Jenza's Pants
Kang Lo Directorate Gallente Federation
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Posted - 2013.08.21 21:09:00 -
[1] - Quote
Nova Knife wrote:The first Council of Planetary Management would like to take a moment to acknowledge the reality that most in the community are already painfully aware of GÇô that now, more than ever, we stand at another turning point for Dust 514. With the release of 1.3 having just landed and the finishing touches being put on 1.4, everyone anxiously awaits evidence that either the game will start rising to the potential we've seen all along, or continue to struggle with some of the same issues that have frustrated many of us since early beta.
1.4 is the first "normal" monthly release since CCP restructured their development process following Uprising's troubled launch. This restructuring also comes in the wake of their acknowledgement that Dust is in a very unhealthy state and needs serious work in order to get back on track. No one can say that CCP hasn't realized that they need to step up their game in order for Dust 514 to stay competitive in today's market. Since Uprising, CCP has been making obvious changes in the right direction, and they've done a pretty fair job so far at revamping their internal goals in order to tackle the most pressing problems with the time they have available. That said, the fact remains that they're using both time and money to resolve avoidable issues that crept up over the past year, and have led to the current unhealthy state of core gameplay elements.
However, the most dangerous problems have not been fully recognized nor appreciated, despite constant calls for improvement from the community for almost two years. A lack of trust between the developers and the community continues to stand between Dust 514 and its full potential. A lack of communication also persists, and has at least been briefly acknowledged as 'something to improve on' multiple times by everyone we've approached in management. Sadly though, these acknowledgements come with only with the faintest hint of understanding pertaining to the severity of these problems.
The trust issue is not primarily reflected in communication frequency, although the two are directly related. Too many times across IRC, dev blogs, and forum posts, we've heard designers cite their own preferences when describing their work instead of acknowledging what they've been hearing from the community. And without enough trust that early player input is an essential part of examining a designed element for potential problems, CCP potentially risks that they'll have to revisit a system again later. We've often seen them ask for feedback much too late in the process, after a design is finished, and well past the time when a community-spotted problem could potentially be addressed and resolved before becoming an issue on the live servers.
This cycle of releasing content, receiving negative feedback, and revising in subsequent patches is both inefficient and carries a heavy cost in community goodwill. At the same time, we don't expect CCP's designers to adopt a "Customer is alway right" mindset either. The proper proverb to apply here should really be "Two heads are better than one". Instead, the failure to seek community input early in the process becomes harmful, making a vice out of a virtue. There have been cases when CCP requests that players trust their changes will be positive and not over-react prematurely.... the history of Dust has sh...
CCP Cmdr Wang wrote:BARDAS wrote:What are these patch notes that people speak of? Do you by chance mean the arcane scribble that magically appears 24 hours before a change takes place thus preventing any meaningful feedback from the community which could potentially prevent problems before they occur? If so yeah I may have heard about those once a while back. Its a shame we don't see them sooner for the aforementioned reason. How are you going to give us meaningful feedback before you even try the changes? Or is your brain so awesome that you can look into the future? And while we are on the subject of feedback, guys, a few one liners and a catch word here and there really doesn't help. If you really care about improving the game, then please structure your feedback in a way that will: 1. List specific issues and the circumstance when it happened. We then put these in a weekly report and discuss them with the dev team on ways to address this. 2. Provide insight on why you think this is happening, if you can. Translation, explain as best as you can on how to reproduce the error/bug you encountered. The patch notes are there to let players know what changes are coming so they can plan their gameplay accordingly, not so that people can theory craft before hand on how things will work before they actually try it. |