"Intensity" of development?

[SpaceSaft]

Hello everyone, Hello dear CSM,

I’ve recently returned to eve again, last time I thought I quit for good and I only returned to checkout what scarcity was about.

Anyway, @Mike_Azariah @Brisc_Rubal if you can answer it, how “intense” is the development for eve at the moment? Is there anything cool in the pipeline or is the game mostly going to stay the way it is?

When I’m browsing through updates.eveonline.com there is very little to be excited about. In retrospect worthy mentions:

Proving grounds are the on the demand pvp eve needed.

2021 we just got the Heist, which is probably low impact
2021 Mar fleet formations
2020 Nov supercarrier respawning, sounds cool, but I don’t think it will affect things much? Dynamic bounty system that’s capped at 200% bonus for some reason.
2019 sharable bookmarks (which is a huge deal, shame it took so long)
2019 Jul blackout, which was reverted
2016 new structures

… you probably get the idea.

I was interested in “scarcity”. Fighting over resources is a cool concept that I would love to see more of. It turned out to simply increase the grind a bit and make logistics a minuscule amount more difficult. But nobody is actually fighting over resources. The isk fountains are well and alive. Nobody has to fear being unable to fuel stations or replace ships or structures because the resources don’t exist and they would actually have to fight over the resources to do so. (And so the blue donut remains.)

For contrast, a few areas of the game that were “being talked about” maybe changing or that are “known issues”, any news about those?

• faction warfare
• not sure what the opinion on the sov system is these days
• industry index still has basically no impact
• ewar? idk.
• noticed today the bounty system is gone? not that the old one will be missed…

Balance passes, graphics and QOL changes are nice and appreciated, they really are, but they are not what I’m logging in for. Also still having to rely on external tools for the game to be remotely playable feels weak. Most of the jobs these tools perform aren’t “big difficult things”, but they make a huge difference.

Don’t want to whine too hard though, resource limits are a thing in the real world and if they’re spent making balance changes that’s not so bad.

All the best to you and the devs.

SpaceSaft

[Xeux]

It is my understanding that current development effort is focused on micro transactions.

[Brisc_Rubal]

@SpaceSaft

Balance passes, graphics and QOL changes are nice and appreciated, they really are, but they are not what I’m logging in for. Also still having to rely on external tools for the game to be remotely playable feels weak. Most of the jobs these tools perform aren’t “big difficult things”, but they make a huge difference.

Don’t want to whine too hard though, resource limits are a thing in the real world and if they’re spent making balance changes that’s not so bad.

CCP has been focused on a number of things over the last year and a half. Primarily, they’re trying to revamp and make more intuitive the new player experience, so new players stick around longer and become vets. They’ve put a significant amount of resources into that part of the game and I expect we’ll start to see some examples of that coming out over the next two quadrants.

Second, they’ve been focused on fixing the economy and redistributing resources, making them more dynamic, and creating things to fight over. Scarcity sucks, I dislike it and disagree with the fundamental premise behind it, but it appears to be ending soon, as CCP has announced they think stockpiles and industry are in a better place than they were when they started the process 18 months ago and they’re ready to start putting some things back that they took away.

Third, they’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes technical work that you can guess is necessary on a game this age. None of it is sexy, but it has to be done in order to provide more stuff in the future.

To answer the question of how “intense” development is right now - it’s summer. This is usually the quietest time for the company so there’s not a ton going on at the moment, although there’s always stuff being done.

Is there anything new and exciting coming down the pipeline? I guess that’s pretty subjective, but I can’t answer that question really in much detail anyway. All I can say is that this is a sandbox game, and the fun comes from our interactions with each other, not from what CCP decides to do. I’m not a big fan of the whole concept of waiting for the company to make the game fun - that’s in all our hands, after all.

[Mike_Azariah]

I think @Brisc_Rubal covered most of it (above) but there is always the questions of ‘when are we (whoever ‘we’ is) going to get something fun/important/profitable’.

Yeah, summer slows down and you may feel like the game is in Caretaker mode.

It isn’t. But you have to take my word for it because of the pesky old NDA. We are still meeting weekly with teams and the producers of the game and still arguing with them about what, when, and how things are coming down the pike.

I am looking forward to the fall but that is me. Each of us has different expectations of the game, of what ‘fun’ is. So I think mainly? we will have to wait and see.

thanks for asking, tho.

m