See here: Serenity a new start and a new era - #49 by Zachri
In regards to the two factors you mentioned, devs love their work, they embrace it. They put blood, sweat and creative tears in it. But it is a job, they are just as subject to marketing as the customer. CCP has demonstrated willingness to remove/replace them over them. What you need to keep in mind is that the venture level sets targets, directives and formulates how the product level approaches these. It’s because devs take their work seriously, and do so with heart, that EVE functions in spite of 15+ years of its corporate evolution with certain oddities as well as internal undermining and a very strict roadmap towards swapping out the operational model. It’s because of them that - in spite of technical debt and grand experiments like chasing buzzwords and snagging awesome by infrastructure/services changes - the place still works.
What you’re missing is that from a business perspective CCP has every reason to focus on short track profit curves, their metrics support the strategy of minimum product viability through past experiments of increasing investment spent versus return per user and so forth.
Ofcourse, before you point it out, most of those past experiments failed due to CCP’s historic oddities, its own growth cycle as well as demonstrable intricacies of less than optimal management. But keep in mind, a lot of that was consciously allowed, even used, in order to further circumstances that would allow for pushing towards conditions where the operational model swap became unavoidable. CCP’s venture level has been responsible in many forms, directly and indirectly, deliberately and through consequences of cumulative action/inaction for undermining alternative approaches.
The product level really hasn’t been a problem ever since the historic incidents of nepotism, entanglements and the house cleaning that followed from that.
And keep in mind, CCP has never been as independant as its internal marketing always claimed.
There have been options for a different approach. Problem is, CCP’s venture level has historically failed at both embracing, exploring and engaging on those. There’s a lot of convulated personal history, decision points, influences of external type as well as certain organisational and personal oddities at play there, but it doesn’t serve much point to go into any of that on these forums. It’s history before the line in the sand either way. These days CCP no longer has options other than as described elsewhere. That affects the product level, obviously.
In that other topic I gave the example of bots. CCP’s strict approach bleeds through in everything. It’s been well known among players how wardecs were not just a “meh” game design bottleneck, but it’s been even more known to CCP. But every year the decision was made to let it continue, in spite of it demonstrably affecting retention as well as acquisition. A few fanfests ago there was a moment where some players engaged Hilmar and some devs on the topic, it was remarkable how different worlds were at play, where the devs had no idea and Hilmar did. Classic case of product level blindspots following from directives set. Classic case also of strict bottom line prioritisation. Don’t spend more per user, metrics show return is the same anyway, and so forth. Only when the same amount of investment can (read: has to) enable / reinforce a new/secondary tier of return is it worth it.
The same applies to these services/infrastructure dramas. Product level does what it can, but it simply can’t do more than move between the boundaries set by venture level. It is that simple. There is no variable in any of this like quality of experience or cost of perception problem accumulation because the marketing / community management priorities already contain the required toolbox to make any of that a non-problem. Buy bias, bank on the quantifiable and demonstrable (metrics) willingness of customers to expend patience, and so forth.