If I was bitter, I wouldn’t be here. Little tidbit of info: The maternal side of my family history is basically ‘look, humans whose hearts don’t work’. Damn near none of them made it to 40. The youngest had a heart attack at 17, while participating in a track and field meet, in an event where he’d been a consistent top-3 performer.
In just under three weeks, I turn 50. Last year, the day before my 49th, I found my mother, dead. None of this is a sob story, none of this is ‘omg, I’m so sorry for your loss’. That’s not what this is about.
What this is about is time. If I was bitter about this game, I wouldn’t be here, because it would be a waste of my time. And I don’t waste that. It could all end at any moment, and that’s been my outlook since I was 8 years old.
If anything, I’m unreasonably optimistic that CCP can actually do better. I believe they can. I believe they want to, and are trying to. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t invest time (there it is again) talking to Rattati about each and every one of these issues. And I certainly wouldn’t bother spending time here.
That said, that has nothing to do with whether or not CCP understand their game. They don’t. They know they don’t, and if you check Rattati’s appearances on various streams, he’s openly admitted they don’t, and that’s one of the reasons he’s so eager to hear from all of us.
So when I say ‘CCP doesn’t understand the game’, that doesn’t mean I’m bitter and frustrated. It doesn’t mean ‘CCP’s understanding of their game is bound not to appeal to everyone who plays it’. It means CCP’s understanding of their game is incomplete, and fundamentally flawed. It means they don’t understand their game. That is not a thing to rage about, it is… an environmental condition to be ameliorated and worked around. But much like a patch of black ice on asphalt, or a crevasse in the ice, you cannot simply wave away those conditions and insist ‘oh, that’s not really true’.
You cannot say ‘look, they’re taking the long view, and in the long view, that patch of ice is insignificant against the full length of the road’ or ‘that crevasse is nothing compared to the full scope of the ice sheet’. Because while yes, when you’re working on the scale of astronomical units, a chunk of metal less with a volume of 250 cubic millimeters is utterly insignificant, 5.56x45mm to the forehead will still kill you, and so will hitting that patch of black ice badly or falling into that crevasse.
Before they can take the long view, they have to get to the long view. Right now, EVE is at PCU numbers lower than any time in the last fifteen years, a time when there were fewer regions of space to spread out into. How many fewer regions? Heh. A dozen or more in null, as well as all 33 regions of j-space (that’s right, there are 33 regions of j-space) and all 6 regions of abyssal space. So that’s about half of the map. Soooo, in effect, we’re taking about roughly 50% of the 2006 population density. Which, if we look at Ye Olde EVE-OFFLINE, would put us at… effectively, 2005 numbers… without the steady influx of new players and all that ‘New Game Smell’ effect going on.
In that kind of environment, changes that make people actively want to stop playing are objectively bad. We’ve lost 30% of the PCU in just the last year. Can we afford to lose another 30%?
It’s to be expected. The VCs wanted to offload the company, so they did what VCs always do in that situation: they looked for exactly the kind of short-term ‘fix’ that needs to be avoided in all of these ‘good for the game’ discussions: they slashed payroll, producing a company that could go for probably 3-5 years with massively reduced costs but good profit projections.
That kind of loss of institutional memory is inevitable there. It’s one of the reasons why, for all of the bitching about PA, I was actually glad to see CCP being owned by people who make games, who want to make games, and who do it because they’re gamers who love games, rather than a bunch of real estate and banking VCs who just wanted someplace to stuff money to ride out the 2007 financial crisis.
Since PA came in, CCP’s expanded their staffing again. But there, there’s a few things holding them back. First, you’ve got to find talent that’s willing to move to a godforsaken volcanic rock in the middle of the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Then you’ve got to keep them from going elsewhere after 2-3 years and a nice fat entry on the resume. As well as all of the issues with bringing immigrant labor into a country, etc etc.
Specialists aren’t a bad thing. Guys who know their stuff inside and out are the people you want to have where they can put that expertise to good use, and advise others on how their stuff will intersect with the things those other folks are working on.
Really, the fact that CCP slashed payroll isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s something to recognize as ‘this is part of the terrain we have to deal with’ and CCP is working to offset that loss of institutional memory. But that’s going to take time, and time… yeah, that’s a thing that pissing off the players you still have… doesn’t buy.
