If they’re only hooked into their small group, they may wind up hearing that from someone in their group who doesn’t like them, or who’s hooked into these forums or reddit or wherever.
Opinion’s a funny thing. If we hear something sucks before we experience it, we’re primed to believe it will suck. We go into the experience waiting for the suck, looking for Teh Suck. The human mind is a pattern-matching engine. It’s what the brain’s been for since our ancestors were fish: sort through experiences, find pattern, evaluate pattern. Is it food (good)? Is it danger (bad)?
It’s why there’s a truth that’s repeated throughout law enforcement, journalism, sociology, programming, and engineering: if you go looking for something wrong, you’ll find it, even if it’s not there. So when you go into the new missions looking for why everyone says it sucks… most people will find something to decide ‘that sucks’. Very few people are actually as open-minded as we like to think we are. It’s not because we’re bad people, it’s because as primates, we communicate patterns, and we integrate that communication into our expectations.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you work in product design, I’m sure you’re familiar with all of this. There’ve been so damned many studies confirming all of this in both academia and marketing that it’s not even funny. The Illusory Truth Effect is real, and as a study published three years ago in the Journal of Experimental Psychology again confirmed, it’s stronger than experts once thought.
So if the vocal feedback is ‘this change sucks’… and it will be, because discontent is always more likely to be voiced than contentment… you’ll have a reinforcement cycle that self-perpetuates:
People hear the new stuff sucks, creating an expectation. They go and experience it expecting it to suck, and so find reasons to confirm their pre-conditioned expectation. Expectations thus confirmed, they go and tell other people ‘it sucks’, adding their voice to the discontented chorus. People who are new to the conversation here more people saying ‘it sucks’ and so become more likely to believe it sucks than earlier groups were, even before they have direct first-hand experience.
That is how the ‘likely case’ scenario plays out. And if that’s how it’s likely to play out when you tamper with something your devs openly admit they aren’t experienced with, and they aren’t good at (but they’re trying to learn!)… then you don’t have them learn on that. Let them work on other things and learn there while your ‘safety net’ product continues to provide a baseline of utility.
And by the way, that whole ‘if you go looking for a pattern, you’ll find it, even if it’s not there’ thing?
There it is, in action. CCP depends on their customers for their paychecks. Most of the current developers came from inside the game. They’re not good at ‘level design’ because it’s something they hadn’t worked on. (again: this is stuff they’ve said on stage at FF) They aren’t sitting around saying ‘our customers suck hahahah’. If they were, then after last fall, the ones who are still there definitely aren’t. If anything, what you’re viewing as cynicism is likely fear. They can’t afford to screw up missioning, so even a 1% chance that they will is too much to risk.
Notes:
- Please, learn to spell that word. It is not spelled with a ‘y’. It appears you’re taking your lead from ‘analyzed’, but that word is a special-case because the root ‘analysis’ is spelled with a ‘y’. ‘Special’ is not. Taking it into the ‘-ize’ verb form doesn’t change that.