Heinrich Jagerblitzen
D3LTA FORC3
1130
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Posted - 2013.12.06 00:46:00 -
[1] - Quote
Shotty GoBang wrote:Hey Guys!
Thanks for all the kind words :-)
I'm dialing back my commitment to Dust and "contribution" to the Forums.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not biomassing this character (though I do intent to be less active).
See you in battle. o7
Sorry to see you dial back, though I don't blame you at all. There's only so much effort anyone can put in without seeing a return on investment, and you're only the latest in a long tradition now of vets gracefully stepping away after trying their best and hitting a wall. I also know full well that this is a morale blow to other players, some of which will also leave as a result.
To address the OP - Unfortunately far too many players have threatened to quit or take a break from Dust over just about every little change that its no longer reasonable to expect CCP to respond to that kind of appeal. That being said, CCP is a business at the end of the day, and can only expect to maintain customers if they put effort into the relationship they have with their players (however meager at times).
The plight of the scout is rather specific, but also related to a much more deep-seated problem. I'll start with the more deep-seated problem first: CCP has left a trail of half finished projects winding all the way back to April of last year when the first beta keys were handed out. The reasons why are still lost on me, and one can only hope that CCP Rouge has the business sense to end this pattern once and for all. Its still too early to tell.
We see evidence of this everywhere: even the recent FW changes rely on a marketplace and team deploy to function, both of which currently exist as "things we need to do". The Sentinel bonus is the posterchild (though I prefer to liken it to the nasty booger stuck in CCP's beard that they've left there for years). Simply put, they really had no business programming in a bonus to an unreleased weapon, in hopes they'd follow up with it later. They haven't, and I still have no idea when we'll see an Amarr heavy weapon. Planning for the future is one thing, saying "When we have __________ this will be awesome" is quite another. We often don't end up with _________, just the unfinished eyesore in the meantime.
This brings us to the Scout, the latest casualty of this longstanding practice. Essentially Scouts are terrible because they're waiting around for Cloaks to make them not-terrible. But as everyone knows we don't have cloaks, just the half finished battlefield role. This isn't even a racial suit we're talking about, its a whole playstyle with its own dwindling fanbase.
To me the solution is simple - its time for CCP to finish projects they start, and to do something radical for such a forward-thinking game. They need to start designing for the present. Not the future, not for "next patch", for the present. Every build should be highly playable, balanced, with design choices that inherently work in the context of the current release. Its great that CCP has plans for cloaks - but everyone deserves to be able to run as a Scout NOW if they'd like, not in several months. CCP should design with room for iteration in mind, but shouldn't be releasing content that depends on other content to function unless released simultaneously.
All that to say, I'm totally emptyhanded in terms of encouragement here, I'd also be reaching that point of frustration if I were you and I don't blame you for your decision. As for me, all I can do for now is to continue to approach this with CCP Rouge as a process problem, not a tribal problem. None of this has anything to do with CCP shitting on Scouts in particular, or the Scout community - it has to do with failing to improve judgement over what content to release and balance and in what order. The sooner they learn that bleeding customers while waiting for a magic content bullet is just bad business, the sooner we can turn this around not just for Scouts but for everyone else in the community as well. |