So I figured I’d post Jestertrek’s AMA here, since it contains a lot of interesting stuff.
The ones I found interesting where:
Why do you think CCP gave so much lip service to caring about the economy when you were a CSM, and now has given up on it so dramatically?
Lots of people have said a lot of things about Dr.Eyjo who was EVE’s chief economist when I was on the CSM. I heard every opinion of the man possible when I was on the CSM, from “he’s useless and never comes into the office unless a reporter or the CSM is in the building” to “he’s critical to helping us balance the economy.”
One thing is for sure, though: when he left, the devs stopped caring about the economy almost completely from a development standpoint. Today, they pay lip service to it (sometimes) but the development isn’t data driven in the way it was (say) in the lead-up to the moongoo rebalance. As bad as that rebalance was done, at least you can say that the devs looked at the data before they did it. These days, I’m not convinced they look.
What was the most audacious, egregious, slap-in-the-player-base’s-face sentiment you ever heard proposed or uttered by a CCP-er? (feel free to leave the CCP employee anonymous if you’d like)
It’s not a single thing. It’s the total disregard that some devs had for player opinion. There were and are some devs that simply don’t give a ■■■■ that there are players out there and that we maybe know the game.
CCP SoniClover was really notorious about this, as were Ytterbuim and Arrow to lesser extents. All of them would come into Summit sessions, drop what they were doing on the table, and pretty much say “take it or leave it”. When Arrow was pushed, he’d say “well, we’ll iterate on that” or “you’ll get used to it”. He said both about monochrome Neocom icons when those were pushed out, which enraged me and I don’t anger easily. He just wasn’t interested in an opinion that didn’t start and end with “You’re a genius.”
CCPlease, listen to your experts and players. With Hilmar’s response in his last AMA, I really hoped CCP understood the value of data analysis to evaluate the state of the game.
Once you’ve employed individuals to research specific issues, then please remember to listen to what they have to say. CCP Ghost had a great presentation on Evesterdam 2019, where he explored the reasons for why people play eve. However, the changes promoted in Invasion does not seem to promote any parts of why most people play eve. Hopefully, we are going to see some better changes in the future. Obviously, this might be too early a patch, so hopefully there are going to be some more relevant changes in the pipeline to improve the sandbox.
Opposed to what some individuals on the forums want you to believe, most of us play eve because of the player interaction and the sandbox aspects. We want more sand.
That CCP doesn’t care about the economy anymore is blatantly evident in the rollercoaster that ISK influx and other chars display since Eyjo left. Before that it was a smooth and controlled increase, since then it is a frustrating mad max ride.
As for the opinions. I am not sure that this really matters. Many users, “experts” included have very questionable and sometimes outright egoistical and self-benefit-driven ideas how EVE should be. And then there are devs like Falcon who have nothing better to do than to agree with them. In my opinion, there are muppets on both sides and neither side is any good.
Experts might not be the right word. I was more referring to people researching and concluding something on a specific issue. An example, would be CCP Ghost. He is not some random, he is an employee of CCP. However, when you look at his talk from Evesterdam 2019 and look at the Invasion patch, they do not seem to correlate.
It’s only one patch, so we’ve got to see what the future brings. However, my guess is that CCP Ghost reports his findings back to higher management constantly, so I’d have hoped to see some changes supporting more player interaction, and not improvement of the agency or more abyssal stuff as the main selling points.
I just hope they either fully embrace the sandbox or actually make a good themepark MMO. Instead of this in-between, where they are not a competent themepark compared to the competition, while the sandbox elements are also deteriorating.
You’ll be surprised, there are some indi developers that are still passionate and love having debates with their community as to which way the game shall head and it’s glorious, too bad they are so small of a dev team.
In addition to what @Maekchu said, I add CCP Shreddy or what his name is and his last year’s Event and Agency talk and the the next events were total garbage. Or before that the Dev (team) that worked on the chat system, boasting about how we’d not notice a difference and then it turned out to be total rubbish. Or CCP Hilmar (or is he called Hellmar nowaday, I don’t care) introducing micr… Macro Transactions into EVE for no good reason and without any justifiable reason.
As for users: Pretty much anything that comes out of a mouth from a CFC member. Or all these useless users who cry for Remove Local just so that they have an easier way to hunt and compensate their own incompetence at hunting.
Well i guess somebody is still trying to stay relevant.
However… as a player i do care about things in the game. But CCP has complete creative control, the day you allow the players to dictate the game you alienate the other spectrum of the player base. Do I agree with what CCP is doing, not always, should they care? No, not at all.
I will either decide enough is enough and stop my subs or continue because I want to see what happens next. At the end of the day I will vote with my wallet.
Interesting read. Couple points in that ama answer a few q’s and thoughts I had rattling around the head. Also the point about either hardcore PVE or alliance sov battles and bugger all sand box now ring true for me in how certain aspects of the game have become stale and neglected.
I’m a little torn over “Hurr durr CCP listen to the players hurr durr durr democracy! CSM!!!”
Versus:
CCP having a vision, sticking to it, and looking after the most powerful vote of all: the one people make with the wallet. Even if they have to dislike the customer base.
It’s a good point that Commander Kane makes though: when you allow players to dictate the direction of the game, it won’t be every player, and those who don’t get to dictate get dissed.
Hence the biggest complaint about the CSM being “a bunch of Goons” or “Nullseccers” or something to that effect.
Has anybody noticed that Eve’s “Golden Age” consisted more of people playing solo, from PVe to solo PVP, than anything else, but CCP Seagul’s vision - and not to fault Seagul BTW a vision is a vision - aligned with the “Eve must be played in a multi-thousand player alliance or GTFO” crowd to create…
the Great Malaise of 2014. Ultimately.
Frankly the CSM is a complete failure and represents how rotten democracy truly is. The funny part is a lot of blame and “we’ll just have to vote harder, by golly!” went towards the CSM by paying customers than towards CCP by paying customers not being paying customers and that would have put the developers and their “visions” in their place as they would have not had any cover from this facade and failure of democracy.
Really enjoyed that thread on reddit. I was never a regular reader of Jester Trek back in teh day but his blog always had a way of pulling me in. Hopefully he gets back into writing someday. Wonder if he is banned after that lol
I found his phrase ‘instant scalability’ when asked about the worst thing to happen to Eve (Skill Injectors) striking. Man this game is over the ledge isn’t it
What is CCP’s vision, anyway? Because according to their roadmap page: https://www.eveonline.com/ccplease There really doesn’t seem like there is a “vision”.
